Chapter 11: Pilgrims of Old England. c1610-1655.

Following Henry Hudson’s historic 1609 voyage for the Dutch, the English launched a flurry of new expeditions across the North Atlantic. In 1610 – now backed by the Virginia Company, the English East India Company, and the English crown – Hudson returned to North American waters seeking a short-cut to Asia. Instead of finding a Northwest Passage to the Pacific, he entered an enormous inlet of the Atlantic. Wintering in freezing waters, with rations running low, crewmen openly questioned Hudson’s leadership. At the onset of summer, 1611, Robert Juet, Hudson’s former first mate, helped direct a mutiny against the captain. Hudson, his teenage son, and seven others were cast adrift in a small boat and left to die in the great bay they had just discovered.1 Juet and other mutineers died from starvation and Indian attacks on the route home, leaving only eight survivors to reach England.

In 1612, another syndicate of English merchants and captains formed the North-West Company – to search for Hudson and to continue the search for the Northwest Passage. They never found any trace of Henry Hudson, though they did discover some tantalizing passages choked by ice.2

As the Dutch began to settle around the lower Hudson River and the wider region of New Netherland, the English feared incursions on land they claimed as part of “Northern Virginia.” The Plymouth Company, which still had a royal monopoly over northern settlement, hastened to occupy the coast. In 1614 the company engaged the services of John Smith. Five years after leaving Jamestown, Smith recrossed the Atlantic, now leading two ships to explore Northern Virginia. Whereas the coastlands of Southern Virginia lay flat and marshy, cut by inlets and estuaries, Captain Smith saw in Northern Virginia a long, craggy coastline, backed by rolling hills, and crowned with towering trees. He described a land of plenty ranged by large game animals, bays stocked with fish, and shallows crawling in lobsters. He met Indians who spoke Algonquian dialects unlike any heard in Chesapeake Bay. The two extremes of Virginia surely warranted different names. In renaming the northern region, Smith drew inspiration from Drake’s west coast Nova Albion and thought that such a name should appear on the east coast. He also knew that Spain and France and the Netherlands were staking great claims on the continent as New Spain and New France and New Netherland. For these reasons, Smith stamped England’s name on NEW ENGLAND.3 Sailing south down the rugged coast, Smith identified several promising harbours, whose names became synonymous with their resident Indians, including “Aucocisco,” around CASCO Bay; and “Passataquack,” at the mouth of PISCATAQUA River. Although Smith characterized most of the regional Indians as friendly and welcoming, his crew had one violent encounter by the rocky shores of “Quonahassit,” where they came under attack from Indian arrows and responded with a lethal burst of gunfire; now spelled COHASSET, the name probably refers to the long rocky place, or rocky promontory.

In his survey of New England, Smith was especially impressed by the land around one large bay. In his glowing account of the region, Smith wrote of the “Countrie of the Massachusets, which is the paradise of all these parts…” He reported one Indian village and its residents as “Massachuset” and “Massachusets.” He also referred to a local waterway the “Massachusets River.” And he called a local hill “Massachusets Mount.” Indeed, the Algonquian name signified a people or place near the big hills. With an extra “t”, the name endured as MASSACHUSETTS. Unable to find any precious metals in New England, Smith loaded his holds with valuable furs and fish before returning to England. He directed Thomas Hunt to load up the second ship with cod to be traded in Spain. But Hunt hoped bigger profits might be made trading Indian slaves, and so abducted two dozen natives from the shores of Cape Cod. Sold into slavery in Spain, most of the Indians succumbed to European disease. But at least one enslaved Indian, called Squanto, was freed with the assistance of Franciscan priests and made his way to England. Squanto eventually made it back to New England. Smith attempted to return to New England in 1615 with a small party of colonists but was captured by French pirates off the Azores. Cheating death once more, Smith made his escape in a small boat during an overnight storm. He never returned to the New World. Back in England, he presented a detailed map of New England to Prince Charles, suggesting he change whatever native names he thought coarse: “I heere present your Highness the description in a map; my humble sute is, you would please to change their Barbarous names, for such English, as posterity may say, Prince Charles was their Godfather.” The prince erased most of the native names on the map, scribbling English names in their stead. Smith kept track of the prince’s changes and, in his “Description of New England,” he published a table showing “The old names” and “The new names.” Among the old, barbarous names was the “Massachusets River,” which Smith promoted as an ideal site for future English settlement; Prince Charles bestowed upon it a new name, the CHARLES River. Among other new names given by Prince Charles was Cape ELIZABETH, honoring his sister, Princess Elizabeth; and Cape ANNE, honoring his mother, the queen consort, Anne of Denmark. In perhaps the most ambitious of his alterations, Charles tried to supplant the name of Cape Cod with “Cape James,” honoring his father, King James. But there are limits to the influence of princes and the prestige of kings; Cape Cod was already too well-known among captains trawling the Atlantic Seaboard. In September 1620, Captain Christopher Jones guided the Mayflower across the Atlantic Ocean, giving passage to a group of English Protestants resolved to separate from the Church of England. Over the last decade in exile, many Separatists had carved out their own community in Leiden, Netherlands, but they now hoped to create their own refuge in North America. Leading Separatists across the Atlantic were William Brewster, William Bradford, Edward Winslow, and John Carver; John Howland, Carver’s indentured servant, was lucky to survive the Atlantic crossing after falling off the Mayflower in mid-ocean and clinging on by a rope.

Having rejected John Smith’s offer to serve as their military advisor, the Separatists instead hired another English mercenary – who had fought against the Spanish occupation of the Netherlands – Myles Standish. Among other non-Separatists aboard the Mayflower was John Alden, a relative of Captain Jones, employed as the ship’s cooper. And hired for his experience was Stephen Hopkins, who had already survived stranding in Bermuda and starvation in Jamestown; now crossing the Atlantic Ocean in the Mayflower, he and his wife Elizabeth welcomed a new baby boy, whom they christened Oceanus Hopkins. After a 66-day journey across the ocean, the hopeful colonists rounded the hooked tip of Cape Cod. While they still lay at anchor in Cape Cod Bay in late November, another child was born aboard the Mayflower: Separatists William and Susanna White christened their newborn son Peregrine, meaning Traveller or Pilgrim. Chroniclers would later call all the passengers Pilgrims. Although the Separatists possessed a grant from the Virginia Company, they had no patent from the Plymouth Company to settle in New England. They solved the problem by drafting a new contract – the Mayflower Compact – and under its terms settled on the southwestern shores of Cape Cod Bay. Months earlier they had embarked from Plymouth, England; now in December they disembarked at new PLYMOUTH, New England. But the name of Plymouth was already anchored in place when the Pilgrims arrived. Indeed, John Smith had explored Cape Cod Bay in the service of the Plymouth Company; and on Smith’s map of New England, a copy of which the Pilgrims carried, Prince Charles had marked one site on the western shores of the bay, “Plimouth,” or Plymouth. The Separatists already risked incurring the monarchy’s wrath by settling the site without a proper royal patent – but they were not so defiant as to erase a name set down by a prince.

Exposure and malnourishment bedevilled every family during the first winter. William Bradford’s wife drowned in Cape Cod Bay; Edward Winslow and Myles Standish both lost their wives to disease. Susanna White lost her husband. Cold, starving colonists were reduced to robbing Indian graves of grain and furs. To shield their departed from a similar fate, colonists discreetly buried their own dead at night. The spring of 1621 brought a change in fortunes, as the English became acquainted with the regional Indians, whose hierarchical structure included chiefs, “sachems,” and subchiefs, “sagamores.” On one warm day in March, an Abenaki sagamore named Samoset walked into their budding settlement announcing, “Welcome Englishmen!” Having learnt broken English from visiting fishermen in his native Maine, he politely asked the Pilgrims if they had any beer. Conveying a message of peace, Samoset returned days later with an allied chief of the Wampanoag, the grand sachem Massasoit. And with him came another Wampanoag Indian, Squanto, who now spoke fluent English. Recently returned from England, Squanto had come home to find his village wiped out by European diseases. Showing no ill-will to English colonists, he guided them to the best fishing spots, helped them plant maize, and showed them how to use menhaden as fertilizer; in vain he encouraged English colonists to bathe more often.

Governor John Carver died from sunstroke in April, and his wife Katherine died weeks later from what Bradford called a “broken heart.” But births in the colony began to outnumber deaths. Susanna White married Edward Winslow, giving birth to five more children including another future leader of the colony, Josiah Winslow.

For five days in late spring, John Billington the Elder feared that some evil had befallen his son, who had vanished into the woods. In their search, the Pilgrims met Hyannis, another Wampanoag sagamore, who welcomed them into his village and fed them generously. Hyannis directed the searchers toward another village – where they found John Billington the Younger unscathed.

In summertime the Plymouth planters saw their crops grow tall. Praising the Lord for their survival, and inviting the Wampanoag to join them, they celebrated their autumn harvest with a three-day Thanksgiving feast. On the table were Indian staples like corn and pumpkin and, perhaps, turkey. And just before the onset of winter, Pilgrims welcomed a new ship of settlers into Plymouth Harbour, the Fortune. While the Wampanoag acknowledged the Plymouth colony in a peace treaty, other Indian tribes were less welcoming. In 1622, Sachem Canonicus of the Narragansetts sent a bundle of arrows wrapped in snakeskin to Governor Bradford. Bradford sent the snakeskin back with gunpowder and bullets. The menacing exchange of ammunition kept belligerents at bay – leading to peace between the Narragansett tribe and the Plymouth Pilgrims. But in 1623 Sachem Massasoit warned the English that several bands of the Massachusetts tribe were plotting a massacre. With Wampanoag assistance, Standish and the Plymouth militia ambushed and killed several of the accused Massachusetts conspirators; one Massachusetts head was placed on a pike and displayed outside the Plymouth fort. To secure trade with the Abenaki in the north, Plymouth leaders sent John Howland – now freed from his indentured service to the late John Carver – to command a northern trading post on the Kennebec River. To increase their trade with the regional Wampanoag, and to capitalize on Dutch merchant ships plying the waters off New Netherland, Plymouth colonists built another trading post on a rugged tidal bay to the south. On their early trips to the bay, they had found large flocks of birds hovering over its waters. Had there been an ornithologist among the early colonists, it might have become “Ospreys Bay.” But colonists confused the bird for a similar species in England and named it BUZZARDS Bay.

While their relations deteriorated with many local tribes, the Plymouth colonists remained on good terms with the Wampanoag. In the late 1620s, a party of colonists sailed north from Plymouth to establish a new colonial outpost. Although they called themselves the “men of Kent,” from their home county in England, they held off giving any Kentish name in New England. As they settled by the chilly waters of a small stream, they embraced its Wampanoag name, meaning cold brook, SCITUATE. New threats to the spiritual purity of the Separatist utopia came from fellow English folk. Throughout the 1620s the Council for New England gifted land grants to prospective colonial promoters. Most ventures foundered within 12 months but one scandalous colony just 30 miles northwest of Plymouth lingered longer. Seeking freedom from the laws of England, English libertine Thomas Morton had assumed the leadership of a nascent settlement, which he named “Merrymount”. Under its carefree name, colonists lived unholy lives – writing lewd poetry, drinking to intoxication, and dancing around a pagan maypole. Rumors spread that they even sold firearms to savages. To Plymouth residents, Morton’s ungodly colony blighted New England's shores. In 1628 Myles Standish marched the Plymouth militia to Merrymount, where he cut down the maypole, drove the colonists from the mainland, and erased Merrymount from the maps. Morton’s satirical description of the region and its people, published in the 1630s as New English Canaan, was among the first books ever banned in America. William Brewster, the senior elder among the Separatists, had long suffered with his persecuted sect. Enduring years of arrest and violence, he had christened his own children Patience, Fear, Love, and Wrestling. Advising Governors Bradford and Winslow, Brewster imposed an austere code of Biblical piety over Plymouth. Stephen Hopkins, who opened Plymouth’s first tavern opposite Bradford’s house, had fiery clashes with Plymouth authorities over the right of patrons to drink beer and play shuffleboard on Sundays. Strict social laws forbade dancing and living alone; adultery and sodomy were among a long list of sexual perversions punishable by death. The first person hanged in the colony was John Billington the Elder, found guilty of murdering a fellow settler.

Expanding around Cape Cod Bay in the 1630s, the Plymouth colony met little resistance from local Indians devastated by European diseases. Settling behind the bay’s mudflats, colonists built humble timber-framed dwellings, making their new homes homelier with familiar names. Following the model set by Smith's naming of New England, and consolidating the pattern set in Plymouth, settlers replaced native names with English ones. Myles Standish was among the first proprietors and settlers of DUXBURY, named for the ancestral estate of the Standish family, Duxbury Hall, Lancashire. After decades leading the Plymouth militia, Standish would retire to his farm in Duxbury.

In the 1630s, amongst several terms as governor, Edward Winslow was granted land north of Duxbury. By the end of the decade, he had built a home and resettled there with his wife, Susanna, and their children, including Peregrine. Winslow invited the Reverend Richard Blinman to immigrate with a congregation straddling the English county of Gloucestershire and the Welsh County of Monmouthshire. As Blinman’s flock arrived in 1640, Winslow’s budding settlement adopted the name of MARSHFIELD – supposedly for the local marshy fields. However, there were two towns named Marshfield in Britain: one in Gloucestershire and one in Monmouthshire. Some of Blinman’s flock, if not the reverend himself, must have once called old Marshfield home. But few would stay long in new Marshfield. After quarrelling with fellow settlers over theological issues, Blinman led most of his flock out of the colony in 1642.

The widow Deborah Bachiler Wing brought her sons to the colony in the 1630s and settled south of Plymouth. Having long-since left their home in Sandwich, Kent, the Wings built their new homes in SANDWICH. The name may have been selected to honor Deborah Wing, the matriarch of the early community. But early proprietors might have chosen the name as much for its literal value as a village by the sand.

Some new arrivals to the Plymouth Colony came from Devonshire, the home county of old Plymouth. John Chipman sailed out of old Barnstaple, Devon, in the early 1630s; by the late 1630s, he was amongst the first settlers of new BARNSTABLE, Plymouth Colony. Chipman would later marry John Howland’s daughter, Hope, with whom he had a dozen children. Other settlers from Devon were active in the region, including John Otis, also from old Barnstaple, whose children and grandchildren would soon settle in new Barnstable. Successive generations of the Otis family would found other settlements and form a powerful New England dynasty. Spreading around Cape Cod, new English settlers founded YARMOUTH. Although several passengers on the Mayflower had come from Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, none had survived the first winter in Plymouth. But two of the first three proprietors of new Yarmouth in the 1630s, John Crow and Thomas Howes, had roots in the English county and perhaps saw a resemblance in Cape Cod’s coastline to the long, flat, sandy shores around Great Yarmouth. Elizabeth Poole was a wealthy, well-born Englishwoman who dreamed of founding a Christian sanctuary in New England. She urged her kith and kin from Somerset to emigrate with her, including the Street and Strong families. Arriving in the late 1630s, Poole led settlers inland to a new town named for their old home in Somersetshire, TAUNTON. The Reverend Nicholas Street, who had married Anne Poole, Elizabeth’s sister, would serve as an early minister of the town. William Poole, Elizabeth’s brother, was a leader of the local militia. Elizabeth remained unmarried, nurturing the settlement for almost two decades until she died in “her virgin state.” She is often regarded as the first woman to found a town in the American colonies. In 1642, a beastly scandal tore through the colony when Love Brewster’s teenage servant, Thomas Granger, was caught having sex with a horse and convicted by the courts of “buggery with a mare, a cow, two goats, divers sheepe, two calves, and a turkey...” Granger was executed for his crimes, as were most of the animals. Thomas Prence first arrived in the Plymouth Colony aboard the Fortune in 1621. Through his marriage to Patience Brewster he secured his influence in the colony, and would serve several terms as governor. In the 1640s, after decades in Plymouth and Duxbury, Prence founded a new settlement on the distant shores of Cape Cod, called EASTHAM. The name was probably chosen for its literal value the East Town – the easternmost in the colony – but it also echoed the London district of East Ham. In fact, before embarking for Plymouth, Prence had lived for a time in London – a few miles west of East Ham. Prence resided in new Eastham for two decades, before returning to Plymouth to complete an extended tenure as governor.

William Brewster died in 1644, leaving Bradford and Winslow without their old mentor and spiritual beacon. Like many elders, they feared that younger generations were being corrupted by temptation. Indeed, Winslow would endure the indignity of seeing his stepson, Peregrine White, convicted and fined by the Plymouth court for fornicating before marriage – because his wife gave birth too soon after their wedding day.

More than a decade after the founding of Taunton, and a dozen miles to the north, a new town was called BRIDGEWATER; in Somersetshire, England, the village of Bridgwater lies a dozen miles to the south of Taunton. Many residents of new Taunton had ties to old Bridgwater; the Reverend Nicholas Street had been baptized in the Somerset village of Bridgwater. Although the first proprietors of new Bridgewater were based in Duxbury and Plymouth, not Taunton, the local Somerset folk probably planted the name. Feeling increasingly isolated, old Governor Bradford lamented that outbound migration was weakening Plymouth, “And thus was this poor church left, like an ancient mother, grown old, and forsaken of her children (though not in their affections), yet in regard of their bodily presence, and personal helpfulness.” Bradford’s lament was but an echo of louder complaints back in old England, with the crown and church increasingly concerned by the loss of righteous subjects to New England. In the 1630s alone, almost 20,000 Englanders had made a great migration to New England. But only a tiny fraction came to Cape Cod Bay. Most were drawn to the neighbouring shores of Massachusetts Bay.