Mayflower (12 page)

William Bradford’s silver drinking cup, made in England in 1634

A writing cabinet said to have been brought on the
Mayflower
by the White family in 1620

A chest reputed to have been brought aboard the
Mayflower
by William Brewster

On the morning of Thursday, December 28, they turned their attention to the high hill, where they began to construct a wooden platform on which to mount the various cannons they had brought with them aboard the
Mayflower.
This was also the day they started to plan the organization of the settlement. But first they needed to decide how many houses to build. It was determined that “all single men that had no wives to join them” should find a family to live with, which brought the total number of houses down to nineteen. From the beginning, it was decided that “every man should build his own house, thinking by that course, men would make more haste than working in common.”

Miles Standish appears to have had a hand in determining the layout of the town. At lectures on military engineering at the University of Leiden, soldiers could learn from the Dutch army’s chief engineer that the most easily defended settlement pattern consisted of a street with parallel alleys and a cross street. The Pilgrims created a similar design that included two rows of houses “for safety.” For the present, Plymouth was without a church and town green, the features that came to typify a New England town.

In the weeks ahead, the death toll required them to revise radically their initial plans. Instead of nineteen, only seven houses were built the first year, plus another four buildings for common use, including a small fortlike structure called a rendezvous. The houses were built along a street that ran from Fort Hill down to the sea. Known today as Leyden Street, it was crossed by a “highway” running from north to south down to Town Brook. Around this intersection, the town of Plymouth slowly came into being, even as death reduced the newcomers to half their original number.

Thursday, January 11, was “a fair day.” Given the uncertainty of the weather, they knew they must make as much progress as possible on the houses—especially since, it was still assumed, the
Mayflower
would soon be returning to England.

The frantic pace of the last two months was beginning to tell on William Bradford. He had suffered through a month of exposure to the freezing cold on the exploratory missions, and the stiffness in his ankles made it difficult to walk. But there was more troubling him than physical discomfort. Dorothy’s passing had opened the floodgates: death was everywhere. It pursued them in the form of illness, and it had been waiting for them here on the blighted shores of Plymouth. Now, in the midst of winter, he could only wonder if he would ever see his son again.

That day, as Bradford worked beside the others, he was “vehemently taken with a grief and pain” that pierced him to his hipbone. He collapsed and was carried to the common house. At first it was feared Bradford might not last the night. But “in time through God’s mercy,” he began to improve, even as illness continued to spread among them. The common house soon became as “full of beds as they could lie one by another.” Like the Native Americans before them, they must struggle to survive on a hillside where death had become a way of life.

In the days ahead, so many fell ill that there were barely half a dozen left to tend the sick. Progress on the houses fell to a standstill as the healthy ones became full-time nurses—preparing meals, tending fires, washing the “loathsome clothes,” and emptying chamber pots. Bradford later singled out William Brewster and Miles Standish as sources of indomitable strength:

At one point, Bradford requested a small container of beer from the stores of the
Mayflower,
hoping that it might help in his recovery. With little left for the return voyage to England, the sailors responded that if Bradford “were their own father he should have none.” Soon after, disease began to ravage the crew of the
Mayflower,
including many of their officers and “lustiest men.” Unlike the Pilgrims, the sailors showed little interest in tending the sick. Early on, the boatswain, “a proud young man,” according to Bradford, who would often “curse and scoff at the passengers,” grew ill. Despite his treatment of them, several of the passengers attended to the young officer in his final hours. Bradford claimed the boatswain experienced a kind of deathbed conversion, crying out, “Oh, you, I now see, show your love like Christians indeed one to another, but we let one another die like dogs.” Master Jones also appears to have undergone a change of heart. Soon after his own men began to fall ill, he let it be known that beer was now available to the Pilgrims, “though he drunk water homeward bound.”

On Friday, January 12, John Goodman and Peter Brown were cutting thatch about a mile and a half from the settlement. They had with them the two dogs, a small spaniel and a huge mastiff bitch. English mastiffs were frequently used in bearbaitings—a savage spectator sport popular in London in which the two creatures fought each other to the death. Mastiffs were also favored by English noblemen, who used them to subdue poachers. The Pilgrims’ mastiff appears to have been more of a guard dog brought to protect them against wild beasts and Indians.

That afternoon, Goodman and Brown paused from their labors for a midday snack, then took the two dogs for a short ramble in the woods. Near the banks of a pond they saw a large deer, and the dogs, no doubt led by the mastiff, took off in pursuit. By the time Goodman and Brown had caught up with the dogs, they were all thoroughly lost.

It began to rain, and by nightfall it was snowing. They had hoped to find an Indian wigwam for shelter but were forced, in Bradford’s words, “to make the earth their bed, and the element their covering.” Then they heard what they took to be “two lions roaring exceedingly for a long time together.” These may have been eastern cougars, also known as mountain lions, a species that once ranged throughout most of North and South America. The cry of a cougar has been compared to the scream of a woman being murdered, and Goodman and Brown were now thoroughly terrified. They decided that if a lion should come after them, they would scramble into the limbs of a tree and leave the mastiff to do her best to defend them.

All that night they paced back and forth at the foot of a tree, trying to keep warm in the freezing darkness. They still had the sickles they had used to cut thatch, and with each wail of the cougars, they gripped their sickles a little tighter. The mastiff wanted desperately to chase whatever was out there in the woods, so they took turns restraining the huge dog by her collar. At daybreak, they once again set out in search of the settlement.

The terrain surrounding Plymouth was no primeval forest. For centuries, the Indians had been burning the landscape on a seasonal basis, a form of land management that created surprisingly open forests, where a person might easily walk or even ride a horse amid the trees. The constant burning created stands of huge white pine trees that commonly grew to over 100 feet tall, with some trees reaching 250 feet in height and as many as 5 feet in diameter. Black and red oaks were also common, as well as chestnuts, hickories, birches, and hemlocks. In swampy areas, where standing water protected the trees from fire, grew white oaks, alders, willows, and red maples. But there were also large portions of southern New England that were completely devoid of trees. After passing several streams and ponds, Goodman and Brown came upon a huge swath of open land that had recently been burned by the Indians. Come summer, this five-mile-wide section of blackened ground would resemble, to a remarkable degree, the wide and rolling fields of their native England.

Not until the afternoon did Goodman and Brown find a hill that gave them a view of the harbor. Now that they were able to orient themselves, they were soon on their way back home. When they arrived that night, they were, according to Bradford, “ready to faint with travail and want of victuals, and almost famished with cold.” Goodman’s frostbitten feet were so swollen that they had to cut away his shoes.

The final weeks of January were spent transporting goods from the
Mayflower
to shore. On Sunday, February 4, yet another storm lashed Plymouth Harbor. The rain was so fierce that it washed the clay daubing from the sides of the houses, while the
Mayflower,
which was riding much higher than usual after the removal of so much freight, wobbled precariously in the gusts.

On Friday, February 16, one of the Pilgrims was hidden in the reeds of a salt creek about a mile and a half from the plantation, hunting ducks. Throughout the last few weeks, there had been a growing concern about Indians. A few days earlier, Master Jones had reported seeing two of them watching the ship from Clark’s Island. That afternoon, the duck hunter found himself closer to an Indian than any of them had so far come.

He was lying amid the cattails when a group of twelve Indians marched past him on the way to the settlement. In the woods behind him, he heard “the noise of many more.” Once the Indians had safely passed, he sprang to his feet and ran for the plantation and sounded the alarm. Miles Standish and Francis Cook were working in the woods when they heard the signal. They dropped their tools, ran down the hill, and armed themselves, but once again, the Indians never came. Later that day, when Standish and Cook returned to retrieve their tools, they discovered that they’d disappeared. That night, they saw “a great fire” near where the duck hunter had first seen the Indians.

The next day, a meeting was called “for the establishing of military orders amongst ourselves.” Not surprisingly, Miles Standish was officially designated their captain. A small man with a broad, powerful physique and reddish hair, Standish also had something of a chip on his shoulder. He seems to have been born on the Isle of Man off the west coast of England, and even though he was descended from “the house of Standish of Standish,” his rightful claim to ancestral lands had been, according to his own account, “surreptitiously detained from me,” forcing him to seek his fortune as a mercenary in Holland. Well educated and well read (he owned a copy of Homer’s
The Iliad
and Caesar’s
Commentaries
), he appears to have conducted himself with a haughty impulsiveness that did not endear him to some of the settlers, one of whom later claimed that the Plymouth captain “looks like a silly boy, and is in utter contempt.” That first winter, John Billington took umbrage at Standish’s attempts to whip the men of the settlement into a fighting force and responded to his orders “with opprobrious speeches.”

Governor Carver’s response was swift. Billington was sentenced to have his hands and feet tied together in a public display of humiliation. But Carver, whose dignified and normally gentle manner appears to have deeply influenced William Bradford, came to think better of the sentence. After listening to impassioned pleas from Billington’s family, he granted him a reprieve, “it being his first offense.”

But tensions among the Pilgrims remained high. With two, sometimes three people dying a day throughout the months of February and March, there might not be a plantation left to defend by the arrival of spring. Almost everyone had lost a loved one. Christopher Martin, the
Mayflower
’s governor, had died in early January, soon to be followed by his wife, Mary. Three other families—the Rigsdales, Tinkers, and Turners—were entirely wiped out, with more to follow. Thirteen-yearold Mary Chilton, whose father had died back in Provincetown Harbor, became an orphan when her mother passed away that winter. Other orphans included seventeen-year-old Joseph Rogers, twelve-yearold Samuel Fuller, eighteen-year-old John Crackston, seventeen-year-old Priscilla Mullins, and thirteen-year-old Elizabeth Tilley, who also lost her aunt and uncle, Edward and Ann. By the middle of March, there were four widowers: Bradford, Standish, Francis Eaton, and Isaac Allerton, who was left with three surviving children between the ages of four and eight. With the death of her husband, William, Susanna White, mother to the newborn Peregrine and five-year-old Resolved, became the plantation’s only surviving widow. By the spring, 52 of the 102 who had originally arrived at Provincetown were dead.