Mayflower (48 page)

CHAPTER SEVEN-
Thanksgiving

Unless otherwise noted, all quotations are from
MR,
pp. 59–87, and
OPP,
pp. 87–90. According to the genealogist Robert Anderson in a personal communication, “Three months was the average interval between the death of a spouse and remarriage…and I have seen a few instances in the six-week range.” On marriage in Puritan New England, see Horton Davies’s
The Worship of the American Puritans,
pp. 215–28. For an excellent account of the seasonal rhythms of the Indians’ lives, see the chapter “Seasons of Want and Plenty” in William Cronon’s
Changes in the Land,
pp. 34–53. On the historic importance of the Titicut or Taunton River to the Native Americans and English, see Henry Holt’s
Salt Rivers of the Massachusetts Shore,
pp. 14–16, as well as Michael Tougias’s
A Taunton River Journey,
pp. 1–19, and Alfred Lima’s
The Taunton Heritage River Guide,
pp. 18–30. On Miles Standish’s assertion that Sowams was “the garden of the Patent,” see John Martin’s
Profits in the Wilderness,
p. 80.

Kathleen Bragdon discusses Native games of chance in
Native People of Southern New England,
pp. 222–23. Henry Martyn Dexter surmises that the fish Massasoit caught for Winslow and Hopkins were large striped bass,
MR,
p. 108, n. 354. Francis Billington’s discovery of the Billington Sea is described in
MR,
p. 44. Kathleen Bragdon writes of the pniese in
Native People of Southern New England,
pp. 214–15. John Seelye writes of Standish’s role as Joshua to Bradford’s Moses in
Prophetic Waters,
p. 123. Dexter identifies Corbitant’s headquarters as Gardner’s Neck in
MR,
p. 54, n. 379. As Neal Salisbury notes in
Manitou and Providence,
the only copy of the September 13, 1621, treaty appears in Nathaniel Morton’s
New England’s Memorial,
pp. 119–20. On the Pilgrims’ parochialism relative to the Puritans, see Seelye,
Prophetic Waters,
pp. 91, 120. On the Pilgrims’ First Thanksgiving, I am indebted to James Deetz and Patricia Deetz’s
The Times of Their Lives,
pp. 1–9; the Deetzes argue that instead of being what the Puritans would have considered a Thanksgiving, the celebration in 1621 was more in keeping with a secular harvest festival. For a contrasting view, see Jeremy Bangs’s “Thanksgiving on the Net: Bull and Cranberry Sauce,” www.SAIL1620.org. Bangs argues that even though the Pilgrims did not use the term themselves, the gathering was, in essence, a Thanksgiving. On the history of domesticated turkeys in the New and Old Worlds, I have relied on Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald’s
America’s Founding Food,
pp. 161–62. On winter being the time to hunt turkeys, see William Wood’s
New England Prospect:
“Such as love turkey hunting must follow it in winter after a new fallen snow, when he may follow them by their tracks,” p. 51. On the changing colors of autumn leaves I have looked to “Fantasy, Facts and Fall Color” at www.agricul ture.purdue.edu/fnr/html/faculty/Chaney/FallColor.pdf. In 1675, in the days before the beginning of King Philip’s War, Metacom told the Quaker John Easton that “when the English first came their king’s father was as a great man and the English as a little child, [and] he constrained other Indians from wronging the English and gave them corn and showed them how to plant and was free to do them any good and had let them have a 100 times more land, than now the king had for his own people,” “John Easton’s Relation,” in
Narratives of the Indian Wars,
edited by Charles Lincoln, p. 10.

CHAPTER EIGHT-
The Wall

My account of the arrival of the
Fortune
is based on
OPP,
pp. 90–126, and
MR,
pp. 84–96. On how the arrival of the
Fortune
affected the demographics of Plymouth, I have relied on the analysis of John Navin in
Plymouth Plantation,
pp. 397–98. A portion of Robert Cushman’s sermon “The Sin of Self-Love” appears in the notes of Ford’s edition of
OPP,
vol. 1, pp. 235–36. Unless otherwise indicated, my account of the Narragansett challenge and the other events chronicled in this chapter is based on
OPP,
pp. 96–115, and Edward Winslow’s
GNNE,
pp. 7–24. My description of the wall the Pilgrims built around the settlement is based, in part, on Emmanuel Altham’s September 1623 letter, reprinted in
Three Visitors to Early Plymouth¸
edited by Sydney James Jr., p. 24; in 1624 John Smith wrote, “The town is impaled about half a mile in compass,” in notes to Emmanuel Altham’s March 1624 letter in
Three Visitors,
p. 37. For information on the differences between English and American felling axes, see volume 3 of
New England Begins,
edited by Jonathan Fairbanks and Robert Trent, p. 543. My account of the impaling of Plymouth is indebted to discussions with Pret Woodburn and Rick McKee, interpretive artisans at Plimoth Plantation, who brought the existence of the Jamestown trenching tool to my attention. In a note in
OPP,
Samuel Eliot Morison speaks of stool ball, p. 97. On the importance of boundaries and enclosures to the Puritans of seventeenth-century New England, see Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald’s
America’s Founding Food,
pp. 148–49.

Karen Ordahl Kupperman makes note of the irony that the Pilgrims found themselves trusting two Indians, Squanto and Hobbamock, who were named for the god that the Pilgrims considered to be the devil, in
Indians and English,
p. 185. Bradford’s unwillingness to surrender Squanto to Massasoit may have had something to do with what Leon and Rebecca Grinberg have called in
Migration and Exile
the immigrant’s need for “a familiar someone” ; this longing for “a trustworthy person who can take over or neutralize the anxieties and fears he feels toward the new and unknown world can be compared to that of a child who is left alone and desperately searches for the familiar face of his mother…. Onemodel that comes close to this idea is the ethnologist’s notion of ‘imprinting,’” pp. 76–77. Eric Johnson talks about Indian assassinations in
“Some by Flatteries and Others by Threatenings”:
“How frequent they were is not known; but several assassinations or attempted assassinations were reported, although not all can be proved,” p. 194. Whatever the case may be, the similarities between Massasoit’s possible assassination of Squanto and his son Philip’s reputed assassination of the interpreter Sassamon fifty-three years later are striking. In
Early Encounters: Native Americans and Europeans in New England,
Sears Nickerson claims the Indian skeleton that was “washed out of a hill between Head of the Bay and Crow’s Pond” at Monomoyick around 1770 was probably Squanto’s, p. 200.

CHAPTER NINE-
A Ruffling Course

Unless otherwise noted, my account of the Wessagussett attack and the events leading up to it is based on
OPP,
pp. 116–19;
GNNE,
pp. 23–56; and Phineas Pratt’s account of his days at Wessagusett, written in 1668 and titled “A Declaration of the Affairs of the English People that First Inhabited New England,” MHS Collections, vol. 4, 4th ser., 1858, pp. 474–87. On the lethal malaise that overtook the English settlers at Jamestown, see Karen Kupperman’s “Apathy and Death in Early Jamestown,”
Journal of American History,
June–September 1979, pp. 24–40. On the use of groundnuts as food, see Howard Russell’s
Indian New England before the
Mayflower, p. 156. As Kupperman points out in “Thomas Morton, Historian” in
NEQ,
vol. 50, 1977, pp. 660–64, Morton’s
New English Canaan
provides a probing account of the Wessagussett raid that is very different from those of Bradford and Winslow.

The description of typhus comes from Roger Schofield’s “An Anatomy of an Epidemic” in
The Plague Reconsidered,
p. 121. My thanks to Carolyn Travers, research manager at Plimoth Plantation, for bringing this reference to my attention. In
New English Canaan,
Morton claims that Standish and his men “pretended to feast the Salvages of those parts, bringing with them pork and things for the purpose, which they set before the Salvages,” p. 110. Morton also accuses Standish and company of having no real interest in saving any of Weston’s men: “But if the Plimoth Planters had really intended good to Master Weston or those men, why had they not kept the Salvages alive in custody until they had secured the other English? Who, by means of this evil managing of the business, lost their lives,” p. 111. Morton makes the claim that after Wessagussett, the Pilgrims were known as “stabbers” or “cutthroats” by the Massachusetts, p. 111. Bradford and Isaac Allerton write of their inability to trade with the Indians after the Wessagussett raid in a September 8, 1623, letter reprinted in the
American Historical Review,
vol. 8, 1903, p. 297. In
Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America,
Daniel Richter writes, “It is quite possible…that there had not, in fact, been anything like a Wampanoag or Pokanoket nation until Massasoit invented it from the surviving remnants who coalesced at Mount Hope Neck and a few other locations such as Mashpee on Cape Cod in the 1620s,” p. 99.

In the chapter “Liquidation of Wessagusset” in
Saints and Strangers,
George Willison maintains that the Pilgrims’ account of the Indian plot “was fabricated after the event in an effort to justify a series of treacherous actions of which the Pilgrims were always a little ashamed,” p. 224. For a withering critique of Willison’s account, see Jeremy Bangs’s
Indian Deeds,
pp. 13–14. On the other extreme is Charles Francis Adams’s version in
Three Episodes of Massachusetts History.
While pointing out that “[h]ad the situation been reversed, and the Indians, after similar fashion, set upon the Europeans in a moment of unsuspecting intercourse, no language would have been found strong enough to describe in the page of history their craft, their stealth and their cruelty,” p. 100, Adams maintains that the Pilgrims did what they had to do: “Yet, admitting everything which in harshest language modern philanthropy could assert, there is still no reasonable doubt that, in the practical working of human events, the course approved in advance by the Plymouth magistrates, and ruthlessly put in execution by Standish, was in this case the most merciful, the wisest and, consequently, the most justifiable course,” p. 100–101. According to the “moral calculus” of William Vollmann’s
Rising Up and Rising Down: Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom, and Urgent Means,
violent deterrence of the kind the Pilgrims inflicted on the Massachusetts Indians is unjustified “when it is executed proactively as both deterrence and retribution,” volume MC, p. 113, which appears to have been the case—at least as far as Standish was concerned—at Wessagusett. John Robinson’s letter critical of the Pilgrims’ actions at Wessagussett is in
OPP,
pp. 374–75. The festivities surrounding Bradford’s marriage to Alice Southworth (including the raising of the blood-soaked flag in tribute to Massasoit) are in Emmanuel Altham’s September 1623 letter in
Three Visitors to Early Plymouth,
edited by Sydney James, pp. 29–32.

CHAPTER TEN-
One Small Candle

Unless otherwise noted, the quotations that appear in this chapter come from
OPP,
pp. 120–347. For information on the great Migration, see David Hackett Fischer’s
Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America,
pp. 13–17, and Karen Kupperman’s
Settling with the Indians,
p. 21. The December 18, 1624, letter from the Merchant Adventurers referring to the Pilgrims as “contentious, cruel and hard hearted” appears in
Governor William Bradford’s Letter Book,
reprinted from the
Mayflower Descendant,
p. 4. John Demos in “Demography and Psychology in the Historical Study of Family-Life: A Personal Report,” cited in John Navin’s
Plymouth Plantation: The Search for Community on the New England Frontier,
claims that Plymouth Colony was typified by “an extraordinary degree of contentiousness among neighbors,” p. 660. Navin claims that “the early settlers were far more inclined to become engaged in disputes with newcomers than with each other,” p. 660; he also states that in the aftermath of the Reverend John Lyford’s expulsion from Plymouth, the colony lost approximately a quarter of its residents,
Plymouth Plantation,
p. 498.

The published material about Thomas Morton and Merrymount is voluminous (see Michael Zuckerman’s “Pilgrims in the Wilderness: Community, Modernity, and the Maypole at Merry Mount” ; Minor Major’s “William Bradford versus Thomas Morton” ; and Daniel Shea’s “Our Professed Old Adversary: Thomas Morton and the Naming of New England,” for just a sampling), but perhaps the most probing words ever written about the future ramifications of the incident come from Nathaniel Hawthorne in his short story “The MayPole of Merry Mount”: “The future complexion of New England was involved in this important quarrel. Should the grizzly saints establish their jurisdiction over the gay sinners, then would their spirits darken all the clime, and make it a land of clouded visages, of hard toil, of sermon and psalm forever,” in
The Complete Novels and Selected Tales of Nathaniel Hawthorne
(New York: Modern Library, 1965), pp. 886–87. On the marriage of Elizabeth Warren and Richard Church and their son Benjamin, see Robert Wakefield’s “The Children and Purported Children of Richard and Elizabeth (Warren) Church” in the
American Genealogist,
July 1984, pp. 129–39. According to Richard Slotkin in
Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier,
1600–1860. “Daniel Boone and Leatherstocking are [Morton’s] lineal descendants,” p. 63. Morton tells of Standish’s attack and the Pilgrims’ lack of humanity in
New English Canaan,
pp. 113, 146. William Hubbard writes of Miles Standish in his
General History of New England,
pp. 110–11. Harold Peterson in
Arms and Armor of the Pilgrims
notes that Standish’s sword, which is on display at Pilgrim Hall, “is about six inches shorter than the average rapier, which would have made it easier to handle for a small man,” p. 9. Isaack de Rasiere’s 1627 account of Plymouth on a Sunday is in
Three Visitors to Early Plymouth,
pp. 76–77. John Navin in
Plymouth Plantation
speaks of the militaristic nature of the Plymouth settlement, pp. 576, 631. Bradford writes of his frustrations with Isaac Allerton in
OPP,
pp. 226–34, 237–44. For a view that is more sympathetic to Isaac Allerton, see Cynthia Van Zandt’s “The Dutch Connection: Isaac Allerton and the Dynamics of English Cultural Anxiety,” in
Connecting Cultures: The Netherlands in Five Centuries of Transatlantic Exchange,
edited by Rosemarijn Hoefte and Johanna Kardux, pp. 51–76. George Langdon provides an excellent summary of Plymouth’s financial dealings in
Pilgrim Colony,
pp. 32–33.