Then came the Pilgrims, about a hundred strong. English religious Separatists and their servants, these “Pilgrims” (the word did not actually come into use until after the American Revolution) deplored Stuart absolutism, decried the “idolatrous” religious conventions of the Church of England, and refused to comply with the rules of conformity dictated by the Church of England. Some had escaped to Holland for a time but now wanted to leave because they saw their children rapidly assuming Dutch ways. As a last resort, they had struck a bargain with some English merchants: in trade for passage to America and regular supplies, these pious shopkeepers would establish a plantation in the New World and repay their debts with fish and beaver pelts.
They made landfall off the sand cliffs of Cape Cod in mid-November 1620. Looking on these heights, then “wooded to the brink of the sea,” and not stripped of their thin topsoil as today, they must have ached to stand upon the firm soil after weeks at sea.
Their agreement with the merchant adventurers, however, called for settlement farther south, near the Hudson River, so they set sail in that direction until thwarted by the submerged bars of Nantucket Shoals.
Returning north, they rounded the Cape’s tip, taking shelter off present-day Provincetown, then called “Milford Haven” on John Smith’s map.
The voyagers could not have dropped anchor off a more inhospitable region of the New England coast. Wide shallows forced those going ashore to wade through icy waters for some distance. The wild and fantastic dunes of the Cape’s tip offered neither edibles, water, nor game. Parties scouting south found little save a European fisherman’s grave and some stored Indian corn. No promising settlement sites were to be found, “and every day we saw whales playing hard by us, of which in that place, if we had instruments and means to take them, we might have made a rich return, which to our great grief we wanted.” Demoralized, and beset with racking coughs, the Pilgrims decided to forgo moving farther north (to what would become Ipswich), where fishermen had reported seeing miles and miles of land cleared by the Indians. Instead, they followed the Mayflower captain’s command to head west across the bay, where a few modest hills broke the monotonous horizon marking the location of a shallow harbor, named “Plymouth” on John Smith’s map.
Here they settled, and (as the Mayflower wintered in deeper waters over a mile offshore) constructed rude huts, “as full of beds as they could lie by one another. Disease soon claimed half the hundred-odd passengers, enfeebled from malnutrition and depression, sometimes at a rate of two or three a day. Of the survivors, only a half dozen had the strength to bury the victims by night in graves that they camouflaged, lest the Indians realize their helpless condition.
In time, friendly contacts with the Indians gave the Pilgrims the skills to live in a manner which was to become basic to all colonial New England shore dwellers.
Went a song reputedly written by a Pilgrim in those first lean years. Though the Pilgrims never had any success with their attempts at fishing their hooks being the wrong size, their nets shoddy, their fishing craft having sunk in a storm-the colony did gather much bounty from the sea. They raked the clam flats at low tide and gathered thatch for roofs from the salt marsh; salt hay fed their cattle and sheep, and herring running up the small streams to spawn provided fertilizer for their crops.
This ability to fall back on the resources of the shoreline allowed the Pilgrims time to spend making and gathering supplies for the repayment of their original debt (assumed by a number of colonists in 1626 in trade for tax rights and monopolies on certain exports). They offered payment in furs (obtained from the Indians in exchange for Pilgrimraised corn), clapboards hewn for a relatively unforested England, and that contemporary wonder drug, sassafras.
Life at Plymouth in those early years must have been a most sad endurance. Frivolity was not a part of the separatists’ ethic, and those who tried to liven the dull existence of sun-bleached board, blowing sand, and wood smoke with innocent revels, as did some youths attempting to play ball on a Christmas Day, were quickly rebuked. The little village itself, a huddle of mud-brush-timber dwellings, set on a slope overlooking the sea, must have felt more attachment to the ocean across which its inhabitants once came than to the vast and empty chaos of a continent just over the crest of the hill behind it. At tideline could be found good sustenance and materials for shelter. As the little band went about their daily tasks, they must have gazed longingly across Cape Cod Bay, usually a calm protected flat water, with ever the hope that a sail might suddenly whiten the far blue, bringing news and small luxuries from their old homeland.
Over the next decade, more colonists arrived, some to swell the little colony of Plymouth, still clustered around a single stockaded street; others to move north, toward the fabled richness of Massachusetts Bay. Historians today estimate that by 1630, about 300 Europeans lived along the Massachusetts shore (most by Plymouth), and another 900 could be found along the coasts of what are today New Hampshire and Maine. 5
The majority of these 900 colonists were not Separatists. Many were adventurers, ready to trade with the Indians for whatever they wanted, including guns, shot, and powder; still others were men of business, overseeing the work of their hired laborers fishermen, woodchoppers, and traders. Still more were Anglican gentry, hoping to stem a feared Puritan control of New England. The Anglicans first tried to settle near present-day Weymouth, south of Boston,
in 1623, but soon dispersed to set up individual homes among the islands and peninsulas of Boston Harbor. We know little about their style of living, although it is set down that a number lived in homes stockaded like Indian forts, and that William Blaxton or Blackstone, an educated bachelor, brought a copious library to the house he built on the western slope of what would one day become Boston’s Beacon Hill. Here he enjoyed his books in a quiet solitude, broken only by the frequent company of visiting Indians. Basic subsistence for these “Old Planters” was most likely easier than for the debt-ridden Pilgrims, as the Massachusetts Bay shores had, before pestilence and invasion, supported great tribes of Indians with crops, shellfish, fish, and game.
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