Old Cape Cod

I

It is a welcoming country, and easily enough some of the Pilgrims, after they had established their settlement at Plymouth, returned to the sandy shores, the woods and meadows that had first offered them the possibility of home. They must have had a peculiar sentiment for the place: for here began their adventure in the great free country of the wilderness, and the chronicles of Bradford and Winslow show an ingenuous pleasure in the recital of it. They were for the most part yeomen and farmers, exiles from the pretty valley of the Trent, who for some eleven years had lived restricted in small Dutch cities; and for sixty-seven days all of them, yeomen and artisans, men, women, and children, many more than the Mayflower could well accommodate, had been buffetted about the Atlantic by autumn gales. Driven out of their calculated course to the southward, they made their landfall at Cape Cod, “the which being certainly known to be it,” no wonder that they were “not a little joyful.” “Being thus arrived in a good harbor and brought safe to land,” writes William Bradford, “they fell upon their knees and blessed ye God of Heaven, who had brought them over ye vast and furious ocean, and delivered them from all ye periles and miseries thereof, againe to set their feete on ye firme and stable earth, their proper elemente.”

Nor was it a country unknown to them. Since Cabot’s voyage of discovery more than a hundred years earlier, the whole coast from Cape Breton to the Hudson had been increasingly visited by French and English seamen who were attracted chiefly by the rich fishing-grounds. It is even said that the great Drake was the first Englishman to set foot in New England, and that it was upon Cape Cod he landed. There are stories of ancient adventurers voyaging, as it might be, to the rhythm of Masefield’s Galley-Rowers:

Madoc of Wales, Saint Brendan the Irishman, Icelanders, Phœnicians even; and, more certainly, a company of Norsemen who set up a wrecked boat on the Cape Cod bluffs, the Long Beaches, to guide the landfall of later visitors to their Keel Cape.

French, Dutch, Spanish, English, all had their names for the Cape, but in 1602, Bartholomew Gosnold, examining the coast of New England with a view to colonization, was to give it the predestined and only right name: “Cape Cod.” Making across Massachusetts Bay “with a fresh gale of wind,” writes his chronicler, “in the morning we found ourselves embayed with a mightie headland” with “a white sandie and very bolde shore,” where, landing, they met an Indian “of proper stature, and of a pleasing countenance; and after some familiaritie with him, we left him at the seaside and returned to our ship.” Another scribe of the party remarks that the Indian had plates of copper hanging from his ears and “shewed willingness to help us in our occasions.” “From this place, we sailed round about this headland, almost all the points of the compass,” and so on to Cuttyhunk, “amongst many faire Islands.” But the significant point for us is that they “pestered” their ship so with codfish that they threw numbers of them overboard, and thereupon named the land Cape Cod.

In 1604, and for several years thereafter, Champlain was much upon the New England coast, helping Du Monts in a colonizing scheme under a charter of Henri Quatre; had they succeeded, New France would have reached Long Island Sound. Champlain landed at Barnstable and named the harbor “Port aux Huistres,” “for the many good oysters there.” He judged, also, that it would have been “an excellent place to erect buildings and lay the foundations of a state, if the harbor were somewhat deeper and the entrance safer.” The tip of the Cape he called “Cap Blanc,” the treacherous shoals at the elbow “Mallebarre,” and at Chatham he was like to have been swamped in the shoals had the Indians not dragged his boats over into the harbor—“Port Fortune” he called it. But it held no good fortune for him: for his men quarrelled with their rescuers, and after two of them had been killed, he sailed away. Champlain, a scientific man, the king’s geographer, wrote interestingly of the savages, their appearance, customs, agriculture, dwellings, and weighed the advantages of colonization there, but French the land was not to be.

After Gosnold came several Englishmen, Martin Pring among them, searching for sassafras, which he knew was to be found in sandy soil, and was then much esteemed in pharmacy as of “sovereigne vertue against the Plague and many other Maladies.” Pring coasted along to Plymouth, where at last he found “sufficient quantitie” of his sassafras, and camped for several months. There one of his company played the “gitterne” to the joy of the savages who danced about him “twentie in a Ring, ... singing lo la lo la la and him that first brake the ring the rest would knocke and cry out upon.” Henry Hudson spent a night off the Cape and had some difficulty with shoals and tides and mists; but he testified that “the land is very sweet,” and some of his men brought away wild grapes and roses; as did also Edward Braunde, who hoped to discover “sertayne perell which is told by the Sauvages to be there,” and found near Race Point, where he landed, only some “goodly grapes and Rose-Trees.” It should be noted that as Hudson cruised thereabouts, Thomas Hilles and Robert Rayney of his crew saw “the mermaid.” And in 1614 Captain John Smith set sail for these shores to look for whales and gold-mines, failing which they would take “Fish and Furres,” as the event proved to an amount of some fifteen hundred pounds. Smith, with eight men in an open boat, explored and charted the coast and dedicated his map to Prince Charles, with the request that he change “the barbarous names” thereon. “As posteritie might say,” writes Smith, “Prince Charles was their godfather.” New England, the river Charles, Plymouth retain the royal nomenclature. But his Stuart Bay and Cape James are still Cape Cod and Cape Cod Bay, and Milford Haven is Provincetown Harbor. Cape Cod, “a name, I suppose, it will never lose,” said Cotton Mather, “till the shoals of codfish be seen swimming on the highest hills.” “This Cape,” wrote Smith, “is made by the maine Sea on the one side, and a great Bay on the other in forme of a Sickell.” “A headland of high hills, over growne with shrubby Pines, hurts [huckleberries] and such trash, but an excellent harbour for all weathers.”

And while Smith was engaged in his scientific expedition, Captain Thomas Hunt, whom he had placed in command of the larger boat, after lading her with fish and furs, put his time to profit by capturing twenty-four savages, Nauset and Patuxet Indians among them; and setting sail for Malaga, he sold the cargo for his masters and the savages at twenty pounds the head for the advantage of his own pocket. “This vilde act,” wrote Smith, “kept him ever after from any more employment in these parts.” But such commerce was not unknown: in 1611, Harlow, sailing for the Earl of Southampton, with “five Salvages returned for England,” and one of these men “went a Souldier to the Warres of Bohemia.” The Cape Cod Indians seem to have been a gentle, even a forgiving race, but they had a long memory for such perfidy, which was to prove a bad business for all later visitors to the region. Yet more often than not whites and natives fought, however friendly the first overtures might have been; and Smith reports, as a matter of course, of the Indians about Plymouth: “After much kindnesse wee fought also with them, though some were hurt, some slaine, yet within an houre after they became friends.” But kidnapping seems to have been the unforgivable offence.

Only the summer before the Pilgrims arrived came Thomas Dermer, sailing for Fernando Gorges, Governor of Old Plymouth, and returned the Indian Tasquantum or Squanto, captured by Hunt and survivor of many vicissitudes, to the end that he might serve as interpreter and find out the truth about tales of treasure in the country. Dermer thought favorably of Plymouth for a settlement, and rescued a Frenchman who had been wrecked three years before on Cape Cod and was living with the Indians. He brought back, with Squanto, Epenow, one of Harlow’s victims, who, however, succeeded in escaping at Martha’s Vineyard. Epenow, during his exile, had been something of a personage: “being of so great stature he was shewed up and downe London for money as a wonder, and it seemes of no lesse courage and authoritie, than of wit, strength and proportion.”

It is reasonably certain that some of these adventures, perhaps all of them, were known to the Pilgrims. They would have been common talk in Plymouth, the city of Fernando Gorges, and in London; and the Pilgrims were come to a region familiar at least to their captain or his pilot, who is said to have sailed once with Dermer. But every man aboard the Mayflower, as they rounded the tip of Cape Cod, knew that they were about to land beyond the bounds of their permission to colonize, which lay within the jurisdiction of the North Virginia Company and “not for New England, which belonged to another government”; and “some of the strangers amongst them had let fall mutinous speeches—that when they cam ashore they would use their own libertie.”

Not for such liberty had Brewster, Bradford, Winslow, Carver, come upon their pilgrimage; they were men who meant to be free only within lawful bounds; and they were true pioneers, men who in an unforeseen perplexity could make a just decision. Hardly had they sighted the golden dunes of the Cape, and fetched short about to escape its treacherous shoals, than they were meeting their first test. As they made the “good harbor and pleasant bay” of Provincetown, “wherein a thousand sail of ships might safely ride,” the famous Compact was written, and forty-one men of the company signed it ere they set foot to land. It was a simple act, and none could have been more amazed than the Pilgrims had they known its historical significance. But because they meant to be both free and obedient, their Compact contained the germ of all just government: “It was thought good that we should combine together in one body, and to submit to such government and governors as we should by common consent agree to make and choose.”

“In ye name of God, Amen. We whose names are underwritten, the loyall subjects of our dread soveraigne, King James, ... haveing undertaken, for ye glorie of God and advancemente of ye Christian faith, and honour of our king and countrie, a voyage to plant ye first colonie in ye Northerne parts of Virginia, doe by these presents solemnly and mutualy in ye presence of God and one of another, covenant and combine ourselves togeather into a civill body politick, for our better ordering and preservation and furtherance of ye ends aforesaid, and by vertue hearof to enacte, constitute and frame such just and equall lawes, ordinances, acts, constitutions and offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meete and convenient for ye generall good of ye colonie, unto which we promise all due submission and obedience.”

There is the Compact. Freedom within due limits set by the consent of the governed, these men who had chosen exile rather than submission to a tyrannous reading of the law proclaimed as the rule of their future, a principle vital to the spirit of the nation that was to be. And their Compact signed, and John Carver chosen governor for the ensuing year, the captain anchored offshore and they proceeded upon the next step of their adventure.

After the cramped wretchedness of the Mayflower, they must have been eager for release. “Being pestred nine weeks in the leaking unwholsome shipe, lying wet in their cabins, most of them grew very weake and weary of the Sea,” John Smith wrote of their passage thither. In any case there could be no question as to the necessity of landing: they must have wood and water; the women wanted to wash, the men to stretch their legs and replenish the larder with fish and game and corn. If in the process they found a spot suitable for settlement and offering a prospect of fair return on the investment made by their financial backers, the “Merchant Adventurers” of London, so much the better.

That first day, November 11, Old Style, after the Compact was signed, some fifteen men landed rather to gather firewood than to explore. They saw no Indians, and found the “sand hills much like the downs of Holland, but better, the crust of the earth a spit’s depth excellent black earth all wooded with oaks, pines, sassafras, juniper, birch, holly, vines, some ash, walnut; the wood for the most part open and without underwood, fit either to go or ride in.” Comment which would ill describe the present appearance of Provincetown and Truro; but then the whole inner shore of the Cape, at least, seems to have been wooded to the water’s edge. The party returned with a boatload of juniper, “which smelled very sweet and strong.” The Sunday they kept aboard ship, with what thankful hearts for their “preservation on the great deep,” and steadfast hope of the future as we may imagine. On Monday the men went ashore to do some boat-building, and the women to wash. These landing parties had an uncomfortable time of it, for the water was too shallow to beach a boat, and they “were forced to wade a bow-shot or two in going a-land, which caused many to get colds and coughs, for it was many times freezing weather.”

On the fifteenth an exploring party set off under the command of Captain Miles Standish. For drink, wrote Edward Winslow, there was “a little bottle of aqua vitæ—and having no victuals save biscuit and Holland cheese—at last we came into a deep valley full of brush, wood gaile [bayberry] and long grass through which we found little paths or tracts; and there we saw a deer, and found springs of fresh water, and sat us down and drank our first New England water with as much delight as we ever drank drink in all our lives.” They sighted a few Indians, who “ran into the woods and whistled their dogge after them”; and William Bradford, lagging behind to examine a deer-trap, was caught by the leg for his pains. “It was a pretty device made with a rope of the Indians’ own making which we brought away with us.” They were as eager as boys on a Scout trail; and when they came upon an old palisado, they were sure it must have been the work of Christians; and on what is still known as Corn Hill they found a cache of corn packed in baskets, and an old ship’s kettle. Whereupon they took a kettleful of corn along with them—they meant to pay for it when they found the owners, they said, and, moreover, many months after, they did so. They saw flocks of geese and ducks, and also three fat bucks, but would rather have had one. And they camped in the open near Stout’s Creek at East Harbor, and next day kept on to Pamet Harbor in Truro. Altogether a satisfying expedition for Miles Standish and his men who had been cooped up for so many weeks in the Mayflower, but they had found no spot to their taste for a settlement. They wanted not only good farm lands, but an adequate harbor for the trade that was to be: Pamet Harbor they dismissed on account of the “insufficiency of the place for the accommodation of large vessels and the uncertainty as to the supply of fresh water.” These way-worn stragglers were entirely sure they were to need accommodation for large vessels; fresh water, by the way, was there a-plenty, although they did not find it.

On the twenty-seventh they set out on their Second Discovery, this time by boat under the command of Master Jones, the Mayflower skipper, who landed them short of their destination at Pamet River. They camped in a freezing sleet, and taking boat again in the morning kept on to Pamet. That night they camped under some pines and supped on “three fat geese and six ducks which we ate with souldiers’ stomachs, for we had eaten little that day.” Next morning, on the way to Corn Hill, they killed a brace of geese at a single shot. “And sure it was God’s good providence that we found the corn, for else we know not how we should have done.” Again they camped in the open, and again marched on by Indian wood paths until they came upon a broad trail leading to a settlement. And although they saw no Indians—no doubt keen eyes were watching them from woodland coverts—they poked into the wigwams that were low wattled huts with doorways scarce a yard high hung with mats; and they noted the wooden bowls and trays, earthenware pots, and baskets of wrought crab-shells, and “harts’ horns and eagles’ claws.” They seem, here and there, to have taken a sample of the best, and regretted that they had nothing to leave in exchange. “We intended to have brought some beads and other things to have left in their homes in sign of peace and that we meant to truck with them, but it was not done; but as soon as we can conveniently meet with them, we will give them full satisfaction.” They discovered the grave of a white man, they thought, decently buried, with his sailor’s clothes and treasures beside him, and a child’s grave, from which they took a few pretty ornaments. Some burial mounds they left undisturbed, saying sententiously that “it might be odious unto them to ransack their sepulchres,” which very likely was no more than truth. And still they found no place to strike root.

But the Third Discovery was to have a better result. On December 6 they set out, again by boat, and rounded Billingsgate Point before they landed to camp for the night. About five in the morning, their picket rushed in with cries of “Indians! Indians!” and they roused to savage war-whoops and arrows rattling down upon the camp. But when they fired their muskets the Indians, probably some of the Nausets whom Thomas Hunt had despoiled of men, ran away as they had come, with no one harmed on either side. The place, situated near Great Meadow Creek in Eastham, was named “The First Encounter.” Again the explorers took boat, and passing the harbor and fertile lands of Barnstable in a driving northeast gale and snowstorm, drenched with the freezing spray that made their clothes “many times like coats of iron,” they pressed on to Plymouth Bay. So thick was the weather that their pilot, who had probably sailed with Smith or Dermer, lost his bearings. “Lord be merciful, my eyes never saw this place before,” cried he as they passed the Gurnet. He would there and then have beached the boat, but one of stouter heart shouting, “About with her, or we are all dead men,” they turned and ran under the lee of Clark’s Island where they landed. There, in storm and wet, they miserably bivouacked over the next day, a Sunday; and on the Monday exploring the mainland and finding harbor, meadow, and brook to their mind, they determined to make here at Plymouth their permanent settlement. Very likely they had bethought them of Dermer’s commendation of it to Fernando Gorges, although they seem not to have been amenable to advice from John Smith, who cites them as a warning in his “advertisemente to Unexperienced Planters.” “For want to good take heede,” writes he of them in 1630, “thinking to finde all things better than I advised them, spent six or seven weekes in wandering up and downe in frost and snow, winde and raine, among the woods, cricks, and swamps.” On December 16, Old Style, the whole company, reunited at Plymouth, set about the building of their new home.

The Pilgrims had been little more than a month at Provincetown, but, beside the great achievement of the Compact, history had been making to open the annals of Anglo-Saxon New England: Edward Thompson, Jasper Moore, and James Chilton had died; Dorothy, the young wife of William Bradford, had fallen overboard to her death; and Mrs. William White had been delivered of a son, fittingly named Peregrine, the first born of English parents in New England. Not unreasonably does Cape Cod claim precedence of Plymouth when homage is paid the Pilgrim Fathers.

II

The Compact sprang into being by no magic of inspiration: it was the fruit of minds that had fostered the intention to be free through years of just living, and the winning simplicity of the Pilgrims’ several declarations of faith was the natural outcome of the spirit that framed them. For eighteen years or more their leaders had believed and practised the precepts of John Robinson whom they had chosen as pastor of their little congregation at Scrooby; and Robinson charged them, according to Edward Winslow, to keep an open mind: “for he was very confident the Lord had more truth and light yet to break forth out of His holy word. He took occasion, also, miserably to bewail the state of the Reformed Churches” who stuck where Luther and Calvin had left them. “Yet God had not revealed His whole will to them.... It is not possible ... that full perfection of knowledge should break forth at once.” Men who held that concept of life—the progressive revelation of truth—were as little likely to cramp the just liberties of other men as they were to submit themselves to the unjust imposition of law. And when England persecuted them, it was fitting that they should flee to Holland, the country of William the Silent, who had declared: “You have no right to trouble yourself with any man’s conscience, so long as nothing is done to cause private harm or public scandal.” That might have been the motto of their new government. It has been truly said that the Plymouth Church was “free of blood.” They never hanged a Quaker or burned a witch, and refugees from the Massachusetts Bay Colony constantly found asylum with them. It must be remembered that they were so-called “Separatists,” the Independents, men who set religion above any church, a very different folk from those uncompromising protestants of the Church of England, the Puritans. Yet, wisely, John Robinson had counselled them to be “ready to close with the godly party of the Kingdom of England and rather to study union than disunion” with their neighbors in the New World. That “union” was meant to include no abandonment of principle, and when unwillingly enough they were forced to merge with the richer colony of Massachusetts Bay, they were sufficiently powerful to expand somewhat its rigid theocracy; though the Puritan influence, in turn, did much to curdle the early tolerance of the Pilgrims.

In the seventy years of their independence, the Pilgrims worked out, by sober and deliberate progression, a plan of government that was a model of statehood, and they had the advantage over other colonies that they were constrained by no formal royal patent. When their agents had gone over from Holland to obtain the king’s consent to their undertaking, James was ready to concede that “the advancement of his dominions” and “the enlargement of the gospel” were an honorable motive; the idea of fishery profits was no less to his liking. “So God have my soul,” quoth he, “an honest trade. ’Twas the Apostles’ own calling.” But a formal grant to the despised Separatists was another matter, and they had to be content with a hint that “the king would connive at them and not molest them provided they behaved themselves peaceably.” They were willing to take the chance that the king’s word was as good as his bond: for if later there should be a purpose to injure them, they shrewdly reasoned, though they had a seal “as broad as the house floor,” there would be “means enow found to recall or reverse it.” And they secured financial backing in London, obtained permission from the North Virginia Company to settle on their coast, then “casting themselves on the care of Divine Providence, they ventured to America.” Divine Providence, apparently, decreed that they should be free of even such slight restraint as the permission of the North Virginia Company, and instead of settling near the Hudson they were driven to the New England coast.

But they took care in the Compact and in all succeeding legislation to affirm their loyalty to the English Government. Though England had been none too tender in her treatment of them, they recognized and meant to abide by the essential justice of English law, and to profit by the stability that a strong bond with the Home Government could give them. Moreover, in these men flourished the British instinct to make whatever spot of the globe they should elect as home “forever England.” They themselves for eleven long years had fretted as expatriates in an alien land. “They grew tired of the indolent security of their sanctuary,” wrote Burke of them, although as a fact they had worked hard enough for their daily bread, “and they chose to remove to a place where they should see no superior.” In any case they meant that their children should be English rather than Dutch, and they had refused overtures from Holland to settle in Dutch territory.

The machinery of their government was of the simplest, and expanded, as necessity came, with their growth. As provided in the Compact, the Governor was elected yearly by general manhood suffrage. His one assistant was soon replaced by a council of seven. For eighteen years the legislative body, the General Court it is still called, was composed of the whole body of freemen; and the qualifications of a freeman were that he should be “twenty-one years of age, of sober, peaceable conversation, orthodox in religion [as a minimum, belief in God and the Bible], and should possess rateable estate to the value of twenty pounds.” By 1639 the colony had grown to require a representative form of government; and the two branches, the Governor and Council and the town representatives, sat as one body to enact laws. But save in a crisis, no law proposed at one session could be enacted until the next, so that the whole body of freemen could have opportunity to pass upon it—a clear case of the “referendum.” As early as 1623 the community had outgrown its custom of trying an offender by the whole body of citizens, and substituted trial by jury. Capital offences were six as against thirty-one in England—treason, murder, diabolical conversation, arson, rape, and unnatural crimes—and of these only two came to execution. No one was ever committed, much less punished, for “diabolical conversation.” Smoking was forbidden outdoors within a mile of a dwelling-house, or while at work in the fields: evidently there was to be no gossip over a pipe with the farmer next door. In time this law was eased; and though in the early days the clergy alluded to tobacco as the “smoke of the bottomless pit,” they soon came to use it themselves and “tobacco was set at liberty.”

In 1636 they first codified their law; in 1671 was printed their Great Fundamentals. Hubbard, in his “General History of New England from the Discovery to 1680,” writes: “The laws they intended to be governed by were the laws of England, the which they were willing to be subject unto, though in a foreign land, and have since that time continued of that mind for the general, adding only some particular municipal laws of their own, suitable to their constitution, in such cases where the common laws and statutes of England could not well reach, or afford them help in emergent difficulties of place.” They were loyal Englishmen to the bone, and in the first codification of law affirm their allegiance: “whereas John Carver, William Bradford, Edward Winslow, William Brewster, Isaac Allerton and divers others of the subjects of our late Sovereign Lord James ... did undertake a voyage into that part of America called Virginia or New England thereunto adjoining, there to erect a plantation and colony of English, intending the glory of God and the enlargement of His Majesty’s dominions, and the special good of the English nation.” Yet they never waived a jot of their rights as freemen; and in 1658, toward the end of Cromwell’s Government, they prefaced the General Laws with a note that the advisers of George III would have done well to heed: “We the Associates of New Plymouth, coming hither as freeborn subjects of the State of England, endowed with all and singular the privileges belonging to such, being assembled, do ordain, constitute and enact that no act, imposition, law or ordinance be made or imposed on us at present or to come, but such as shall be made and imposed by consent of the body of the associates or their representatives legally assembled, which is according to the free liberty of the State of England.”

At the Restoration they gave allegiance to Charles; in 1689, bridging the chasm of revolution, to William and Mary: the significant point that they held themselves loyal to England, whatever its government might be. And it is interesting, in their address to William and Mary, that they felt entirely free to pass judgment upon the hated Royal Governor, Andros: “We, the loyal subjects of the Crown of England, are left in an unsettled state, destitute of government and exposed to the ill consequences thereof; and having heretofore enjoyed a quiet settlement of government in this their Majesties’ colony of New Plymouth for more than three score and six years ... notwithstanding our late unjust interruption and suspension therefrom by the illegal arbitrary power of Sir Edmond Andros, now ceased, ... do therefore hereby resume and declare their reassuming of their said former way of government.” But that, to their great disappointment, was not to be, and the royal charter of William and Mary united definitely the colonies of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay.

The advantage of their “quiet settlement of government” had been a double benefit: for it seems to have been a fact that liberal Plymouth was free of any interference from England, while the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay, on the contrary, were in continual hot water with the Home Government. England probably did not love the Separatists better than she had ever done, but she had no notion of quarrelling with sober, reasonable men who, in consideration of a personal latitude that cost her no inconvenience, were willing that other men, provided they were “civil,” should live according to their individual right; and thereby saved her the trouble of playing arbiter in colonial disputes. England, moreover, was deriving considerable profit from the lusty young colony that, by its enterprise, was tipping the scales in her favor in the trader’s game she was playing with Holland and France.

III

The Pilgrims had been no visionaries seeking Utopia. They were members of a well-constructed joint-stock company which, as occasion offered, they adapted to the changing needs of the colony; and they were prepared to earn not only a home for themselves, but a return on the money invested in their enterprise by their financial backers, and, if they prospered, a sum sufficient to buy out such interests. It is true that they were, first, religious men seeking religious freedom for themselves, and, if God willed, they would be the bearers of good news to others. Beyond all other reasons pushing them to their adventure, wrote Bradford, was “a great hope and inward zeal they had of laying some good foundation, or at least to make some way thereunto, for the propagation and advancing of the gospel of Christ in those remote parts of the world; yea, though they should be but even as stepping stones unto others for the performing of so great a work.”

Yet money as well as zeal was necessary for such an undertaking as theirs, and the Holland exiles were poor. But arrangements were concluded with a company of promoters in London, “Merchant Adventurers” was their more romantic title then, to supply the larger part of the necessary capital, while the Pilgrims as “Planters” should furnish the man power. Their agreement set forth that: “The Adventurers and Planters do agree that every person that goeth, being aged sixteen years and upward, be rated at ten pounds, and ten pounds be accounted a single share”; that “he that goeth in person and furnishes himself out with ten pounds either in money or other provisions be accounted as having twenty pounds in stock, and in the division shall receive a double share”; and “that all such persons as are of this Colony are to have their meat, drink, apparel, and all other provisions out of the common stock of said Company.”

Doctor Eliot, in his speech at the dedication of the Pilgrim monument at Provincetown, lucidly described the working-out of the Agreement: “It was provided that the Adventurers and Planters should continue their joint-stock partnership for a period of seven years, during which time all profits and benefits got by trading, fishing, or any other means should remain in the common stock.... At the end of seven years the capital and profits, namely, the houses, lands, goods, and chattels, were to be equally divided between the Adventurers and the Planters.... Whoever should carry his wife and children or servants should be allowed for every such person aged sixteen years and upward one share in the division.... At the end of seven years every Planter was to own the house and garden then occupied by him; and during the seven years every Planter was to work four days in each week for the Colony and two for himself and his family.... Before the seven years of the original contract with the Adventurers had expired the Pilgrims had established a considerable trade to the north and to the south of Plymouth, and had found in this trade a means of paying their debts and making a settlement with the Adventurers, which was concluded on the basis of buying out their entire interest for the sum of eighteen hundred pounds. Eight of the original Planters advanced the money for this settlement, and therefore became the owners of the settlement, so far as the Adventurers’ liens were concerned. It was then decided to form an equal partnership, to include all heads of families and all self-supporting men, young or old, whether church members or not. These men, called the ‘Purchasers,’ received each one share in the public belongings, with a right to a share for his wife and another for each of his children. The shares were bonded for the public debt, and to the shareholders belonged everything pertaining to the colony except each individual’s personal effects. These shareholders numbered one hundred and fifty-six, namely, fifty-seven men, thirty-four boys, twenty-nine women, and thirty-six girls.” Probably the heads of these families were the men referred to as Old Comers or First Comers; namely, those who had arrived in the first three ships that brought colonists from England—the Mayflower, the Fortune, and the Anne and her consort. “The Purchasers put their business into the hands of the eight men who had become the Colony’s bondsmen to the Adventurers, and the trade of the Colony was thereafter conducted by these eight leading Pilgrims, who were known as Undertakers.”

There is the framework of their polity; its sure foundation that they were “straitly tied to all care of each other’s good and of the whole by everyone; and so mutually”—the bedrock requirement for the successful working of any coöperative scheme. There was no playing of favorites: each man worked; each man, if for no more than his own sake, must work with good-will. “The people,” Robinson had written of them, “are for the body of them industrious and frugal, we think we may safely say, as any company of people in the world.” He knew intimately the men of whom he spoke. They were “common people” as compared with some of the aristocrats of Massachusetts Bay; yet on the Mayflower roster appeared “masters,” “servants,” and “artisans”; and each in his degree contributed to the public welfare. Action they constantly matched up with their professed attitude to God, with the result that if the expression of their belief were of an ancient pattern, the practice of it would stand well with the liberalism of to-day.

The first year of the little colony was difficult enough, and before the winter was over they might have starved had it not been for the fisheries and the kindness of their Indian neighbors. Yet of their neighbors’ good-will they were not too confident, and they levelled the graves of their dead lest the number should be known to the Indians, and for the discouragement of prospective colonists. Before the spring was over, one half of the one hundred and two souls that sailed by the Mayflower had died, and of the eighteen women only four survived the hardships of the first six months. Yet they would not lose heart. “It is not with us as with other men whom small things can discourage or small discontentments cause to wish themselves home again,” William Brewster and John Robinson had declared. “If we should be driven to return, we should not hope to recover our present helps and comforts, neither indeed look ever for ourselves to attain unto the like in any other place during our lives.” Wherein one may read how bitter had been the years of their exile, how constant their longing for freedom and the abiding comfort of justice. They meant now to hold on and succeed, and if possible to encourage others to join them, in the place where their own courage and initiative had set them; for it seems to have been a fact that the Pilgrims displayed not only indomitable spirit in their optimistic reports to correspondents in the old country, but also the considered policy of shrewd men who would enlist recruits for their enterprise. Even their critic, John Smith, was moved to admiration for these men who, to be sure, had invited trouble by “accident, ignorance, and wilfulness,” yet “have endured, with a wonderful patience many losses and extremities.” And he marvels that “they subsist and prosper so well, not any of them will abandon the country, but to the utmost of their powers increase their numbers.”

Somehow, in spite of sickness and death and short rations, they won through the dark months of that first winter, and fortunately for them the spring broke early. On March 19 and 20, “we digged our grounds and sowed our garden seeds”; and these Yorkshire farmers, at any cost, must have been glad to be out in the open again planting their seeds. “I never in my life remember a more seasonable year than we have here enjoyed,” Winslow had the courage to write in his “Brief and True Declaration.” “For the temper of the air here, it agreeth well with that in England, and if there be any difference at all, this is somewhat hotter in summer. Some think it to be colder in winter, but I cannot out of experience so say. The air is very clear and not foggy, as hath been reported.” It is a cheerful report, persuasive reading for would-be colonists, that Winslow sent back to England by the Fortune which, in the autumn of 1621, brought over the Pilgrims that had perforce remained behind when the Speedwell broke down. And among the new colonists was one William Hilton, who was so pleased with the prospect that he sent back post-haste for his family.

“Loving cousin,” wrote he, “At our arrival ... we found all our friends and planters in good health, though they were left sicke and weake with very small meanes, the Indians round about us peaceable and friendly, the country very pleasant and temperate, yeelding naturally of itself great store of fruites. We are all free-holders, the rent day doth not trouble us; and all of those good blessings we have, of which and what we list in their seasons for taking. Our companie are for the most part very religious honest people; the word of God sincerely taught us every Sabbath: so that I know not anything a contented mind can here want. I desire your friendly care to send my wife and children to me, where I wish all the friends I have in England, and so I rest Your loving kinsman.”

William Hilton had arrived in time for the celebration of their first Thanksgiving Day, which was kept after the kindly manner of the Harvest Home in Old England. Here is Winslow’s description of the festivity: “Our harvest being gotten in, our Governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might, after a more special manner, rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labours. They four in a day killed as much fowl as, with a little help besides, served the company almost a week. At which time amongst other recreations, we exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us. And amongst the rest their greatest king, Massasoyt, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted. And they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the Plantation, and bestowed on our Governor, and upon the Captain and others. And although it be not always so plentiful as it was at this time with us; yet by the goodness of God, we are so far from want that we often wish you partakers of our plenty.” A memorable feast; and twenty-five years later Bradford wrote: “Nor has there been any general want of food amongst us since to this day.” The fine healthy temper of the pioneers shines out in these simple words—the words of men who could pass lightly over the uncertainties and privations of that first difficult winter, when more than once it must have seemed to them that all their hope and labor were in vain and their adventure doomed, to emphasize only the good things that had come to them.

And Robert Cushman who, with his family, arrived by the Fortune, sent report back to his “loving friends the Adventurers of New England” that New England it was not only because Prince Charles had named it so, but “because of the resemblance that is in it of England, the native soil of Englishmen; it being much the same for heat and cold in summer and winter; it being champaign ground, but no high mountains, somewhat like the soil in Kent and Essex; full of dales and meadow ground, full of rivers and sweet springs, as England is.”

IV

The country was sparsely settled by natives: for some four years earlier an “unwanted plague,” an act of God the pious might have been excused for judging it to sweep the country bare for the uses of white immigrants, had all but depopulated the coast from the Penobscot to Narragansett. The vicinity of Plymouth, in particular, had been affected, and when Squanto was returned there by Dermer, he found all his kinsmen dead. It is said that a short time before the calamity, the Nausets, making reprisals on a shipwrecked French crew for the kidnapping activities of the whites, had been promised by one of their victims the vengeance of the white man’s God who would surely destroy them and give over their country to his people. “We are too many for him to destroy,” boasted the Indians. But when the plague wasted them, and the arrival of the Mayflower might be held as confirmation of the prophecy, their assurance may have weakened. It seemed that the white man’s God might have more power than they supposed; and perhaps that futile flight of arrows at the First Encounter was no more than a half-hearted protest at the decree of fate. The natives had some pretty superstitions of their own—as to the discovery of Nantucket, for instance, which, they told the Englishmen, had been quite unknown until many moons earlier when a great bird had borne off in his talons so many children from the south shore that a giant, one Maushope, moved with pity, had waded out into the sea and followed the bird to the island where he found the bones of the ravished children under a tree. Whereupon, recognizing the futility of regret, he sat him down to smoke, and the smoke was borne back across the waters he had traversed—the true origin of fog in the Sound. And Indians, as it drove in from sea, would say: “There comes old Maushope’s smoke.” Another story has it that Nantucket was formed of the ashes from Maushope’s pipe; but that the island was discovered by the parents of a papoose that was borne off by an eagle. They followed fast in their canoe, but not fast enough, for they were only in time to find the bones of their child heaped under a tree in the hitherto unknown land of Nantucket.

The Plymouth settlers seem to have encountered no great opposition from the natives who, although shy and suspicious as might be any creatures of the forest, were responsive to the just dealing that was the considered policy of the Pilgrims; and on both sides there was an impulse to friendliness tempered, however, by the ineradicable racial instinct to be wary of whatever is strange. Within a few months the settlers had concluded a treaty with Massasoit, the great overlord of the region. And Samoset, who had learned a little English from traders, soon presented himself with his friendly greeting: “Welcome, Englishmen, welcome.” And Squanto, from the first, was their faithful interpreter. The remnants of the Cape tribes, the Cummaquids, the Nausets, and Pamets, scattered among their little settlements from Sandwich to Truro—Mashpee, Sacuton, Cummaquid, Mattacheesett, Nobscusset, Monomoyick, Sequautucket, Nauset, and Pamet—were, save the Nausets possibly, a singularly gentle race. Nor were the Nausets, when it was well within their power once, disposed to take vengeance upon a boy.

In July, 1621, young John Billington set out from Plymouth to do some independent exploring; nor was this the first escapade of the Billington family. Back there at Provincetown, one morning, John’s brother Francis was like to have blown up the Mayflower by firing off a fowling-piece in the cabin where there was an open keg of powder. “By God’s mercy, no harm was done.” The Billingtons seem to have been among the undesirables of the Mayflower: the father “I know not by what friends shuffled into our company,” Bradford writes of him. And later, in 1630, the man was hanged for murder. But the settlers were not men to leave young John to his fate; yet search as they would, they could find no trace of him until Indians brought in rumors of a white lad roaming about the Cape. Ten men, with two Indians as interpreters, set sail for Barnstable Bay, and asked news of the boy from some natives catching lobsters there. Yes, such a boy was known to be with the Nausets, and the company was invited to land. They were welcomed by Iyanough, sachem of the Cummaquids, “a man,” wrote Edward Winslow of him, “not exceeding twenty-six years of age, but very personable, gentle, courteous and fair-conditioned; indeed, not like a savage except in his attire. His entertainment was answerable to his parts, and his cheer plentiful and various.” And here at Cummaquid they saw a woman, upwards of a hundred years old, who was mother of three of Hunt’s victims and bewailed the loss of her sons so piteously that the visitors sought to comfort her not only with futile words, but with a gift of “some small trifles which somewhat appeased her.” And after partaking of the “plentiful and various cheer,” they set out again, with Iyanough himself and two of his men as a guard of honor, and grounded their boat near the Nauset shore. But they did not land, and after some cautious interchange of civilities, Aspinet, the sachem there, brought the boy, whom he “had bedecked like a salvage,” and “behung with beads,” out to their boat. And through Aspinet, the Plymouth men arranged to pay for the seed corn they had taken from his cache on Corn Hill in the previous November. Returning with Iyanough to Cummaquid, there was further “entertainment”: the women and children joined hands in a dance before them; Iyanough himself led the way through the darkness to a spring where they might fill their water cask; he hung his own necklace about the neck of an Englishman. And the party set out for home with due reciprocation of courtesy, but were hindered by tide and wind, and again returned, and again were welcomed by the natives. Truly, a fine adventure for young John Billington.

This expedition seems to have cemented a friendly understanding with the Cape Indians. In November, when the Fortune was sighted off the Cape and the Indians feared she might be a hostile French ship, they warned Plymouth in time for the townsmen to prepare for possible attack. And the natives were always ready to supplement the settlers’ scanty stock of food, which, but for them, would have had no other variety than game from the forest and fish from the sea. Not that the pious were unmindful of such mercies. “Thanks to God who has given us to suck of the abundance of the seas and of treasure hid in the sands,” was the grace said over a dish of clams to which a neighbor had been invited. But for the fruits of the earth they were chiefly dependent upon the savages. “The cheapest corn they planted at first was Indian grain, before they had ploughs,” runs the record. “And let no man make a jest at pumpkins, for with this food the Lord was pleased to feed his people to their good content till corn and cattle were increased.”