One Small Candle: The Pilgrim's First Year in America (The Thomas Fleming Library) Read online

  1 The Sweet Ship

  2 Answerable Courages

  3 The Strangers

  4 God’s Chosen People

  5 Even Sailors Prayed

  6 Water Water Everywhere

  7 What Could Now Sustain Them

  8 The Promised Land

  9 Cold Harbor

  10 A Battalion of Demons

  11 Love Against Death

  12 Welcome!

  13 A Special Instrument of Their Good

  14 Duels and Diplomacy

  15 War or Peace?

  16 Thanksgiving Day

  17 Help from Home

  Copyright

  The ship had never carried passengers. She was a freighter, rather old and tired after more than fourteen years of running taffeta and satins from Germany, hats and hemp to Norway, wine and cognac from France. Thanks to the wine, she was called a sweet ship - her hold full of pleasant odors, in contrast to the foul fumes that rose from similar ships of the day. Otherwise, riding high beside her dock at Redriffe on the Thames, after discharging a cargo of wine from Rochelle, France, on May 15, 1620, she was no different from a hundred other square-riggers in this bustling section of London Port.

  Down the quay crowded with boxes and barrels and lounging sailors came two men. One walked with a quick uneasy gait, his eyes wary. The second was better dressed and carried himself with an expansive swagger. They stopped before the ship, and the second man called out to a seaman repairing sails on the sunny deck. “Ahoy, there. Mayflower of London?”

  “Aye.”

  “Captain Christopher Jones?”

  “Aye.”

  They were necessary questions. The old ship had a common name. Centuries later, confused historians would count at least twenty Mayflowers in the port records of the era. Two even fought on that historic day in 1588 when the seamen of Queen Elizabeth smashed Spain’s mighty Armada and made the oceans of the world English territory.

  Good Queen Bess was dead now, these seventeen years. Will Shakespeare, her reigning poet, was dead four years, although some of his plays - Henry IV, Othello, Much Ado About Nothing - still did a brisk business for the King’s Men at Blackfriars Theater. But the rest of England was neither prosperous nor content. An utterly different ruler now sat on the throne. Unstable, indecisive James I had done little since 1603 but drain the treasury with his extravagance, shock the nation with his morals, and embitter those who yearned for religious liberty.

  Not that King James was any worse, or better, than his times. It was an age of excess. Elizabeth had had a fondness for extravagance, which once inspired the Earl of Hereford to greet her with three thousand footmen fitted out for the occasion with black and yellow feathers and gold chains. Under James, extravagance had become a passion. It was hard to tell London’s fantastically dressed gallants from women. Ladies appeared at court in gowns that cost fifty pounds a yard for the embroidering alone, equal to 7,000 pounds today. The House of Cecil spent over fourteen hundred pounds hanging the bedroom of their Countess of Salisbury with white satin embroidered with gold, silver, and pearls to celebrate the birth of an heir. In a typical year, the king paid out five thousand pounds in “benevolences” to his favorites.

  The manners and morals of the court were appalling. Banquets frequently turned into riots. A Venetian diplomat described one repast at St. James’s Palace with its usual shoving, brawling crowd. “At the first assault, they upset the table and the crash of glass platters reminded me precisely of a severe hailstorm at midsummer smashing the window glass.” When the lord mayor of London gave a dinner for the new Knights of Bath, the so-called gentlemen behaved outrageously with the citizens’ wives. The sheriffs finally broke open a door and found Sir Edward Sackville in such a scandalous position that the entire banquet was forthwith abandoned.

  Elsewhere the bucolic “merrie England” of song and story was rapidly vanishing. One justice of the peace wrote to a friend: “It is sessions with me every day all the day long here, and I have no time for my own occasions, hardly to put meat in my mouth. There was yesterday fourteen brought before me and presented that are so fit for no place as the House of Correction, all of one parish. . . .” Unemployment was widespread. “The number of poor do daily increase,” one commentator wrote, “there has been no collection for them, no not these seven years, in many parishes of the land, especially in country towns: but many of those parishes turneth forth their poor, yea, and their lusty laborers that will not work, or for any misdemeanor want work, to beg, filch and steal for their maintenance . . . until the law bring them unto the fearful end of hanging.” Men and women were regularly hanged for stealing as little as a loaf of bread. No one seemed to think twice about it, perhaps because a prison term was also tantamount to a death sentence, either from disease or the brutality of venal jailers.

  It was an uneasy society, racked by vast changes in money, morals, and religion, with the last by far the greatest. Martin Luther’s protest had sent a shock wave rolling through Europe. In country after country, rulers were struggling to control alarming new impulses toward personal freedom and spiritual independence. Perfectly logical, from a royal point of view. If a man was free to choose his religion one day, the next he might feel free to choose his king.

  But the publication of the Bible in the vernacular had unleashed a power that no king could control - and no nation had taken to this new freedom more eagerly than England. “Theology rules here,” said one visitor shortly after Elizabeth’s death. The scandals of King James’s court only convinced more and more people that England needed a deep infusion of Biblical religion if the nation was to survive. From secret printing presses in Scotland, Holland, and Switzerland, Bible-inspired books and tracts poured into the country year after year urging reform in the English Church as a first step to reforming a corrupt crown.

  Others, despairing of reform, urged separation from the English Church and the right to join independent churches where men could worship as their consciences directed them. This was even more dangerous doctrine, and against these “Separatists” the royal fury was unchecked. Informers, sheriffs, constables, and bailiffs were under orders to “harry them out of the land.”

  Captain Christopher Jones of the Mayflower had no interest in such arguments. He was a solid, steady, respectable businessman of fifty with a wife and two children ashore and a one-fourth interest in his ship to guarantee his prosperity. Besides, he had spent most of his life at sea, more interested in reading charts and compasses than the Bible. Born in Harwich, the son of a prominent sea captain, he was hardly the sort of man to become involved with religious extremists. But the two men who greeted him in his comfortable Great Cabin on this lovely June day had a business proposition that was deeply involved with England’s explosive religious dilemmas.

  Robert Cushman was the name of the first man. He was mild mannered and nervous and described himself as a wool comber from Canterbury. The second man, bluff, hearty, full of jokes and good nature, did most of the talking. He was Thomas Weston, an ironmonger by trade but quick to make it clear that his money spoke for him in a dozen other businesses.

  Weston was a born promoter and described in glowing terms the plans that he and some London friends had for starting a plantation in North America. Over seventy merchants and gentlemen were prepared to put up seven thousand pounds to launch a joint stock company for the venture. They would avoid all the mistakes that had turned Jamestown, Virginia, into a costly fiasco – yet to show a cent of profit after thirteen years of toil. Mr. C
ushman was acting here as the representative of the prospective planters - sober, industrious Christians now sojourning in Holland because they disliked the king’s religious conformity and wished to stay out of his majesty’s jails. They had a royal patent for a tract of land on the American coast. All they needed was a ship. Would Captain Jones be interested?

  America was a long voyage, but ships were making it almost every month now. What about money? Several years before, Jones had charged 160 pounds to a merchant who had chartered his ship for a voyage to Norway. On that trip Jones had proved himself a shrewd businessman„ collecting his money even though his backer went into bankruptcy and charging thirty shillings for each day his ship was tied up in port during the litigation. The going rate for passengers on the Atlantic crossing in 1620 was about four pounds per person, and baggage went at three pounds a ton. Expenses ran to about three pounds a person when the shippers were responsible for supplying the food. But Weston and Cushman quickly reduced this charge by promising to bring their own provisions. Nonetheless, there was some hard bargaining in the Mayflower’s Great Cabin before they settled on a figure. Jones insisted on a demurrage clause in their contract, entitling him to charge by the day if he was forced to linger on the American coast after he disembarked his passengers. Yielding this point, Weston and Cushman got Jones to agree on a price in the vicinity of four hundred pounds.

  Good enough. But did Captain Jones want to go? A man his age, with a wife and family on shore, might well think twice about an Atlantic crossing.

  For years Christopher Jones, like all his contemporaries, had been hearing and reading stories about America. The heroes of his Harwich youth were hometown men such as Christopher Newport, who had helped bring back the plunder from the fabulous Portuguese treasure ship Madre de Dios and, as admiral, had led the first expedition to Virginia in 1607. When Christopher Jones went to the theater, the stage was full of people like Captain Seagull in George Chapman’s Eastward Hoe! with his wild tales of rubies and diamonds on the American seashore, or that weird native of the New World, Caliban, in William Shakespeare’s last play, The Tempest. Almost every month saw a book by some captain or his more literate ship’s surgeon describing new wonders and new coasts. It all made the life of a merchant sailor seem pretty tame. In his younger days Captain Jones had hunted whales off Greenland. Why not one more daring voyage, before old age crept up? The captain put out his hand. He was ready to take his ship across the vast, treacherous Atlantic.

  Back at Menage House, a rabbit warren of tenements in the Aldgate section of London, Robert Cushman sat down to write a letter to his friends in Holland. If Christopher Jones could have seen it, he would almost certainly have had second thoughts about his agreement. Wearily Cushman lamented that “the many discouragements I find here . . . had made me to say I would give up my accounts to John Carver . . . and so leave it quite, with only the poor clothes on my back. But gathering up myself by further consideration, I resolved yet to make one trial more, and to acquaint Mr. Weston with the fainted state of our business.” He went on to tell how Weston himself was equally discouraged, and “save for his promise, he would not meddle at all with the business any more; yet . . . at the last he gathered up himself a little more, and coming to me two hours after, he told me he would not yet leave it. And so advising together, we resolved to hire a ship. . . .”

  Clearly, there was anything but harmony prevailing between the backers and the backed. But this was only one of the problems Weston and Cushman had neglected to mention to Christopher Jones. Far more alarming to a respectable businessman would have been the news that one of his passengers on the voyage would be a fugitive for whom King James had been ransacking Holland and England for over a year.

  The man’s name was William Brewster, and were it not for him, Robert Cushman would never have come to Christopher Jones in search of a ship. For eleven years Brewster had been the guiding spirit of the small band of exiles to which Cushman belonged. Trying to earn a living as a publisher, Brewster had made the mistake of printing a book attacking King James’s plans to reorganize Scotland’s Presbyterian Church along English lines. Copies were smuggled into Scotland and soon came to the king’s attention.

  His majesty flew into a royal rage and ordered his secretary of state to start an immediate manhunt for the printer. The trail led first to Holland and then back to London, where Brewster was assisting Cushman in the tortuous negotiations for a government grant of land in the New World. Brewster immediately went into hiding. He knew what would happen to him if the king’s men caught him. For printing a similar book around the same time, a Scottish minister was fined three thousand pounds and sentenced to be whipped and set in the Pillory at Westminster, to have one of his ears cut off and his nose slit, to be branded in the face with the letters S.S. (Stirrer of Sedition), to be whipped and pilloried again on a market day in Cheapside, to have the other ear cut off - and be imprisoned for life. The king did not take religious dissent lightly.

  Cushman had written nervously to their friends in Holland: “Mr. B. is not well at this time: whether he will come back to you or go into the north, I know not.” When they reported that bailiffs under the direction of the English ambassador to the Netherlands were scouring the country for “one Brewster,” the fugitive fled north, using the name Mr. Williamson. At first Cushman continued the negotiations alone, and then was joined by John Carver, a former London merchant who had assisted him when these delicate dealings with the king and the bishops first began, three long years before.

  Small wonder that Robert Cushman’s nerves were taut. Brewster’s clash with the king had made his own situation doubly precarious. As a Separatist, he was always liable to arrest. The dickerings with the king, conducted through a screen of sympathetic friends in high places, had been full of alarming twists and turns. At first James had seemed to favor the idea of letting dissenters go forth as colonists. He asked how they would earn their living, and when he was told by fishing, he exclaimed: “So God have my soul, an honest trade! It was the Apostles’ own calling!” But when it came time for him to affix the Great Seal to a document guaranteeing the exiles’ religious freedom in the New World, the king suggested that the Separatists first have a conference with the Archbishop of Canterbury. Since this would have almost inevitably resulted in a prison sentence, the negotiators wisely declined.

  Even without the king’s guarantee, they had continued to negotiate with the Virginia Company, backers of Jamestown, for a patent giving them the right to found a “particular plantation” within their spacious domains. They had persuaded one John Wincomb, a “religious gentleman” in the household of the Countess of Lincoln, to play the part of a respectable front man, and the Virginia Company had finally issued a patent in his name. Ironically, Cushman and his friends never made the slightest use of this document, on which they had wasted three nerve-wracking years of negotiation. When they signed their agreement with Thomas Weston, a new patent was promptly issued to John Pierce, a London clothier and an associate of Weston’s.

  That had been in February. The future had had a victorious glow, then, after three dreary discouraging years. On the same day, the Virginia Company had passed a very liberal ordinance, giving captains and leaders of Particular Plantations “liberty till a form of government be here settled for them, to associate unto themselves divers of the gravest and discreetest of their companies to make orders, ordinances and constitutions for the better ordering and directing of their business, provided they be not repugnant to the laws of England.” Freedom to make their own laws, to choose their own leaders! For Cushman and his friends, who had suffered so long from bad laws and worse rulers, it was almost unbelievably good news.

  But in the last three months, numerous complications had arisen to make a “damp” in this original optimism. First there was a sudden outburst of disagreement over their destination. Their patent permitted them to settle in “the northern part of Virginia,” and they had decided on the mouth o
f “Hudson’s River” as a likely place. But in 1614 Captain John Smith of Jamestown fame had done an excellent job of mapping the New World’s coast from Maine to the tip of Cape Cod. He had named the area New England and come home to hymn its praises as the garden spot of the New World. Now a group of Englishmen, led by Sir Ferdinando Gorges, governor of the Port of Plymouth, were forming a separate company to colonize this coast. Weston and his friends heard about it and rushed to their would-be settlers urging them to plant there instead of on Hudson’s River.

  There was a possibility that the Council for New England, as the new company was being called, would grant them a monopoly on the fishing rights. They could make a fortune. But the new company had yet to get a charter from the king, and this could take years. Moreover, in spite of John Smith’s glowing description, other explorers had denounced New England as a land of intolerable snow and ice. One colony, led by Sir John Popham, had already expired after a disastrous winter in Maine. To the disgruntlement of their investors, the exiles announced that they preferred to stay within the boundaries of the Virginia Company.

  Next came the problem of the “strangers.” The original plans were to create a colony exclusively from the exiles in Holland. But volunteers turned out to be discouragingly few, and Weston had had to recruit several dozen people from London and the surrounding countryside. This was disturbing enough. But when it came to buying supplies, these newcomers demanded the right to have a representative on the purchasing committee.