The Mayflower and the Pilgrims' New World* (11 page)

The shallop set out from the
Mayflower
once more on Wednesday, December 6. The
Mayflower
's two pilots, Robert Coppin and John Clark, had replaced Master Jones and were accompanied by the master gunner and three sailors. The Pilgrims were represented by Bradford, Carver, standish, Winslow, John Tilley and his brother Edward, John Howland, Richard Warren, stephen Hopkins, and Hopkins's servant, Edward Doty—less than half the number of the previous expedition. Illness and freezing temperatures—it was now in the low twenties, if not colder—had already taken a considerable toll.

Almost as soon as they set sail, the salt spray froze on their coats—“as if they had been glazed,” Bradford wrote. They sailed south into Wellfleet Bay, about fifteen miles beyond Truro. On the shore they saw a dozen or so Indians working around a large dark object that they later discovered was a pilot whale, a small, black whale around twenty feet long. The Indians were cutting the whale's blubber into long strips when they saw the shallop approaching and fled.

Once ashore, the Pilgrims built themselves a barricade and a large fire, and as night descended, they noticed the smoke from another fire about four miles away. The next day was spent looking for a possible settlement site, with some of them taking to the shallop while others remained on land. Once again, they found plenty of graves and abandoned wigwams, but no people and no suitable places to anchor a large ship. They decided to sail for Thievish Harbor the following day.

Toward nightfall, the shore party met with those in the shallop at a tidal creek known today as Herring River. As they had done the previous night, they built themselves a circular barricade of tree trunks and branches, with a small opening where they stationed several guards. Around midnight, the silence was broken by “a great hideous cry.” The watchmen shouted out, “Arm! Arm!” several muskets were fired, and all was silent once again. One of the sailors said he'd heard wolves make a similar noise in Newfoundland. This seemed to comfort them, and they went back to sleep.

About 5 A.M. they began to rouse themselves. Most of them were armed with matchlocks—muskets equipped with long-burning wicks that were used to light the gunpowder. They were not the most reliable weapons, particularly in the wet and cold, since it was difficult to keep the powder dry. several men decided to fire off their guns, just to make sure they were still working.

After prayer, they began to prepare themselves for breakfast and the long journey ahead. In the predawn twilight, some of the men carried their weapons and armor down to the shallop. Laying them beside the boat, they returned to the camp for breakfast. It was then they heard another “great and strange cry.”

One of the men burst out of the trees and came running for the barricade, screaming, “They are men—Indians, Indians!” suddenly the air was filled with arrows. Every man reached for his gun. They dipped their matches into the embers of the fire, and with their matches lit, began to blast away. But standish ordered them “not to shoot, till we could take aim.” He didn't know how many Indians were out there in the woods, and they might need every shot.

In the meantime, those who had left their muskets beside the shallop sprinted back to get them. The Indians soon had them trapped behind the boat. standish and those guarding the entrance to the barricade called out to make sure they were unhurt. “Well, well, everyone,” they shouted. “Be of good courage!” Three of them at the boat fired their muskets, but the others were without a way to light their matches. One of the men in the barricade picked up a burning log from the fire and ran with it to the shallop, an act of bravery that, according to Bradford, “did not a little discourage our enemies.” For their part, the Indians' war cries were a particularly potent psychological weapon that the Pilgrims would never forget, later transcribing them as “Woath! Woach! Ha! Ha! Hach! Woach!”

They estimated that there were at least thirty Indians, “although some thought that they were many more yet in the dark of the morning.” As the French explorer samuel Champlain had discovered fourteen years earlier on the south coast of Cape Cod, the Indians' bows and arrows were fearsome weapons. Made from a five-and-a-half-foot piece of solid hickory, maple, ash, or witch hazel, a Native bow was so powerful that one of Champlain's men was skewered by an arrow that had already passed through his dog—making a gruesome shish kebab of the French sailor and his pet.

The feathered arrows were over a yard long, and each warrior kept as many as fifty of them in a quiver made from dried reeds. With his quiver slung over his left shoulder and with the hair on the right side of his head cut short so as not to interfere with the bowstring, a Native warrior was capable of firing arrows much faster than a musket-equipped Englishman could fire bullets. Indeed, it was possible for a skilled bowman to have as many as five arrows in the air at once, and the Pilgrims were forced to take shelter as best they could.

There was one Indian in particular, “a lusty man and no whit less valiant, who was thought to be their captain.” He stood behind a tree within “half a musket shot” of the barricade, peppering them with arrows as the Pilgrims did their best to blast him to bits. The Native leader dodged three different gunshots but, seeing one of the Englishman taking “full aim at him,” wisely decided to retreat. As fragments of bark and wood flew around him, he let out “an extraordinary shriek” and disappeared with his men into the woods. some of the Pilgrims, led no doubt by standish, followed for about a quarter of a mile, then stopped to shoot off their muskets. “This we did,” Bradford wrote, “that they might see we were not afraid of them nor discouraged.” Before they departed in the shallop, they collected a total of eighteen arrows, “some ... headed with brass, others with harts' horn, and others with eagles' claws,” for eventual shipment back to England. None of the men had suffered even a scratch. “Thus it pleased God,” Bradford wrote, “to vanquish our enemies and give us deliverance.”

Despite Bradford's claims, what became known as the First Encounter could hardly be considered a victory. The Pilgrims could not blast, fight, and kill their way to a permanent settlement in New England. After the First Encounter, it was clear that friends were going to be difficult to find here on Cape Cod.

It was on to Thievish Harbor.

 

◆◆◆ With the wind out of the southeast, they sailed along the southern edge of Cape Cod Bay. Then the weather got worse. The wind picked up, and with the temperature hovering around freezing, sleet combined with the salt spray of the bay to drench the passengers to the bone. The wind continued to build, and as night came on, the boat became unmanageable in the large waves. All seemed lost, when the pilot, Robert Coppin, cried out, “Be of good cheer, I see the harbor!” By now it was blowing a gale, and in the freezing rain, the visibility was terrible. But Coppin saw something that convinced him they were about to enter Thievish Harbor.

They were bashing through the rising seas when their mast splintered into three pieces. Once they'd gathered up the broken mast and sail and stowed them away, they took up the oars and started to row. The tide, at least, was with them. But it quickly became clear that instead of the entrance to a harbor, they were steering for a wave-pummeled beach where the huge breakers might destroy their boat and kill them all. Coppin cried out, “Lord be merciful unto us, for my eyes never saw this place before!”

Just when all seemed lost, the sailor at the steering oar cried out some much-needed words of encouragement, and with the waves bursting against the shallop's side, they tried to row their way out of danger. “so he bid them be of good cheer,” Bradford wrote, “and row lustily, for there was a fair sound before them, and he doubted not but they should find one place or other where they might ride in safety.”

The shallop had nearly run into a shallow cove at the end of a thin, sandy peninsula called the Gurnet. Once they rowed the shallop around the tip of the Gurnet, they found themselves in the shelter of what they later discovered was an island.

In the deepening darkness of the windy night, they discussed what they should do next. some insisted that they remain aboard the shallop in case of Indian attack. But most of them were more fearful of freezing to death, so they went ashore and built a large fire. When at midnight the wind shifted to the northwest and the temperature dropped till “it froze hard,” all were glad that they had decided to come ashore.

The next day, a saturday, proved to be “a fair, sunshining day.” They now realized that they were on a heavily wooded island and, for the time being, safe from Indian attack. John Clark, one of the
Mayflower
's pilots, had been the first to set foot on the island, and from that day forward it was known as Clark's Island.

They were on the western edge of a large, wonderfully sheltered bay. Even though they had “so many motives for haste,” they decided to spend the day on the island, “where they might dry their stuff, fix their pieces, and rest themselves.” The shallop needed a mast, and they undoubtedly cut down as straight and sturdy a tree as they could find and fashioned it into a new spar. The following day was a sunday, and as Bradford recorded, “on the sabbath day we rested.”

They spent Monday exploring the harbor that was to become their new home. They tested the water's depth and found it deep enough for ships the size of the
Mayflower.
They went on land, but nowhere in either
Of Plymouth Plantation
or
Mourt's Relation,
the book Bradford and Winslow wrote after their first year in America, is there any mention of a Pilgrim stepping on a rock.

Like Cape Cod to the southeast, the shore of Plymouth Bay is nondescript and sandy. But at the foot of a high hill, just to the north of a brook, was a rock that must have been impossible to miss. More than twice as big as the mangled chunk of stone that is called Plymouth Rock today, this two-hundred-ton granite boulder stood above the low shoreline. But did the Pilgrims use it as a landing place?

◆
A photograph from the nineteenth century that shows the sandy and rocky coast where the Pilgrims first arrived.

At half tide and above, a small boat could have sailed right up alongside the rock. For these explorers, who were suffering from chills and coughs after several weeks of wading up and down the frigid tidal flats of Cape Cod, using the rock as a landing point must have been difficult to resist. But if they did use it as their first stepping-stone onto the banks of Plymouth Harbor, Bradford never made note of the historic event. That would be left to later generations of mythmakers.

They marched across the shores of Plymouth “and found divers cornfields and little running brooks, a place (as they supposed) fit for situation.” Best of all, despite the signs of farming, they found no evidence of any recent Indian settlements. The next day they boarded the shallop and sailed for the
Mayflower
with the good news.

It had been a long month of exploration. Later, looking back on their trek along the shore of Cape Cod, Bradford could not help but see their journey in biblical terms. New World Israelites, they had, with God's help, finally found their Canaan. But back then, in the late afternoon of Tuesday, December 12, as the shallop approached the
Mayflower,
Bradford and his companions had little reason to believe they had found the Promised Land.

Much of Plymouth Harbor was so shallow that a ship the size of the
Mayflower,
which was twelve feet deep, had to anchor more than a mile from shore. The harbor was also without a navigable river extending into the land's interior. It was true that there were no Native settlements nearby, but that didn't mean they wouldn't be attacked. The Indians in the region had already surprised them once; it would probably happen again. Worst of all, they were approaching what Bradford called “the heart of winter,” and many of them were sick—indeed, some were on the verge of death.