The Landing of the Pilgrims (13 page)

Pecksuot, who had come in without knocking, began a speech in which he implied that the Captain was a cowardly runt who should be at work in the fields with the women. Standish understood enough Indian to get the full import of the insult and his anger strained like a hound on the leash, but he made no reply. As Witawamat left he pointed again to his knife and said, “By and by it shall see; by and by it shall eat but not speak.”

“You shall soon have a lesson in talking knives,” muttered the Captain to himself.

The next day four Indians came to the Captain’s house. Witawamat brought with him his brother, a young Indian of about eighteen. The gigantic Pecksuot was accompanied by a brave nearly his size and of equally villainous expression. The Indians, as usual, were naked to the waist. From their necks hung sheathed knives. There were three soldiers in the room besides Standish and Hobomok. Each Englishman wore a steel corselet.

When the Indians were all in the room, Standish nodded his head slightly. At the signal Hobomok noiselessly closed and barred the door. Pecksuot began a bragging speech. In the middle of it Standish made a sudden leap and, snatching the Indian’s knife from its sheath, buried it to the hilt in his breast. In an instant the room was a shambles of struggling men and stabbing knives.

Witawamat, bleeding from a dozen terrible knife wounds, rolled on the floor, grappling with his attacker. With unbelievable toughness and strength, the Indians kept up the unequal fight. Hobomok stood motionless against the wall, coolly watching the fierce action. Pecksuot in his death agony still grappled with the Captain.

Suddenly it was over. Three bodies lay on the floor in pools of blood. The youngest Indian had somehow escaped with a few cuts. “Take him out and hang him from the nearest tree at once,” ordered Standish. He bent over the body of Witawamat and with the Indian’s own knife severed the head.

Hobomok stepped forward and with his foot pushed the body, contemptuously saying, “Yesterday Witawamat say he big and strong. He say Captain little man. Today little Captain big enough to lay Witawamat on the ground.”

The Weston men refused to return to Plymouth with Standish. They joined the fishing fleet and returned to England.

All Plymouth turned out to welcome the return of the shallop. Standish marched up the Fort Hill at the head of his little troop. In the crowded meeting house he drew from a bag the bloody head of Witawamat and held it on high. It was placed on a pike on the wall of the fort, after the English custom, as an example to enemies.

This was a day of triumph and thanksgiving. Elder Brewster said that Captain Standish had been a David and a Gideon to them and had greatly cast down their enemies.

The fate of the chief conspirator Witawamat spread terror through the forest and the Indian confederacy was broken up. Whole tribes left their fields and villages and fled in terror to the swamps where many died from disease and starvation.

In the abandoned compound of Weston’s colony at Wessagussett, the grass and weeds grew, and the sumac and the goldenrod took possession. The Indians avoided the neighboring forest, where the spirits of Pecksuot and the headless Witawamat walked in the moonlight when the wind wailed and mourned in the naked treetops.

(1623)

Spring had come. It was March and the frost had come out of the hard ground, leaving soft and wet mud. The last handfuls of corn were being given out in equal rations from the common store. Only the precious seed corn for planting was left. On it depended the settlers’ survival from starvation. The time for their third planting was at hand. Each year the Governor divided the common land equally among the families. The soundest church members usually got the best lots.

Last year this had caused discontent and there had been grumbling. Some were workers and some were shirkers, but all received equal amounts of food from the common supply. This was taken up at the town meeting. It was decided that each family should keep the crop it raised on its allotted land. Each little farm would be a free enterprise.
There would be no more common store. Each would work for himself.

The result was wonderful. Each family, even the women and the children, worked in the fields daily from dawn till dark. Every inch of each field was planted and tended. There never had been such a planting. They had no plows, horses, or oxen. With spades and mattocks they loosened the earth, planted two fish in each hill, and dropped in the hard kernels. At night they took turns watching to keep the animals from digging up the fish. The lean and ragged colonists tended their greening fields with a new pride and energy. The laziness and indifference of “communitie” had vanished like the sea mist before the sun.

It would be weeks before their crops were ripe. They had long ago ceased expecting a supply ship from England. In summer the wild fowl were hard to shoot. Each day now starvation stared them in the face.

At their feet the great Bay was teeming with cod, herring, bass, a dozen kinds of fish. They had seen grampuses, whales, and seals. Squanto had showed them where there were shellfish and eels in abundance. They were used to the roast beef of old England and to the bread, cheese, and butter of Holland, and they hated fish. But now if they would not starve they must take the harvest of the sea.

There was only one boat, but they worked it in
relays. One crew took her out as soon as another came in.

“Neither did they return until they had caught something, though it were five or six days before, for they knew there was nothing at home, and to go home empty would be a great discouragement to ye rest.”

When the shallop was out long or came back with a small catch, the men dug clams from the mud at low tide and caught lobsters, crabs, and shellfish. Now and then the hunters brought in a deer or two from the woods. From day to day they lived on what the Lord provided and were thankful.

May passed with fair weather. Indeed, the weather was too good. Day after day, they watched the unclouded sky as the corn drooped and turned yellow for lack of rain. It had not rained for six weeks. Hopes of an abundant harvest from their well-tilled fields faded.

“Upon which they sett aparte a solemne day of humiliation, to seek ye Lord by humble & fervente prayer, in this great distrese.”

All day in the crowded meeting house on the hill they prayed, thanking God for His blessings. The service had continued over eight hours and the sun had shone all day in the brassy July sky.

(August 1623)

August came. The tasseled corn waved its green banners to the sun. The silk on the full ears was turning brown.

The boom of the signal gun turned all eyes seaward to where a fleck of a sail gleamed on the horizon. It was the supply ship
Anne
. Ten days later her consort, the pinnace
Little James
, came in. The two had been separated in heavy weather at sea. Together they brought sixty new colonists to Plymouth. Many were from the Leyden congregation. Among them were wives and children of men who had been waiting for them for three years.

Of the rest, Bradford wrote: “Some of them being very useful persons, and became good members of ye body, and some were so bad, as
they were faine to be at charge, to send them home againe ye next year.”

The new arrivals were dismayed at the gaunt and ragged veterans of New Plymouth who welcomed them on the beach. Some were discouraged by the meager meal of fish, lobster, and cold spring water—with no bread—that was offered them.

The colonists had discovered in America that water was an attractive and healthy drink, but in England most men drank only beer and looked on water as unhealthy and dangerous.

Sixty more new mouths to feed raised serious problems. Later at harvest time the Plymouth planters would have plenty. In the meantime, the newcomers were afraid that the planters would soon eat up the provisions they had brought. So it was agreed, and sanctioned before Governor Bradford, that the planters should keep all of their crops if they did not accept any of the newcomers’ supply. The newcomers could keep the provisions they had brought, if they did not claim any of the planters’ corn when the harvest was ripe.

All law-abiding newcomers not of the Plymouth company were welcomed to the colony, but they must donate an annual bushel of corn to the general store kept for emergency, and serve in the common defense. They would not have trading privileges with the Indians, because this trade the Pilgrims kept strictly for themselves.

That year each family gathered the full ears and
brought in great heaping baskets to fill their bins with golden plenty. Under the new system, those who had abundance could sell or barter with those who would buy.

“Some of ye abler sorte and more industrious had to spare, and sell to others, so as any generall wante or famine hath not been amongst them since to this day.”

The
Anne
was taking on her cargo of clapboard and all the beaver and other skins the colony had. She was taking back a few passengers who had come over to visit the country and others who, being discontented, did not want to remain.

The crews of the
Anne
and the
Little James
went ashore. They had assembled about a keg of rum in a house adjoining the general storehouse, and were making a night of it with songs and drunken gaiety around the fireplace, where flames blazed against the cold. The fire roared up the chimney and a stiff wind sent the sparks swirling in the darkness. A spark started a fire in the thatched roof, and it soon blazed up in the wind.

The dreaded cry “Fire” rang through the town.

“Save the storehouse or we be overthrown,” cried the Captain.

Men rushed into the blazing building with wet blankets and beat the flames back from the storehouse. But the wind had carried the flaming sparks to the roofs of neighboring houses. Two, three, four houses were ablaze. The wind whipped the flames into a devouring furnace. In the lurid light, men and women rushed to and fro, etched against the blackness of the night.