The Romantic Story Of The Mayflower Pilgrims Part 3

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Courtesy of the Smithsonian Inst.i.tution_

MODEL OF THE MAYFLOWER]

The weather was cold and tempestuous, and the pa.s.sage unexpectedly long.

Half way across the Atlantic the voyagers incurred the penalty of those early delays, which now left them still at sea in the bad season. Caught by the equinoctial gales, they were sadly buffeted about, driven hither and thither by boisterous winds, tossed like a toy on the face of great rolling, breaking billows, the decks swept, masts and timbers creaking, the rigging rattling in the hard northern blast. One of the violent seas which struck them, unshipped a large beam in the body of the vessel, but by strenuous labour it was got into position again, and the carpenters caulked the seams which the pitching had opened in the sides and deck. Once that st.u.r.dy colonist of later years, John Howland, venturing above the gratings, was washed overboard, but by a lucky chance he caught a coil of rope trailing over the bulwark in the sea, and was hauled back into the ship. A birth and a death at intervals were also events of the pa.s.sage. It was not until two whole months had been spent on the troubled ocean that glad cries at last welcomed the sight of land, and very soon after, on November 21, sixty-seven days out from Plymouth, the Mayflower rounded Cape Cod and dropped anchor in the placid waters of what came to be Provincetown Harbour.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Copyright, 1890, by A. S. Burbank, Plymouth_

PLYMOUTH HARBOUR, AS SEEN FROM COLE'S HILL]

FOOTNOTES:

[3] New style, which is that adopted for the dates of sailing, and arrival and landing in North American.

IV

"INTO A WORLD UNKNOWN"--TRIALS AND TRIUMPH

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Photograph by A. S. Burbank, Plymouth_

_From a Painting_

THE LANDING OF THE PILGRIMS]

IV

"INTO A WORLD UNKNOWN"--TRIALS AND TRIUMPH

_The breaking waves dash'd high_ _On a stern and rock-bound coast;_ _And the woods, against a stormy sky,_ _Their giant branches toss'd._--MRS. HEMANS.

We can imagine with what wondering awe and mingled hopes and fears the Pilgrims looked out over the sea upon that strange New World, with its great stretch of wild, wooded coast and panorama of rock and dune and scrub, wintry bay and frowning head-land, to which destiny and the worn white wings of the Mayflower together had brought them. With thankful hearts for safe deliverance from the perils of the sea, mindful of the past and not despairing for the future, they turned trustfully and bravely to meet the dangers which they knew awaited them in the unknown wilderness ash.o.r.e.

The point reached by the voyagers was considerably north of the intended place of settlement, the vicinity of the Hudson River; but whether accidental or designed--and some evidence there certainly was which seemed to show that the master of the Mayflower had been bribed by the Dutch[4] to keep away from Manhattan, which they wanted for themselves--the variation was a happy one for the colonists, inasmuch as it saved them from the savages, who were warlike and numerous near the Hudson, while in this district they had been decimated and scattered by disease.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Copyright, 1906, by A. S. Burbank, Plymouth_

_From a Painting_

THE MARCH OF MILES STANDISH]

Now the Pilgrims were a prudent as well as a pious and plucky people, and while yet upon the water they set about providing themselves with a system of civil government. Placed as they were by this time outside the pale of recognized authority, some fitting subst.i.tute for it must be established if order was to be maintained. The necessity for this was the more imperative as there were some on board--the hired labourers, probably--who were not, it was feared, "well affected to peace and concord." a.s.sembled in the cabin of the Mayflower, we accordingly have the leaders of the expedition, preparing that other historical incident of the pilgrimage. There they drew up the doc.u.ment forming a body politic and promising obedience to laws framed for the common good. This was the first American charter of self-government. It was subscribed by all the male emigrants on board, numbering forty-one. Under the const.i.tution adopted, John Carver was elected Governor for one year.

The Mayflower rode at anchor while three explorations were made to discover a suitable place of settlement, one of them on sh.o.r.e under Captain Miles Standish, and two by water in the ship's shallop, which had been stowed away in pieces 'tween decks on the voyage. On December 21st an inlet of the bay was sounded and p.r.o.nounced "fit for shipping,"

and the explorers on going inland found "divers cornfields and little running brooks," and other promising sources of supply. They accordingly decided that this was a place "fit for situation," and on December 26th the Mayflower's pa.s.sengers, cramped and emaciated by long confinement on board, leaped joyfully ash.o.r.e. Appropriately the spot was named New Plymouth, after the last port of call in Old England.

The Pilgrims landed on a huge boulder of granite, the Pilgrim Stone, still reverently preserved by their descendants: a rock which was

to their feet as a doorstep Into a world unknown--the cornerstone of a nation![5]

The early struggles of the Plymouth planters and the hardships they endured form a story of terrible privation and suffering on the one hand and heroic endurance and self-sacrifice on the other. They were late in arriving, and the season, midwinter, was unpropitious. The weather was unusually severe, even for that rigorous climate, and the Pilgrims found themselves in sorry plight on that bleak New England sh.o.r.e. Cold and famine had doggedly to be fought, and the contest was an unequal one.

Cooped up for so long in the Mayflower, and badly fed and sheltered on the voyage, the settlers were ill-fitted to withstand the stress of the new conditions. For a time it was a struggle for bare existence, and the little colony was brought very near to extinction.

The first care was to provide accommodation ash.o.r.e, and for economy of building the community was divided into nineteen households, and the single men a.s.signed to the different families, each of whom was to erect its own habitation and to have a plot of land. These rude homesteads of wood and thatch, and other buildings, eventually formed a single street beside the stream running down to the beach from the hill beyond. The soil of the chosen settlement appeared to be good, and abounded with "delicate springs" of water; the land yielded plentifully in season, and life teemed upon the coast and in the sea.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Copyright, 1906, by A. S. Burbank, Plymouth_

THE CANOPY OVER PLYMOUTH ROCK]

But many of the Pilgrims never lived to enjoy this provision of a bountiful Providence. Worn out, enfeebled in health, insufficiently housed ash.o.r.e, they were a prey to sickness. Death reaped a rich harvest in their midst. Every second day a grave had to be dug for one or other of them in the frozen ground. Sometimes, during January and February, two or three died in a single day. So rapid was the mortality that at last only a mere handful remained who were able to look after the sick.

William Bradford was at this time prostrated, and it is pathetic to note the expression of his grat.i.tude to his friend William Brewster and Miles Standish and others who ministered to his needs and those of the fellow-sufferers around him. One house, the first finished, was set apart as a hospital. The hill above the beach was converted into a burial-ground,[6] and one is touched to the quick to read of the graves having to be levelled and gra.s.sed over for fear the prowling Indians should discover how few and weak the strangers were becoming!

With March came better weather, and for the first time "the birds sang pleasantly in the woods," and brought hope and gladness to the hearts of the struggling colonists. But, by that time, of the hundred or more who had landed three short months before, one-half had perished miserably.

John Carver succ.u.mbed in April, and his wife quickly followed him to the grave. Bradford, by the suffrages of his brethren, was made Governor for the first time in Carver's place. He had himself sustained a heavy bereavement, for, while he was away in the shallop with the exploring party, Dorothy May, the wife he had married at Amsterdam, fell overboard and was drowned. Many men of the Mayflower also died that dreadful winter as the ship lay at anchor in the bay, including the boatswain, the gunner, and the cook, three quartermasters and several seamen.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Photograph by A. S. Burbank, Plymouth_

_From a Painting_

THE OLD FORT AND FIRST MEETING HOUSE]

To other troubles were allied the ever menacing peril of the Indians, which resulted in the famous challenge of the bundle of arrows wrapped in a rattlesnake's skin, and Bradford's effective reply to it with a serpent's skin stuffed with powder and shot; also, less happily, that return of Miles Standish and his men bearing in triumph a sagamore's head; and the building of the hill-fort, with cannon brought ash.o.r.e from the Mayflower mounted on its roof, where also they worshipped till the first church was built at the hill fort in 1648. Here it was that the Pilgrims perpetuated the church founded at Scrooby in England. A building erected for storage and public worship in the first days of the colony took fire soon after its completion and was burnt to the ground.

Of the refuge on the hill Bradford writes: "They builte a fort with good timber, both strong and comly, which was of good defence, made with a flatte rofe and batilments, on which their ordnance was mounted, and where they kepte constante watch, especially in time of danger. It served them also for a meeting-house, and was fitted accordingly for that use." The fort was large and square, and a work of such pretentions as to be regarded by some of the Pilgrims as vainglorious. Its provision was fully justified by the dangers which threatened the settlers, and it became the center of both the civic and religious life of the little colony.

An excellent idea of the scene at Sunday church parade is given in a letter[7] written by Isaac de Ra.s.sieres, secretary to the Dutch colony established at Manhattan, the modern New York, in 1623, describing a visit he paid to the Plymouth Plantation in the autumn of 1627. After speaking of the flat-roofed fort with its "six cannon, which shoot iron b.a.l.l.s of four and five pounds and command the surrounding country," the writer says of the Pilgrims meeting in the lower part: "They a.s.semble by beat of drum, each with his musket or firelock, in front of the captain's door; they have their cloaks on, and place themselves in order three abreast, and are led by a sergeant without beat of drum. Behind comes the Governor in a long robe; beside him, on the right hand, comes the Preacher with his cloak on, and on the left the Captain with his sidearms and cloak on, and with a small cane in his hand; and so they march in good order, and each sets his arms down near him. Thus they are constantly on their guard, night and day."

The spectacle may not have been strictly that witnessed at every service on "Sundays and the usual holidays," for this was a state visit to the Colony, with solemn entry and heralding by trumpeters, and the Pilgrims probably treated the occasion with more form than was their wont. Still it is an instructive picture, full of romantic suggestion.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Photograph by A. S. Burbank, Plymouth_

_From the Painting by G. H. Boughton_

PILGRIMS GOING TO CHURCH]

And then the service itself. For some notion of this we must turn to a visit paid to the Plantation five years later, in the autumn of 1632, when we are introduced to another scene in the fortified church. From the "Life and Letters" of John Winthrop, Governor of the neighbouring Colony of Ma.s.sachusetts Bay, we gather that, at the time stated, Winthrop and his pastor, John Wilson, came over to Plymouth, walking the twenty-five miles. "On the Lord's Day," we read, "there was a sacrament, which they did partake in." Roger Williams was there as a.s.sistant to Ralph Smith, the first minister of Plymouth church, and in the afternoon Williams, according to custom, "propounded a question," to which Mr.

Smith "spake briefly." Then Mr. Williams "prophesied," that is he preached, "and after, the Governor of Plymouth spake to the question; after him, Elder Brewster; then some two or three men of the congregation. Then Elder Brewster desired the Governor of Ma.s.sachusetts and Mr. Wilson to speak to it, which they did. When this was ended the deacon, Mr. Fuller, put the congregation in mind of their duty of contribution; whereupon the Governor and all the rest went down to the deacon's seat, and put into the box, and then returned."

There is nothing here about the music of the services, such as it was, vocal only, rugged, but not without melody. We know, however, that the Pilgrims used that psalter, brought over by them to New England, with its tunes printed above each psalm in lozenge-shaped Elizabethan notes, which Longfellow so grandly describes in "The Courtship of Miles Standish" as

the well-worn psalm-book of Ainsworth, Printed in Amsterdam, the words and the music together, Rough-hewn, angular notes, like stones in the walls of a churchyard, Darkened and overhung by the running vine of the verses.

The duty of "tuning the Psalm," as they designated the performance, in the young colonial days, before choirs or precentors were dreamt of, was delegated to some l.u.s.ty-lunged brother present, and, judged by the testimony which has come down to us, it was an onerous one, trying to his patience and his vocal power when, as sometimes happened, the congregation carried another tune against him. They were called to Sabbath worship in the earlier times by sound of horn or beat of drum or the blowing of a large conch-sh.e.l.l. At Plymouth we have seen it was by drum beat, probably from the roof, that the people were a.s.sembled at the meeting-house.

When the Mayflower left them to return home in the spring, the settlers must have felt they were desolate indeed, for their nearest civilised neighbours were five hundred miles to the north and south of them, the French at Nova Scotia and the English in Virginia. Seven months later, in November, came the Fortune, bringing thirty-five new emigrants, including William Brewster's eldest son; John Winslow, a brother of Edward; and Robert Cushman, who had turned back the year before at Old Plymouth. In addition to her pa.s.sengers, the Fortune brought out to the colonists, from the Council of New England, a patent[8] of their land, drawn up in the name of John Pierce and his a.s.sociate Merchant Adventurers in the same way as the charter granted them by the Plymouth Company on February 21, 1620, authorising the planters to establish their colony near the mouth of the Hudson river.