Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War

by Nathaniel Philbrick

The original plan had been to relocate the entire congregation to the New World. Now there were just 50 or so of them—less than a sixth of their total number, and only about half of

the Mayflower ’s 102 passengers.

In the fall of 1620, the Mayflower ’s ability to steady herself in a gale produced a most deceptive tranquillity for a young indentured servant named John Howland. As the Mayflower lay ahull, Howland apparently grew restless down below. He saw no reason why he could not venture out of the fetid depths of the ’tween decks for just a moment. After more than a month as a passenger ship, the Mayflower was no longer a sweet ship, and Howland wanted some air. So he climbed a ladder to one of the hatches and stepped onto the deck. Howland was from the inland town of Fenstanton, Huntingdon-shire, and he quickly discovered that the deck of a tempest-tossed ship was no place for a landsman. Even if the ship had found her own still point, the gale continued to rage with astonishing violence around her. The shriek of the wind through the rope rigging was terrifying, as was the sight of all those towering, spume-flecked waves. The Mayflower lurched suddenly to leeward. Howland staggered to the ship’s rail and tumbled into the sea. That should have been the end of him. But dangling over the side and trailing behind the ship was the topsail halyard, the rope used to raise and lower the upper sail. Howland was in his midtwenties and strong, and when his hand found the halyard, he gripped the rope with such feral desperation that even though he was pulled down more than ten feet below the ocean’s surface, he never let go. Several sailors took up the halyard and hauled Howland back in, fina...

It is deeply ironic that the document many consider to mark the beginning of what would one day be called the United States came from a people who had more in common with a cult than a democratic society.

For generations to come, Monday would be wash day in New England, a tradition that began with the women of the Mayflower.

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.

Carver’s one surviving male servant, John Howland, was left without a master; in addition to becoming a free man, Howland may have inherited at least a portion of Carver’s estate. The humble servant who had been pulled from the watery abyss a few short months ago was on his way to becoming one of Plymouth’s foremost citizens.

In accordance with “the laudable custom of the Low Countries,” Edward and Susanna were married in a civil ceremony. Bradford, who presided over the union, explained that “nowhere…in the Gospel” did it say a minister should be involved in a wedding. In the decades to come, marriages in Plymouth continued to be secular affairs, one of the few vestiges of their time in Holland to persist in New England.

Thomas Weston,

Among the Massachusetts, the Pilgrims had earned a new name: wotawquenange—cutthroats.

“Oh, how happy a thing had it been,” he wrote, “if you had converted some before you had killed any!

eighty-foot-high maypole—a

Elizabeth Warren’s

After being taken by Standish and his men, who “fell upon him as if they would have eaten him,” Morton began to question who were now the true savages in this land.

In April, Bradford had decided that each household should be assigned its own plot to cultivate, with the understanding that each family kept whatever it grew. The change in attitude was stunning. Families were now willing to work much harder than they had ever worked before.

Castine was

Plymouth had become a backwater.

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.

Now, with the arrival of the Puritans in Massachusetts-Bay, it was up to others to become the spiritual arbiters of New England.

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 ...

But as became increasingly clear, the sheer size of what is now known as the Great Migration meant that Plymouth had no choice but to be shunted aside as it watched dozens of Puritan settlements spring up to the north and south. It was only a matter of time before

Instead of attacking the English, he attacked Uncas and the Mohegans.

Many settlers returned to England to join in Parliament’s efforts to overthrow King Charles’s repressive regime.

From the start, the second generation suffered under the assumption that, as their ministers never tired of reminding them, they were “the degenerate plant of a strange vine.”

Instead of the afterlife, it was the material rewards of this life that increasingly became the focus of the Pilgrims’ children and grandchildren.

The Pilgrims’ decision to remain at their shallow anchorage doomed Plymouth to becoming the poorest of the New England colonies.

Now that their daily lives no longer involved an arduous and terrifying struggle for survival, they had begun to take the Indians for granted.

In what is the great and terrible irony of the coming conflict—King Philip’s War—by choosing to pursue economic prosperity at the expense of the Indians, the English put at risk everything their mothers and fathers had striven so heroically to create.

John Eliot

Philip, it appears, had launched into a calculated strategy of selling land for weapons.

That he was about to sell almost every parcel of land he owned was, in the end, irrelevant, since it was all to fund a war to win those lands back.

But by July 1675, the hysteria of war had taken hold of New England. Shocked by the atrocities at Swansea, most English inhabitants had begun to view all Indians with racist contempt and fear. As a result, many Indians who would gladly have remained at peace were given no choice but to go to war.

Unaware of the Indians’ use of concealment as a tactical weapon, Beers led his men into an ambush

Only one person was killed—a man who believed that as long as he continued to read the Bible, no harm would come to him. Refusing to abandon his home, he was found shot to death in his chair—the Bible still in his hands.

In 2002 it was estimated that there were approximately 35 million descendants of the Mayflower passengers in the United States, which represents roughly 10 percent of the total U.S. population.