Mayflower (5 page)

The
Mayflower
’s commanding officer, known as the master, was Christopher Jones. About fifty years old, he was also a part owner of the ship. Records indicate that Jones had been master of the
Mayflower
for the last eleven years, sailing back and forth across the Channel with English woolens to France and returning to London with French wine. Wine ships such as the
Mayflower
were known as “sweet ships,” since the inevitable spillage of the acidic wine helped to temper the stench of the bilge. In addition to wine and wool, Jones had transported hats, hemp, Spanish salt, hops, and vinegar to Norway and may even have taken the
Mayflower
on a whaling voyage to Greenland. He and his wife, Josian, had had five children, and although he had no way of knowing it at the time, Josian was pregnant with another son, who would be born at their home in Rotherhithe, just down the Thames from London, the following March.

Serving as Jones’s mate and pilot was Robert Coppin, who, unlike Jones, had been to America before. Also serving as pilot was John Clark, forty-five, who’d delivered some cattle to Jamestown the previous year. Giles Heale was the ship’s surgeon. In the days ahead, as sickness spread through the passengers and crew, he would become one of the most sought-after officers of the
Mayflower.
Another important position was that of the cooper, who was in charge of maintaining all barreled supplies and provisions. In Southampton, Jones secured the twenty-one-year-old cooper John Alden, who because of his youth and skills was already being encouraged by the Pilgrims to remain in America at the completion of the crossing. In addition, there were somewhere between twenty and thirty sailors, whose names have not survived.

In Southampton, the Leideners met up with the family and friends who had first boarded the
Mayflower
in London and would be continuing on with them to America. Most shared their religious beliefs and several of them were actual members of the Leiden congregation. The most notable of the group was Elder William Brewster, who had been hiding out in Holland and perhaps even England for the last year. The return of Brewster, the highest-ranking layperson of the congregation and their designated spiritual leader in the New World, must have been as emotionally charged as their departure from Leiden.

Also joining them in Southampton were Robert Cushman and John Carver, who was traveling with his wife, Katherine, and five servants. Although not a member of the congregation, Captain Miles Standish was well known to the Leideners. Standish, who was accompanied by his wife, Rose, and may or may not have come over on the
Speedwell,
had served as an English mercenary in Holland and would be handling the colony’s military matters in America.

It was in Southampton that they met the so-called Strangers—passengers recruited by the Adventurers to take the places of those who had chosen to remain in Holland. Besides the domineering Christopher Martin, who had been designated the “governor” of the
Mayflower
by the Adventurers and was traveling with his wife and two servants, there were four additional families. Stephen Hopkins was making his second trip to America. Eleven years earlier in 1609 he had sailed on the
Sea Venture
for Virginia, only to become shipwrecked in Bermudaan incident that became the basis for Shakespeare’s
The Tempest.
While on Bermuda, Hopkins had been part of an attempted mutiny and been sentenced to hang, but pleading tearfully for his life, he was, at the last minute, given a reprieve. Hopkins spent two years in Jamestown before returning to England and was now accompanied by his pregnant wife, Elizabeth; his son, Giles; and daughters Constance and Damaris, along with two servants, Edward Doty and Edward Leister.

In addition to the Mullinses, Eatons, and Billingtons (whom Bradford later called “one of the profanest families amongst them” ), there were four children from Shipton, Shropshire. Ellen, Jasper, Richard, and Mary More were the products of an adulterous relationship between their mother, Catherine More, and her longtime lover, Jacob Blakeway. When Catherine’s husband, Samuel More, an aristocrat who spent most of his time in London, belatedly realized that his children were not his own (their resemblance to Blakeway, he insisted in court, was unmistakable), he divorced his wife and took custody of the children. More determined that it would be best for the children to begin a new life in America. They were sent to London and placed under the care of Weston, Cushman, and Carver, who assigned Ellen, eight, to Edward and Elizabeth Winslow; Jasper, seven, to the Carvers; and both Richard, five, and Mary, four, to William and Mary Brewster, who were accompanied by their evocatively named sons Love and Wrestling.

In the meantime, matters were coming to a head between the Leideners and Thomas Weston. Cushman had signed the revised agreement with the merchants in London, but the Leideners refused to honor it. Weston stalked off in a huff, insisting that “they must then look to stand on their own legs.” As Cushman knew better than anyone, this was not in their best interests. They didn’t have enough provisions to feed them all for a year, and yet they still owed many of their suppliers money. Without Weston to provide them with the necessary funds, they were forced to sell off some of their precious foodstuffs, including more than two tons of butter, before they could sail from Southampton.

Adding to the turmoil and confusion was the behavior of Christopher Martin. The
Mayflower
’s governor was, according to Cushman, a monster. “[H]e insulteth over our poor people, with such scorn and contempt,” Cushman wrote, “as if they were not good enough to wipe his shoes…. If I speak to him, he flies in my face as mutinous, and saith no complaints shall be heard or received but by himself.” In a letter hastily written to a friend in London, Cushman saw only doom and disaster ahead. “Friend, if ever we make a plantation God works a miracle, especially considering how scant we shall be of victuals, and most of all un-united amongst ourselves and devoid of good tutors and regiment. Violence will break all. Where is the meek and humble spirit of Moses?”

When it finally came time to leave Southampton, Cushman made sure he was with his friends aboard the
Speedwell.
He was now free of Martin but soon found that the
Speedwell
was anything but speedy. “[S]he is as open and leaky as a sieve,” he wrote. As they watched the water spout through the gaps in the planking, he and his compatriots from Leiden were reminded of the earthen dikes in Holland, claiming that “the water came in as at a mole hole.” Several days after clearing the Isle of Wight off England’s southern coast, it was decided they must put in for repairs, and both vessels sailed for Dartmouth, a port only seventy-five miles to the west of Southampton.

It was now August 17. The repairs were quickly completed, but this time the wind refused to cooperate. They were stuck in Dartmouth, a rock-rimmed harbor surrounded by high, sheltering hills, waiting for a fair breeze. People were beginning to panic—and with good reason. “Our victuals will be half eaten up, I think, before we go from the coast of England,” Cushman wrote. Many of the passengers decided it was time to abandon the voyage. Even though they’d lose everything they had so far invested, which for some of them amounted to everything they possessed, they wanted out. But Martin refused to let them off the
Mayflower.
“[H]e will not hear them, nor suffer them to go ashore,” Cushman wrote from Dartmouth, “lest they should run away.”

The months of unremitting tension had caught up with Cushman. For the last two weeks he had felt a searing pain in his chest—“a bundle of lead as it were, crushing my heart.” He was sure this would be his last good-bye: “[A]lthough I do the actions of a living man yet I am but as dead…. I pray you prepare for evil tidings of us every day…. I see not in reason how we shall escape even the passing of hunger-starved persons; but God can do much, and His will be done.”

They departed from Dartmouth and were more than two hundred miles beyond the southwestern tip of England at Land’s End when the
Speedwell
sprang another leak. It was now early September, and they had no choice but to give up on the
Speedwell.
It was a devastating turn of events. Not only had the vessel cost them a considerable amount of money, but she had been considered vital to the future success of the settlement.

They put in at Plymouth, about fifty miles to the west of Dartmouth. If they were to continue, they must crowd as many passengers as would fit into the
Mayflower
and sail on alone. To no one’s surprise, Cushman elected to give up his place to someone else. And despite his fear of imminent death, he lived another five years.

It was later learned that the
Speedwell
’s master, Mr. Reynolds, had been secretly working against them. In Holland, the vessel had been fitted with new and larger masts—a fatal mistake that was probably done with Reynolds’s approval, if not at his suggestion. As any mariner knew, a mast crowded with sail not only moved a ship through the water, it acted as a lever that applied torque to the hull. When a ship’s masts were too tall, the excess strain opened up the seams between the planks, causing the hull to leak. By overmasting the
Speedwell,
Reynolds had provided himself with an easy way to deceive this fanatical group of landlubbers. He might shrug his shoulders and scratch his head when the vessel began to take on water, but all he had to do was reduce sail and the
Speedwell
would cease to leak. Soon after the
Mayflower
set out across the Atlantic, the
Speedwell
was sold, refitted, and, according to Bradford, “made many voyages…to the great profit of her owners.”

Bradford later assumed that Reynolds’s “cunning and deceit” had been motivated by a fear of starving to death in America. But the Pilgrims appear to have been the unknowing victims of a far more complex and sinister plot. Several decades later, Bradford’s stepson Nathaniel Morton received information from Manhattan that indicated that the Dutch had worked to prevent the Pilgrims from settling in the Hudson River region “by [creating] delays, while they were in England.” Morton claimed it was the
Mayflower
’s master, Christopher Jones, who was responsible for the deception, but there is no evidence that Jones was anything but a loyal and steadfast friend to the Pilgrims. It was Reynolds, not Jones, who had kept them from sailing.

In early September, westerly gales begin to howl across the North Atlantic. The provisions, already low when they first set out from Southampton, had been eroded even further by more than a month of delays. The passengers, cooped up aboard ship for all this time, were in no shape for an extended passage. Jones was within his rights to declare that it was too late to depart on a voyage across the Atlantic.

But on September 6, 1620, the
Mayflower
set out from Plymouth with what Bradford called “a prosperous wind.”

Robert Cushman had not been the only Leidener to abandon the voyage. His friend William Ring had also opted to remain in England, as had Thomas Blossom. By the time the
Mayflower
left Plymouth, the group from Leiden had been reduced by more than a quarter. 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.

John Robinson had no way of knowing their numbers would be so dramatically depleted by the time they left England for the last time, but the Pilgrims’ minister had anticipated many of the difficulties that lay ahead. His selfless yet strong-willed insistence on probity would be dearly missed by the Pilgrims in the months ahead. At least for now, they had the wisdom of his words.

In a letter written on the eve of their departure from Holland, he urged his followers to do everything they could to avoid conflict with their new compatriots. Even if men such as Christopher Martin pushed them to the edge of their forbearance, they must quell any impulse to judge and condemn others. Robinson exhorted them to “[s]tore up…patience against that evil day, without which we take offense at the Lord Himself in His holy and just works.” For the future welfare of the settlement, it was essential that all the colonists—Leideners and Strangers alike—learn to live together as best they could.

This nonjudgmental attitude did not come naturally to the Leideners. As Separatists, they considered themselves godly exceptions to the vast, unredeemed majority of humankind. A sense of exclusivity was fundamental to how they perceived themselves in the world. And yet there is evidence that Robinson’s sense of his congregation as an autonomous enclave of righteousness had become considerably less rigid during his twelve years in Holland. By the time the Pilgrims departed for America, he had begun to allow members of his congregation to attend services outside their own church. Robinson’s fierce quest for spiritual purity had been tempered by the realization that little was to be gained by arrogance and anger. “[F]or schism and division,” Edward Winslow later wrote of Robinson, “there was nothing in the world more hateful to him.” This softening of what had once been an inflexible Separatism was essential to the later success of Plymouth Plantation.

In this regard, the loss of the
Speedwell
had been a good thing. Prior to their departure from Plymouth, the Leideners had naturally gravitated to their own vessel. But now, like it or not, they were all in the same boat.

When he later wrote about the voyage of the
Mayflower,
Bradford devoted only a few paragraphs to describing a passage that lasted more than two months. The physical and psychological punishment endured by the passengers in the dark and dripping ’tween decks was compounded by the terrifying lack of information they possessed concerning their ultimate destination. All they knew for certain was that if they did somehow succeed in crossing this three-thousand-mile stretch of ocean, no one—except perhaps for some hostile Indians—would be there to greet them.