Cape Cod (4 page)

The Saints had recruited some of the Strangers. Others, like Jack Hilyard, had been brought on by the London Adventurers, the financial backers. Most were decent, some devout, and all had accepted the same terms—seven years of contracted labor—forced upon the Saints themselves. But some Strangers had come seeking their fortune first, not their God, and that might be the undoing of them all.

Saint and Stranger faced each other across the mouth of the slop bucket, and for a time, the only sound was the rush of the wind through the sails. On a small ship and a long journey, hostility was unwelcome but inevitable. All waited to see who would strike first, Ezra Bigelow with his lofty rhetoric or Jack Hilyard with his slop bucket.

Then a gull cried. Master Jones did not notice, for the cry of a gull was a common sound to men who plied the European coastal trade. But when the bird cried a second time, Jones felt it at the base of his spine before he heard it. He saw the bird at the same moment that a wild cry echoed from the foretop:
“Land! Land ho!”

Jack Hilyard and Ezra Bigelow looked up, and Hilyard leaped for joy, because the voice crying out the sight of land belonged to his own son, Christopher.

Bigelow seemed to smile, although his face barely moved. “God gives thy son a great gift, the first sight of our promised land.”

Through his glass, Master Jones saw the horizon waver for the first time in sixty-four days. The sight filled him with joy and relief. Though modern man had known for over a century that the world was not flat, no one had seen it from far enough away to know for certain, and even a good seaman like Jones had moments of doubt.

There were few aboard the
Mayflower—
Saints, Strangers, or sailors—who did not rejoice at the cry of Christopher Hilyard. They poured from the tween-decks and the forecastle as though thinking to see the face of God himself. They lined the rail and hung in the rigging and for a few moments forgot the bitter journey just ended.

But their joy was soon tempered. Instead of God’s face, they saw only the wilderness. First, black patches of evergreen stood out against the horizon; then gray masses of beech and oak lifted their bare November arms in threat, like soldiers upon a great parapet of sand that rose from behind the curve of the earth, until it stood full before them, a hundred feet high, defying their ship as surely as it did the ocean wearing at its base.

“A continent protected by sand,” said Jack’s wife, Kate. “The foolish man build his house on the sand—”

“Show more faith,” chided Simeon Bigelow. “You see a goodly land, wooded to the brink of the sea. God could have given us no better.”

“I sees sand,” said Jack Hilyard.

“ ’Tis what God has offered.” Ezra Bigelow raised his voice, as if to raise his own spirits and those around him with the Scripture. “Did not the Israelites face burning sands before they reached the Promised Land?”

“Aye,” said Simeon. “Let us give thanks for what the Lord has brought us to.”

The chart showed that the Lord had brought them to a peninsula resembling, in all its parts, a man’s arm raised to strike a blow at the sea. The chart called the place Cape James, a name John Smith had given to curry the favor of King James. But sailors used the name that Bartholomew Gosnold had given it after fishing here in 1602:
Cape Cod
.

iii.

More had come.

Men in a great canoe, as big as a hillside, driven by white wings on the wind. Men whose faces grew hair like the pelt of the beaver. Men who dressed in layers of colored skins, yet whose own skin was as white as birchbark. Men who brought some good things… and many bad.

The canoe, called a ship, was the largest that Autumnsquam had ever seen, and he felt fear, like the taste of blood, rise in his throat.

He had been a boy when
les françaises
appeared in the Bay of the Nausets, fifteen summers before. He still remembered the one called Champlain, who sat on the bow of his canoe and made pictures of the land.

The next year
les françaises
had visited the Nausets again, then sailed south to the land of the Monomoyicks. They stayed too long and would not leave, and there was a fight in which many whites and Monomoyicks died.

More came after that. Some flew the red-crossed flag of the English, others the flowered flag of
les françaises
. A few showed a black flag with a white skull and bones. Some simply fished. Some traded knives and metal for pelts. A few pretended trade only to steal Nausets for slaves, and their evil stained every white.

But in the life of the Nausets and the Wampanoag nation, in the sachemdoms from the tip of the Narrow Land to the edge of the Narragansett Bay, the Great Sickness that followed the white men would be remembered before anything else, good or bad.

It began, they said, to the north, in the Penobscot Land, where the whites fished and traded. It reached Autumnsquam’s village shortly after a runner brought news of it. An old man began to shiver and felt great pains in his head. His skin grew hot as a baking stone. His woman bathed him in cold water, and the
pauwau
sang his song. It did no good. The old man died four days later.

But few noticed, because by then, people everywhere were shivering and growing hot at the same time. Little children went so mad with the heat inside their heads that they did not know their own parents. Brave men who had hunted wolves whimpered like old women with pain. Some jumped into the sea to cool their misery, and some of them drowned.

But few noticed, because the Wampanoags were dying everywhere. Autumnsquam did not notice, because he was burying his baby daughter and his own woman.

The dying began in fall and did not end until spring. In some parts of the Wampanoag nation, there were more dead than alive, more dead than the living could bury, and the bones lay bleaching on the sand. For reasons that no man knew, there was less dying on the Narrow Land than in other places, but still there was too much.

Before the white man, there had never been such sickness, the Nausets had never before been dragged into slavery, and the eastern horizon had been the home of the dawn, not the lair of great canoes called ships. Now, the Nausets were no longer friendly to the whites. They enslaved those who were shipwrecked and drove off those who came to trade. But this was the biggest ship that ever had come.

And it was turning south.

Autumnsquam feared that they were searching for the Bay of the Nausets, to steal more of his people and punish them for what they had done to other whites. He would bring the warning, and his people would be ready.

He had learned from his father to measure his gait by the movement of the copper pendants that hung from his ears. If they bounced against his cheeks, it meant that he was running too fast. If they made no motion, he went like the turtle. But if he kept a strong, steady pace, he would feel them swing in rhythm with his gait, and he would go fast yet with dignity.

Because there were fewer now to use the path, much thicket had grown over it, but Autumnsquam was young and strong and wore his winter breeches, and what he could not step over, he went through. For much of the morning, the path took him along the bluff, so that he could watch the white men’s ship and keep himself ahead of it.

Then the bluff gave way to long spits of sand that protected the Bay of the Nausets. The path turned inland along the shore, and Autumnsquam could no longer see the ship. This worried him some, but he kept his copper pendants swinging steadily, stopped only for a handful of pemmican, and soon smelled the cookfires of his village.

At word of the ship, the men took their bows and went to the shore. The women took the children and hid in the forest. And the Nausets waited the day through. But the white men did not come.

Then the setting sun burned through the clouds, sending long rays, like arrows, across the world. The sandspit that formed the eastern shore of their bay glimmered in the golden light. Then the arrows of sun struck something else. At first, Autumnsquam could not tell what it was, this thing that seemed to glide along the rim of the dunes. He was taken by the beauty of it and wondered if it was some new god, come to save them from the white men. Then he knew. It
was
the white men. Their ship was beyond the spit, with only its wings showing above the sand. It had gone south and was now turning north. The white men were looking for a place to land.

iv.

November 10
. Yesterday, near dawn, we raised the sand heights of Cape Cod, dead on the forty-second parallel. Master Coppin, who has sailed these waters, said they were a fine landmark—as they proved to be—and no more than a degree north of Hudson’s River. There was prayer, some rejoicing, and then dispute.

Some wished to land here, but the elders determined to make straight for the Hudson, where they have charter. So we tacked south and were seeking to turn the elbow of the Cape when we fell amongst shoals and currents so swift that the sand billowed off the bottom as we passed. Coppin had warned of this place, and I had read of it in a Dutch rutter, yet were we near lost when the tide took the ebb and the breakers roared to life around us. The only sound louder was the praying, which I did not discourage.

With night coming and the wind fading, I told them we had no choice but to come about. Else the tide would carry us onto a shoal, where the waves would make short work of us.

At this, Ezra Bigelow grumbled that I was in the pay of the Dutch, who wish also to settle at Hudson’s River. I am rankled. This Bigelow impugns me and henceforth walks a thin line.

We beat north’ard now. Afore dawn, we enter Cape Cod Harbor, safest anchorage in the Americas. There is no more talk of Hudson’s River. We are low on beer, and the passengers need solid ground ’neath their feet. Methinks many are pleased to settle here, outside the circle of the Virginia government.

But they must needs create government of their own, for voices of discontent have rose to mutinous pitch since we turned north. Strangers like Jack Hilyard say that without charter for this place, the Saints have no control over them, and they will go where they wish once ashore.

So the elders gather in the steerage cabin where, with strident voice and much debate, they compose charter to bind them till their London men gain legal one. They will ask all freemen and male servants to sign in the morning.

Jack Hilyard, for one, says he will refuse. Ezra Bigelow threatens to clap him in the stocks they have brought for public discipline.

v.

The fire threw shadows on the walls of the longhouse. The men listened with grim faces as Autumnsquam spoke. In the
wetus
, the children cried, and their mothers soothed them. Outside, the dogs barked at the wind.

The old sachem Aspinet threw another log on the fire and watched the sparks rise with the smoke. “The white men may never stop coming.”

The others nodded and said yes, except for Autumnsquam. He cast his eyes toward the roof hole, where smoke and sparks escaped. “We are like the embers going up in the night sky. We must send these whites away before our fire is used up.”

“We are no longer strong.”

“We will only grow weaker if we allow the whites their way.” Autumnsquam looked at the others. Their eyes were on him, but their brows furrowed so the sockets were like dark shadows hiding their thoughts. “We drove off whites not four moons ago. Let us do the same with this ship.”

Aspinet shook his head. The lines in his face had deepened since the Great Sickness. He had been laid low but had defeated death. This made him stronger in the eyes of his people, though the people themselves had grown weak. “This ship is bigger than any other. It could be filled with warriors. If they have gone north, let them go.”

Autumnsquam said no. Though young, he was a
pinse
, a trusted brave and close counselor of the sachem. He could speak his thoughts openly. “These whites think we are weak, so they come to avenge those we have driven off. We must fight them.”

He sat back and looked around again. The bodies of the young men glistened with grease. It was all they needed to keep them warm in winter or keep off the bugs in summer. The old men needed dogs sleeping beside them on cold nights and deerskins around their shoulders even in spring.

But the sickness had not burned all the fire from Aspinet’s belly. He thought for a time, he sucked a long breath of smoke from his pipe, and he told the others that Autumnsquam was right. They should fight for their land or they were women. Now the others nodded and said yes.

Aspinet handed his pipe to Autumnsquam. “We will wait and watch. If they come south from the rivers of the Pamets, we will stop them.”

Autumnsquam sucked on the pipe and passed it to another. “If they come south, they will know that we are not women.”

vi.

“In the name of God, amen,” intoned William Brewster from the half deck. His had been one of the first and strongest of the Saints’ voices, and he had become eldest of the elders.

“ ‘We whose names are underwritten, the loyal subjects of our dread sovereign Lord King James, by the Grace of God of Great Britain, France, and Ireland King, Defender of the Faith, et cetera, Having undertaken for the Glory of God and advancement of the Christian Faith and Honour of our King and Country, a Voyage to plant the First Colony in the Northern Parts of Virginia, do by these presents…’ ”

Saints and Strangers had assembled on deck, in a cold mist, in the bay of a cold wilderness, to hear the reading of the agreement. One hundred and two souls would be asked to obey, though only the men had been asked to sign. The wife, after all, was the man’s chattel and would do as she was told.

Kate Hilyard jammed an elbow into her husband’s ribs. “Thou’d better sign if thou knows what’s good for thee.”

“I don’t care how handsome it’s writ, I ain’t signin’,” whispered Jack Hilyard.