Penguin History of the United States of America (8 page)

And the time being come that they must depart, they were accompanied with most of their brethren out of the city, unto a town sundry miles off called Delftshaven, where the ship lay ready to receive them. So they left that goodly and pleasant city which had been their resting place near twelve years; but they knew they were pilgrims, and looked not much on those things, but lift up their eyes to the heavens, their dearest country, and quieted their spirits.

This was on 22 July 1620.

Even now there were more delays.
Speedwell
proved unseaworthy (Bradford thought her crew had sabotaged her), but it was long before hope of her repair was abandoned. Only on 16 September did
Mayflower
finally sail from Plymouth. She carried, besides the officers and crew, 105 persons, of whom thirty-five only were certainly Pilgrims (as the Separatists may now, following their historian, properly be called). The rest had been found by the London merchants whom the Pilgrims had induced to finance their voyage, and were indentured servants or persons of particular skills likely to be useful in the new colony (the lessons of Jamestown had sunk in, though the Pilgrims had dared to refuse John Smith’s offer to come with them). The ship was heavily laden with furniture, pots, pans and provisions; some livestock, it appears – pigs, goats and chickens, two dogs (of course), no cattle. The ship herself is described as a ‘staunch, chunky, slow-sailing vessel, square-rigged, double-decked, broad abeam, with high upper structure at the stern, the passengers occupying cabins or quarters between decks, or, in the case of the women and children, in rough cabins forward below the poop’.
¹²
She was about ninety feet long, twenty-five feet wide at her waist. She boasted twelve cannon. Her upper deck leaked in bad weather, and she was very overcrowded, having perhaps thirty more people on board than she should. During the voyage she encountered the autumnal gales, and her passengers were extremely seasick. At one point there was serious danger of the vessel foundering. Altogether, it was in conditions very like those of the later steerage, as well as those of the earlier Virginia voyages, that the Pilgrims crossed the Atlantic. In this sense they had a typical emigrant experience. The single advantage of
Mayflower
was that she was a ‘sweet’ ship: having been engaged in the wine trade, her hold was not rank with the smells and diseases left behind by animal cargoes. The result was a healthy voyage: of the entire complement of 149 persons, ‘only’ five died. But food was insufficient and not good, the voyage was overlong, confinement on shipboard was even longer. When the landing in America had been made and the winter had come, the mortality from scurvy and similar complaints was frightful, carrying off half the crew and half the passengers, including all but four of the eighteen married women. Many of these deaths must be attributed to what was suffered on
Mayflower
.

So when, at daybreak on 9 November, they made landfall, ‘they were not a little joyful’. The tip of Cape Cod, fifty miles out from the mainland, must have looked much as it does today: a waste of tumbled white sand dunes, patchily held together by stands of scrubby oak and pine. The Pilgrims could not settle there, but they took water aboard and then set out to look for a friendlier shore. They hoped to sail south and settle on the Hudson, in what was then termed ‘the northern parts of Virginia’; but wind and rocks forced them back into what is now Provincetown harbour on Cape Cod. From there various reconnaissance parties went out in search of food and a suitable site for inhabitation, and on 11 December a party led by Bradford found its way, in a blinding snowstorm, into Plymouth harbour (first discovered by John Smith, named by him and the future Charles I). Plymouth was chosen to be their new home, and on 16 December
Mayflower
entered the harbour.
¹³
On 25 December, ignoring any popish significance of the date, they set to work to erect ‘the first house for common use to receive them and their goods’. Jamestown had acquired a sister.

The Pilgrims’ case was grim enough. Bradford says:

And for the season it was winter, and they that know the winters of that country know them to be sharp and violent, and subject to cruel and fierce storms, dangerous to travel to known places, much more to search an unknown coast. Besides, what could they see but a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men – and what multitudes there might be of them they knew not… What could now sustain them but the Spirit of God and His grace? May not and ought not the children of these fathers rightly say: ‘Our fathers were Englishmen, which came over this great ocean, and were ready to perish in this wilderness; but they cried unto the Lord, and He heard their voice and looked on their adversity,’ etc. ‘Let them therefore praise the Lord, because He is good: and His mercies endure forever.’

The Pilgrims had to suffer: agony followed their arrival, an agony which did not abate until 1625, when, Bradford tells us, the settlers first tasted ‘the sweetness of the country’. But in some respects they were lucky. The winter was mild for the region, and the Indians, having been immensely reduced in number by a plague, were less dangerous than those of Virginia. Near-contemporary accounts,
¹⁴
though admittedly written as encouraging propaganda, do make it seem that conditions were less unbearable in Plymouth than they had been, ten years previously, in Virginia. For one thing, the Pilgrims were made of better stuff than the Virginians. They survived, and thus achieved their historic mission.

For New Plymouth was not a colony that could easily or quickly grow. The Separatists were a minority of the inhabitants to begin with, but they early subdued their fellows to their ways; yet their ecclesiastical doctrines, which in effect denied the authenticity, the purity, of all other congregations whatever, except those of the remaining exiles in Leyden and Amsterdam, were bound to repel many, even many other Puritans, who might have joined them. Then, the economic basis of the colony was too weak and narrow to support any ambitious edifice: not until 1648 did the Pilgrims pay off the debts in which their voyage had involved them. Farming and fishing (the soil being thin and Plymouth far from the best fishing-grounds) alike at first disappointed the hopes that had been placed in them: only the fur-trade kept the infant colony in being. In a small way, it is true, it throve: in 1628 the town presented a respectable appearance to a Dutch visitor, who has left us details of the well-built wooden houses, the gardens, the stockade and the cannon; by 1630 its population stood at nearly 300, by 1637 it was nearly 550. But Virginia, at the same dates, had a population of more than 2,500 and more than 5,000 respectively. Plymouth, with its population of, in the main, unintellectual and socially undistinguished zealots, could save itself, indeed prosper, by its exertions; its influence could spread only by example. There would be nothing like the steady march of population across country from the first settlement that so strongly characterized the Virginian development; though it is worth noting that in other respects the common features of American experience made themselves felt. Thus, in Plymouth, as in Jamestown, an attempt to have all things in common was made, and failed. Bradford tells us:

So they began to think how they might raise as much corn as they could, and obtain a better crop than they had done, that they might not still thus languish in misery. At length, after much debate of things, the Governor
¹⁵
(with the advice of the chief-est among them) gave way that they should set corn every man for his own particular, and in that regard trust themselves… And so assigned every family a parcel of land… This had very good success, for it made all hands very industrious, so as much corn was planted than otherwise would have been by any means the Governor or any other could use, and saved him a great deal of trouble, and gave far better content. The women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn; which before would allege weakness and inability.

Once more it had been shown that, whatever their faith in a common road to heaven, Jacobean Englishmen desired individual economic salvation on earth, and that the only way to secure their prosperity and cohesion in the New World was by assuaging their land-hunger: which, fortunately, was easy. In New England, as in Virginia, the most alluring advertisement for the colonies was to be that which we find in such remarks as William
Hilton’s, made from Plymouth in 1621: ‘We are all freeholders, the rent day doth not trouble us…’

And, as in Virginia, the political necessities of American life also made themselves felt promptly. When the
Mayflower
company contemplated its future after reaching Cape Cod it seemed plain that such a group, far from all the sanctions and blessings of regular English government, could not thrive without an agreed constitution. Accordingly the Saints (remembering the covenant by which they, like all Separatist churches, had established themselves) and the Strangers (that is, the non-Saints) agreed on the
Mayflower
Compact – signed on 11 November by most of the company’s adult males. In content it was no more than a covenant constituting the signatories a body politic, which would issue and abide by its own laws; but the manner in which it was arrived at was, if not democratic, at least self-governing, like the Separatist churches;
¹⁶
and the constitution which evolved from it, though in substance paternalistic (for the Governor and his council made all decisions), had similar characteristics: notably the provision for the annual election of the Governor by all properly qualified adult males. Seen against a modern American background there is nothing very striking in the Pilgrims’ political arrangements; but set against the background of Stuart England they are eloquent of what was different about the New World. Government, indeed survival, was possible there only with the consent of the governed; political institutions therefore became in the first instance instruments for securing that consent. The
Mayflower
Compact was the first of innumerable agreements arrived at by the American people as they founded new settlements. Its example was unconsciously but exactly followed in seventeenth-century New England, in eighteenth-century Kentucky, throughout revolutionary America, and everywhere on the nineteenth-century frontier: in Texas, California, Iowa and Oregon. These agreements enabled generations of settlers to feel that their lives, property and prospects were secure under the rule of law, and they conditioned American political assumptions, so that the leaders of revolutionary Maryland could assert without fear of contradiction that ‘All government of right originates from the people, is founded in compact only.’
¹⁷
All this prepared the way for the greatest compact of all, the Constitution of the United States. The Pilgrims were thus forerunners of even more than was prophesied to them from England in 1623, when their associates wrote: ‘Let it not be grievous unto you that you have been instruments to break
the ice for others who come after with less difficulty; the honour shall be yours to the world’s end.’ The Pilgrims had shown what could be done; and others soon profited from their example.

For England had now entered on a half-century of chronic trade depression, and her greatest export, cloth – especially in its traditional form, the so-called Old Draperies – was hardest hit of all. An ill wind blew throughout East Anglia and the South-West, where Puritanism, outside London, was at its strongest; and presently a new force began to make itself felt in the Church of England: the bigoted moderation of William Laud, created bishop in 1621, Bishop of London in 1628, Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633. Over-zealous and over-sure of himself he was, in the end, to do as much as any man (next the King) to bring down the old order in England; but before that he mightily helped to bring about another important work, the Great Migration of thousands of Puritans to New England, there to be free of him and hold up the model of a Reformed church to their unhappy countrymen at home.

Other impulses too pushed them westwards, as they had pushed the Virginians before: impulses which, throughout this time, were speckling the Atlantic coast, from Newfoundland southwards, with white men’s habitations. As a result of the depression, land-hunger and the quest for trade were stronger than ever. Not only that, it was an era when mounting incompetence and remoteness were driving the Stuart monarchy into ruinously arbitrary courses: it was not so good to be an Englishman as it had been. But there can be no doubt that the religious impulse, as such, was predominant, indeed sufficient by itself to account for this ‘Puritan Hegira’.
¹⁸
It was intimately connected, of course, with the other forces mentioned. Two-fifths of the emigrants seem to have come from the cloth counties. The King’s incompetent despotism was a seamless web, oppressing the political and economic as well as the religious life of his subjects, with Star Chamber as well as High Commission, since religion, labour and politics were interfused. But none of this need have been true, and the Puritans would still have sailed. Laud silenced the godly preachers, enforced conformity, frustrated all attempts to puritanize the Church of England from within. More and more the Puritans found God’s work to be hampered in England; they must pursue it elsewhere.

It is unnecessary to elaborate the process which led to the great decision. The propaganda of a generation had pointed the way, and the Pilgrims had made it seem practicable. Laud made the matter urgent. Earlier efforts were crowned and superseded by the foundation, in 1629, of the Massachusetts Bay Company, which inherited a struggling plantation at Naumkeag (now Salem) in New England; and in 1630 it put a fleet to sea of eleven ships, carrying 700 passengers, 240 cows, sixty horses, the royal charter of the
Company (so that self-government was legally possible in New England)
¹⁹
and a leader, the Governor of the Company and the colony, John Winthrop (1588–1650), the first great American.