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

Cushman and Carver, anxious to demonstrate their Christian charity, agreed. After all, these people were putting their money into the venture, too. But the representative, one Christopher Martin of Billerica, Essex, turned out to be a violent, headstrong personality, who totally ignored his new confreres and rushed off to Kent, where he began buying up supplies at a fantastic rate, with no apparent attention to prices or planning. John Carver, fearful that Martin would spend every cent in the treasury with little to show for it, hurried down to Southampton and began buying supplies too.

  Weston and his fellow merchants were outraged. They wanted all the supplies bought in London, where they could save money through their business connections. Nor was this their last complaint. Weston had originally drawn up an agreement with the exiles in Holland, organizing a joint stock company to which he and his merchant friends would contribute money and the exiles labor for a period of seven years. During this time, all profits from “trade, traffic, trucking, working, fishing or any means” were to be credited to the joint account. At the end of that time, the profits were to be divided on the basis of the number of shares held by each person. The merchants bought shares at ten pounds each. The settlers were to earn a share for each person in their households over the age of sixteen.

  Not the most generous terms in the world, but the breezy Weston had convinced the exiles that they could not do better elsewhere. Then he had found that most of the merchant backers were objecting violently to two clauses in the agreement. One stipulated that the settlers’ houses would not be included in the final accounting of the company’s net worth. The second gave the settlers the right to work two days a week for “the more comfort of themselves and their families.” No, growled the hardnosed Londoners. That gave them too much incentive and time to work for themselves. Strike those two clauses, they told Weston, or we pull our money out of the whole venture.

  Weston went to work on Robert Cushman with a potent mixture of threats and persuasion. Martin and Carver were both crying for more money. Carver alone said he needed some five hundred pounds. Between them, the two buyers had already spent the meager sums that the exiles in Holland had entrusted to the venture, and they had yet to hire a ship. As Cushman saw it, either he agreed to the changes or the whole project collapsed.

  Cushman immediately found himself a target of recriminations from both sides. His friends in Holland accused him of making terms “fitter for thieves and bond slaves than honest men.” Weston warned him that if his friends did not go along with his commitment, they could all “go scratch” for more money. “We will,” Cushman moaned, “with going up and down, wrangling and expostulating, pass over the summer before we go. And to speak the truth, there is fallen already among us a flat schism: and we are readier to go to dispute than to set forward a voyage.”

  It was hardly a bright prospect that poor Cushman saw before him. He had invested every cent he had in the world in this colony, and had left wife and son behind in Holland during years of dangerous diplomacy. When he walked the streets of London, he found little to console him. All around him swirled the cruel vitality of the great city, the gallants with their “bombasted” or “beer barrel” breeches and gorgeous ruffs, the great ladies in their chaises with braces of footmen dashing before them to clear a path through the rabble, the tough pikemen of the town watch, ready and willing to break the head of any brawler, no matter how blue his blood.

  Here came an exuberant flock of law students on their way to a new play by John Fletcher, whose gay comedies had replaced Elizabethan blood and thunder. There went a swirl of roaring young apprentices, fresh from the tavern, on the way to Paris Gardens across the Thames, where they would watch a Russian bear fight for his life against a swarm of mastiffs, or howl as an ape was dismembered by another pack of maddened dogs. Men and women staggered past, so drunk they could hardly see, bellowing bawdy verses. Drunkenness was so common in 1620 London that it was almost respectable. Ladies of the evening, wearing gowns cut low enough to make imagination superfluous, called invitingly from convenient doorways.

  Exiled. Exiled. Even here in the heart of home. That was the real sorrow in Robert Cushman’s heart as he walked the streets of London. Each year England seemed to drift further from the ideals he and his friends treasured. They could not know how many other men were thinking the same thoughts, and before the century was half over, those who revered the kingdom of God and those who revered the king of the realm would drench the nation in the bitter blood of civil war.

  Robert Cushman and his friends would not have fought, even if they had been offered the chance. They had already chosen the exile’s path, and the path had lengthened slowly before their wondering eyes, until now it stretched from the green fields of England to a wilderness three thousand miles away. It was a deep and wonderful thing to them, this inward road they had traveled, which was now about to bring them and others to such a long voyage. It had echoes in it of Moses and the God who led the Chosen People into another wilderness. Robert Cushman and his friends had heard those echoes, and believed they were God’s voice.

  It was this deep fellowship in faith which sustained Robert Cushman and enabled him to accept criticisms and disappointments which would have disheartened many men. Even when the criticism came from his fellow church members, they were still his “brethen,” and he took leave of them in his letters with “all love and affection.”

  In the next few days, contracts were signed and the Mayflower was officially hired. Cushman told Captain Jones that his friends were buying another ship in Holland which would accompany the Mayflower on the voyage and remain in the New World to reap (hopefully) fabulous profits in fishing and trading. They were to rendezvous in Southampton, England, in mid-July - little more than a month away.

  That meant Captain Jones had no time to spare. He had to hire a crew, and, for a long Atlantic voyage, men must be selected with care and forethought. For his first mate and pilot, Jones chose John Clark, who had made two previous voyages to America. It was a good choice on his record, and one that would prove even wiser in crises to come.

  Jones knew little about the sea routes to America. It would be vital to have a man like Clark aboard, with his knowledge of currents and prevailing winds. Clark had made his first voyage to Virginia in 1610 as pilot under the strict and demanding Captain Sir Thomas Dale. That summer, the young sailor was captured by a Spanish caravel investigating Jamestown - a small but ominous reminder that there were other dangers on the ocean besides wind and waves. Taken to Madrid, Clark had been held prisoner for four years and intensively quizzed for his knowledge of sea routes to America.

  Four years in a seventeenth-century prison would be enough to make most men swear off the sea for life. But in 1616, Clark was exchanged for a Spaniard held in London, and returned home to ship out promptly for Virginia again, this time with a load of cattle. No doubt about it, John Clark was a salt-water man, and Captain Christopher Jones must have rubbed his hands with satisfaction as his first mate signed his papers for the voyage.

  Two more master’s mates plus four quartermasters, a ship’s carpenter, cooks, and gunners to man the Mayflower’s ten cannon were soon on the rolls. Also a ship’s doctor, one Giles Heale, licensed the year before by the honorable Company of Barber Surgeons. Young Heale came from the same parish as Thomas Weston – St. Giles in the Fields – and had been persuaded by that glib gentleman that there was profit and high adventure to be found aboard the good ship Mayflower.

  Hiring the seamen was a lesser problem for Captain Jones. After a lifetime on deep water, he could size up a sailor at a glance. Not that he had an especially exquisite range of choices. Sailors of 1620 were fond of saying that “a man who went to sea for pleasure would be likely to go to hell for past-time.” But with poverty and unemployment stalking the land, even the sailor’s pittance of eighteen shillings a month looked good, and the Mayflower’s complement of some thirty able seamen was soon full.

  By now Christopher Jones had disco
vered that all was not sweetness and light between his passengers and their backers. It was not a good omen, this bickering. A ship’s company needed harmony to survive on the high seas in 1620. Unhappy passengers could communicate their dissatisfactions to the crew, and in a week they could have a roaring mutiny on their hands. Jones knew from harsh experience how easily sailors could be incited to revolt. Only a few years before, a stranger had come aboard his ship while it was in port, led the crew in breaking into the wine, and started a riot which Jones and his mates had had to suppress with force.

  But Christopher Jones had come to know Robert Cushman pretty well. He had learned how he and his friends had given up comfortable homes and jobs in England to live as common laborers in Holland because there they were part of a church that seemed to them the incarnation of the Christian spirit. This sounded a bit strong to Christopher Jones, who had heard more blasphemy than prayers from his congregations at sea. Like most men of action he was a skeptic at heart. But he had traveled around the world enough to be surprised at nothing. He would judge these people as he judged everyone else - face to face, on their deeds and not on their words. If there was anything extraordinary about these exiles, they would have to prove it to the captain of the Mayflower.

  While Christopher Jones was hiring his crew and overhauling his ship for the long voyage, his prospective passengers were equally busy in Holland. But while Jones proceeded with the practiced calm of the experienced professional, his passengers made their preparations for the journey with uneasy, mournful hearts. Many were by no means certain that they should exchange the peace and prosperity of Holland for the dubious prospects of an unmapped wilderness.

  They had spent eleven years in Leyden, bustling center of Holland’s world famed cloth industry. Life had not been easy for them. Country people, used to living off the land, they had had to toil as weavers and spinners in the city’s cloth factories. Others became serge workers, twine makers, hatters, goldsmiths. The hours were long and the pay modest, but the majority managed to make an acceptable living, and a few of the more gifted and industrious, such as thirty-year-old William Bradford, became almost comfortable.

  Like many other members of the little church, Bradford had begun his adult life in Leyden. In 1613 he had married Dorothy May, the daughter of a prominent, well-to-do English family from Amsterdam, bought his own home, and become a citizen. All this took sacrifice. Six days a week Bradford worked twelve and fourteen hours weaving fustian, an expensive twilled cloth made from cotton and linen. He had little time to give to his only son John. His young wife, only sixteen when they married, was lonely for her friends and family in Amsterdam, and doted on the five-year-old boy to the point where he was in danger of being badly spoiled.

  William Bradford was used to sacrifices. He had begun making them early in his life. Orphaned in boyhood, he had spent a sickly, unhappy childhood among complaining relatives. While still in his early teens, he had walked from his native Austerfield across the fields to Scrooby and met William Brewster, bailiff of the manor and keeper of the King’s Post on the Great North Road. At that time Brewster, in his mid-forties, was a man of local wealth and importance. In his youth he had studied at Cambridge and served as trusted assistant to Queen Elizabeth’s secretary of state. He had returned to his native countryside when his adventures in the world of kings and courtiers were abruptly ended by his patron’s fall from royal favor.

  Between the genial man of the world and the lonely uncertain country youth, there had flamed something unique: a recognition of spiritual kinship that was to endure until death. Brewster gave Bradford books to read, and talked freely to him about his religious beliefs. Already he had gathered around him a small group of thoughtful men and women who felt the need of a purer, more personal religion.

  Soon, to the horror of his relatives, William Bradford was attending the secret meetings of the little “church” at Scrooby Manor. Bradford’s father had been a yeoman - among the principal landholders of Austerfield. But for Bradford, the bailiff of Scrooby Manor was father, teacher, and priest, and when the spies and informers of the local bishop began hounding those who met at Scrooby, Bradford sold his lands and followed Brewster into exile.

  William Bradford never uttered a word of regret for this decision. From his early teens, he was a man who knew his own mind with remarkable sureness. In Leyden, he says, they found “peace and spiritual comfort,” which they valued “above any other riches.” No spies or informers molested them. They worshipped each Sunday in the spacious house that William Brewster had bought for their pastor in Bell Alley, not far from the vast fourteenth-century basilica of St. Peter.

  They modeled their church and their lives on the example of the first Christians. Robert Cushman and John Carver were deacons. William Brewster was the ruling elder. All were united under the solemn vow or “covenant” which bound them to share their love and prayers and, if necessary, their money and property. Edward Winslow, a young printer from Droitwich, England, who joined the church not long after it was formed, later said: “I persuade myself never people on earth lived more lovingly together . . . than we the Church at Leyden did.”

  Thanks largely to Brewster, they had found an extraordinary pastor. John Robinson was a Cambridge graduate who had been ordained a priest of the Church of England. But like many other men, he had gradually become convinced from studying the Bible that for him, at least, this was not the right path to genuine religion. He came to this decision with regret. Instead of castigating bishops and canons, the way many other reformers did, Robinson wrote: “I esteem so many in that Church, . . . for my Christian brethren, and myself a fellow member with them of that one mystical body of Christ scattered far and wide throughout the world that I have always, in spirit and affection, all Christian fellowship and communion with them.” In contrast to the quarrels that tore several of the reformed churches in Amsterdam and made them the laughingstock of England, the Church of Leyden was a model of peace and harmony under Robinson’s gentle guidance.

  Why were they leaving such a pastor and this beautiful city, famous for its lovely waterways, sunlit squares, and scrupulously neat streets? There were many reasons. New war was looming between Holland and Spain. In 1574, during the first war of liberation, Leyden had withstood a savage siege in which half its 100,000 citizens had died of starvation or disease. The Dutch, eager to have England as an ally, might be forced to placate King James and suppress this refugee church whose ruling elder had published a seditious book. The long arm of the English king had already been demonstrated when his ambassador sent Dutch bailiffs searching through Leyden for William Brewster.

  There was also the exile’s yearning to stand upon a piece of soil and say: “This is mine.” The leaders of the church had been men of property in England. But land was not by any means their overriding motive. Far more important was their concern for the future of their children.

  “Many . . . that were of best dispositions and gracious inclinations,” William Bradford says, “having learned to bear the yoke in their youth and willing to bear part of their parents’ burden, were oftentimes so oppressed with their heavy labours that though their minds were free and willing, yet their bodies bowed under the weight of the same, and became decrepit in their early youth, the vigour of nature being consumed in the bud as it were.” Many other young people refused to bear the burden. They threw the “reins from their necks” and, departing from their parents, “some became soldiers, others took upon them far voyages by sea, and others some worse courses.”

  It was inevitable that some of the younger exiles would be attracted by the high-spirited traditions of Holland. The Dutch youth of 1620 were extremely emancipated. One English visitor noted: “The women of these parts give great liberty to their daughters. Sometimes by chance they slide on the ice till the gates of the city be locked, and the young men feast them at Inns in the suburbs all the night, or till they please to take rest. . . . Sometimes the young men and virgins agree
. . . to be drawn with horses upon sledges to cities 10-20 or more miles distant and there feast all night, and this they do without all suspicion of unchastity, the hostesses being careful to lodge and oversee the women.”

  The exiles could visualize their children disappearing into this wealthy, easy-living society, forgetting that they were English, much less people with a special call from God. “They saw,” Bradford says, “their posterity would be in danger to degenerate and be corrupted.” So, as early as 1617, they had begun to debate the wisdom of finding another refuge. Three years of hesitation and negotiation, of pondering such books as Sir Walter Raleigh’s Discoverie of Guiana, had followed. Raleigh had praised Guiana as a region of perpetual spring, virgin soil, and abundant gold mines. But the proximity of the Spaniards discouraged the Leyden exiles. Fifty years before, French Protestants had tried to settle in Florida. Some four hundred were slaughtered by Spanish raiders, for the simple crime of trespassing on dominions that the Pope had given to the king of Spain.

  The northern coasts of America seemed more promising. But here, too, there were problems. Everyone by now knew the shocking mortality that had all but destroyed the settlement at Jamestown. Nine out of every ten settlers had died within a year. Of the twelve hundred who had gone out in 1619, a thousand had died by 1620. Prophets of doom in the congregation predicted that the same thing would happen to them.

  “The length of the voyage was such as the weak bodies of women and other persons worn out with age and travail (as many of them were) could never be able to endure,” is how William Bradford recalls their warnings. If they survived the voyage, there were the “miseries of the land” - famine, nakedness, the change of diet and air to “infect their bodies with sore sicknesses and grievous diseases.”