Whittock - Mayflower Lives: Pilgrims in a New World and the Early American Experience

MAYFLOWER

LIVES

Pilgrims in a New World and the
Early American Experience

MARTYN WHITTOCK

PEGASUS BOOKS

NEW YORK LONDON

In fond memory of

Don Bramwell Myers (19292018).

Definitely one of the Saints.

T he publication of this book coincides with the four hundredth anniversary of the voyage of the Mayflower to North America in 1620. Since that first historic landing at Plymouth Rock, in the winter of that year, the ship, its voyage, and its complex mixture of passengers have passed into myth and legend. Their voyage, trials and triumphs, settlement and interaction with the indigenous peoples of the New England coastlands have become integral to understanding the roots of American culture and identity. It is, of course, undeniable that their contribution is only one of the many streams of immigration that have flowed into the making of the modern United States. And their immigration stream is numerically tiny compared to the massive tributaries that flowed into North America in the 19th and 20th centuries, and which continue into the 21st century. Just about half of these 130 travelers to the New World died in the first winter of 162021, which sets both their numbers and hardships in sharp perspective.

Nevertheless, the Pilgrims have had an impact on popular consciousness that is in excess of their original numbers and original significance. As such, their legacy punches well above its original weight. A United States without the Pilgrims, without Thanksgiving and the Mayflower Compact, without their epic voyage and their passionate desire to create a new home in a new world, is significantly incomplete, emotionally as well as historically.

Furthermore, their story is an English one as well as an American one, for both before and after the journey they were subjects of the Stuart monarchy (whether they liked it or not). And they remained connected with a nation spiraling down to the British Civil Wars of the 1640s. The Mayflower story is, therefore, a transatlantic story and a uniting factor between two Atlantic communities that would eventually (in the next century) take separate but related paths of national development. But the Mayflower was part of both these national journeys.

In many ways the unique impact of these Mayflower Lives is encapsulated in the word Pilgrims, for these immigrants included many whose motivation went far beyond economic migration, as important as that was. These particular passengersand later settlerssaw their goal as being much more than that. They believed that they were Gods elect, set on building more than merely a new community beyond the reach of religious persecution. Their aims encompassed nothing less than the construction of a New Jerusalem in the New World. It was this that contributed something very distinctive to how they understood their escape from religious persecution (many had been in exile in the Netherlands after facing problems in England), the upheavals and upsets of the journey, surviving New England winters, and the kind of community they should eventually create. This cannot be ignored, whether one interprets their arrival positively, as contributing something essential to the ethics and self-understanding encapsulated in the later American Dream, or negatively, as part of a European settlement that was to eventually lead to the destruction of the lives and culture of Native Americans (whether deliberately or as collateral damage caused by European diseases). There is something of the seeds of both these later experiences in aspects of the mind-set and the early impact of these settlers. What is clear is that the Pilgrims shine a strong light, or cast a long shadow (depending on the viewpoint of those reflecting on them), down the centuries.

The people who feature in Mayflower Lives, as on the original ship, were a mixture of so-called Saints (members of Puritan Separatist congregations) and Strangers (economic migrants). Together they made up a rather uneasy community on the ship and in the eventual settlement, and we need to remember both groups when exploring the adventure on which they embarked. Some of those we will meet were Saints, some were Strangers. And one of the latter was very much an outsider, who came to have an impact to rival any of the insiders. But together they give us an insight into this epic adventure.

Many books tell the story of the Mayflower, but the characteristic of this book is that it explores the motives, trials, tribulations, successes, and significance of this myth-making voyage and settlement through the interlocking lives of fourteen of those who were part of these events. Some were men; some were women; one was a little child who did not survive the first winter; one was a Native American. Their lives are dramatic and colorful. For example: Captain Jones was a successful sailor but one who had never previously crossed the Atlantic; John Howland fell overboard but survived; William Bradford wrote the definitive history of the settlement; Mary and Richard More were sent to America without family because their father thought them products of his wifes adulterous relationship; Stephen Hopkins had survived shipwreck and had served with John Smith (of Pocahontas fame); Tisquantum (Squanto) was a Native American who had escaped from kidnapping, spoke English, and assisted the colonists; Myles Standish and John Alden were allegedly love rivals, and Standish was a brave but, at times, brutal military man; Richard More was later excommunicated for gross unchastity with another mans wife. Together they are part of this astonishing story.

As these individual stories build, we will increasingly see how these particular lives intersected and affected each other; whether it was by way of cooperation, or conflict; positively or negatively. Each life has been selected because it opens up a window into a particular aspect of the Mayflower experience. In this way we can explore wider issues, such as religious faith, relations with native peoples, politics, the fur trade, motherhood and family life, romance and sexual relationships, deviance and crime. Yet each wider theme is rooted in a personal his-story or her-story. They have also been chosen so that, together, they move the story forward from journey, to settlement, to building a community. And where they intersect with other lives they provide their own individual perspective on the unfolding events. For these were lives bound together on one very small ship and one very small colony. Despite this, their interlocking small worlds give us insights into a distant past and a legacy that transcends their own individual experiences. It is biography with a difference, because these are Mayflower Lives.

Visiting Massachusetts in 2018 as part of the research for this book gave me a vivid insight into how this history is still apparent in the modern world. While waiting at passport control in Bostons Logan International Airport, I was amused to see a poster of a demurely dressed Puritan woman assuring me that We thank thee for thy patience! But the connection with the 17th century is even more tangible. It is still possible to touch the water from the spring near Truro, on Cape Cod, where Pilgrims first drank; stand on First Encounter Beach and imagine the flying arrows and musket shots; walk the street they knew in Plymouth; gaze out to sea from Coles Hill, which still contains the bones of those who died that first winter; stand beside the graves of John and Priscilla Alden, and of Myles Standish, at Duxbury; see the grassy depression marking the cellar of their house there and stand beside the hearth of John Howlands excavated homestead at Rocky Nook. One can still look down at Plymouth Rock and wonder if it truly was where the Pilgrims first stepped ashore at the place the indigenous peoples knew as Patuxet.