When mayflowers blossom : a romance of Plymouth's first years

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Dedication

Infinite Father, thj lupremacj ii sore. The multitudes of man- Idnd, from age to age. appear and vanish. But thou hast revealed to us the continuance ol life unceasing and joyous for all who worship thee. Heeding thy voice within them and in thy written Word, our fathers walked before thee in this world and have gone to thy supernal presence. For a season we remain. Help us who now are here, to fill our day with deeds acceptable to thee, and for the good of our fellows.

May this child of our gratitude reflect thy praise, and that of thine adorable Son, our Savior Jesus Christ. Let his empire of righteousness and peace now be established in all lands, and thy will be done on earth as in Heaven. Amen.

In loving remembrance of my Father, Albert Hale Plumb, for half a century a minister of Girist in Boston and vicinity, and of the eighth generation from William Bradford, with gratitude for his leading me in the durable way of the Pilgrims.

Foreword

T TNWILLING to trouble eagerly credulous minds, or ^^ persons of suspicious temperament, it seems best to help candid readers who wish to discriminate between the actual and the imaginary, by making certain statements concerning this historical romance.

Every event and circumstance mentioned with reference to Plymouth Colony, and all other historical narration, has been collated with most scrupulous regard for the truth. Following this principle, sentiment has been sacrificed without hesitation, wherever prosaic or unwelcome fact might have been colored by some pleasing iiction, or even by desirable supposition within the limits of possibility, which, however, lacked sufficient basis.

The leading, and often the only final, authorities are Bradford and Winslow, the one important for the long period his history covers, the other our great benefactor for the almost minute detail of his account of the first three years at Plymouth.

Outside of historic portrayal, the remaining contents of this book are generally unreal, though uniformly consistent with contemporary life. Native manners are carefully observed, Rc^er Williams being the most notable source of information, all whose observations do not pertain to the Rhode Island Indians alone.

Beyond what vital statistics and a few familiar declarations show concerning them and theirs, the acts of the

8 FOREWORD

hero and heroine, John Howland and Elizabeth Tilley, are almost entirely the creation of fancy (exceptions being evident) ; as are their conversations and those of all other personages, with various attendant happenings of no colonial significance.

Some may wonder why, in the dial(^es, there is an easy change, and seemingly without cause, between the ancient and modern uses of verbs and of pronouns in the second person. The King James Version of the Bible has an unbroken uniformity of archaic dignity. Also present poetry, whenever it adopts the ancient mode at all, is required by good taste to be consistent. It is not our purpose here to lay down certain apparent rules governing this changeable manner in the familiar conversation of the seventeenth century; hut if any are in doubt, who look for the undeviating Scriptural style in the common talk of the Mayflower voyagers, we refer them to such classics of contemporary English as Bunyan's " Pilgrim's Progress " and the works of Shakespeare, as well as to Bradford's own history " Of Plimoth Plantation."

Albert H. Plumb.

Andoves Hill.

Contents

I. Tempest on the Deep . . . . ii

II. Stepping-stones to Plymouth Rock . 20

III. Virginity Faces Virginia ... 41

II

SPEAKING in general, all Pilgrims were Puritans. . . .

Had there not been first a Puritan there would have been no Pilgrim to write a new chapter in the story of Christianity and human progress. Had there been no Pilgrim to emphasize with heroic daring and targe sacrifice his sense of the need of reformation in the conduct of religious life and in the management of ecclesiastical affairs, Puritanism, in all probability, would have been like one of those western streams which starts in the mountains, and is clear and vigorous in its flow for a while, but before it reaches the ocean is tost in the sands. . . .

The truth uttered by Wycliffe, so long before the great German Reformer had acted his part in the sublime drama of human progress, baflled and arrested though it was, never lost its hold on the English mind. The light shed by Wycliffe, who with justice has been called "The Morning Star of the Reformation," obstructed and refracted though it was, never wholly faded out of the English sky. The seed scattered by Wycliffe, who was following the Master in His spiritual husbandry, trodden underfoot though it was by the iron hoof of blind persecution, never ceased to hold in it a germinating power. From Wycliffe's time on Puritanism was in the air. — The Pilgrims: Frederick A. Noble.

WHO were these men and women, with children, that were wending their way at this time over the unfathomed deep, or drifting helplessly upon its agitated bosom ? What was their quest, and what the antecedents to their marvellous purpose?

The untraced path of the Mayflower forms a lengthened telescope, through which the inquiring eyes of a nation, nay, of many peoples in Christendom, peer wonderingly, pondering on those causes which produced an exodus so strange.

As our observation sweeps slowly through the ages, certain outstanding features appear.

The geographical procession of the continents would seem, to a superhuman being regarding them at a distance, like the rough-forged shoe of some incredibly immense Bellerophon, with more correctness than the imaginary shapes of constellations appeared to astronomers of old. The far Oriental interior, or toe-piece, of this huge horse-shoe; also its left end, comprising Africa; and its right side, forming the Pan-American continents, for a long time lay shrouded in mystery, not only to us Caucasians but to all the world outside the respective sections named.

Comparatively early in the day of striding bipeds known as men, in that third millennium before Christ, while the Euphrates and the Nile were witnessing almost prehistoric achievements of mortal renown, India's mighty triangle received the inrush of her human hosts; and along the Asiatic centre the Mongols swarmed toward the Yellow River and the shores of

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far Cathay. These outlying Oriental peoples became so separated from the rest of their kind, that whatever records may be gleaned concerning their earliest conduct, must be accepted mainly at their hand. It was not yery long before the coming of the despised Nazarene, that Alexander reputed Great, after smashing decayed governments in his ambitious adventures, (Ksclosed to western knowledge the land of the Sanskrit bards, and wept that his Macedonians would not let him do more. And up in the very heart of Asia, the old Kalgan stone has testified to the rapidly increased following of the Babe of Bethlehem. Except for these two liftings, the curtain of obscurity separated ancient farther Asia for aeons, from our gaze.

In the present time of much vaunted breadth of mind, often by its very latitude dissipating to the thinness of mist that which should be sound and substantial, men do not need in religion the lesson of the church in Alexandria, whose leaders' acrimonious discussions as to whether, for instance, an angel could stand on a needlepoint or not, prevented the growth of Oiristianity in Africa, and invited its actual overthrow by the scimitar of the Saracen. For that reason, and because of difficulties of access, this tip of the great terraneous horse-shoe remained a mystery close to Europe; and the enigma of the Nile was solved only within the nineteenth century lately passed, while the Congo, curving northward like a defiant bow, was uncovered but a generation ago.

In this list of the long unknown, what of America? How soon her dusky denizens arrived, rearing their

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tremendous mounds, erecting their Aztec palaces, and tunnelling through mountains at the behest of proud Incas, is known to no present resident of our planet. Rumors are rife here, and speculation supplements them. Certain it is, that prehistoric man was well established in the two most western continents, as surely as in those other two western which are tied to old Mother Asia.

The ethnic effects of the delimitation of land by water, are important. As political Europe was made possible by the partition of the Spanish headland from the Moorish coasts, and by the conversion of primal lacunar basins into the Mediterranean " Great Sea," so on a grander scale the whole Eastern Hemisphere was left separate, to keep not only its joys and prosperity, but its sorrows and failures, all to itself, apart from the vast West. This was well, till mankind might grow in knowledge and wisdom.

The secret beyond the seas was not to be withheld too long. It was divulged slowly but surely, after the high tide of Arabic and Ottoman monotheism, less pure than the Hebrew belief, had thundered, through nearly despairing Dark Ages, against Terra's most diminutive continent, both on its south and at its very centre, threatening the infancy of Christianity there in Europe, the latter herself scarcely emerged from the uncertain combination of northern barbarism and effete southern ctvilizatioa

The solving of the Occidental riddle, with its latent new opportunity for humanity, was accomplished first by certain of our racial fellows who kept it to themt4 WHEN MAYFLOWERS BLOSSOM

selves, because to us they could not reveal it. The continents of their discovery made them exiles for ever. Probably much later, in our far north-east, along the curving nautical course between Iceland and Greenland pointing to Labrador, the well attested voyages of the Norsemen were made, to their Vinland, America's New England.

These last described their way hitherward when our globe had whirled around its annual orbit not over a thousand times, or thereabouts, after the Galilean carpenter wrought his wonders. To Leif Erikson, at the time of Christianity's introduction to Iceland, belongs the honor of the first discovery of America recorded with clearness sufficient to dispel all doubt. He was impelled to the search, by the storm-tossed Bjami Herjulfson's previous sight of strange wooded .shores unlike those of Greenland. The subsequent zealous expeditions of the Northmen, consistently narrated, and their temporary settlement on our New England coasts, all ceased, when to other hardships was added the plague.

Their predecessors here left evidences of at least preponderating Asian strain, rather than Iberian and Transatlantic derivation. And though Chinese junks, presumably directed by their own discovered mariner's compass, are said to have been occasionally found on the Pacific coast as far back as the era of Spanish exploration, the bulk of immigration was undoubtedly over the adjacent Arctic lands of Siberia and Alaska. Our natives at Bering Straits now frequently cross to the other continent in their little fishing boats.

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-Dim as these beginnings appear, one need not go so far as to consider prehistoric American myths and wholly untenable propositions as to the influx of our genus. But in regard to the immediate successors of the Icelandic pioneers on our soil, the evidences of the Welsh entry under their exiled Prince Madoc, and of their gradual absorption among the aborigines during seven centuries thereafter, were so repeatedly shown by witnesses in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, that this claim should now command the same respect it formerly did.

Not only, however, did the prows of Scandinavian sea-dogs cut the salt spume; not only, again, may the Cambrian chronicles correctly claim that their brave navigators steered westward, trained to adventure beside the tempestuous cliffs of Wales; but another severe naval school, the notorious Bay of Biscay, sent forth later its experienced pupils toward the setting sun, presumably in the wake of the Cabot brothers. Jacques Cartier, a leading pioneer himself, found numerous Basque whalers in the St. Lawrence Gulf, quite familiar with that region, to which they had given names. But they were seeking neither fame nor fields. They earned their livelihood from the sea, as fishermen, and they wanted neither competition nor colonization.

There was then little general interest abroad, in the vague shores supposedly about the same whether west or east of Greenland, or anywhere near its lonely latitude. The recollection of a fair western Vinland of previous centuries, had now faded from the prac-

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ticat, unimaginative northern mind, though preserved in well-guarded records. And what idea could the Basque sailors have had, of the wide extent of these unknown abodes of savage men and ferocious beasts, beycwid their own chilly resorts? Doubtless they rejoiced with their welcoming families, when hcHne again in France after their arduous annual tours. Although the Anglicized Cabots at Labrador had rediscovered the American mainland, bringing it for the first time to the notice of Eur<^ as a whole, just before Columbus, having found various islands, discovered the South American continent, nevertheless people remained comparatively indifferent much of the time, later explorers' terrible disasters or mysterious disappearances cooling every outburst of public enthusiasm.

It is a singular honor which Italy enjoys, that beside sending her imperial governors over pagan Europe, she furnished to her former maritime provinces of Spain and Britain Cristoforo Colombo and that venturesome Venetian, Gabotto, forerunners of exploration in South and North America. The honor of originating the name of these united continents was allowed Amerigo Vespucci because, though not specially prominent in discovery, he was able to give to the world the first intelligible chart of the Western Hemisphere as far as then ascertained.

Though Spain, founder of the oldest European town in North America, was so checked by the continued, impetuous resistance of the Florida natives that at one time her government forbade further expeditions hitherward, nevertheless she slowly came to

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occupy the lands of tropical fertility. For had not Pope Alexander VI, the recognized head over heathen tribes, drawn a line from pole to pole in magnificent allotment of all the Western Hemisphere to Spain and Portugal? This papal decree for a long time caused the inaction of such English kings as were either sympathetic or afraid. Thus the Spanish name of Florida lay over the entire Atlantic seaboard, which had soon been found to border a land not identical with India, and large enough of itself.

Then a woman came to the British throne, who dared to give to Sir Walter Raleigh, a man wh" was the mirror of bis times, the right to claim for England all North American territory " not actually possessed of any Christian Prince or People." So was confirmed the long-neglected authority given by Henry the Seventh to John and Sebastian Cabot. Raleigh made, in vain, an attempt at English settlement in 1584, when Queen Elizabeth bestowed the name of Virginia, in her own praise, upon all her territory in the West.

Yet as Virginia had the power of Spain on her south, so to the north France was long allowed, even by treaty, to hold the country entered by Cartier, the Stanley of the St. Lawrence and Canada, and covered by Samuel de Champlain. New France^ destined to endure long enough to give a lasting character to Canada, was extended to the Great Lakes and the Father of Waters, reaching around through the hinterland till it touched Spanish territory on the south. Not only the fur-traders, who were averse to colonizing projects, but the Jesuits, those intrepid heralds of the Cross, penetrated far, and displayed a marvellous fortitude.

And just before the English settled at Jamestown, heroic de Champlain, whose personally discovered lake by the Green Hills of Vennont is a lovely reminder of his life, surveyed the northern coast, and left a recognizable map and description of the final harbor of the Pilgrims. No sooner had the English taken a site in Virginia, than rocky Quebec, the key to Canada, was occupied by Champlain, on the third of July, 1608.

In the same year of Jamestown's beginning, 1607, the English Plymouth Company built fifty houses, an intrenched fort, a church and storehouse, on the Kennebec River in Maine. Biit after winter had frozen their harbor, lire razed their fort, and death slain their leader, the Popham colony was abandoned.

To this general section, "the parts of Northern Virginia," the name of New England was given in 1614, by Captain John Smith, the Jamestown hero, who thereafter wrote his famous and eloquent treatise urging settlement here. He was disappointed that the Mayflower expedition did not solicit his guidance.

But before the colony in Maine endured its one winter, indeed before any English visitor had built an abode in New England, almost in the very opening of the seventeenth century, Bartholomew Gosnold, boldly taking a more direct route across the ocean which shortened that dread voyage by fifteen hundred miles, came straight to the Massachusetts north shore; then found and named Cape Cod ; and erected a storehouse of stone on a pond at Cuttyhunk, the outmost of the Elizabeth Islands, which comprise the present town of Gosnold. But from fear of their numerous foes, his little company soon forsoc^ their refuge, the first English dwelling-place in New England, even as their compatriots, sent by Raleigh, had either perished or forsaken Virginia before the founding of Jamestown. Similarly, the fishing settlement of Sir Humphrey Gilbert, who established the British claim in the north, at Newfoundland, in 1583, had been abandoned for a time, following his death at sea.

The first child of English parentage in America was Virginia Dare, bom at Roanoke Island, August 18, 1587, her mother one of the seventeen women under the fort's brief protection, her grandfather the annually visiting Governor, John White. Raleigh repeatedly sought in vain for any trace of this colony. Their generation who shall declare? Presumably it ceased, or was fused with aboriginal blood.

The first specimen of English literature regarding America was John Smith's account of the settlements, entitled " True Relation of Virginia," written in 1608, and published the same year in London, shortiy before Henry Hudson found the river which was named for him, at the site of New Amsterdam.

Such were the historical antecedents, the march of ethnic events, leading to the advent of the Pilgrim Forefathers and their residence in Northern Virginia, latterly called New England.

And what was their own reason for coming?

The English Reformation, in the grand program of Europe's Renaissance, had indeed created a national so WHEN MAYFLOWERS BLOSSOM

Established Church, independent of Rome: but ecclesiastical conduct by the Thames came to resemble that hy Tiber, so much at one time, that Puritans sought to give the English Church a truly spiritual character; and their more forward Separatists, or Independents, could not even remain in that Church, considering its elaborate formalities and political complexion to be no better than a second, and smaller, rival papacy. This view was far from agreeable to king and clergy. Persecution waxed bitter. Yet Puritans and Independents increased in numbers and in recognized godliness. Their movement acquired such momentum as to win much popular favor; and they were enrolled by the thousand. Their enemies derisively designated the Separatists as Brownists, after a discouraged leader who left them; and the whole Puritan constituency were taunted with the contemptuous name of Round-heads, because many of the men cropped their hair, in revolt from the effeminate tresses of others, and the general luxury and laxity of the time.

When, because of governmental violence, life itself came to be an uncertainty in the Motherland, the Separatists sought exile in place of imprisonment, confiscation, and death; since to disobey conscience they would not. They believed the saying of John Robinson, who became one of their most beloved leaders : " Religion is the best thing; the corruption of it, the worst."

The young Netheriands Republic, exulting in its escape from the grip of Spain, afforded a happy haven

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to all who suffered for their faith. Thither fled the Pilgrims, as these English Separatists termed them- . selves. There they rested; for William the Silent, the hero of Holland, had been asked " to maintain the exercises only of the Reformed Evangelical religion, without, however, permittii^ that inquiries should be made into any man's belief or conscience, or that any injury or hindrance should be offered to any man on account of his religion." The world had long waited for such an attitude of civil government.

Hdland had entered upon her era of excellent development, in things metaphysical and material. The Pilgrim congregations were received in a spirit of kind toleration, and prospered spiritually; while their bread-winners busied themselves in various honest trades, for the space of about twelve years.

Then the natural desire prevailed, not to be absorbed in a people of strange tongue and nationality; and they hoped to be allowed to live by themselves undisturbed, in some distant colony under the British Crown. Finally, the decision was reached, to embark for Virginia, there to establish their homes and temples. And this was the purpose of the Pilgrim voyagers.

Such purpose was in keeping with the temper of the age. Blind formalism failed to perceive the strength of this genius of protest and progress, and fought against it with a ferocity that was only equalled by stupidity. Proud conventionality, in its medieval mood fancying itself secure, had been aroused from slumber too late to preserve its mastery.

But note the men^ processes in the religious movement of centuries, forced to its final happy expression, in the English instance, through the hostility of King James and the narrow order of spirit which he most fittingly represented.

In the boyhood of Jesus of Nazareth, the supreme governmental machine which permitted his crucifixion made its last offensive campaign, and disastrously, against the Germanic power, in the Teutoburg Forest of the North, to the consternation of Caesar Augustus and the perpetual glory of Hermann. From that time, the fallen republic which with base inertia placed all its hard-earned popular offices in one deified man, the empire which could tolerate the actual enslavement of persons superior to their brutalized masters, this sickly, voluptuous shadow of departed Roman valor was only able, by aid of its hired barbarian soldiery, to maintain the defensive against the coming race, the hardy ancestors of Luther. These men talked with enterprising traders from the supposedly eternal city; they felt the pressure of savagery behind and the lure of Italian landscapes before them, while their vigorous and virtuous woipen nursed a numerous increase. Also the Grospel of Pilate's Victim came among their border tribes, when but three centuries had rolled from the dark hour of Calvary; and the Empire, by recognizing Christianity under Constantine, was the more prepared for the influx of strange northern blood. Then when, as a degraded and restricted Western Empire, Rome was about to draw its last gasp, Bishop Leo saved the capital city from the atrocities of those horrible little Orientals, the Huns, in a marvellously

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successful embassy to their conquering leader Attila. Popular gratitude was unbounded, and it was just. However, it was only a respite, for the hitherto slow decline of imperial Rome was now hastening to its final fall.

But unhappily that vestige of former power did not utterly vanish until it had seen the secularization of the Christian Church within it, and a gradual lapse from early apostolic purity. The original spirituality of the body of believers on the Tiber, that faith which had survived many pagan persecutions, was afterwards rewarded first by the toleration of government, and lastly by its sympathy. Then, in the crumbling of that government, Christianity became unequal to the temptation of temporal power. Its ecclesiastical head, now receiving political responsibility, was flattered with the title of " Papa," in the people's affectionate recognition of his protection amid the barbaric chaos. Such was the origin of the later official title of Pope. And its paternalism was excessive. Leo the First, instead of being humbly thankful to Providence for the strange turning away of the Astatic scourge, seemed to be elated with a sense of superiority over Church and State, and the vision of unlimited worldly splendor, shrewdly promoted by religious pretence.

Here was Caesar revived under the safe covering of churchly armor. Neither the daring Julius nor the adroit Octavius would have known such a son in their room, but the genius was much the same; and the ruling personality again accepted a veneration that

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was practically an idolatrous deification. Declarations as to the authority and inerrancy of the professed ambassador of Jesus Christ on earth, blasphemously assumed certain prerogatives and functions belonging to Divinity alone.

It mattered not that the new despotism was disguised under an enormous incubus of sacred terms and conventionalities. The mask increased the menace. The ruse of employing eccleslasticism to hide political cupidity and universal covetousness, operated so successfully that, notwithstanding centuries of remon< strance, it has never been abandoned.

Nevertheless, with all this accretion of Christless characteristics, there was still found an element of true religion, lowly and unpretentious and befitting mortal creatures." Men of God were by no means wanting, willing to be hidden under the heavenly glory of the Master they proclaimed. Gregory the Great, the first Pope and one of the best, joined with Archbishop Augustin and King Ethelbert in the establishment of Christianity among the Saxons, at hoary Canterbury, first city of the faith in England. With all her errors, errors unperceived at first by the sincere, Rome was our spiritual mother. And only her usurpation of divine offices and civil rights would justify the severe denunciation that has followed her. The monasteries stood like castles above the wild social disorder, the feudal fragments of states; and within their quiet walls were conserved both religion and learning, till Europe came from its seething crucible a vessel of form and stability. The Teutonic peoples, checked in their course as they neared the Atlantic, rested from their roving life; and seeing the benefit of planted fields in Italy, they began to make clearings in their native forests and drained their swamps, instructed largely by those earlier monks who, far from the luxurious ease of Rome, toiled as faithful heralds of Christ.

Eventually, however, the Church of Rome, standing tmchallenged over the ashes of ancient magnificence, became intoxicated with power; and extended a baleful influence over the lands of her missionary enterprise, seeking to dominate their local rulers, in secular affairs as well as in sacred matters. In thus descending from her proper sphere, the mother disgraced before her children her own self and that Holy Name she had told them. She lost the simplicity of the spiritual life, and sank to the level of her material avocations. In point of interest, they became her main vocation.

The bitter fruitage of this policy soon showed itself. Europe had been rescued from the unspeakable Hunnish hordes, and the Germanic irruption was becoming a blessing rather than a curse; but her corrupted Christianity required flagellation by the Moslem, the fierce Ishmaelite inured to conflicts in the desert, and desperate with the courage of fatalism. To save even her nominal Christianity, the Holy Roman Empire arose and formed a long, solid wall from south to north, composed of old Roman traditions, fresh Germanic might, and vast ecclesiastical assumption. This combination was effectual for the preservation of

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political Europe during a long period; but its very success foreshadowed its fall, because of the increase, to an intolerable degree, of effrontery and audacity on the part of the reputed representative of Christ. When at one time a papal minion kicked from him, in cool contempt, the crown of England, pious arrogance struck at itself.

This medley of piety and politics knew no bounds. It carefully placed on record, as for its own condemnation, obtainable statements that have never been retracted or effaced, affirming absolute right over all civil states and over every human mind, and declaring to be evil the toleration of other forms of Christian belief as on an equal standing with itself.

Such a condition could not indefinitely remain unchallenged. The inability of the Crusaders to wrest the Holy Land from the Mohammedan grasp, revealed the weakness of the papal, pseudo-Christian paganism, the di^uised idolatry of things ritual, in conjunction with sincere yet fanatical devotion in semi-barbarous breasts. But the density of p(^ular ignorance was partially dispelled by contact with the Orient, in those calamitous Wars of the Cross. Europe was liberated from its intense provincialism, and, while solidified by religious federation, became susceptible to the best which the older continent could offer, particularly in the establishment of commercial relations. Through such interchange, the free Italian cities, and various northern marts, prospered. Diplomatic reciprocity also developed, in some instances. And the way was opened for the gradual reception of the literary and scientific weahh of Asia.

All this did not make for the security of the Roman Babylon, as the papal power was sometimes named in the days of its undisturbed tyranny. Insurrection, incipient Protestantism, increased. Even as early as the introduction of Christianity into far-away Iceland and the discovery of America by the Northmen at the end of the first Christian millennium, and following the darkest of the Dark Ages, there were visible signs of protest against the depravity of the Roman Church.

The failure of the Crusades, to restore to Palestine the Cross without its Christ, was a lesson unheeded by the hierarchy, which then began to vent its venom at home, in the indescribable refinements of cruelty Inquisitorial. In the sable-draped, subterranean Chamber of Horrors, again the true saints of Jesus Christ refused to recant, as they had done in the days of imperial persecution. Heroic men and women, humanity's true nobles, calmly accepted those prolonged and elaborated torments which were resorted to in the Romish determination to rule. But such measures betokened the fact that sanctified rapacity had beclouded reason, and was sure to awaken dissent in multitudes Icmg quiescent.