Mayflower (10 page)

Around midnight, the silence was broken by “a great hideous cry.” The sentinels shouted out, “Arm! Arm!” Several muskets were fired, and all was silent once again. One of the sailors said he’d heard wolves make a similar noise in Newfoundland. This seemed to comfort them, and they went back to sleep.

About 5
A.M.
they began to rouse themselves. Most of them were armed with matchlocks—muskets equipped with long burning wicks that were used to ignite the gun’s priming powder. They were not the most reliable of weapons, particularly in the wet and cold, since it was difficult to keep the powder dry. Several men decided to fire off their guns, just to make sure they were still in operating order.

After prayer, they began to prepare themselves for breakfast and the long journey ahead. In the predawn twilight, some of the men carried their weapons and armor down to the shallop. Laying them beside the boat, they returned to the camp for breakfast. It was then they heard another “great and strange cry.”

One of the men burst out of the trees and came running for the barricade, screaming, “They are men—Indians, Indians!” Suddenly the air was filled with arrows. Every man reached for his gun. Instead of a matchlock, Miles Standish possessed a snaplock, a predecessor to the flintlock, and immediately fired off a round. The others dipped their matches into the embers of the fire, and with their matches lit, began to blast away. Standish ordered them “not to shoot, till we could take aim.” He didn’t know how many Indians were out there in the woods, and they might need every shot.

In the meantime, those who had left their muskets beside the shallop sprinted back to retrieve them. The Indians soon had them trapped behind the boat. Standish and those guarding the entrance to the barricade called out to make sure they were unhurt. “Well, well, everyone,” they shouted. “Be of good courage!” Three of them at the boat fired their muskets, but the others were without a way to light their matches and cried out for a firebrand. One of the men in the barricade picked up a burning log from the fire and ran with it to the shallop, an act of bravery that, according to Bradford, “did not a little discourage our enemies.” For their part, the Indians’ war cries were a particularly potent psychological weapon that the Pilgrims would never forget, later transcribing them as “Woath! Woach! Ha! Ha! Hach! Woach!”

They estimated that there were at least thirty Indians, “although some thought that they were many more yet in the dark of the morning.” Backlit by the fire, the Pilgrims standing at the entrance of the barricade were easy targets, and the arrows came thick and fast. As the French explorer Samuel Champlain had discovered fourteen years earlier on the south coast of Cape Cod, the Indians’ bows and arrows were fearsome weapons. Made from a five-and-a-half-foot piece of solid hickory, maple, ash, or witch hazel and strung with a three-stranded length of sinew, a Native bow was so powerful that one of Champlain’s men was skewered by an arrow that had already passed through his dog—making, in effect, a gruesome shish kebab of the French sailor and his pet. The feathered arrows were over a yard long, and each warrior kept as many as fifty of them in a quiver made from dried rushes. With his quiver slung over his left shoulder and with the hair on the right side of his head cut short so as not to interfere with the bowstring, a Native warrior was capable of firing arrows much faster than a musket-equipped Englishman could fire bullets. Indeed, it was possible for a skilled bowman to have as many as five arrows in the air at once, and the Pilgrims were forced to take shelter as best they could.

There was one Indian in particular, “a lusty man and no whit less valiant, who was thought to be their captain.” He stood behind a tree within “half a musket shot” of the barricade, peppering them with arrows as the Pilgrims did their best to blast him to bits. The Native leader dodged three different gunshots but, seeing one of the Englishman taking “full aim at him,” wisely decided to retreat. As fragments of bark and wood flew around him, he let out “an extraordinary shriek” and disappeared with his men into the woods.

Some of the Pilgrims, led no doubt by Standish, followed for about a quarter of a mile, then stopped to shoot off their muskets. “This we did,” Bradford wrote, “that they might see we were not afraid of them nor discouraged.” The clothes they had left hanging on the barricade were riddled with arrows, but none of the men had suffered even a scratch. Before they departed in the shallop, they collected a total of eighteen arrows, “some…headed with brass, others with harts’ horn, and others with eagles’ claws,” for eventual shipment back to England. “Thus it pleased God,” Bradford wrote, “to vanquish our enemies and give us deliverance.”

The approximate site of this exchange is still known as First Encounter Beach in Eastham. It could hardly be considered a victory. The Pilgrims knew they could not blast, fight, and kill their way to a permanent settlement in New England. But after the First Encounter, it was clear that goodwill was going to be difficult to find here on Cape Cod.

It was on to Thievish Harbor.

With the wind out of the southeast, they sailed along the southern edge of Cape Cod Bay. Then the weather began to deteriorate. The wind picked up, and with the temperature hovering around freezing, horizontal sleet combined with the salt spray to drench them to the bone. The rough seas made it difficult to steer this wide and heavy boat, and even though the carpenter had labored mightily in preparing the shallop, her rudder did not prove equal to the strain. They were somewhere off the whitish rise of Manomet Bluff when a wave wrenched the rudder off the transom, and the boat rounded up into the wind in a fury of luffing sails and blowing spray. It took two men standing in the stern, each clutching a long oak oar, to bring the shallop back around and start sailing, once again, along the coast.

The wind continued to build, and as night came on the boat became unmanageable in the waves. All seemed lost, when the pilot Robert Coppin cried out, “Be of good cheer, I see the harbor!” By now it was blowing a gale, and in the freezing rain, the visibility was terrible. But Coppin saw something—perhaps an inviting darkness between two wave-whitened shoals—that convinced him they were about to enter Thievish Harbor.

They were running before the wind, with their full mainsail set, bashing through the building seas, when their mast splintered into three pieces. Once they’d gathered up the broken mast and sodden sail and stowed them away, they took up the oars and started to row. The tide, at least, was with them.

But it quickly became evident that what they had taken to be their salvation was about to be their ruin. Instead of the entrance to a harbor, they were steering for a wave-pummeled beach. Coppin cried out, “Lord be merciful unto us, for my eyes never saw this place before!”

Just when all seemed lost, the sailor at the steering oar exhorted them to use their oars to round the boat up to windward, and with the waves bursting against the shallop’s side, they attempted to row their way out of danger. “So he bid them be of good cheer,” Bradford wrote, “and row lustily, for there was a fair sound before them, and he doubted not but they should find one place or other where they might ride in safety.”

The shallop had nearly run into a shallow cove at the end of a thin, sandy peninsula called the Gurnet. The Gurnet terminates with a jog to the southwest known as Saquish Head. It was the beach between the Gurnet and Saquish Head that had almost claimed the Pilgrims. Once they rowed the shallop around the tip of Saquish, they found themselves in the lee of what they later discovered was an island.

In the deepening darkness of the windy night, they discussed what they should do next. Some insisted that they remain aboard the shallop in case of Indian attack. But most of them were more fearful of freezing to death, so they went ashore and built a large fire. When at midnight the wind shifted to the northwest and the temperature dropped till “it froze hard,” all were glad that they had decided to come ashore.

The next day, a Saturday, proved to be “a fair, sunshining day.” They now realized that they were on a heavily wooded island and, for the time being, safe from Indian attack. John Clark, one of the
Mayflower
’s pilots, had been the first to set foot on the island, and from that day forward it was known as Clark’s Island.

They were on the western edge of a large, wonderfully sheltered bay that might prove to be exactly the anchorage they needed. Even though they had “so many motives for haste,” they decided to spend the day on the island, “where they might dry their stuff, fix their pieces, and rest themselves.” The shallop needed a mast, and they undoubtedly cut down as straight and sturdy a tree as they could find and fashioned it into a new spar. The following day was a Sunday, and as Bradford recorded, “on the Sabbath day we rested.”

They spent Monday exploring what was to become their new home. They sounded the harbor and found it suitable for ships the size of the
Mayflower.
They ventured on land, but nowhere in either
Of Plymouth Plantation
or
Mourt’s Relation,
the book Bradford and Winslow wrote after their first year in America, is there any mention of a Pilgrim stepping on a rock. Like Cape Cod to the southeast, the shore of Plymouth Bay is nondescript and sandy. But at the foot of a high hill, just to the north of a brook, was a rock that must have been impossible to miss. More than twice as big as the mangled chunk of stone that is revered today as Plymouth Rock, this two-hundred-ton granite boulder loomed above the low shoreline like a recumbent elephant. But did the Pilgrims use it as a landing place?

At half tide and above, a small boat could have sailed right up alongside the rock. For these explorers, who were suffering from chills and coughs after several weeks of wading up and down the frigid flats of Cape Cod, the ease of access offered by the rock must have been difficult to resist. But if they did use it as their first stepping-stone onto the banks of Plymouth Harbor, Bradford never made note of the historic event. That would be left to subsequent generations of mythmakers.

They marched across the shores of Plymouth “and found divers cornfields and little running brooks, a place (as they supposed) fit for situation.” Best of all, despite the signs of cultivation, they found no evidence of any recent Indian settlements. The next day they boarded the shallop and sailed for the
Mayflower
with the good news.

It had been a long month of exploration. Later, when looking back on their trek across the wastes of Cape Cod, Bradford could not help but see their wintry walkabout in biblical terms. New World Israelites, they had, with God’s help, finally found their Canaan. But back then, in the late afternoon of Tuesday, December 12, as the shallop approached the
Mayflower,
Bradford and his compatriots had little reason to believe they had found the Promised Land.

Plymouth Harbor was commodious, but much of it was so shallow that a ship the size of the
Mayflower,
which drew twelve feet, must anchor more than a mile from shore. The harbor was also without a navigable river to provide access to the country’s interior. It was true that there were no Native settlements nearby, but that didn’t mean they would be immune to attack. The Indians in the region had already surprised them once; it would probably happen again. Worst of all, they were approaching what Bradford called “the heart of winter,” and many of them were sick; indeed, some were on the verge of death.

And then that evening, Bradford received what would have been, for many men, the final blow. He learned that five days before, Dorothy May Bradford, his wife of seven years and the mother of his three-year-old son, John, had slipped over the side of the
Mayflower
and drowned.

Bradford never wrote about the circumstances of his wife’s death. Much later in the century, the Puritan historian Cotton Mather recorded that Dorothy Bradford had accidentally fallen overboard and “was drowned in the harbor.” That she fell from a moored ship has caused some to wonder whether she committed suicide.

Dorothy certainly had ample reason to despair: She had not seen her son in more than four months; her husband had left the day before on his third dangerous trip away from her in as many weeks. On the same day the shallop had departed, seven-year-old Jasper More, one of the four children placed on the
Mayflower
by their cuckolded father, died in the care of the Brewster family. Two other More children would die in the months ahead. For Dorothy, whose own young son was on the other side of the Atlantic, the plight of these and the other children may have been especially difficult to witness.

We think of the Pilgrims as resilient adventurers upheld by unwavering religious faith, but they were also human beings in the midst of what was, and continues to be, one of the most difficult emotional challenges a person can face: immigration and exile. Less than a year later, another group of English settlers arrived at Provincetown Harbor and were so overwhelmed by this “naked and barren place” that they convinced themselves that the Pilgrims must all be dead. In fear of being forsaken by the ship’s captain, the panicked settlers began to strip the sails from the yards “lest the ship should get away and leave them.” If Dorothy experienced just a portion of the terror and sense of abandonment that gripped these settlers, she may have felt that suicide was her only choice.

Even if his wife’s death had been unintentional, Bradford believed that God controlled what happened on earth. As a consequence, every occurrence
meant
something. John Howland had been rescued in the midst of a gale at sea, but Dorothy, his “dearest consort,” had drowned in the placid waters of Provincetown Harbor.

The only clue Bradford left us about his own feelings is in a poem he wrote toward the end of his life.