Mayflower (6 page)

Soon after departing from Plymouth, the passengers began to suffer the effects of seasickness. As often happens at sea, the sailors took great delight in mocking the sufferings of their charges. There was one sailor in particular, “a proud and very profane young man,” Bradford remembered, who “would always be contemning the poor people in their sickness and cursing them daily with grievous execrations.” The sailor even had the audacity to say that “he hoped to help to cast half of them overboard before they came to their journey’s end.” As it turned out, however, this strong and arrogant sailor was the first to die. “But it pleased God,” Bradford wrote, “before they came half seas over, to smite this young man with a grievous disease, of which he died in a desperate manner, and so was himself the first that was thrown overboard.” Bradford claimed “it was an astonishment to all his fellows for they noted it to be the just hand of God upon him.”

A succession of westerly gales required Master Jones to work his ship, as best he could, against the wind and waves. Several times during the passage, the conditions grew so severe that even though it meant he must lose many hard-won miles, Jones was forced to “lie ahull”—to furl the sails and without a stitch of canvas set, secure the helm to leeward and surrender his 180-ton ship to the elements.

In 1957, the crew members of the
Mayflower II
—a replica of the original vessel, built in Brixton, England—became the first mariners of the modern era to experience what it was like to ride out a gale in a Jacobean-era ship. Over the course of the first few weeks of the passage, they had discovered that the
Mayflower II
’s boxy hull shape took some getting used to. At times, the motion in the high aft poop cabin became so violent that Captain Alan Villiers—one of the most experienced blue-water sailors in the world—feared that he might be flung out of his bunk. What this ship would do in survival conditions was a matter of deep concern to Villiers and his men.

Toward the end of the voyage, a storm set in, forcing Villiers to do as Master Jones had done 337 years before. As the motion of the ship in the giant waves became intolerable, he decided he had no option but to lie ahull. The sails were furled, and everything on deck was tied down. Then, with considerable trepidation, Villiers ordered that the helm be secured to leeward. “This was the crucial test,” Villiers wrote. “Would she lie that way, more or less quietly, with the windage of the high poop keeping her shoulder to the sea? Or would she just wallow hopelessly in the great troughs, threatening to roll her masts out? We didn’t know. No one had tried the maneuver in a ship like that for maybe two centuries.”

As soon as the ship’s bow swung into the wind, a remarkable change came over the
Mayflower II.
Even though she was under bare poles in a howling gale, her slablike topsides functioned as a kind of wooden storm sail, magically steadying the ship’s motion. Almost perfectly balanced, the
Mayflower II
sat like a contented duck amid the uproar of the storm. After being pounded unmercifully by the waves, the ship was finally at peace. “I reflected that the Pilgrim Fathers, who tossed through many such a wild night in Atlantic storms, at least knew tranquility in great gales,” Villiers wrote.

In the fall of 1620, the
Mayflower
’s ability to steady herself in a gale produced a most deceptive tranquillity for a young indentured servant named John Howland. As the
Mayflower
lay ahull, Howland apparently grew restless down below. He saw no reason why he could not venture out of the fetid depths of the ’tween decks for just a moment. After more than a month as a passenger ship, the
Mayflower
was no longer a sweet ship, and Howland wanted some air. So he climbed a ladder to one of the hatches and stepped onto the deck.

Howland was from the inland town of Fenstanton, Huntingdon-shire, and he quickly discovered that the deck of a tempest-tossed ship was no place for a landsman. Even if the ship had found her own still point, the gale continued to rage with astonishing violence around her. The shriek of the wind through the rope rigging was terrifying, as was the sight of all those towering, spume-flecked waves. The
Mayflower
lurched suddenly to leeward. Howland staggered to the ship’s rail and tumbled into the sea.

That should have been the end of him. But dangling over the side and trailing behind the ship was the topsail halyard, the rope used to raise and lower the upper sail. Howland was in his midtwenties and strong, and when his hand found the halyard, he gripped the rope with such feral desperation that even though he was pulled down more than ten feet below the ocean’s surface, he never let go. Several sailors took up the halyard and hauled Howland back in, finally snagging him with a boat hook and dragging him up onto the deck.

When Bradford wrote about this incident more than a decade later, John Howland was not only alive and well, but he and his wife, Elizabeth, were on their way to raising ten children, who would, in turn, produce an astounding
eighty-eight
grandchildren. A Puritan believed that everything happened for a reason. Whether it was the salvation of John Howland or the sudden death of the young sailor, it occurred because God had made it so. If something good happened to the Saints, it was inevitably interpreted as a sign of divine sanction. But if something bad happened, it didn’t necessarily mean that God disapproved; it might mean that he was testing them for a higher purpose. And as they all knew, the true test was yet to come.

Unknown to Jones and any other mariner of the day was the presence of the Gulf Stream—a virtual river of warm water flowing up from the Caribbean along the North American coast, across the Atlantic, and past the British Isles. Bucking the Gulf Stream and westerly gales, the
Mayflower
had managed an average speed of just two miles an hour since leaving England back in September.

Jones had a cross-staff, a calibrated three-foot-long stick equipped with a sliding vane, that enabled him to calculate his latitude, or north–south position, within a few miles, but he had no reliable way of determining his longitude, or east–west position. This meant that after all the bad weather they’d encountered, he had only the vaguest idea of how far he was from land.

He knew the
Mayflower
was well north of her ultimate destination, the mouth of the Hudson River. But at this late stage in the voyage, with disease beginning to appear among the passengers and crew, he needed to find his way to the coast as quickly as possible. So he made a run for it, sailing west along a latitude that would lead him to the sandy peninsula known to most mariners of the time as Cape Cod. It was named Cape James in Captain John Smith’s map of New England, but Jones didn’t care what it was called. Reaching out to them like an upturned arm, the Cape was as good a target as any.

The
Mayflower
pushed on until they were within smelling distance of the continent. Seagulls began to appear in the sky, and the color of the water changed from deep blue to pale green. And then, at daybreak on Thursday, November 9, 1620, after sixty-five days at sea, they saw land.

I
T WAS A BEAUTIFUL
late-fall morning—clear skies and light winds out of the northwest. There was a thin slice of moon overhead, gradually fading to nothingness as the sun rose behind them in the east. Up ahead to the west was what Jones believed to be the forearm of Cape Cod. Known to subsequent generations of mariners as the “back side” of the Cape, this almost thirty-mile stretch of barrier beach runs from north to south and is edged by dramatic hundred-foot-high cliffs of sand that must have been instantly recognizable to Jones’s pilots if they had been in this region before. Stretching behind the cliffs were rolling, tree-covered hills.

The
Mayflower
’s passengers were, according to Bradford, “not a little joyful.” The clarity of the atmosphere on a crisp autumn day in New England shrinks the distances and accentuates the colors, and the Pilgrims were “much comforted…[by] seeing so goodly a land, and wooded to the brink of the sea.” Just to make certain, Jones tacked the
Mayflower
and stood in for shore. After an hour or so, all agreed that this was indeed Cape Cod.

Now they had a decision to make. Where should they go? They were well to the north of their intended destination near the mouth of the Hudson River. And yet there were reasons to consider the region around Cape Cod as a possible settlement site. In the final chaotic months before their departure from England, Weston and others had begun to insist that a more northern site in New England—which was the new name for what are now the states of Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont—was a better place to settle. As Cape Cod’s name indicated, this region was renowned for the large schools of cod that frequented these shores. Come spring, hundreds of codfishing vessels from England, France, Holland, and other European countries plied the waters of New England, particularly to the northeast off modern Maine. A colony established on Cape Cod would be well positioned to take advantage of this profitable fishery. But when the
Mayflower
had departed from England, it had been impossible to secure a patent for this region, since what came to be called the Council for New England had not yet been established by the king. If they were to settle where they had legally been granted land, they must sail south for the mouth of the Hudson River 220 miles away.

Master Jones had his own problems to consider. Given the poor health of his passengers and crew, his first priority was to get these people ashore as quickly as possible—regardless of what their patent dictated. If the wind had been out of the south, he could easily have sailed north to the tip of Cape Cod to what is known today as Provincetown Harbor. With a decent southerly breeze and a little help from the tide, they’d be there in a matter of hours. But the wind was from the north. Their only option was to run with it to the Hudson River. If the wind held, they’d be there in a couple of days. So Jones headed south.

Unfortunately, there was no reliable English chart of the waters between Cape Cod and the Hudson. Little had changed since 1614, when John Smith’s experiences in the region had caused him to dismiss all existing charts as “so much waste paper, though they cost me more.” Smith’s own chart of New England only went as far south as the back side of the Cape—where the
Mayflower
had made landfall—and provided no help for a voyage south. Except for what knowledge his pilots might have of this coast—which appears to have been minimal—Jones was sailing blind.

The master of the
Mayflower
had no way of knowing about the specific hazards ahead, but he knew enough to make extensive use of his sounding leads, of which he had two: the deep-sea or “dipsy” lead, which weighed between forty and one hundred pounds and was equipped with 600 feet of line, and the smaller “hand-lead,” just seven to fourteen pounds with 120 feet of line. As the
Mayflower
sailed south, the leadsman was in near-perpetual motion: heaving the lead, letting the line pay out, calling out the depth, then drawing in the line and heaving the lead again. The depth off Cape Cod hovers at about 120 feet—at the very limit of the hand-lead—until about three miles offshore, where the bottom plummets to more than 300 feet. Running roughly parallel to shore, this line of sudden drop-off is known as the Edge. As Jones made his way along the back side of the Cape, he more than likely followed the Edge as if it were an invisible lifeline south.

For the next five hours, the
Mayflower
slipped easily along. After sixty-five days of headwinds and storms, it must have been a wonderful respite for the passengers, who crowded the chilly, sun-drenched deck to drink in their first view of the New World. But for Master Jones, it was the beginning of the most tension-filled portion of the passage. Any captain would rather have hazarded the fiercest North Atlantic gale than risk the uncharted perils of an unknown coast. Until the
Mayflower
was quietly at anchor, Jones would get little sleep.

Jones stood perched on the aftmost deck of his ship—a narrow, razorback ridge of planking called the poop deck, just nine feet wide and about twenty-three feet above the water, with a taffrail adding another four feet of height. Here, two and a half stories up, with the expansive girth of the
Mayflower
—twenty or so feet at her widest—before him, Jones stared out nervously toward the shore to starboard, awaiting the latest word on the sea’s depth.

The ship’s helmsman was stationed in steerage, a tiny, suffocating space below and forward of the poop deck. Jones and his pilots could communicate with the helmsman through an open hatch above the helmsman’s head. Peering down at him, they could see the ship’s compass mounted in a candle-equipped binnacle, just forward of the helmsman and aft of the mizzenmast. Instead of a wheel, the helmsman steered the ship with a long vertical pole, called a whipstaff, that attached to the tiller through a hole in the steerage deck.

They sailed south on an easy reach, with the sandy shore of Cape Cod within sight, past the future locations of Wellfleet, Eastham, Orleans, and Chatham. Throughout the morning, the tide was in their favor, but around 1 p.m., it began to flow against them. Then the depth of the water dropped alarmingly, as did the wind. Suddenly, the
Mayflower
was in the midst of what has been called “one of the meanest stretches of shoal water on the American coast”: Pollack Rip.

Pollack Rip is part of an intricate and ever-changing maze of shoals and sandbars stretching between the elbow of Cape Cod and the tip of Nantucket Island, fifteen or so miles to the south. The huge volume of water that moves back and forth between the ocean to the east and Nantucket Sound to the west rushes and swirls amid these shoals with a ferocity that is still, almost four hundred years later, terrifying to behold. It’s been claimed that half the wrecks along the entire Atlantic and Gulf coasts of the United States have occurred in this area. In 1606, the French explorer Samuel Champlain attempted to navigate these waters in a small pinnace. This was Champlain’s second visit to the Cape, and even though he took every precaution, his vessel fetched up on a shoal and was almost pounded to pieces before he somehow managed to float her free and sail into Nantucket Sound. Champlain’s pinnace drew four feet; the deeply laden
Mayflower
drew twelve.

The placid heave of the sea had been transformed into a churning maelstrom as the outflowing tide cascaded over the shoals ahead. And with the wind dying to almost nothing, Jones had no way to extricate his ship from the danger, especially since what breeze remained was from the north, pinning the
Mayflower
against the rip. “[T]hey fell amongst dangerous shoals and roaring breakers,” Bradford wrote, “and they were so far entangled therewith as they conceived themselves in great danger.” It was approaching 3 p.m., with only another hour and a half of daylight left. If Jones hadn’t done it already, he undoubtedly prepared an anchor for lowering—ordering the sailors to extract the hemp cable from below and to begin carefully coiling, or flaking, the thick rope on the forecastle head. If the wind completely deserted them, they might be forced to spend the night at the edge of the breakers. But anchoring beside Pollack Rip is never a good idea. If the ocean swell should rise or a storm should kick up from the north, any vessel anchored there would be driven fatally onto the shoals.

Eleven years earlier, Stephen Hopkins had been a passenger aboard the
Sea Venture
—a ship bound for Jamestown that wrecked on the coral-studded shore of Bermuda. As a nobleman wrote in a letter that subsequently became a source for Shakespeare’s storm scene in
The Tempest,
the water pouring in through the leaking hull and decks was terrifying, but it was the screams of the “women and passengers not used to such hurly and discomforts” that none of them would ever forget. On the afternoon of November 9, 1620, with the breakers at Pollack Rip thundering in his ears, Hopkins must have begun to wonder whether he was about to hear those terrible cries again.

Just when it seemed they might never extricate themselves from the shoals, the wind began to change, gradually shifting in a clockwise direction to the south. This, combined with a fair tide, was all Master Jones needed. By sunset at 4:35 p.m., the
Mayflower
was well to the northwest of Pollack Rip.

With the wind building from the south, Jones made a historic decision. They weren’t going to the Hudson River. They were going back around Cape Cod to New England.

By 5 p.m., it was almost completely dark. Not wanting to run into any more shoals, Jones elected to heave to—standard procedure on an unknown coast at night. With her main topsail aback, the
Mayflower
drifted with the tide, four or five miles off present-day Chatham, waiting for dawn.

In the meantime, all was bustle and commotion belowdecks. The news that they were headed to New England instead of the Hudson River put the passengers in an uproar. As they all knew, their patent did not technically apply to a settlement north of the Hudson. Some of the Strangers, no doubt led by Stephen Hopkins, who had unsuccessfully participated in an uprising eleven years before in Bermuda, made “discontented and mutinous speeches,” insisting that “when they came ashore they would use their own liberty, for none had power to command them.” It’s likely that Hopkins was joined by John Billington, who subsequently established a reputation as the colony’s leading malcontent and rabble-rouser.

No matter who were the agitators, it was now clear that the future of the settlement was, once again, in serious peril. The Strangers were about half the passengers, and unlike the Leideners, who were united by powerful and long-standing bonds, they had little holding them together except, in some cases, a growing reluctance to live in a community dominated by religious radicals. On the other hand, some of the Strangers, including the
Mayflower
’s governor, Christopher Martin, had strong ties to the Merchant Adventurers in London; in fact, passenger William Mullins was one of them. These Strangers recognized that the only way for the settlement to succeed financially was if everyone worked together. Although Martin had shown nothing but contempt for the Leideners at the beginning of the voyage, the disturbing developments off Cape Cod may have created an uneasy alliance between him and the passengers from Holland. Before they landed, it was essential that they all sign a formal and binding agreement of some sort. Over the course of the next day, they hammered out what has come to be known as the Mayflower Compact.

It is deeply ironic that the document many consider to mark the beginning of what would one day be called the United States came from a people who had more in common with a cult than a democratic society. It was true that Pastor Robinson had been elected by the congregation. But once he’d been chosen, Robinson’s power and position had never been in doubt. More a benevolent dictator than a democratically elected official, Robinson had shrewdly and compassionately nurtured the spiritual well-being of his congregation. And yet, even though they had existed in a theocratic bubble of their own devising, the Pilgrims recognized the dangers of mixing temporal and spiritual authority. One of the reasons they had been forced to leave England was that King James had used the ecclesiastical courts to impose his own religious beliefs. In Holland, they had enjoyed the benefits of a society in which the division between church and state had been, for the most part, rigorously maintained. They could not help but absorb some decidedly Dutch ways of looking at the world. For example, marriage in Holland was a civil ceremony, and so it would be—much to the dismay of English authorities—in Plymouth Colony.

As had been true for more than a decade, it was Pastor John Robinson who pointed them in the direction they ultimately followed. In his farewell letter, Robinson had anticipated the need to create a government based on civil consent rather than divine decree. With so many Strangers in their midst, there was no other way. They must “become a body politic, using amongst yourselves civil government,” i.e., they must all agree to submit to the laws drawn up by their duly elected officials. Just as a spiritual covenant had marked the beginning of their congregation in Leiden, a civil covenant would provide the basis for a secular government in America.

Written with a crystalline brevity, the Mayflower Compact bears the unmistakable signs of Robinson’s influence, and it is worth quoting in full: