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The Pilgrims reach America
Plymouth was a colony founded by people with no experience, and funded by people with no money. It was motivated by pure idealism, and hindered by the harsh realities of life. The Pilgrims found themselves sabotaged by the Dutch, and felt they were cheated by their financing company. Furthermore, their few affluent investors seemed to want to reduce their influence in the colony and replace it with that of mainstream Puritans.
When they finally reached the shores of North America, they were more than 200 miles North of their intended destination. Their new area, however, presented unique opportunities. They could be free of London regulations, form their own government, and they were in a place renowned for its cod fishing. They decided to stay, and signed the Mayflower Compact – a perfect example of Puritan government.
Then, they elected a new governor, John Carver, and began to explore the area. It was cold, but beautiful, and perhaps most surprisingly, seemingly uninhabited.
Transcript
It was as they were making their preparations to leave for Virginia that Brewster re-antagonized James by starting to print Puritan materials to sell in England. He sold Browne’s old books, as well as Cartwrights, which were the biggest sellers. Another was a book by someone who had written deeply personal criticisms of the king. Their English contacts continued to support them, though they were reprimanded, but Brewster had to lay low at the crucial moment that the venture was coming together. His books, paper and printing type were seized, and though he was second in command to John Robinson, who wouldn’t be sailing to America, Brewster wasn’t available to help plan the mission at its crucial stages. Even when the ship did set sail, Brewster’s name was left off the manifest.
The Pilgrims had considered Guiana, Virginia and New England as final settling points, noting that fishing would be better in Cape Cod than anywhere in Virginia. They wanted to be far enough away from the main colony to set up a colony that adhered to their own beliefs and values, but one close enough that they could turn to Virginia for help when necessary. Furthermore, Sandys had been encouraging them to go to Virginia, and the Plymouth Company had just gone out of business. They decided to settle at the very northern edge of the Virginia Company patent, near the Hudson River.
The Virginia Company of London was struggling, and the Plymouth Company had just gone out of business. One of the ways the Virginia Company started to try to make money was authorizing “particular plantations,” which meant selling patents to individual groups of people, who would then have a certain amount of time to finance, organize and set up a colony before the patent expired. That essentially eliminated Virginia Company financial liability for a colony, and ensured at least a small profit for the company.
When the Plymouth Company was reorganized as the Council for New England in 1620, Gorges and his associates used this model of colonization exclusively. They’d suffered their own failures, and watched the Virginia Company struggle for almost two decades to survive. This model of colonization would ensure the Council’s ability to remain financially solvent, and it also contributed to a fascinating difference between New England and Virginia which would reverberate through the centuries. Virginia was colonized, by and large, by individuals. The Virginia Company had appealed to individuals to come to America, and start a life there. New England came to be colonized by groups of people. The Particular Plantation required a group of people to come together, apply for a patent, raise the funds themselves, and go as a unit. So, while the Chesapeake as built on the kin-relations between individuals of landed classes, New England was built on the township model, by people who had largely been townspeople in England.
For the Pilgrims, though, this model meant that they needed to find financiers, also known as adventurers. They had a connection named Edward Pickering, related to Browne himself, who was a separatist who supported them strongly enough to leave them money in his will, and who knew a man named Thomas Weston who was an investor looking for new sources of revenue. In a way, it was a relationship that could be mutually beneficial. They needed money, and he led a company of 70 investors. Both were interested in America, and neither had any other viable option.
On the other hand, it was a relationship in which neither side really brought anything to the table in terms of ability to make the voyage a success. The Pilgrims didn’t have much money, or experience. Weston was a 35 year old gentleman who had no money and no income. He was the son of a Catholic family with a small amount of money and 16 children. His oldest brother would go on to be knighted by Charles I, but Weston had simply finished an ironworking apprenticeship and found himself with no income or money to start a business. He’d spent seven years trading the lowest-end Welsh cotton that he bought using IOUs, and ultimately upgraded to selling unfinished wool products to the Dutch using IOUs. He didn’t have the connections or the money to get involved with the monopolies trading high-profit luxury imports. He just lived day-to-day doing what he could. A lawsuit put him in debt when one of his trade deals didn’t work out. In the aftermath of Edwin Sandys’ famous speech, and the subsequent dissolution of Parliament, James had attempted to raise royal revenue while stimulating the economy using something called the Cokayne Project, named for William Cokayne. They would start processing cloth in England, and allow the people who had once funded the Dutch cloth trade to now fund the English cloth processing industry. The dutch refused to buy the products of the project, and not only did the project collapse, the whole wool industry almost did. It only failed when the old company who had financed the Dutch cloth trade bought a monopoly on the trade, but that forced men like Weston out of business. Weston was one of the people who had been arrested in protest, but to no avail. There were some profitable things, like fish and furs, in New England, and Weston had no other alternatives.
Weston’s group wasn’t particularly sympathetic to Brownists either, as most of them were mainstream Puritans. None of them had been Virginia Company shareholders, and none of them had all that much money, though two were on their way up in English society. Their names were Beauchamp and Sherley, and they were dedicated London Puritans. Beauchamp would go on to be a justice of the peace under Cromwell, and both were deeply connected to London Puritanism and towns in the surrounding countryside. They were also connected to John Pocock, another deeply Puritan investor. All three were members of the Honorable Artillery Company, which really was to Plymouth as the Sirenaicals had been to Virginia – a different organization that a disproportionate number of investors were involved in. The HAC would later form the core of the rebellion which turned into the English Civil War, which supplied some of the regicides, and who would oppose Charles I’s taxes. It was through their group that Miles Standish was recruited, after acting as a Calvinist mercenary in the Netherlands. These people didn’t particularly care about the fate of the Pilgrims. In fact, the Pilgrims and these Puritans didn’t like each other. They saw the Mayflower’s voyage as an experiment. It was a gamble for profit, but also a way to start exploring colonization. However, in case the colony did take off, Pocock wanted to minimize Brownist influence in the colony and replace it with Puritan influence. For that, he sent Christopher Martin, who himself had a record of clashes with local church authorities, but who was a Puritan, not a separatist. He was made supply officer, and governor, and his presence immediately shook the Pilgrim community. Cushman went so far as to call him a monster, who “insulteth our poor people with such scorn and contempt as if they were not good enough to wipe his shoes. If I speak to him, he flies in my face as mutinous and saith no complaints shall be heard or received but by himself. This small group of people also started to recruit other settlers, including Stephen Hopkins, who had spent two years in Jamestown before returning to London, getting married and having kids. By the end of their intervention, only 15 of 24 families were Leideners, comprising about half the settlers. The Leideners found themselves at odds, even with the other Brownists of the company. These hadn’t been Smyth’s followers. They’d been Robinson’s. And now, they comprised just barely half of the group heading to the New World, surrounded by contemptuous strangers.
The Pilgrims also rejected John Smith’s offer for help. He had a strong personality, a worldly nature, and knew more than they did, so they knew he would likely end up with more control over the colony than they wanted to give.
Weston had been slow in getting the Pilgrims a boat, so the Pilgrims had bought their own boat in the Netherlands, the Speedwell. Unfortunately, due to either cheating or, as later records suggest, sabotage by the Dutch who wanted to colonize that part of North America, the ship was rendered useless when it was fitted with a mast big enough to put pressure on the seams and cause it to leak in high winds. The Pilgrims never figured out how to fix it, and ended up selling the ship at a loss, as well as being forced to leave a number of Leideners behind. The boat’s new owners were quickly able to fix the problem, and it continued to sail flawlessly for years.
Weston finally did get them the Mayflower, though, with John Clark as pilot, and Christopher Jones as captain. Jones was from an East Anglican maritime town called Harwich, which was part of a network of Puritan sea towns across Europe, from La Rochelle to Gdansk and of course to the Netherlands. In these towns, local sea captains tended to control the government, and governed in a Puritan way. This is exactly what Jones did, becoming a burgess in his mid-30s and working his way up to bigger ships and more lucrative trades. His town’s government hanged 5 women as witches, dragged harlots through the streets on a cart, and banned gambling. He himself was in the wine trade, specifically trading English wool for European wine, and selling the extremely popular and increasingly valuable drink back in England. His business was going great, until the value of English wool started to decline. By 1619, he too was looking to America for financial solvency. Specifically, cod fishing, which though not as extravagantly profitable as wine, yielded a respectable profit either through salted cod or train oil, which was used to make soap.
By the time they were preparing to leave, even though most of them had sold everything, they were 350 pounds short of what they needed. This severely reduced the resources for their first winter in America. Weston didn’t have any money either, and started insisting the colonists work seven days a week for the company, with even their houses treated as company assets for division after seven years. If he couldn’t pay, the colony would collapse, and Cushman readily agreed to the new terms. The rest of the Pilgrims felt the new terms were fitter for thieves and bondslaves than honest men, and it drove a wedge between Cushman and them. Still, they had no choice but to accept Weston’s terms, and in addition they had to sell even more of their food including more than two tons of butter, before they could afford to set sail. Adding in delays from the Speedwell, and the Pilgrims had gone through about half their food before they even left England. A few of the passengers decided to abandon the voyage, even though that meant they’d lose everything they’d invested so far, which for some meant everything they’d possessed. It wasn’t a good idea to leave in the condition they left in, but it was then or never. So, the 50 remaining colonists decided to leave.
Cushman stayed behind, and tried to work with Weston and recruit new settlers to go to New England.
But finally, after 10 years of wandering, and a year of planning and setbacks, on September 6, the Pilgrims were en route to New England. The normal hostility between mariners and settlers was exacerbated by the fact that the pilgrims’ belongings and food took up space that the sailors usually used to store stuff to sell to supplement their own paltry wages, and the Pilgrims showed the bitter side of separatism when they considered it God’s will that the sailor who most viciously mocked them died. It was a rough voyage, to a new place, taken by people who didn’t have experience, and funded by people who didn’t have money.
They arrived in North America on November 11, but not in Virginia. After some rough weather blew them off their intended path, they ended up 220 miles north of their intended destination. They were outside of the Virginia Company’s patent, so they had no legal regulations binding their colony from England. They couldn’t be compelled to obey orders, and they were in a place that had been noted – and that they had considered as a destination – for its exceptional cod fishing. At this exact moment, amoebic dysentery – one of the most dangerous diseases associated with seafaring – started to appear, compelling them to stay in New England rather than sailing 220 miles downriver, a voyage that would have taken 2-3 days.
Now, part of me thinks this is too perfect to be a coincidence. This was the perfect situation for a Brownist – a place outside of existing legal boundaries where they could set up a Calvinist society with no top-down hierarchy whatsoever. And, one that just happened to be on the shores of the best codfishing area in North America, after saying they intended to finance the mission by fishing. Furthermore, though there were people of different backgrounds on the Mayflower, there are essentially no primary sources for this period apart from those written by Bradford and Winslow – two Pilgrims.
A decade after the Sea Venture crashed in Bermuda, Stephen Hopkins found himself in a stunningly similar situation. And, he behaved essentially the same, leading an attempt to get people to stay where they were rather than sail to Virginia. Many of the Leideners were reluctant, not wanting to venture outside of their patent, but Jones sided with Hopkins and they decided to set up their plantation in Cape Cod.
They first landed on a Sunday, and the next day began the New England tradition of a Monday washday. They also signed the Mayflower Compact. The compact is one of the most remembered documents in American history, though its importance is debated at this point. It was pretty radical for its time, though. It laid out the colony as a civil body politick, and was signed by the majority of the male passengers. Its actual text was very short, but fit squarely within a Puritan framework. In fact, it mimicked almost identically the type of society that Browne and his more respected associates, like Moreley and Mornay, had advocated in the 1580s. Christian Assemblies should be guided by the people as a whole, run like an Athenian Democracy, with even the preacher being subject to elections. At the same time, they should be run with the kind of uncompromising adherence to the Law of Moses and the Will of God. Complete democracy on the one hand, and complete regulation of behavior on the other.
Next, in adherence to their new compact, they had to elect a leader. The Puritan investors in London would have liked to see Martin lead the colony, but he had made a point of being openly hostile to the Pilgrims. The colony was split almost 50/50 between the Pilgrims – who would vote as a block – and the rest of the colony – who ranged from London Brownists to mainstream Puritans to people who didn’t even have religious opinions. Martin couldn’t win an election, but John Carver could. He had a relatively gentle manner, was well respected by most of the colonists, was himself from East Anglia, though his wife was from Robinson’s hometown of Sturton, and had given more than just about anyone for the benefit of the colony.
So, with their government and leadership organized, it was time to find a settlement location. For this, Miles Standish led the way. It was cold, it was snowy, but it was beautiful. There were massive trees, with gaps big enough to ride a horse through, they saw whales and fish, geese and ducks, but perhaps most interestingly of all, the whole area seemed completely empty of native inhabitants. Some areas looked like they’d been recently inhabited, and others were completely abandoned, with occasional unburied human bones littering the landscape. This was New England.