Mayflower (21 page)

Despite some remarkable early returns in the fur trade, Bradford and his fellow investors struggled to pay off the colony’s debt. Bradford blamed most of their difficulties on his former assistant governor, Isaac Allerton. Allerton, who had mercantile ambitions of his own, was entrusted with overseeing Plymouth’s relations with the merchants in England, and it eventually became apparent that Allerton was mixing his personal business with the colony’s. As a result of his mismanagement, if not outright fraud, Plymouth’s debts only increased even though the Pilgrims had sent significant quantities of furs back to England.

In truth, it was not all Isaac Allerton’s fault. Bradford, who’d suffered reversals of his own back in Leiden, never had a talent for financial matters, and the colony continued to have trouble with the merchants in London long after Allerton ceased representing them in 1630. According to Bradford’s calculations, between 1631 and 1636, they shipped £10,000 in beaver and otter pelts (worth almost 2 million in today’s dollars) yet saw no significant reduction in their debt of approximately £6,000.

Not only were the Pilgrims poor judges of character, they were forced to struggle with the logistical difficulties of sending goods back and forth across three thousand miles of ocean. Plymouth was an inadequate port to begin with, and financial stability only came to the colony when their principal market shifted from London to Boston, which later emerged as New England’s primary port. Not until 1648, after they had been forced to sell off some of their own land, did Bradford and the other Plymouth investors finally settle their accounts with the merchants in England. It would be left to others to hit upon a way to wealth in the New World.

As Pastor Robinson had suggested, the Pilgrims had lost more than a little of their collective soul at Wessagussett. But so had the Pokanokets. Massasoit had entered into a devil’s bargain with the English. By selling out his Native neighbors in Massachusetts and Cape Cod, he had cast his lot with a culture and technology on which his own people increasingly came to depend. Whether it was iron hoes and kettles, blankets, liquor, or guns, the English had what the Pokanokets wanted. There would be some good years ahead as the Pilgrims eagerly traded with them for furs. But as the beavers and other fur-bearing animals grew scarce, the only thing the Indians had to sell to the English was their land.

It had begun innocently enough in 1621, when Massasoit had given Patuxet to the Pilgrims as a gift. Back then it had been difficult to imagine a time when land would be anything but a boundless resource. The Pilgrims believed that since no Indians were presently living on the land, it was legally theirs. “[I]t is lawful now to take a land which none useth,” Robert Cushman wrote, “and make use of it.” By the 1630s, however, the Pilgrims had begun to take a different view—a change in attitude that may have been in response to the radical beliefs of a new minister.

Roger Williams had already upset the authorities in Massachusetts-Bay by the time he moved from Boston to Plymouth in 1633. In addition to what Bradford described as some “strange opinions” regarding spiritual matters, Williams insisted that the Indians were the legal owners of their lands. If the English were to take title, Williams argued, they must first purchase the land from its previous owners. Williams’s unusual religious convictions soon got him into trouble in Plymouth, forcing him to move back to Massachusetts-Bay. (By 1635, his “unsettled judgment” resulted in his banishment from the colony, and he soon after founded Rhode Island.) Despite the brief and tumultuous nature of Williams’s time in Plymouth, he appears to have had a lasting influence on the colony. Soon after his departure, the Pilgrims began recording their purchases of Indian land.

It’s true that the English concept of land ownership was initially unfamiliar to the Indians. Instead of a title and deed, the Indians’ relationship to the land was based on a complex mixture of cultural factors, with the sachem possessing the right to distribute land in his own territory. But whatever misunderstandings existed in the beginning between the Indians and English, by the second decade of Plymouth Colony, with towns springing up across the region, there was little doubt among the Indians as to what the Pilgrims meant by the purchase and sale of land.

From the start, Plymouth authorities insisted that all Native land purchases must have prior court approval. By maintaining control over the buying and selling of Indian land, the colony hoped to ensure clear titles while protecting the Natives from unscrupulous individuals who might use alcohol and even violence to part them from their property. In 1639, Massasoit and his son Wamsutta confirmed their original treaty with the colony and promised that “they shall not give, sell, or convey any of his or their lands…without the…consent of this government.”

Initially, it appears, the transactions were quite informal—at least when it came to determining the price the English paid for the land. In November 1642 Massasoit agreed to sell a portion of what became the township of Rehoboth. The deed reports that the sachem “chose out ten fathom of beads…and put them in a basket, and affirmed that he was full satisfied for his lands…, but he stood upon it that he would have a coat more.” In 1650, he sold 196 square miles of what became modern Bridgewater for seven coats, nine hatchets, eight hoes, twenty-nine knives, four moose skins, and ten and a half yards of cotton. In 1652, he and Wamsutta sold the future site of Dartmouth for thirty yards of cloth, eight moose skins, fifteen axes, fifteen hoes, fifteen pairs of shoes, one iron pot, and ten shillings’ worth of assorted goods. The following year they sold lands in the vicinity of the Pokanokets’ ancestral village of Sowams for £35, currently worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $7,000.

Today, the sums paid for Massasoit’s lands seem criminally insignificant. However, given the high cost of clearing Native land and the high value the Indians attached to English goods, the prices are almost justifiable. Certainly, the Pilgrims
felt
they were paying a fair price, and their descendants later insisted that they “did not possess one foot of land in this colony but what was fairly obtained by honest purchase of the Indian proprietors.”

This may have been true as far as it went, but in at least one instance, lands bought from the Indians were subsequently resold at a 500 percent profit. In reality, the system cut the Indians out of the emerging New England real estate market. By monopolizing the purchase of Indian lands, Plymouth officials kept the prices they paid artificially low. Instead of selling to the highest bidder, Massasoit was forced to sell his land to the colonial government—and thus was unable to establish what we would call today a fair market price for the one Native commodity, besides the ever dwindling supply of furs, that the English valued.

We have been taught to think of Massasoit as a benevolent and wise leader who maintained a half century of peace in New England. This is, of course, how the English saw it. But many of the Indians who lived in the region undoubtedly had a very different attitude toward a leader whose personal prosperity depended on the systematic dismantling of their homeland.

As their land dwindled, the Pokanokets continued to be afflicted by disease. In 1634, smallpox and influenza ravaged both the Indians and the English in the region. William Brewster, whose family had managed to survive the first terrible winter unscathed, lost two daughters, Fear and Patience, now married to Isaac Allerton and Thomas Prence, respectively. For the Native Americans, the smallpox epidemic was, in many ways, worse than the plague of 1616–19. Their skin became so consumed with sores that their flesh adhered to the mats on which they slept. “When they turn them,” Bradford wrote, “a whole side will flay off at once as it were, and they will be all of a gore blood, most fearful to behold….[T]hey die like rotten sheep.”

And yet, from Massasoit’s perspective, his alliance with the English continued to serve him well. In 1632, the Pokanokets’ old enemies, the Narragansetts, attacked Sowams. The Pilgrims had recently built a trading post near the village, and Massasoit took refuge in the English structure. Standish rallied to the sachem’s defense, and the Pokanokets were soon free to return to their village. The incident at the Sowams trading post appears to have been a pivotal event for Massasoit. As Native Americans customarily did after undergoing a life-altering experience, he changed his name, calling himself Usamequin, meaning yellow feather.

Massasoit had promised on his sickbed always to remember the debt he owed the Pilgrims—particularly to Edward Winslow. And yet, in true sachem fashion, Massasoit never ceased manipulating those around him. In 1634, the year that smallpox swept away so many Indians, he and Winslow were walking together from Sowams to Plymouth. Unbeknownst to his companion, the sachem sent word ahead that Winslow was dead. Massasoit even instructed the messenger to show the residents of Plymouth “how and where [Winslow] was killed.”

By this point, Edward and Susanna Winslow had had five children, including seven-year-old Josiah, the future governor of the colony. Needless to say, the Indian messenger’s news created great grief in Plymouth. The following day, Massasoit appeared in Plymouth with Winslow by his side. When asked why he had played such a cruel trick on the inhabitants, the sachem replied “that it was their manner to do so, that they might be more welcome when they came home.” Winslow may once have saved his life, but that had not prevented the sachem from reminding the Pilgrims that death stalked them all.

Over the course of the next decade, as King Charles and Archbishop Laud made life increasingly difficult for nonconformists in England, an estimated twenty-one thousand Puritan immigrants flooded across New England. With larger, more economically successful colonies flourishing to the north, south, and west, Plymouth had become a backwater.

But if they were now outnumbered, the Pilgrims could take consolation in the fact that the new arrivals shared their belief in a reformed Protestant Church. For the last ten years, the Pilgrims had conducted a virtual laboratory experiment in how an individual congregation, removed from the intrusions of the Church of England, might conduct itself. How much real influence the Pilgrims had on the development of what eventually became the Congregational Church is still subject to debate, but Bradford quite rightly took pride in how he and his little community of believers had laid the groundwork for things to come. “Thus out of small beginnings,” he wrote, “greater things have been produced by His hand that made all things of nothing, and gives being to all things that are; and, as one small candle may light a thousand, so the light here kindled hath shone unto many, yea in some sort to our whole nation; let the glorious name of Jehovah have all the praise.”

The Puritans staunchly denied it, but their immigration to America had turned them, like the Pilgrims before them, into Separatists. They might claim to be still working within the Church of England, but as a practical matter, with no bishops in New England, they were free to worship as they saw fit. With a clutch of Cambridge-educated divines scripting their every move, the Puritans of Massachusetts-Bay developed a more rigorous set of requirements for church membership than had been used at Plymouth, where it had been assumed since the days of John Robinson that only God ultimately knew whether a person was or was not a Saint. In the years since Robinson’s death, the members of the congregation at Plymouth had resigned themselves to going their own, often ministerless way in the New World, and in the process they had become considerably less jealous about guarding their divine legacy. Now, with the arrival of the Puritans in Massachusetts-Bay, it was up to others to become the spiritual arbiters of New England.

An April 11, 1638, letter from William Bradford to John Winthrop, with a draft of Winthrop’s response on the lower left

Minimal from the beginning, the religious distinction between the “Pilgrims” and “Puritans” quickly became inconsequential, especially when in 1667 John Cotton, a Harvard-trained minister from Massachusetts-Bay, became the pastor at Plymouth. Instead of serving as religious designations, the terms “Puritan” and “Pilgrim” came to signify two different groups of settlers, with the perpetually underfunded Pilgrims and their associates arriving in Plymouth between 1620 and 1630, and the more well-to-do and ambitious Puritans arriving in Massachusetts-Bay and Connecticut after 1629.

The influx of Puritan immigrants prompted the Pilgrims to rethink how the government of their settlement was organized, and once again, Plymouth and Massachusetts-Bay followed a similar course. By the 1630s, each colony was ruled by its own General Court, which included the governor and his assistants and, after 1638 in the case of Plymouth, deputies from the various towns. In addition to passing laws, levying taxes, and distributing land, the General Court probated wills and heard criminal trials. As it so happened, Plymouth magistrates found themselves presiding over the colony’s first murder trial just as the Puritans began to arrive at Boston Harbor.