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Title: Early explorers of Plymouth Harbor 1525-1619
Author: Henry F. Howe
Release date: November 16, 2023 [eBook #72138]
Language: English
Original publication: Plymouth, MA: Plimoth Plantation, Inc. and the Pilgrim Society, 1953
Credits: Steve Mattern and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EARLY EXPLORERS OF PLYMOUTH HARBOR 1525-1619 ***
Transcriber’s Note: Italics are enclosed in _underscores_. Additional
notes will be found near the end of this ebook.
[Illustration:
Early
Explorers of
Plymouth Harbor
1525–1619
by
Henry F. Howe
Published jointly by
Plimoth Plantation, Inc.
and the Pilgrim Society
Plymouth, 1953
]
_Copyright by Plimoth Plantation, Inc., and the Pilgrim Society_, 1953
HENRY F. HOWE is author of _Prologue to New England_,
New York, 1943, and _Salt Rivers of the Massachusetts
Shore_, New York, 1951, both published by Rinehart
& Co., Inc. Much of the material here presented is
condensed from these volumes.
The cover decoration, which is reproduced from the
London 1614 translation of Bartholomew Pitiscus,
_Trigonometry: or the doctrine of triangles_, shows not
only early seventeenth century ships but seamen using a
cross-staff and casting a lead.
_Printed in offset by The Meriden Gravure Company, Meriden, Connecticut_
_Composition by The Anthoensen Press, Portland, Maine_
_Early Explorers of Plymouth Harbor_,
1525–1619
Visitors to Plymouth are often amazed to learn that the _Mayflower_
was not the first vessel to drop anchor in Plymouth Harbor. The “stern
and rock-bound coast” of Massachusetts was in fact explored by more
than twenty recorded expeditions before the arrival of the Pilgrims.
At least six of these sailed into Plymouth Harbor. Plymouth appeared
on five good maps of the Massachusetts coast by 1616, one of them a
detailed map of Plymouth Harbor itself, made by Samuel de Champlain in
1605. The Harbor had been successively called Whitson Bay, the Port du
Cap St. Louis, and Cranes Bay by English, French and Dutch explorers,
but the name _Plimouth_, bestowed on it by Captain John Smith in 1614,
was the one the Pilgrims perpetuated.
The Pilgrim voyage was the successful culmination of a century of
maritime efforts along the New England coast by Spanish explorers,
Portuguese fishermen, French and Dutch fur traders, and Elizabethan
English “sea dogs.” All the western ports of Europe seethed with
ambitious shipmasters in search of opportunities for profit in commerce
or fishing, free-booting, the slave trade, warfare or piracy. Some,
like Henry Hudson, visited New England primarily as geographers looking
for a Northwest Passage through North America. A few were probing out
possibilities for a colonial beachhead in the New World. One of these,
led by French Jesuits, had, like the Pilgrims, a religious motive.
Three or four others attempted New England colonies, but failed.
Only the Pilgrims succeeded in hanging on, through the inevitable
preliminary disasters of the first year or two, to found a permanent
colony.
Indians of Massachusetts probably first saw Europeans during the four
Vinland voyages of Leif Ericsson and his successors between 1003 and
1015 A.D. There is good reason to suppose that these voyages touched
the shores of Cape Cod and the islands about Martha’s Vineyard, but no
direct evidence connects them with Plymouth Harbor. Continuous contact
with Europeans did not begin until nearly five hundred years later when
John Cabot’s second Newfoundland voyage coasted North America southward
to the Carolinas in 1498. The Portuguese nobleman, Miguel Cortereal, a
castaway on a voyage of exploration, may have lived among the Indians
at the head of Narragansett Bay from 1502 until 1511. Certainly these
Indians, the ancestors of Massasoit, were visited in 1524 by Giovanni
da Verrazano, whose French expedition spent two weeks in Narragansett
Bay in that year. Verrazano wrote that he was met by about twenty
dugout canoes filled with eager people, dressed in embroidered
deerskins and necklaces. The women wore ornaments of copper on their
heads and in their ears, and painted their faces. These Indians were
delighted to trade furs for bright bits of colored glass. They lived
in circular houses “ten or twelve paces in circumference, made of logs
split in halves, covered with roofs of straw, nicely put on.” From the
description, these people were no doubt the Wampanoags, who a hundred
years later were such friendly allies to the Pilgrims at Plymouth, only
thirty miles away.
Verrazano did not enter Massachusetts Bay. But in the spring of 1525
a Spaniard, Estevan Gomez, cruised for two months on the New England
coast. While he left no narrative of his voyage, “Tierra de Estevan
Gomez” appeared immediately on Spanish maps of the period, notably
that of Ribero, 1529. An indentation of the bay shore behind his “Cabo
de Arenas” sufficiently suggests Plymouth Harbor and Cape Cod Bay
to make one speculate whether this is not in fact the first record
of a visit to Plymouth, ninety-five years before the landing of the
Pilgrims. What has been interpreted as Boston Harbor on this Ribero
map bears the name “Bay of St. Christoval,” but the indentation that
suggests Plymouth remains nameless. It seems likely that Estevan Gomez
was the discoverer of Plymouth in 1525.
After these first Massachusetts discoveries, there follows a period of
seventy-five years of documentary obscurity so far as Massachusetts is
concerned. Maritime activities about Newfoundland, the St. Lawrence
River, and Nova Scotia steadily grew. Cartier founded, and then had
to abandon, his French colony at Quebec. Jehan Allefonsce, one of
his shipmasters, was blown southward from the Newfoundland banks in
1542, into “a great bay in latitude 42°,” but Massachusetts Bay is
not mentioned during the rest of the century. Both French and English
built up an increasing fur trade on the Maine coast, especially about
the Penobscot and in the Bay of Fundy. Fishermen from all the maritime
nations of Europe crowded in increasing numbers to the Newfoundland
banks, carrying back apparently inexhaustible supplies of codfish to
feed Catholic Europe in the season of Lent. By 1578 as many as 350
fishing vessels were making the transatlantic voyage, usually twice
each year. Since fishermen and fur traders rarely left written records,
we can only assume that with the increased volume of shipping, some of
these vessels found their way to Massachusetts shores. But we have no
documentary evidence of their visits.
[Illustration:
TIERA DE AYLLON
TIERA DE ESTEVA GOMEZ
TIERA NOVA: DE CORTEREAI
Map of the North American Coast, a portion of the World Map made by
Diego Ribero in 1529, showing the results of the explorations of
Estevan Gomez in 1525
Reproduced from the Map Collection, Yale University Library]
Inevitably the tremendous growth of all this free-lance commercial
shipping, in the fur trade and fisheries, must lead to attempts to
organize it either into colonial administrations under government
control, or business companies privately financed. Everyone could
see that permanent bases were needed in the New World. International
quarrels and actual piracy were already appearing in the Newfoundland
fisheries. Sir Humphrey Gilbert determined to make Newfoundland an
English colony. But in 1583 his well-organized expedition came to
grief by shipwreck. His half brother, Sir Walter Raleigh, renewed the
attempt, this time at Roanoke in the Carolinas, but was unable to
maintain the colony’s supply, once it was established. The project
failed. But the idea was right, and men in England like Raleigh and
Richard Hakluyt, the historian of English voyages, kept preaching the
necessity of overseas colonies. Similar ideas were growing in the
western ports of France.
The turn of the century marked the beginning of a concerted campaign
on the part of both France and England to establish plantations in
New England. The first move was made by a group of free-lance English
merchants who in 1602 sent out Bartholomew Gosnold on a commercial
voyage with thirty-two men in the bark _Concord_. Its objective was
twofold, to get sassafras (a medication thought to be “of sovereigne
vertue for the French poxe”) and to establish an outpost somewhere in
the area described by Verrazano seventy-five years before. Sir Humphrey
Gilbert’s son Bartholomew was among the company. After brief landings
on Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard, the expedition built a hut on the
islet in the pond on Cuttyhunk Island in Buzzards Bay, there traded
with the Indians, cut a cargo of sassafras root and cedarwood, and
after a minor altercation with the natives pulled up stakes and sailed
back to England with two enthusiastic narratives of the country and its
commodities.
Less than nine months later, and obviously because of the success of
the Gosnold voyage, a new expedition of two vessels, _Speedwell_ and
_Discoverer_, with forty-four men and boys, sailed to Massachusetts
from Bristol under command of Martin Pring, a Devonshire skipper. This
voyage was instigated by Richard Hakluyt, together with some merchants
of Bristol. Robert Salterne, pilot of the Gosnold voyage, was assistant
to Pring. Deliberately avoiding the long sail around Cape Cod, Pring
entered Massachusetts Bay, coasted its North Shore looking for
sassafras, and finding none, sailed across to “a certaine Bay, which
we called Whitson Bay.” It had a “pleasant Hill thereunto adjoyning,”
and a “Haven winding in compasse like the Shell of a Snaile,” with
twenty fathoms at the entrance, and seven fathoms at the land-locked
anchorage. Here was a “sufficient quantitie of Sassafras.” This was
Plymouth Harbor in 1603.
Ashore, Pring’s men built a “small baricado” or watchtower and kept it
manned with sentinels while the crew worked in the woods. They also
took ashore with them two great mastiff dogs, of whom the Indians were
mortally afraid. Indians appeared in considerable numbers, “at one time
one hundred and twentie at once.” One of the crew delighted the natives
by playing a guitar and they sang and “danced twentie in a ring” about
him and gave him gifts of tobacco, tobacco pipes, snakeskin girdles
and “Fawnes skinnes.” They had black and yellow bows, and prettily
decorated quivers of rushes filled with long feathered arrows. They
used birch-bark canoes “where of we brought one to Bristoll.” Their
gardens were planted with tobacco, pumpkins, cucumbers and corn. The
men wore breech clouts, and feathers in their knotted hair; the women
“Aprons of Leather skins before them down to the knees, and a Bears
skinne like an Irish Mantle over one shoulder.”
[Illustration: Martin Pring’s men ashore with a mastiff, Plymouth
Harbor, 1603
Reproduced from J. P. Abelin, _De Wytheroemde Voyagien der Engelsen_
(Leiden, 1727) in the Boston Athenæum]
For the story of the latter days of their seven weeks’ stay at
Plymouth, we can scarcely do better than read Pring’s narrative in
the original: “By the end of July we had laded our small Barke called
the Discoverer with as much Sassafras as we thought sufficient, and
sent her home into England before, to give some speedie contentment
to the Adventurers; who arrived safely in Kingrode about a fortnight
before us. After their departure we so bestirred ourselves, that our
shippe also had gotten in her lading, during which time there fell out
this accident. On a day about noone tide while our men which used to
cut down Sassafras in the woods were asleep, as they used to do for
two houres in the heat of the day, there came down about seven score
Savages armed with their Bowes and Arrowes, and environed our House or
Barricado, wherein were foure of our men alone with their Muskets to
keepe Centinell, whom they sought to have come down unto them, which
they utterly refused, and stood upon their guard. Our Master like-wise
being very careful and circumspect, having not past two with him in the
shippe, put the same in the best defence he could, lest they should
have invaded the same, and caused a piece of great Ordnance to bee
shot off to give terrour to the Indians, and warning to our men which
were fast asleepe in the woods: at the noyse of which peece they ...
betooke them to their weapons, and with their Mastives, great Foole
with an halfe Pike in his mouth, drew down to their ship; whom when
the Indians beheld afarre off with the Mastive which they most feared,
in dissembling manner they turned all to a jest and sport and departed
away in friendly manner, yet not long after, even the day before our
departure, they set fire on the woods where wee wrought, which wee
did behold to burne for a mile space, and the very same day that wee
weighed Anchor, they came down to the shore in greater number, to wit,
very neere two hundred by our estimation, and some of them came in
theire Boates to our ship, and would have had us come in againe, but
we sent them back, and would none of their entertainment.” One would
love to know more than is provided in Martin Pring’s brief narrative in
order to estimate fairly whether the English had given provocation to
the Indians for this threatened attack at Plymouth. The only hint of
provocation is the taking of a canoe back to England.
Had Plymouth been populated by two hundred Indians in 1620 it seems
unlikely that the Pilgrims could have survived. The English adventurers
transferred their explorations to the coast of Maine, where in 1605
George Waymouth, and in 1606 Martin Pring, made investigations
preparatory to the major colonization attempt of the English Plymouth
Company at Sagadahoc, the mouth of the Kennebec River. This colony
failed after a year through a breakdown in leadership. For our purposes
it is significant that the English sent no further explorations into
Massachusetts waters for eight years after the voyages of Gosnold
and Martin Pring. It looks as though the enmity of the Massachusetts
Indians dissuaded English merchants from further plans to set up a
colony in that region.
Plymouth’s next visitor was that great French explorer and empire
builder, the founder of Canada, Samuel de Champlain. A group of French
merchants organized by the governor of Dieppe, that old French port
which had been sending fishermen to America for more than a century,
succeeded in 1603 in getting from Henri IV a commission to found a
colony. After spending the summer of 1603 exploring the St. Lawrence,
the leaders decided that a more southern climate was desirable.
Accordingly in 1604, De Monts and Pont-Grave, with Samuel de Champlain
as geographer and chronicler of the expedition, explored the Bay of
Fundy and founded a colony on Dochet Island in Passamaquoddy Bay. Half
the colonists died during the first winter, and the colony was moved
across the Bay to a better site at what is now Annapolis, Nova Scotia.
Meantime Champlain spent the summers of 1605 and 1606 exploring the
New England coast, familiarizing himself with all the shores as far
south as Woods Hole in Massachusetts. He wrote a splendid account of
these expeditions, which is still good reading; and for the first time
produced a good map of the Massachusetts coast, with detail maps of
Gloucester, Plymouth, Eastham and Chatham harbors.
[Illustration: Champlain’s Map of Plymouth Harbor, 1605
_Legends on Champlain’s Map of Port St. Louis with comments_
A. SHOWS THE PLACE WHERE VESSELS ANCHOR
The figures show the fathoms of water. The depths are now much less
than those indicated on the map, and the difference may represent
an actual change.
B. THE CHANNEL
C. TWO ISLANDS
Clarks Island, a low swell of upland occupied by farms, and Saquish
Head, likewise low upland occupied by a few buildings and some
bushes.
D. SAND DUNES
The long line of dune beaches, collectively called Duxbury Beach,
connecting Brant and Gurnet points.
E. SHOALS
A prominent feature of this part of Plymouth Harbor and of Duxbury
Bay. As Champlain states, they are largely bare at low tide.
F. WIGWAMS WHERE THE INDIANS CULTIVATE THE LAND
A number are situated on the slope where now stands the historic
city of Plymouth founded by the Pilgrim Fathers fifteen years after
this visit of Champlain.
G. THE SPOT WHERE WE RAN OUR PINNACE AGROUND
Browns Bank, still an impediment to the navigation of the harbor.
Apparently it was while their pinnace was aground that Champlain
landed on the north end of Long Beach, where he sketched this map.
H. A KIND OF ISLAND COVERED WITH TREES, AND CONNECTED WITH THE SAND
DUNES
The Gurnet, a low-swelling upland island, ending in a low bluff;
it is largely bare of trees and occupied by a group of buildings
belonging to the light station. It was thickly wooded when the
Pilgrim Fathers settled here in 1620. Slafter’s contention that
this was Saquish Head he later abandoned.
I. A FAIRLY HIGH PROMONTORY, WHICH IS VISIBLE FROM FOUR TO FIVE
LEAGUES OUT TO SEA
Manomet Hill, 360 feet in height, a plateau ridge cut to an abrupt
bluff where it reaches the sea, thus forming a conspicuous landmark.
]
[Illustration: Map of Plymouth Harbor, Massachusetts, adapted from a
modern chart for comparison with Champlain’s map of Port St. Louis,
to which it is adjusted as nearly as possible in scale, extent, and
meridian
Reproduced from the Champlain Society edition of _The Works of Samuel
de Champlain_, plate LXXIV. The compass is Champlain’s, which is
supposed to be set to the magnetic meridian, but the true north is
shown by the arrow.]
Champlain’s Plymouth visit occurred in 1605, two years after Pring’s
expedition. He had spent several days in Gloucester Harbor and a night
in Boston Harbor, where he had watched the building of a dugout canoe
by the Indians. Coming down the South Shore, his bark grounded on one
of the numerous ledges that dot that portion of Massachusetts Bay.
“If we had not speedily got it off, it would have overturned in the
sea, since the tide was falling all around, and there were five or six
fathoms of water. But God preserved us and we anchored” near a cape,
which perhaps was Brant Rock. “There came to us fifteen or sixteen
canoes of savages. In some of them there were fifteen or sixteen, who
began to manifest great signs of joy, and made various harangues, which
we could not in the least understand. Sieur de Monts sent three or four
in our canoe, not only to get water but to see their chief, whose name
was Honabetha.--Those whom we had sent to them brought us some little
squashes as big as the fist which we ate as a salad like cucumbers,
and which we found very good--We saw here a great many little houses
scattered over the fields where they plant their Indian corn.”
The expedition now sailed southward into Plymouth Harbor. “The next
day [July 18] we doubled Cap St. Louis, so named by Sieur de Monts, a
land rather low, and in latitude 42° 45’. The same day we sailed two
leagues along a sandy coast as we passed along which we saw a great
many cabins and gardens. The wind being contrary, we entered a little
bay [Plymouth] to await a time favorable for proceeding. There came
to us two or three canoes, which had just been fishing for cod and
other fish, which are found there in large numbers. These they catch
with hooks made of a piece of wood, to which they attach a bone in the
shape of a spear, and fasten it very securely. The whole thing has a
fang-shape, and the line attached to it is made out of the bark of a
tree. They gave me one of their hooks, which I took as a curiosity. In
it the bone was fastened on by hemp, like that in France, as it seemed
to me. And they told me that they gathered this plant without being
obliged to cultivate it; and indicated that it grew to the height of
four or five feet. This canoe went back on shore to give notice to
their fellow inhabitants, who caused columns of smoke to rise on our
account. We saw eighteen or twenty savages, who came to the shore and
began to dance.” Was this a reminiscence of dancing to the guitar for
Pring’s sailor, perhaps? “Our canoe landed in order to give them some
bagatelles, at which they were greatly pleased. Some of them came to
us and begged us to go to their river. We weighed anchor to do so,
but were unable to enter on account of the small amount of water, it
being low tide, and were accordingly obliged to anchor at the mouth.
I went ashore where I saw many others who received us very cordially.
I made also an examination of the river, but saw only an arm of water
extending a short distance inland, where the land is only in part
cleared up. Running into this is merely a brook not deep enough for
boats except at full tide. The circuit of the Bay is about a league. On
one side of the entrance to this Bay there is a point which is almost
an island, covered with wood, principally pines, and adjoins sand
banks which are very extensive. On the other side the land is high.
There are two islets in this bay, which are not seen until one has
entered and around which it is almost dry at low tide. This place is
very conspicuous from the sea, for the coast is very low excepting the
cape at the entrance to the bay. We named it Port du Cap St. Louis,
distant two leagues from the above cape and ten from the Island Cape
[Gloucester]. It is in about the same latitude as Cap St. Louis.”
[Illustration: NEW ENGLAND
CAPTAIN JOHN SMITH’S MAP OF NEW ENGLAND, 1614
Reproduced from the Pequot Collection, Yale University Library
]
Champlain’s map of Plymouth Harbor, which is reproduced herewith, was a
quick sketch which he drew from the end of Long Beach after his vessel
went aground there, probably during the afternoon of their arrival.
Since the expedition stayed in Plymouth Harbor only over one night, too
much accuracy of detail must not be expected of it. Saquish Head is
represented as an island, and no distinction is made between Eel River
and Town Brook. Plymouth Harbor has probably shoaled a good deal since
the early seventeenth century, since it would now be impossible to find
a seven-fathom anchorage anywhere except immediately around Duxbury
Pier Light; yet Champlain’s anchorage in the middle of Plymouth Bay is
so designated. Martin Pring had even described a _landlocked_ anchorage
in seven fathoms. The chief value of Champlain’s little map, aside from
confirming the locality, is its evidences of very extensive Indian
houses and cornfields occupying much of the slopes above the shore all
the way around from the Eel River area through Plymouth and Kingston to
the shores of Duxbury Bay.
The expedition left Plymouth on July 19 and sailed around the shores
of Cape Cod Bay before rounding the Cape and arriving the next day at
Nauset Harbor in Eastham. During several days’ stay there, a French
sailor was killed by the Indians in a scuffle over a kettle. The
following year, when Champlain returned to Cape Cod, a more serious
disaster occurred. Four hundred Indians at Chatham ambushed and
massacred five Frenchmen in a dawn raid, then returned and disinterred
their bodies after burial. The French took vengeance by coolly
slaughtering half a dozen Indians a few days later. But, like the
English adventurers, the French then abandoned Massachusetts and never
returned. Champlain reported that in all his travels he had found no
place better for settlement than Nova Scotia. Two years later, changes
of plans in France transferred him to Quebec, where he spent the
remainder of his career laying the foundations of French Canada along
the St. Lawrence. Massachusetts Indians had again rebuffed the threat
of European penetration.
We have already noted that while Champlain was in Massachusetts, George
Waymouth and Martin Pring had been exploring Maine. The coördination
of these exploratory voyages was largely the work of Sir Ferdinando
Gorges, a diligent organizer of New England colonial preparations. In
1606 the administrative architecture of the English colonial movement
in America was built. King James gave charters to two companies, the
London Company and the Plymouth Company, providing for settlements
respectively in what came to be known as “Southern” and “Northern”
Virginia. The successful colony at Jamestown was founded by the London
Company in 1607. The coincident attempt by the Plymouth Company,
organized by Gorges, and the Popham and Gilbert families, to found a
colony on the Kennebec River in Maine failed after a year’s trial. This
Sagadahoc Colony failure was a blow to New England colonization, the
effects of which lasted for a generation, since the impression of New
England as a subarctic area, impractical for settlement, remained in
English minds for many years. It needs to be emphasized, however, that
despite this setback to English hopes, the loss of fortunes invested
in the enterprise, and the breakdown of the Plymouth Company produced
by this failure, the enterprise had come much nearer to success than
Humphrey Gilbert’s attempted colony in Newfoundland. Much was learned
about techniques of living in the new country, getting along with
Indians, and the need for continuous replacement and supply. These
ventures were hazardous: they required courage, teamwork, strong
leadership, and personnel of heroic wisdom and tenacity.
After the Sagadahoc failure, the pattern of English activity on the New
England coast reverted for five years to the former state of occasional
trading and fishing voyages. The only events that touched even remotely
on Plymouth history were Cape Cod visits of three men from different
areas of activity. In 1609 Henry Hudson landed briefly on Cape Cod on
his way from Maine to his explorations of the Hudson River which led to
the Dutch claims in that region. Samuel Argall from Virginia in 1610
likewise saw Cape Cod on a voyage designed to supplement Jamestown’s
failing food supplies with New England codfish. And in 1611 Captain
Edward Harlow, sent on an exploring voyage to the Cape Cod region
by the Earl of Southampton, seems to have had five skirmishes with
Indians on Cape Cod and the Vineyard. Harlow’s vessel was attacked
by canoes while at anchor, and lost a long boat being towed astern
to the Indians, who thereupon beached her, filled her with sand and
successfully prevented the English from retaking her. Harlow returned
to England with little except five captured natives. Among them was
Epenow, an Indian whose treachery later accounted for the death of
Captain Thomas Dermer.
In 1613 the French fur-trading activities on the Bay of Fundy were
supplemented by an ambitious project to establish a Jesuit missionary
colony in that region. But this second French attempt to colonize
Maine was nipped in the bud after only a few weeks by Sir Samuel
Argall’s armed cruiser, sent from Virginia for the purpose. This ended
the threat of France as a colonial power in New England except for
occasional incursions into eastern Maine.
The year 1614 opened with a visitor to Plymouth from a new quarter.
Dutch fur traders, following in the wake of Henry Hudson’s 1609
discoveries, were already at work in the Hudson River. Two of them,
Adrian Block and Hendrick Christiansen, were about to weigh anchor
from Manhattan and depart for the Netherlands with a cargo of furs in
the fall of 1613 when one of their ships caught fire and burned to the
water’s edge. Both crews therefore stayed over the winter on Manhattan
Island, and there built a new “yacht,” the _Onrust_, which they felt
must be given a shakedown cruise before attempting the Atlantic
crossing. Block therefore sailed her eastward, the first passage of
Long Island Sound by a European, and explored the Connecticut shore
and rivers, Narragansett Bay and the Cape Cod region, to all of which
he laid claim for the Dutch as “Nieu Nederlant.” Contemporary Dutch
accounts offer us little of interest about the Massachusetts phases of
this voyage except some sailing directions in Massachusetts Bay that
suggest that Adrian Block sailed from a place called Pye Bay, usually
identified with Salem, to the Lizard on the English Channel. But the
Figurative Map which he published in 1616 as a part of his report to
the States General of the Netherlands contains many additional details
to which Dutch names are applied, including a wholly unmistakable
outline of Plymouth Harbor, here called Cranes Bay. From this it seems
obvious that Block did visit Plymouth in the spring of 1614, and may
be considered as yet another of its explorers. It would be interesting
to know whether any of the Leyden Pilgrims, living in the Netherlands
for four years after the map’s publication, ever saw it before setting
out for the New World. In view of the controversy over whether the
Pilgrims were indeed headed for the Hudson River, it is interesting to
note that this map of Adrian Block’s would have been the most accurate
one available to them as a guide to the New York region, yet there is
nothing in the Pilgrim chronicles to suggest that they had it with them
on the _Mayflower_.
Also in 1614 there came sailing into Plymouth Harbor a man whose map
and writings were used by the Pilgrims, though he said that they
refused his advice and his leadership. Captain John Smith would like to
have been the founder of New England, but had to be content to be its
Hakluyt. He named New England, and “Plimouth,” and Massachusetts, and
the Charles River and Cape Ann--at least he was the first to publish
these names. He produced the best known map of New England of that
early period. He spent the last seventeen years of his life writing the
history of New England voyages and pamphleteering for its settlement.
Yet a succession of misfortunes prevented him from ever revisiting the
coast for which he developed such enthusiasm during his three months’
voyage in 1614. Smith had already been governor of Virginia and had
experience in what it took to plant a successful colony. His writings
had unquestionably a strong influence on the Massachusetts colonial
undertakings, particularly since he was not afraid of Indians and since
he recognized the difference between the bleak coast of Maine and the
relatively better-situated Massachusetts area as a site for colonial
development.
John Smith arrived at Monhegan Island in Maine in April, 1614, with
two vessels. In the smaller of these he spent his time exploring and
mapping the coast from the Penobscot to Cape Cod, much as Champlain had
done nine years earlier. Thomas Hunt in the larger vessel remained at
Monhegan, fishing. Reaching “the Countrie of the Massachusetts, which
is the Paradise of all those parts,” Smith entered Boston Harbor. “For
heere are many Iles all planted with corne: groves, mulberries, salvage
gardens, and good harbours: the coast is for the most part high clayie,
sandie cliffs. The Sea Coast as you passe, shews you all along large
corne fields and great troupes of well proportioned people; but the
French, having remained heere neere six weeks left nothing for us.” At
Cohasset he wrote: “We found the people in those parts verie kinde, but
in their furie no lesse valiant. For upon a quarrell we had with one of
them, hee onely with three others, crossed the harbor of Quonahassit to
certaine rocks whereby wee must passe; and there let flie their arrowes
for our shot, till we were out of danger,--yet one of them was slaine,
and another shot through his thigh.” His description of Plymouth, which
was variously known as Patuxet or Accomack, immediately follows the
Cohasset episode quoted above: “Then come you to Accomack, an excellent
good harbor, good land, and no want of anything except industrious
people. After much kindnesse, upon a small occasion, wee fought also
with fortie or fiftie of those; though some were hurt, and some were
slaine; yet within an hour after they became friends.” In another
passage he adds, “we tooke six or seven of their Canowes which towards
the evening they ransomed for Bever skinnes.” Apparently Smith supplied
a motive for the resumption of friendship, knowing that the Indians
could be bought off. This was the kind of Indian policy Myles Standish
used at times; in fact there is a certain resemblance between the two
men. In any case Smith left for England with a cargo of beaver, and the
Indians of Plymouth got back their canoes.
But the next visitor to Plymouth, still in 1614, did not leave as good
an impression. With Smith departed for England, Thomas Hunt appeared in
Plymouth Harbor in Smith’s larger vessel. Not content with a hold full
of Monhegan codfish, Hunt now kidnaped twenty or more Plymouth natives,
stowed them below decks, and sailed away to Spain, where he sold them
into slavery at Malaga, “for £20 to a man.” This was a typical seaman’s
private venture, or side bet to the profits of the codfish cargo. John
Smith wrote that “this wilde act kept him [Hunt] ever after from any
more emploiment in those parts.” Samuel Purchas termed Hunt’s “Savage
hunting of Savages a new and Devillish Project.” One can imagine what
bitterness grew toward the English among Massachusetts Indians after
this demonstration of European barbarism.
The quirks of history are at times worthy of the most fantastic
fiction. Thomas Hunt’s universally condemned crime happened to produce
one result which proved of great advantage to the Pilgrims. Among the
twenty wretched Plymouth natives whom Hunt sold at the “Straights of
Gibralter” was an Indian named Squanto. Then began a five-year European
education which trained Squanto for his irreplaceable services to the
Pilgrims as their interpreter. Squanto was rescued by good Spanish
friars, “that so they might nurture [him] in the Popish religion.” In
some unknown manner he reached England and continued his education
for several years in the household of one John Slany, an officer of
the Newfoundland Company. His subsequent travels will appear in our
discussion of Thomas Dermer’s voyage in 1619. It is sufficient at this
point to note that perhaps the greatest blessing ever bestowed upon the
Pilgrim Fathers was the gift of a treacherous English shipmaster, a
Spanish Catholic friar, and an English merchant adventurer.
Things were going badly in another area of Massachusetts during that
eventful year of 1614. As though the expeditions of Block, Smith, and
Hunt were not sufficient for one year, Nicholas Hobson now made his
appearance at Martha’s Vineyard. Sent out by Sir Ferdinando Gorges in
an attempt to establish a fur-trading post in that region, Hobson was
using the Indian, Epenow, captured by Harlow’s expedition in 1611,
as his pilot through the shoals of Nantucket Sound. Epenow cleverly
contrived his escape, and a full-scale battle ensued. “Divers of the
Indians were then slain by the English, and the Master of the English
vessel and several of the Company wounded by the Indians.” Hobson’s
party “returned to England, bringing nothing back with them, but the
News of their bad Success, and that there was a War broke out between
the English and the Indians.” Increase Mather later remarked that
“Hunt’s forementioned Scandal, had caused the Indians to contract such
a mortal Hatred against all Men of the English Nation, that it was no
small Difficulty to settle anywhere within their Territoryes.”
It was at this point in history that another strange series of events
took place, of much more far-reaching significance. With English
expeditions defeated and sent back to England empty-handed, with an
Indian war “broke out,” fate, or Providence, or whatever you call that
destiny which seems at times to intercede for civilization in its
remorseless quest for progress, now took a hand. Some European disease,
to which the natives had no resistance and the Europeans complete
immunity, swept the coasts of Massachusetts clear of Indians. Suddenly
it appeared in all the river villages along the Mystic, the Charles,
the Neponset, the North River, and at Plymouth. No one knows what it
was--whether chicken pox or measles or scarlet fever. The Indians
believed it was the product of a curse leveled at them by one of the
last survivors of a French crew wrecked on Boston Harbor’s Peddock’s
Island in 1615. By analogy with what later happened to other primitive
races in the Americas and the Pacific islands, it was probably one of
the children’s diseases. The Indians died in thousands. A population of
a hundred thousand shrank to five thousand in the area from Gloucester
to New Bedford. “They died on heapes,” Thomas Morton wrote, “and the
living that were able to shift for themselves would runne away and let
them dy and let there Carkases ly above the ground without buriall....
And the bones and skulls upon the severall places of their habitations
made such a spectacle after my comming into those parts that as I
travailed in that Forrest, nere the Massachusetts, it seemed to mee a
new-found Golgotha.”
Overnight the Indian war had vanished. Overnight the coast from Saco
Bay in Maine to Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island lay wide open to
European settlements. The cleared fields along the rivers and salt
marshes grew up to weeds, ready for the spade of the English planter.
For twenty miles inland the land was cleared of the Indian menace in
precisely the area where they had been most agricultural, in what
John Smith had called the “Paradise of all those parts.” The choicest
sites for plantations, at the river mouths and along the tidal reaches
of Boston Bay, Salem, Gloucester, and Plymouth, were stripped of
opposition. Beaver, deer, and codfish multiplied unhindered. Smith’s
description of Plymouth, “good harbor, good land and no want of
anything but industrious people,” was now doubly true of the whole
mainland shore of Massachusetts Bay.
These conditions were confirmed by Captain Thomas Dermer in 1619.
Dermer had been associated with John Smith and Ferdinando Gorges in an
attempted New England voyage in 1615, and was probably familiar with
the coast. He was in Newfoundland in 1618 and there became acquainted
with Squanto, who had been living in the household of John Slany in
England. Squanto’s European stay was now completed, and someone had
brought him out to Newfoundland. Dermer appreciated how valuable he
might prove to be in a trading voyage to Massachusetts, and secured
permission from Governor John Mason of Newfoundland, and also from Sir
Ferdinando Gorges, to use him as a pilot for a Massachusetts voyage.
Arrived in Massachusetts Bay, Dermer wrote: “I passed alongst the
coast where I found some ancient Plantations, not long since populous
now utterly void, in other places a remnant remaines but not free of
sickenesse. Their disease the Plague for wee might perceive the sores
of some that had escaped, who describe the spots of such as usually
die.” Reaching Plymouth, which, we remember, was Squanto’s home, he
goes on: “When I arrived at my Savages native Country (finding all
dead) I travelled alongst a daies journey Westward, to a place called
Nummastaquyt [Nemasket or Middleboro], where finding Inhabitants I
dispatched a messenger a dayes journey further west to Poconokit, which
bordereth on the sea; whence came to see me two Kings; attended with a
guard of fiftie armed men, who being well satisfied with that my Savage
and I discoursed unto them--gave me content in whatsoever I demanded.”
At Poconokit he “redeemed a Frenchman, and afterwards another at
Mastachusit,” victims of shipwreck three years before. What a chronicle
these two castaways might have added to Massachusetts history had their
memoirs been preserved!
Squanto now found himself the only survivor of those two hundred or
more natives of Plymouth whom Martin Pring and Champlain and John Smith
had encountered. We note that he brought the Englishmen of Dermer’s
party into friendly association with the sachems of Poconokit, which
was Massasoit’s village at the mouth of the Taunton River. This was
the first friendly contact with Massachusetts Indians in five years,
the first since the criminal barbarity of Thomas Hunt had aroused the
enmity of the natives in 1614. We can read between the lines what a
reconciliation the homecoming of Squanto, himself a victim of that
barbarous kidnaping, must have produced among the Wampanoags. For
Dermer freed Squanto later, in 1619, and he found his way back to
Massasoit before the arrival of the Pilgrims. Whether Sir Ferdinando
Gorges or Dermer himself was responsible for this peacemaking gesture,
we have no way of knowing, but it seems to have cemented again a
long-standing peace between the English and the Wampanoags, which was
worth a whole battalion of soldiers to the safety of New Plymouth.
Captain Thomas Dermer, who probably never heard of the Pilgrims, thus
brought them peace. The Indian war was ended.
It is therefore the more tragic that Dermer died of Indian arrow wounds
the next year after a battle with Epenow of Martha’s Vineyard, an
Indian captive who had not made peace with the English. Had Epenow,
instead of Squanto, lived at Plymouth, history might have run quite
differently. Captain Thomas Dermer may be considered the first of the
Plymouth martyrs, who lost his life after saving a New Plymouth that
did not yet exist, though the _Mayflower_ was on its way when he died.
It is a strange commentary on the justice of history that the men
who had spent their lives on New England colonization had almost no
share in the first successful plantation in Massachusetts. We have
seen what an outpouring of futile struggle men like Gorges and Smith
and Dermer had expended on the failures that set the stage for the
Pilgrims. It was now to fall to the lot of a group of English exiles,
who had lived twelve years in the Netherlands, to arrive by accident
in Massachusetts at the precise moment when the merchant adventurers,
whom they despised, had succeeded in producing the conditions for
success. The Pilgrim legend is well founded, in the tribute it pays
to the forthright courage and persistence of the forefathers, but it
ignores their utter dependence on the maritime renaissance of England
as the foundation on which their success rested. The line of succession
stemming from the exploits of Drake and Hawkins and the ships that sank
the Armada carried directly on into the efforts of Gosnold, Pring,
Gorges, Smith, Hobson, and Dermer to set the stage for Plymouth. The
fur trade and the fisheries by which New Plymouth finally paid off its
creditors had been painstakingly developed by many hazardous years
of experiment by small shipowners of Bristol and Plymouth and other
smaller havens in the west of England. Faith in New England ventures,
so nearly destroyed by the Sagadahoc failure, had been kept alive and
sedulously cultivated by a little group of earnest men around Gorges
and John Smith, so that money could be available to finance even the
risky trading voyages necessary to keep a foothold on the coast. We
have seen how recently peace had been made with the Indians.
The Pilgrims ascribed all these blessings to acts of Providence in
their behalf. But Providence has a way of fulfilling its aims through
the acts of determined men. Any visitor to Plymouth who reveres the
Pilgrims should also honor those representatives of the glorious
maritime energies of the Old World whose discoveries and explorations
prepared the way for permanent settlement. To them also applies the
phrase which Bradford used of the Plymouth colonists:
“They were set as stepping-stones for others who came after.”
Transcriber’s Notes
Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a
predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they
were not changed.
Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation
marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left
unbalanced.
Illustrations in this eBook have been positioned between paragraphs and
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