American Experience (1988) s28e04 Episode Script

1
(thunderclap)
WILLIAM BRADFORD:
Now faith is the substance
of things hoped for;
the evidence of things not seen.
By faith, the elders
obtained good report,
and through faith,
we understand that the worlds
were framed by the word of God.
Abel.
Enoch.
Noah.
Abraham.
Sarah.
These all died in faith;
not having received
the promises,
but having seen them afar off
and being persuaded of them
and embracing them
and confessing that
they were but strangers
and pilgrims on the earth.
For they that say such things
declare plainly
that they seek another country.
And truly, if they had been
mindful of that country
from whence they came out,
they might have had opportunity
to return.
But they desired
a better country,
that is, a heavenly one,
wherefore God is not ashamed
to be called their God,
and he hath prepared for them
a city.
SUSAN HARDMAN MOORE:
I think William Bradford knew
they were on a journey
in this world towards heaven.
They didn't know
quite how they would get there,
or where they would finally
meet their end.
But I think
that's what he meant
they were on a journey,
they were transient citizens
of the world,
and, ultimately,
citizens of heaven.
And they were on a journey
towards purity.
That's what they sought,
that's what took them
out of England,
that's what took them
over to Holland,
that's what took them
from Holland
over to the New World.
(ship creaking)
NARRATOR:
Summer was fading fast,
and the window for attempting
the long and dangerous
ocean crossing
had already started to close
when on September 6, 1620,
an aging 180-ton ship
called the
Mayflower
weighed anchor off Plymouth,
off the south coast of England,
and set out on her own
across the North Atlantic
on what would prove to be
one of the most historic voyages
of the millennium.
PAULINE CROFT:
It's worth reminding ourselves
that at the time,
they were a very, very small
group of very extreme people.
And if we'd never heard of them
ever again,
nobody would be surprised.
And most English people thought
that they were well rid of them.
The fact that they are,
in the long term,
extraordinarily successful,
that they found the world's
greatest democracy,
throws retrospective luster.
They are, one might say,
if you wanted to be critical,
they're religious nutters
who won't settle for anything
except the most literal reading
of the Bible.
They want to transform
a nation-state
into something that resembles
what they take to be
a godly kingdom.
NICK BUNKER:
They weren't the people
that you would expect
to be founding a new colony.
They weren't soldiers.
They were not emissaries
of a foreign government.
They were not particularly
well provided with supplies.
And at least half of them
were Separatists,
that is to say
radical Protestants,
who were religious exiles
who had been living in Leiden
in the Dutch Republic.
They weren't the people
you would automatically expect
to be founding a new outpost
of the British Empire.
NARRATOR:
They were in many ways
the least likely of task forces
for establishing
a permanent English presence
in the New World.
Fewer than 50 of the 102
passengers were adult men,
many well past
their physical prime.
At least 30 were children,
and nearly 20 were women,
including three expectant
mothers.
By the time they set sail
in the fall of 1620,
England had still not succeeded
in establishing
a truly viable colony
on the shores of the New World,
and their chances of survival,
let alone success,
were all but nil.
SUE ALLAN:
When you look at Jamestown
in Virginia, by 1620,
they'd pumped in something like
8,000 colonists there,
and yet they were struggling to
keep their numbers above 1,000.
The death rate was awful,
so it was a very dangerous step
to even contemplate,
especially given the number
of people on the
Mayflower.
JILL LEPORE:
They don't register at all
numerically.
It's a tiny handful of people,
many of whom don't survive.
We're thinking about migration
to the Americas
in the 17th and 18th century,
we're talking about ten million
Africans, for instance,
as against this tiny handful
of Englishmen and women?
The fascinating thing then
about the Pilgrim story
is how this tiny group of people
managed to get by
and managed to tell the story
in such a way
as to erase
that whole other history.
KATHLEEN DONEGAN:
If you ask people,
"Where does America start?"
they'll say,
"It starts at Plymouth Rock."
Despite the fact that Jamestown
was founded in 1607
and Plymouth was founded
in 1620,
it became our story
of national origin.
NARRATOR:
Somehow, with the passage
of time,
the arrival of this frail,
unlikely band
would come to be seen as the
true founding moment of America,
and the story of their coming
enshrined
as the quintessential myth
of American origins,
commemorated each year
on the fourth Thursday
in November at Thanksgiving
and embodied in a handful
of iconic and instantly
recognizable images,
including a rock and a ship,
and a feast that almost
certainly never took place
as we imagine it did.
NATHANIEL PHILBRICK:
I think we feel that
we're such a new country
that we need to know
how it all began.
We need that beginning moment,
and the Pilgrims
serve that purpose.
But what people forget is that
it wasn't all fated.
These were normal people under
extraordinary circumstances,
and they were making it up
as they went along.
And it ends up being
as much a story of survival
as it is a story of origins.
NARRATOR:
What no one could have imagined
in the fall of 1620,
as autumn winds blew the 102
passengers of the
Mayflower
west across the Atlantic,
was how harrowing, dark,
and deeply unsettling
their pilgrimage
to the New World would be,
or how utterly their quest
for a godly republic
would transform the world
they were sailing towards,
the searchers themselves,
and the nation
that would rise up
long after they were gone,
consecrated to their memory.
DONEGAN:
Because the Pilgrims
have been so enshrined
in the national imagination
because they've meant so much
in what we've told ourselves
about who we are as Americans,
we need to go back
and ask questions
about why we picked that story,
what it was about these people,
what it was about their history
that we wanted to see reflected
in our own national image.
There's been a tremendous amount
of memory produced
around the Pilgrims,
but there's also been
a lot of forgetting.
You know, that memory
is very selective.
And so to look
at what's been remembered
and let that shed light
on what's been forgotten,
is an important exercise
when we're thinking
about something
that has been so central
to our national imagination.
(birds chirping)
BERNARD BAILYN:
The difference is Bradford.
Not simply because
he was the governor
for many, many years,
but because of his personal
qualities.
He was a person
of very delicate sensibilities
and very keen perceptions.
And he watched the flutterings
of their little conventicle
and its ups and downs
with the greatest concern,
and registered it
in this wonderful prose.
NARRATOR:
To a remarkable degree,
we would scarcely remember
the Pilgrims at all,
and certainly not remember them
as we do,
were it not for the unusual man
who came to be lead them
in the New World
and the unusual book
he left behind,
a luminous text
unlike any other account
of early American settlement,
extraordinary
both in what it says
and in what it passes over
in silence.
PHILBRICK:
Bradford's "Of Plymouth
Plantation"
is one of the great books of
American literature and history.
That book, more than anything,
is a kind of bible
in its own way.
It's steeped in the Bible,
obviously,
when it comes to its language.
But when it comes to the history
of Plymouth Colony,
it is the text.
And there's stuff there
that is very dark and turbulent.
NARRATOR:
He labored over the manuscript
for more than 20 years
"Scribbled writings," he said,
"pieced up in times of leisure"
stolen from his duties
as governor
and written in the third person,
as if to a far distant future.
He left the manuscript
to his sons and heirs
the day he died in 1657, along
with a handful of simple poems
written in the first person.
The book itself almost never
came down to posterity.
DONEGAN:
In Bradford's role
as a historian,
he has the possibility
of success
because he has the possibility
to shape that history.
He gets to write for posterity;
he gets to shape the story.
Bradford is clearly writing
for a future.
Plymouth, he understands, will
have its future in its history,
and he's the one
who's creating that history.
BRADFORD:
From my years young
in days of youth,
God did make known to me
his truth
and called me
from my native place
for to enjoy the means of grace.
In wilderness, he did me guide,
And in strange lands for me
provide.
In fears and wants,
through weal and woe,
a pilgrim passed I, to and fro.
BUNKER:
In England, the place
that is most closely associated
with the origins of the Pilgrims
is a village called Scrooby,
which is right
at the northern corner
of the county
of Nottinghamshire.
It's about 150 miles north
of London.
It was an area
where religious divisions
were particularly conspicuous,
where there was still
quite a large number
of lingering Roman Catholics,
an area which had recently
been evangelized
by radical Protestantism.
ALLAN:
You have the right people
at the right time
in the right area
with the same ideas.
And I think that's what happened
up here
in this part of the country.
Got John Robinson
at Gainsborough.
You've got William Brewster
there at Scrooby.
You have Richard Clifton
here at Babworth.
You have William Bradford
in Austerfield,
so spiritually strong
and so young.
They supported each other,
and I think that is why
it took off here
and maybe not in other places.
NARRATOR:
He was born in the tiny village
of Austerfield,
in south Yorkshire,
and baptized on March 19, 1590,
in the ancient stone church
of St. Helena's,
a three-mile walk down a path
called Low Common Lane
from the village of Scrooby.
With farmland of their own
and a sturdy house,
his family,
though far from wealthy,
were far from poor, especially
compared with their neighbors,
tenant farmers
and landless field hands
for the most part.
But his childhood
would be blighted
by the death of virtually
everyone close to him:
his father, William,
when he was one;
his grandfather, William,
when he was six;
his mother, Alice,
when he was seven;
his sister, Alice, and his
grandfather, John Hanson,
when he was 12.
He was sent to live
with his uncle, Robert,
who hoped he would prove useful
working in the fields.
By then, his family's economic
security had been badly shaken
by four failed harvests
in a row,
the Great Dearth of the 1590s,
and by the devastating
depression that followed.
BUNKER:
The standard of living
of the average English laborer
was rapidly declining
It was something
very close to famine.
So it was a very uncertain world
in which even people
from the yeomanry,
as the Pilgrims were,
were always worried
they were about to slip back
into this state
of near-destitution
in which many people lived.
NARRATOR:
Lonely and intelligent
in a world that felt
increasingly precarious
and unmoored to him,
he fell ill when he was 12
with what he called
a "long sickness,"
which took him from the fields,
kept him bedridden for months,
and drove him to seek solace
in the Bible.
The reading of scriptures,
he said,
made a great impression
upon him,
and the more he read,
the more troubled he became
at the gulf between the world
he saw around him
and the simplicity and purity
of the gospel.
Our Father, who art in heaven,
hallowed be thy name
PHILBRICK:
He had this profound sense
as a 12 year old
that the congregation
he was a part of was corrupt,
that the Church was moving them
in a direction
that was not right,
that they prayed to the depraved
beliefs of mortal men
that were moving them
away from God.
And so this was
a deep conviction.
And I think there
you have the beginnings
of a very complex,
inward-looking person
who was improbably preparing
for the ultimate journey.
NARRATOR:
When he was well again,
he went with a friend
to All Saint's Church
at Babworth, ten miles away,
to hear the "illuminating
ministry"
of a forward-thinking Puritan
preacher named Richard Clyfton.
Not long after, he found his way
down Low Common Lane
to the home of William Brewster,
the warm-hearted
Cambridge-educated postmaster
and bailiff of Scrooby Manor,
where he came to feel
he had found a spiritual home,
and where each week,
a private congregation gathered
to hear Richard Clyfton
and another charismatic minister
named John Robinson
preach on the need to purify
worship of everything worldly,
of anything not contained
in scripture.
Your carcasses shall fall
HARDMAN MOORE:
I think the sense
of faithfulness to Scripture
is at the heart of it.
Let us pray.
HARDMAN MOORE:
They want to go
right back to the roots
and strip away
all the human accretions
that have come into the worship
and the life of the Church
and get back
to a primitive purity.
It's no accident
that the larger movement
from which the Separatists came
were called Puritans
by their opponents,
because that's what they were
campaigning for:
greater purity,
greater faithfulness
to what they believed they read
in Scripture.
NARRATOR:
Nothing he read made
a deeper impression on him
than a passage from the book
of St. Matthew,
in which Christ explains
to his disciples
where the true church lies.
For where two or three are
gathered together in my name,
there am I in the midst of them.
CROFT:
That's obviously
the key Separatist text,
that Christ will be with you
without a bishop,
without a church,
without any clear ecclesiastical
organization.
And that prayer,
conversion, commitment,
is enough
for the presence of Christ.
That's an extraordinarily
radical text
when you think about it.
PHILBRICK:
It's a powerful idea
to think that you can,
in an unmediated way, see God.
The Bible is your window in,
and to have a bishop or a pope
telling you what to do
is just getting in the way,
is so much fallen static.
And it's a powerful idea.
I think it's particularly
powerful
for someone like Bradford,
who finds himself alone at 12.
And to think that God
is that accessible,
that if he can find
just a few others
and have a congregation
of people
on the same wavelength,
that they can find their way
to God,
that's what you need.
That's all you need.
And you're willing to go
to the ends of the earth,
literally,
if you know that you will be
following that path.
NARRATOR:
By 1603, he was fully committed
to the radical idea
that the true love of God
might mean separating
ALLAN:
And that's when the real
trouble begins,
because you look
at who's the head
of the oy Church in England,
the head of the Church from
Henry's time is the monarch.
It's not just the Church,
it's the monarch that you're
flying in the face of.
That's what makes this
so dangerous
and so worrying
for the authorities,
because if you're going
to make a stand on religion
and get away with it,
then what else are you going
to make a stand on?
Your carcasses will fall
in the wilderness
MICHAEL BRADDICK:
The issues at stake
are literally more important
than life and death.
It's your eternal life
or your eternal death.
And if your monarch is
jeopardizing your eternal life,
you're a very unreliable
subject.
Because anyone who separates
from the Church
is not just separating
from the Church,
but they're separating
from royal authority.
And that's potentially
very dangerous.
ALLAN:
Bottom line, what was at stake?
Well, their lives.
You can punish somebody
for not attending a church.
You can be fined, and it was
20 pounds in those days,
about 9,000 pounds
in today's money.
That's a lot of money
just for not going to church.
If you persisted,
then you could be imprisoned
so you could think about it.
And Elizabeth, after the Act
Against Puritans in 1593,
had made the next step
banishment.
But I think with James,
the next step could have been
death for these people.
He was newly to the throne,
not popular.
He wasn't going to have
any dissenters.
So I really think that these
folk were risking everything.
HARDMAN MOORE:
And in areas like this,
where people had been, perhaps,
able to get away with things,
there was a new drive
to make sure
that everyone conformed
to the Church of England.
And there were explicit rules
that said
you couldn't have private
religious meetings in houses.
Ministers should not convene
private groups of people.
These conventicles
were judged illegal
and subversive
to order in the realm.
And for that reason,
a network of people here
came to feel that
they were under pressure.
NARRATOR:
In the fall of 1607,
when William Brewster himself
was fined
and threatened
with imprisonment,
it was clear that
only one option remained.
To worship God as they saw fit,
they must separate not only
from the English church,
but from England altogether.
BRADDICK:
Holland had emerged
as the Protestant part
of the Netherlands
opposed to Catholic rule
in the south.
It was a place of refuge
for evangelicals
in a time of threat
and challenge.
So you can see the attraction.
From here to the Humber Estuary
and to Amsterdam
is not very far.
ALLAN:
But they couldn't just leave
the country
because you needed permission
to pass port,
and dissenters weren't going
to get permission
to leave the country.
They'd have to escape
from their own country.
NARRATOR:
A first desperate attempt
to flee ended in disaster
when the English sea captain
they had hired
betrayed them
to the authorities.
Eight months later,
on a cloud-darkened evening
in the spring of 1608,
they tried again,
some fleeing by barge
down the Trent and the Humber
towards Hull,
where this time 16 of the men,
including 18-year-old
William Bradford,
managed to board a Dutch ship
and get away to sea
one step ahead of the searchers
in pursuit,
who arrested the terrified
women and children
and carted them off to jail.
They were soon released,
and over the next year,
in groups of two and three,
quietly made their way across
the North Sea to Amsterdam
and joined their friends
and family members in exile.
CROFT:
And so they join the radical
Protestants of their time,
the Dutch.
And James, for the monarchy,
was, "Let them go there.
"If that's where they're happy,
"no reason why they
shouldn't go there.
"The Dutch are our allies,
"we've been fighting
on the side of the Dutch.
"If you want to live there,
fair enough.
Good riddance."
And no doubt,
many of them would have thought
that they would settle there
quite happily
and that would be it.
ALLAN:
These folk mainly were tied
to the land.
They were used to England.
As far as we know,
only William Brewster
spoke the language.
And you're going to a country
where you don't speak
the language,
you don't know the customs.
How are you going to survive?
And there was no coming back.
NARRATOR:
In 1609, fearing the
congregation would come apart
in the sprawling
Dutch metropolis,
William Brewster
and John Robinson
led their people 22 miles south
to the city of Leiden,
a university town
and the bustling heart
of the Dutch textile industry.
PHILBRICK:
Holland was a completely
different environment
from what they were used to.
And because they were
foreigners,
they ended up getting
really lousy jobs.
Instead of farms, they ended up
basically in little factories,
creating clothing.
And they would work, literally,
from dawn till dusk.
A bell would go off
in the morning,
and they'd work
to the very end of the day,
often with their children.
NARRATOR:
With no family of his own,
William Bradford found lodgings
in a poor neighborhood
called Stink Alley
until, at 21, he was able
to set up shop
in a small house of his own,
toiling six and sometimes
seven days a week as a weaver.
CROFT:
It's clear that many of them
found it very harsh.
The climate was far harsher
than they expected,
the difficulties that they
encountered were much greater.
NARRATOR:
But for all the trials
and hardship,
they would look back
on these years
with an almost rapturous longing
and nostalgia
for the world they created
around them there,
free for the first time
to worship as they wished:
in accordance with God's will,
unmolested.
Such was the true piety,
the humble zeal,
and fervent love of this people,
whilst they thus lived together,
towards God and his ways.
And the single heartedness
and sincere affection
one towards another,
that they came as near
the primitive pattern
of the first churches
as any other church of these
latter times have done.
HARDMAN MOORE:
I think there's something
about what you might call
the "glory days" in Leiden.
The community that John Robinson
builds around himself
his house, the sort of cottages
surrounding it,
the meeting hall
It's very much based
on what they read
in the letters
of the early churches,
Paul's letters
in the New Testament,
about what it means
to be a community
in the body of Christ.
They would take a vision of what
that had been for them in Leiden
across the Atlantic
to the New World.
NARRATOR:
In 1613, William Bradford
married a young English woman
named Dorothy May,
not in a religious service
performed in a church,
but in a civil ceremony
at Leiden's grand city hall
in accordance with Dutch custom,
and because the Separatists
found no precedent in the Bible
for church-ordained weddings.
It was the beginning of the
separation of church and state,
another custom they would take
with them across the Atlantic
sooner than anyone
could have imagined,
as by 1617,
it had begun to clear
that Leiden was not
the promised land after all.
PHILBRICK:
Their biggest concern after
a decade in this foreign land
was that their children
were becoming tch.
And these people had decided
to leave England
for their religious beliefs,
but they were still very proud
of their English heritage.
And so, "If we stay in Holland,
we will lose the identity that
is so essential to who we are."
They were also fearful
that the Spanish were about
to attack again.
NARRATOR:
In late November 1618,
a brilliant blue-green comet
appeared in the night skies.
"We shall have wars,"
the English ambassador
to the Netherlands wrote,
and he was right.
BUNKER:
Europe was on the verge
of an enormous conflict,
the beginning
of what we now refer to
as the Thirty Years' War,
a great religious conflict
involving all the great powers
of Europe,
which Protestants
such as the Pilgrims saw
as a great confrontation
between good,
in the shape of Protestant
Christianity,
and evil, in the shape
of Roman Catholicism.
And this, in the eyes of many,
was a cataclysmic
global confrontation
which might very well lead
to the end of the world.
It might herald, if you like,
the Second Coming of Christ
and the Day of Judgment.
Things were that urgent,
the stakes were that high.
PHILBRICK:
Everything seemed to be on
the edge of complete meltdown,
and so they decided it's time
to pull the rip cord once again,
even if it meant leaving
everything they had known
all their lives.
ALLAN:
But where do you go?
You're Englishmen, after all,
but you can't go back
to England.
And I think that's why
they plumped for the New World.
If you can't go back to England,
at least maybe they could find
the freedom
they're looking for there.
NARRATOR:
After weighing and rejecting
numerous options,
they settled in the end
on an area at the mouth
of the Hudson River,
near present day New York,
in the northern most part
of the English colony
founded by the Virginia Company,
then set out to try and get
a legal charter
and permission to emigrate.
PHILBRICK:
What they had to do to get there
required an awful lot of them.
They really had to figure out
how they were going to do this.
And like many people from cults,
they were really naive
when it came
to the rest of the world.
And so it meant that they
were very prone to being duped
when it came
to trying to figure out,
"How are we going to do this?
"Who are we going to hire?
"Who's going to be
our military officer?
"Where are we going
to find a ship?
Who's going to finance
this endeavor?"
And these were not
wealthy people.
And so they had this huge list
of problems.
NARRATOR:
They had all but despaired
of finding anyone
willing to finance the hugely
costly, high-risk undertaking,
when in early 1620,
they were approached in Leiden
by a 35-year-old broker
from London named Thomas Weston,
who offered to organize
financing for the expedition
through a group called
the Fellowship
of the Merchant Adventurers.
HARDMAN MOORE:
And that is the beginning of
all sorts of trouble for them.
The right time to make
that westward crossing
of the Atlantic
is to set out in the spring.
So the Pilgrims get themselves
ready in Leiden,
and it's June when they discover
that Weston
hasn't organized any transport.
NARRATOR:
To their deep dismay,
Weston also now informed them
that the investors
were getting cold feet
and insisting that
non-Separatist outsiders
go along with them.
The prospect was appalling,
but there was nothing
they could do.
In June, with no word
about financing
or the ship Weston swore
would be waiting for them
in Southampton,
they arranged their own passage
across the English channel
on an aging vessel called
the
Speedwell.
On July 22, they bid
a heart-wrenching farewell
to those staying behind,
including Pastor Robinson,
who it was decided
would remain in Leiden
with the main congregation
until a secure beachhead
had been established.
In anguish, William
and Dorothy Bradford
left their three-year-old son
John in the care of relatives.
JOHN DEMOS:
There was deep sorrow
at the bottom of this decision
for many of them.
As they got on the boat,
they knew,
at least most of them,
had no chance to come back.
They were never going
to see the people
who had meant the most to them
up to that point.
They were going to something
they could barely imagine.
And so they left that goodly
and pleasant city
which had been their resting
place near 12 years.
But they knew they were pilgrims
and looked not much
on these things,
but lift up their eyes
to the heavens,
their dearest country,
and quieted their spirits.
NARRATOR:
The journey across the channel
to Southampton
was swift and uneventful,
and when they arrived,
to their enormous relief,
they found waiting for them
at the dock a second ship,
which Thomas Weston
had secured for them
at the last possible moment:
a medium-sized, 180-ton,
square-rigged merchant vessel
battered from use,
but at 100 feet, three times
longer than the Speedwell,
seasoned and sweetened
from years of shuttling
across the channel,
taking bales of wool to France
and barrels of wine
back to England.
It was called the Mayflower.
Here, too, they had
their first encounter
with the
Mayflower's
captain,
Christopher Jones,
and with its hard-bitten,
rough-and-tumble crew,
and with the Strangers,
the motley assortment
of non-Separatist recruits
the investors had insisted
go with them.
PHILBRICK:
Suddenly these Leideners,
who had spent ten years
cultivating their own spiritual
and very inward bond,
found themselves on a ship
sharing their space
with the Strangers,
who came from a completely
different place,
with the understanding that,
"We're not just sharing
the ship with them;
"we're going to be living
with these people
for the foreseeable future."
NARRATOR:
The
Mayflower and the Speedwell
had finally weighed anchor
and were just beginning
to make headway,
when to their shock and dismay,
the
Speedwell
began to wallow
and take on water.
HARDMAN MOORE:
It sprang leaks like a sieve.
They kept on having
to put back into port
because the
Speedwell
was leaking.
And finally, in Plymouth,
they had to abandon
the
Speedwell
altogether.
And everyone went aboard
the
Mayflower
and set off.
NARRATOR:
It was up to the
Mayflower
now
to sail on on her own,
crowded with as many passengers
from both ships
as she could hold.
Many had to be left behind.
When all was said and done,
there were only 102 passengers
on board,
only half of whom were members
of the original Leiden
congregation.
BUNKER:
It was a long process
before they could finally
get away to sea,
out onto the open Atlantic.
And it was far too late
in the year.
If you wanted to go to America,
to Virginia or New England,
you should try to leave February
or March at the latest
so you could get there
in the spring
and give yourself
a full spring and summer
to become accustomed
to the New World
and to do all the things
you had to do
before the winter set in.
In fact, of course, they
ended up leaving in September,
which was about as bad
as it could be.
NARRATOR:
On September 6, 1620,
fearfully late in the season,
undersupplied and overcrowded,
with autumn storms already
whipping the North Atlantic
into menacing furrows
of white capped waves,
- the
- Mayflower left Plymouth harbor
and set out on her own
across the Atlantic.
Edward Winslow,
a 24-year-old printer
traveling with his wife
Elizabeth,
never forgot the moment
they set sail.
WINSLOW (dramatized):
Wednesday,
the sixth of September,
the winds coming east northeast,
a fine small gale,
we loosed from Plymouth,
having been kindly entertained
and courteously used by divers
friends there dwelling.
NARRATOR:
The
Mayflower
lost sight
of Land's End
sometime towards the end
of the first week of September.
It was starting to gale.
William Bradford remembered her
finally setting forth
under a prosperous wind.
HARDMAN MOORE:
When they finally set sail,
they're going against
the prevailing westerly winds,
they're struggling
against the gulf stream,
and they made
incredibly slow progress,
two miles an hour
across the Atlantic.
PHILBRICK:
Some of them tried to create
little cabins within this,
which just made these
little suffocating cells.
And chamber pots everywhere.
There was a boat that had been
cut up into pieces
that some people were trying
to use for a bed.
There were two dogs: a spaniel
and a giant slobbery mastiff.
And it is a voyage from hell.
BAILYN:
They almost turned back.
The sailors, at one point,
said they'd be happy
to earn their wages,
but they're not going
to risk their lives.
Bradford spells it out.
He describes it as awful.
And these terrible sailors,
who were a blight on humanity,
and the Strangers,
some of whom were worse,
loaded up with all this gear,
animals, people,
it's amazing that
they came out alive.
PHILBRICK:
And by the end of it,
people are getting sick.
And so there was a real sense
of urgency aboard,
particularly for Master Jones,
who knew at some point
he had to get these people
off his ship.
NARRATOR:
Two people had died
and more were failing fast
when early on the morning
of Thursday, November 9, 1620,
after more than two months
at sea,
a crew member spied a line
of high bluffs
gleaming far off
in the early dawn light
and shouted out excitedly
to Captain Jones.
It was the first land
they had seen in 65 days.
But their jubilation
quickly dimmed
as word raced through the ship
that they had made landfall
far north of their
intended destination.
PHILBRICK:
They've arrived off the coast
of Cape Cod,
but they're 200 miles
off course.
And so Master Jones
heads them south
towards the Hudson River,
and unfortunately,
there are no reliable charts.
And they unsuspectingly
find themselves
in one of the most dangerous
pieces of shoal water
on the Atlantic coast.
They're in the midst
of what Bradford would call
"roaring breakers,"
and it looks like this is going
to be the end of them.
And Jones makes a very
historic decision.
He says, "We're not going south,
we're going to take this breeze
to the north,"
around the wrist
of what they called Cape Cod
to whatever harbor is there,
"and I'm getting these people
off my ship."
NARRATOR:
On November 11, 1620,
they rounded the tip of Cape Cod
and sailed into the relative
calm and safety
of the great bay,
where even before
they dropped anchor,
long festering tensions between
the Strangers and the Pilgrims
broke out into the open.
Having landed so far north
of the boundary
of their legal patent,
many of the Strangers insisted
they were now bound
by nothing at all
and began to speak openly
of splintering off
and going their own way
once they came ashore.
BRADFORD:
This day,
before we came to harbor,
observing some not well affected
to unity and concord,
but gave some appearance
of faction,
it was thought good
there should be
an association and agreement,
that we should combine together
in one body
and submit to such government
and governors
as we should by common consent
agree to make and choose
and set our hands to this
that follows word for word.
NARRATOR:
William Brewster,
in all likelihood,
drafted the short agreement,
little more than
a single sentence long,
stating that they agreed
to combine themselves
"together into a civil body
politic,"
with the power to enact
whatever laws proved necessary
to preserve the group.
DEMOS:
The point of the compact
was to ward off the danger
of division and dissolution
after they got
to the other side.
The thing that's key about it
is it's a contract.
It's not exactly an elaborate
plan for democracy.
It's a contract.
"We're going to agree
on this particular goal
"and get everybody's name
on this document
and make a commitment to this."
NARRATOR:
On the morning
of November 11, 1620,
the Mayflower Compact
was offered up for signature.
The first to sign
was John Carver,
one of the wealthiest men
on board;
the last, a servant
named Edward Leister.
In the end, the vast majority
of the men on board
put their names to the paper, 41
adult men in all,
90 percent of the adult male
population of the
Mayflower.
Years later,
when William Bradford and others
codified the rules of Plymouth
Colony in a new Book of Laws,
on the very first page,
they described the compact as
"a solemn and binding
combination,"
whose authority came
from the fact that
it was based upon the vote
of the governed.
Although the compact began
with an affirmation of loyalty
to King James,
the Book of Laws made clear that
at times of political crisis,
the authority of the monarch
could sometimes be suspended,
while the consent
of the governed could never be.
Once the signing was complete,
the colonists acted collectively
for the first time
and elected John Carver
to be their governor.
At least for the moment,
from the relative safety of the
ship at anchor in Cape Cod Bay,
the threat to the corporate
integrity of the colony
had been averted.
BRADFORD:
Being thus past the vast ocean
and a sea of troubles,
they had now no friends
to welcome them
or inns to repair to
or to refresh
their weather-beaten bodies,
no houses, much less towns
to repair to,
to seek for succor.
And for the season,
it was winter,
and they that know
the winters of that country
know them to be sharp and harsh,
subject to cruel
and fierce storms.
Besides, what could they see
but a hideous,
desolate wilderness
full of wild beasts
and wild men?
NARRATOR:
On November 11,
with their ship safely anchored
off the tip of Cape Cod,
a landing party of 16 armed men,
including William Bradford,
Edward Winslow,
and the veteran English soldier
they had hired, Miles Standish,
ventured ashore in a small boat
and stepped on dry land
for the first time
in two months.
Though they walked for hours
amongst the windswept dunes
before returning
to the
Mayflower
with a boatload
of freshly cut fire wood,
on their first excursion ashore,
they found no wild beasts,
and stranger still,
no sign of any human presence
at all, wild or otherwise.
Back on the ship,
as the sun went down,
the enormity of their situation
began to sink in upon them.
There, on the edge of the dark,
whispering continent,
time seemed to stand still
for the immigrants,
then widen into an ominous void.
For summer being done,
all things stand on them
with a weather beaten face.
A whole country,
full of woods and thickets,
represented a wild
and savage view.
If they looked behind them,
there was the mighty ocean
which they had passed,
and was now as a main bar
and gulf to separate them
from all the civil parts
of the world.
Let it also be considered
what weak hopes
of supply and succor
they left behind them.
What could now sustain them
but the spirit of God
and his grace?
May not and ought not
the children of these fathers
rightly say,
"Our fathers were Englishmen
"which come
over this great ocean
"and were ready to perish
in this wilderness,
"but they cried unto the Lord
and he heard their voice
and looked on their adversity,
et cetera."
Let them therefore
praise the Lord,
because he is good,
and his mercies endure forever.
BRADDICK:
In southeastern Massachusetts,
east of Narragansett Bay,
that's Wampanoag territory.
To the north of us
was the Massachusett;
to the west was the Nipmuc;
to the south
were the Narragansett,
the Pequot, Mohegan, Niantic.
We estimate that within that
area, we had about 69 villages.
A village could be anywhere
from 100 people to 2,000.
So, round it off
at 1,000 average,
and you've got close
to 70,000 people.
In 1616, before the coming
of the Pilgrims,
there was a huge plague.
It started in Maine, brought
over by European fishermen.
It swept a 15-mile-wide path
right down the coast,
sort of took a left through
the middle of Wampanoag country,
and stopped at Narragansett Bay.
The Wampanoags, and I think
any other group that it hit,
suffered anywhere from a 50%
to a 90% loss in population.
DONEGAN:
It happened so quickly.
The means of death were
so sudden, and yet relentless.
And English fishermen,
explorers, come to the coast
and say, "It's absolutely
abandoned, it's devastated.
Where did the people go?"
And from that time to 1619,
that's what they found,
emptiness:
abandoned villages, bones
scattered around the ground.
TOBIAS VANDERHOOP:
In some of the accounts,
they found just bones bleached,
not because we didn't have
rituals and observances,
but because there wasn't
anybody left
to take care of the ones
who had passed away.
NARRATOR:
Nowhere was the devastation
more complete
than in a village
the Wampanoags called Patuxet.
One villager named Tisquantum,
kidnapped two years
before the plague began
and carried off in chains
to Europe,
returned in 1619 to find his
village completely abandoned.
VANDERHOOP:
Tisquantum was fortunate,
along with others
who had been kidnapped
from Wampanoag territory,
to make their way back home,
only to find the devastation
that has occurred.
Patuxet is gone.
DONEGAN:
It was a village of
about 2,000 people.
And when Tisquantum came back,
not one had survived.
No one.
He was the only survivor
of his entire village.
It's unimaginable, the grief,
the loss of that.
And this is the world
into which the Pilgrims enter.
MARGE BRUCHAC:
It's very convenient for
the telling of American history
to start with the plague,
to start with this
massive death.
But when those plagues happen,
they are not as total
as they appear.
There are some areas
that were virtually untouched
by the plague.
It was not so empty that
it was ready to be reoccupied
by someone
from across the ocean.
VANDERHOOP:
But when they arrived
in this territory,
they believed that their journey
was ordained by God,
that they had a mission
that they were to fulfill,
and the desolation that they
found was God's providence.
It was meant to be that way
for them.
BRUCHAC:
They did not view Native people
as humans.
They saw them almost as beasts
and vermin
who were cleared away
by God's pestilence
to make room
for God's chosen people.
And so I think it's necessary
to ask who the savages were.
Were they the people who had
lived in this territory
for millennia,
or were they these people
who forced themselves in
to someone else's home?
NARRATOR:
They spent their first month
tethered to the ship
while three successive
scouting parties
probedheir way down
the long arm of the cape
towards the mainland,
looking for fresh water
and a suitable place to settle
for the winter.
On their first day out,
they caught sight
of six men and a dog
walking far down the beach,
the first native inhabitants
they had seen.
The men stared back at them
for a moment,
then whistled for the dog
and disappeared
into the line of trees.
As they moved
through the strange
and inscrutable landscape
filled with signs
of human presence
they could see
but not understand,
their first halting forays
had a primal, transgressive,
unsettling character to them.
DONEGAN:
In the first scouting mission,
they found a sand mound
d started to dig it up.
And they realized
this might be a grave,
so they stopped digging.
Bradford doesn't report that
in his history;
Edward Winslow does.
What Bradford reports
is coming on another place,
finding the same kind of mounds,
digging it up,
and finding baskets of corn.
They take away half the corn.
Then what happens
on the second scouting trip
Bradford doesn't report at all,
but Winslow gives us
a long account
of a smaller group
going in through the woods
to an Indian village
and finding something
that looks like a grave.
So they begin to dig,
and this time they continue.
They start taking out the goods,
they start taking out
the planks,
they start taking out the mats
until they find two bundles,
one larger and one smaller.
They open up the first bundle,
and the first thing they notice
is that it's full
of this fine red powder
that has a kind of smell.
They say it's not a bad smell,
but the smell comes up to them.
They look further in
and they see the bones and skull
of a man.
The face still has skin
clinging to it,
but what's most startling
is that the skull is covered
with blond hair.
So they know that
this is not an Indian,
but the body of a European.
They open up the second mat
and the find the bones
and the skull of a child.
And the child's body
is decorated
with white Indian beads
and bracelets,
and there are little
childish things around.
So there's this mystery.
"What has happened here?
"Who are these bodies?
"What are they doing
in the same grave?
"What was the relationship
between these dead bodies
and the living hands
that put them there?"
And they cannot construct
a narrative about that.
And this makes them think
of their own situation.
"How will we die here?
"Whose hands will attend to us?
What will happen to us here?"
NARRATOR:
They moved on.
A few nights later, at a place
called First Encounter Beach,
they were attacked in the dark
by a party of warriors.
For hours, the air was filled
with war cries
and whistling arrows,
which they answered with
deafening blasts of musket fire
until the attackers withdrew.
"Thus it pleased God,"
William Bradford wrote,
"to vanquish our enemies
and give us deliverance."
Finally, on December 8,
on the far western shore
of the bay,
they came upon a site
they determined might suit them
for a settlement.
BAILYN:
It was an Indian settlement
that had been abandoned.
It seemed, physically speaking,
a proper place.
And it had a nice slope
down to the harbor
and fields beyond,
and that seemed to be
a convenient place.
BRUCHAC:
And one of the sad,
tragic ironies
is that the place that
the Plymouth colonists
settle on for their location
is the village that was perhaps
the hardest hit
of all the Wampanoag vlages,
Patuxet,
to the point where there are
bodies lying on the ground
that cannot be buried
because there are no relatives.
And from a Native perspective,
you would not reoccupy
those places.
So people must have thought
the Pilgrims were insane
to come and settle in a place
where there's been so much death
and loss.
NARRATOR:
On December 12, the third
and final scouting party
sailed back across the bay
to the waiting
Mayflower,
where William Bradford was
greeted with staggering news.
Five days earlier,
his 23-year-old wife Dorothy
had somehow fallen overboard
while the ship lay at anchor
and drowned in the icy waters
of the bay.
ALLAN:
The decks were icy.
She could have slipped
overboard.
She could equally have been
suffering from depression.
Maybe it was too much,
leaving her child behind.
Maybe with the advanced scurvy,
which can give you the feeling
of not just depression,
but of being doomed
Did she slip herself
into the water?
PHILBRICK:
And to this day,
people are wondering,
"Well, was it just an accident?"
We have a tendency, I think,
to think that people of this
enormous religious belief
would never take their life.
And that's not the case at all.
And the fact of the matter is,
despair was a huge part
of what all of them
were feeling.
A child had just died
the day before her death.
NARRATOR:
William Bradford never spoke of
Dorothy's death in his history,
and the circumstances
were never explained.
Late in life, he penned
the lines of a simple poem.
BRADFORD:
Faint not, poor soul,
in God still trust.
Fear not the things
thou suffer must.
For whom he loves,
he doth chastise.
And then all tears
wipes from their eyes.
NARRATOR:
On Friday, December 15, 1620,
with its cargo of sickened, and
sea-weary passengers and crew,
the
Mayflower
sailed west across
the vast windswept bay,
towards the dark wintry shore
that awaited them.
They arrive just at
the worst possible time.
Winter is just coming in.
And it's the end of December
by the time they begin
to start building houses.
HARDMAN MOORE:
The
Mayflower
had to anchor
a mile offshore,
because the harbor at Plymouth
wasn't deep enough
to let the ship right up.
So that they had to ferry
the supplies, the goods,
so slowly
in from the Mayflower.
And they managed to build
only very few houses,
far fewer than they'd
anticipated.
BAILYN:
Everything was wrong.
I mean, they had
to reach the shore
by wading through ice-cold water
to the shoreline.
And, Bradford says, at one point
with sleet beating at them,
they were covered
with this ice glaze.
And they caught cold
and they died.
EDWARD WINSLOW:
Friday, the 22nd.
The storm still continued,
that we could not get a-land
nor they come to us aboard.
WOMAN:
Push, push!
WINSLOW:
This morning good-wife Allerton
was delivered of a son,
but dead born.
Sunday, the 24th,
our people on shore
heard a cry of some savages,
which caused an alarm,
and to stand on their guard,
expecting an assault.
But all was quiet.
NARRATOR:
They had just set to work
building a 21-square-foot
common house for protection
against Indian attack
when the temperature dropped
and the weather closed in
mercilessly.
One by one, the weakened
immigrants began to succumb,
to dysentery, pneumonia,
tuberculosis, exposure.
HARDMAN MOORE:
That first sickness,
that general mortality,
must have been so pervasive.
At one time
in that first winter,
two or three people were dying
every day.
The number of people who were
sick and needed caring for,
it must have been overwhelming.
I think there is something
particularly devastating
about what happens to them
that first winter.
NARRATOR:
By February,
people were dying in droves,
some huddled
in the makeshift settlement,
many more back on the
Mayflower,
which had been converted
to a hospital for the sick,
and a hospice for the dying.
ALLAN:
The conditions onboard that ship
must have been absolutely awful.
They can't go ashore.
They're all suffering
from scurvy.
That sweet ship, the Mayflower,
by the end, it was like
a death house on the water.
It pleased God to visit us then
with death daily,
and with so general a disease
that the living were scarce able
to bury the dead,
and the well in no measure
sufficient to tend the sick.
PHILBRICK:
By the spring,
half of them are dead.
50-some people
die that first year.
And, by all rights,
they all should have died
given how ill-prepared
they were.
NARRATOR:
What happened that first winter
was more than most of the
grieving survivors could bear.
The full horror
of what they went through
was fated to live on
only in the margins of history.
DONEGAN:
In Bradford's history,
he really turns away
from the corpses.
There's no record of burials,
which, with mass mortality,
with the dead outnumbering
the living,
would account for a major
activity of the group.
So the question becomes,
"What happened to the dead?"
And what we do know is hidden
in a piece of court testimony
by a man named Phineas Pratt.
He came in 1623
to find the Plymouth Colony
completely devastated.
And he asks, "Where are
the rest of our friends?"
And the answer, he reports, is,
"God took them away by death.
"And we were so dejected, and
so frightened that first winter,
"that those who could carried
our sick men into the woods,
"and propped them up
against trees,
"with their muskets by their
side, so that the Indians,
"looking in through the forest,
would think that we had a guard,
a forest sentinel."
So, the well, Bradford tells us,
are nursing the sick,
but what Phineas Pratt tells us
is those who have strength
are carrying sick
and dying bodies into the woods
and propping them up
against trees.
Later, when Increase Mather is
writing a history of Plymouth,
he quotes Phineas Pratt.
But right at that terribly
transgressive moment,
Mather changes the story
and inserts, instead,
that they buried their dead
at night,
so as to keep their losses
from the Indians.
And then as the story
of the Pilgrim dead
gets told and retold,
then the story of night burials
starts to get remembered,
and cherished and elaborated.
And it comes to be not only
that they do night burials,
but that they plant corn over
the graves so that the Indians
don't notice how many losses
that they have.
But what really happened
gets completely dropped
out of the history.
It is too transgressive,
and very dangerous,
as the story about the corpses
falling in the wilderness
comes to pass.
And this place becomes
this place of death
both Native and English
And so they had to make
some kind of meaning
out of that.
It couldn't just be a waste yard
of bones for everyone.
They have to mean differently.
So they started to assign
different meanings
to Indian death
and English death.
Indian death were just
bones scattered on the ground,
were forgotten people,
were just material.
Indian death was about
becoming carrion, waste,
dispossession.
Whereas English death was about
becoming the seed, buried,
possession.
English death was going
to be remembered,
was going to be honored.
And Bradford makes
very much of this,
because in his history,
what he has to do is plant
those people in Plymouth,
to make a kind of
permanence there,
to claim that ground,
as a ground of history.
So putting bodies
into the ground,
even though
they're scarce buried,
is a way of making
that ground sacred.
It could be
that the most important thing
that the people of Plymouth
planted was their dead.
NARRATOR:
The days were growing longer,
and the death rate
had finally begun to subside,
when on Friday, March 16,
cries of panic and alarm
rang out as a lone warrior,
naked except for a loin cloth,
and carrying a bow,
broke cover from the line
of trees near their huts
and walked boldly into the camp.
EDWARD WINSLOW:
He saluted us in English,
and bade us welcome,
he was the first savage
we had met withal.
He said his name was Samoset.
He told us the place we now live
is called Patuxet,
and that about four years ago
all the inhabitants died
of an extraordinary plague,
so as there is none
to hinder our possession,
or to lay claim unto it.
DONEGAN:
The Wampanoags
are looking for an ally.
They're suspicious of the
Pilgrims when they first come,
they stay away from them
at first, they watch them.
But, eventually, they realize
that an alliance
is going to be best
for them as well.
VANDERHOOP:
It was not just a political
convenience, it was survival.
If you do not have
power backing you,
and you are a weakened people,
then the enemies
that naturally exist around you
will take advantage.
And our leadership knew
very well
the tough decisions that needed
to be made at the time
in order to ensure
that Wampanoag people
continued to exist
in Wampanoag territory.
NARRATOR:
Six days later,
the emissary returned,
bringing the principle leader of
the Wampanoags, their Massasoit,
and 60 of his men,
including Tisquantum,
the sole survivor of Patuxet,
who served as interpreter
as the two sides concluded
a remarkable treaty,
agreeing among other things
not to harm each other's people,
and to come to each other's aid
in the event of attack.
It was also agreed
that Tisquantum would remain
with the struggling group,
on the site of his former home,
to help with
the spring planting.
PHILBRICK:
Both peoples were in
a survival situation.
The Wampanoag had been
devastated by disease
in the three years before, and
the neighboring Narragansetts
were threatening
to really take them over.
The Pilgrims were obviously
very close to losing everything
after that first winter,
and so they began to form
an alliance with Massasoit
and the Wampanoags.
And I think that defined
so much of what happened
in that first and second year.
NARRATOR:
Two weeks after concluding
the treaty,
the immigrants gathered
at the harbor
to bid a somber farewell
to the
Mayflower,
which on April 5, 1621
set sail for England,
with Captain Jones,
an empty hold,
and a drastically diminished
crew.
It was one of the last voyages
she would ever take.
In less than a year, Captain
Jones himself would be dead,
and two years after that,
the
Mayflower,
rotting at anchor on the Thames,
would be sold for scrap,
and disappear to history.
The Pilgrims' only anchor
and lifeline was gone.
They were on their own.
With the return of warm weather,
they put in their first crops,
under Tisquantum's
careful supervision,
planting herring in yard-wide
mounds of earth
sewn with corn seed,
and adding once the corn came up
seeds of squash and beans.
The coming of spring
did not entirely halt
the sad toll of death.
BRADFORD:
In this month of April, whilst
they were busy about their seed,
their governor, Mr. John Carver,
came out of the field very sick.
It being a hot day, he
complained greatly of his head,
and lay down, and within
a few hours his senses failed,
so as he never spake more
till he died.
Shortly after, William Bradford
was chosen governor
in his stead.
And by renewed election
every year,
continued sundry years together,
which I here note once for all.
NARRATOR:
All through the warm summer
months, the grieving immigrants
labored to make a world
for themselves, building houses,
tilling soil, fishing for cod
and bass in the bay.
In June, they made
their first tentative efforts
to trade with the Native groups
around them.
In July, William Bradford
sent Edward Winslow
and Stephen Hopkins to visit
the Wampanoags in their village,
40 miles to the west,
to build on their alliance,
and to find out whom
they had stolen corn seed from
the previous December,
and to make reparations.
Autumn came, and the days
dipped down into darkness.
By October, they had finished
erecting 11 crude structures
in all seven dwelling houses,
and four common buildings.
They had also managed to bring
in a successful harvest of corn,
thanks to Tisquantum,
and as the leaves began to turn,
they prepared,
Edward Winslow reported,
to in a "special manner rejoice
together after we had gathered
the fruit of our labors."
No one at the time
called it Thanksgiving.
William Bradford made no mention
of it in his history.
BRADDICK:
There isn't much of a record.
There's a paragraph, I think,
in Winslow, that describes
what's come to be known
as the first Thanksgiving.
It says nothing
about an invitation.
It's just that the English
were doing this thing,
and Massasoit showed up
with these 90 men.
They stayed for three days,
they went out and got five deer
to add to what the English
were cooking.
They played games together.
There's like four little facts
of what happened,
and then the rest of it
is fluff that's been added
over the centuries.
NARRATOR:
Two-and-a-half centuries later,
at another American moment
of great trial and suffering,
the humble event,
all but disregarded
by the Pilgrims themselves,
would be recast
as one of the most important
and defining moments
in American history.
DONEGAN:
We love the story
of Thanksgiving
because it's about alliance
and abundance and envisioning
a future where Native Americans
and colonial Americans
can come together and celebrate
the providences of a single God.
But part of the reason
that they were grateful
was that they had been
in such misery,
that they had lost
so many people,
on both sides.
So, in some way,
that day of Thanksgiving
is also coming out of mourning,
it's also coming out of grief,
and this abundance that is
a relief from that loss.
But we don't think about
the loss,
we think about the abundance.
(cannon fire)
NARRATOR:
On November 9, 1621,
a shout went up from a lookout
on Burial Hill, followed by
the loud booming of a cannon,
as far out in the bay
the first sails they had seen
since the departure
of the
Mayflower
loomed on the eastern horizon.
They had had no contact
with the outside world
for more than a year.
Though they feared at first
it might be French pirates,
it turned out to be an English
relief ship, called the
Fortune,
sent by their mercurial broker,
Thomas Weston.
A third the size
of the
Mayflower,
the tiny vessel carried
35 new recruits
to Bradford's dismay only
a handful of them Separatists,
no supplies to speak of,
more mouths to feed
just as winter came on again,
and a stinging letter
from Thomas Weston himself,
rebuking the colonists
for having failed to send back
any cargo with the Mayflower.
When the
Fortune
weighed anchor
four weeks later,
they freighted it
with as much beaver fur
and timber as they could muster,
but it was nowhere near enough
to make a difference.
BUNKER:
They desperately needed to find
something they could ship back
to England to pay their debts.
And that just wasn't available
in those early years
in New England.
So there were
all kinds of challenges,
which they were not
well prepared for.
NARRATOR:
Over the next 18 months,
as the Pilgrims struggled
to stay alive
and keep their group together,
they would face staggering
new challenges,
on not one but three fronts
simultaneously
economic and demographic,
as they struggled desperately
to make ends meet
and to contend with the influx
of what William Bradford called
profane and disorderly
outsiders, but also military,
as it soon became terrifying
clear that their alliance
with the Wampanoags would not be
easily replicated
with other groups in the region.
The struggle
with those challenges
would change them forever.
DONEGAN:
Part of that has to do
with living in a world
where it suddenly seems
that no holds are barred.
Where you're being forced to do
things that you never thought
that you would be forced to do,
and you're willing to do things
that you never thought
that you would be willing to do.
NARRATOR:
Ominous rumors had been
swirling around the settlement
for months, first that
the Narragansetts
then that the Massachusetts
Were planning to attack,
when in early December,
William Bradford ordered
the construction of an
eight-foot-high timber wall
around the entire plantation
for protection.
Work on the massive
fortification
had just been completed
when three new ships
also sent by Thomas Weston
Appeared in the harbor.
Their arrival would trigger
the darkest crisis
in the Pilgrims' history.
DONEGAN:
Thomas Weston sponsored
another competing trading post
north of Plymouth.
It was very different from
the Pilgrim contingent.
They were not there
for religious reasons,
they did not have
a social cohesion,
they did not have
family structures.
They were there
for financial reasons,
and it was a collection
of young men.
NARRATOR:
None of the 60 new colonists
were Separatists.
They had come to set up
what amounted
to a rival trading post,
and after four months
of uneasy cohabitation
with the colonists at Plymouth,
moved 30 miles up the coast
to a place called Wessagussett,
near a Massachusetts village
still reeling
from the recent epidemics.
DONEGAN:
And things very, very quickly
start deteriorating there.
They have terrible relationships
with the Natives.
They run out of food.
The Natives start jeering
at them, making fun of them.
The people at Wessagusset
start trading their clothes
for capfuls of corn, they start
working for the Indians.
And the whole social structure
of that trading post
just absolutely falls apart.
(thunder crackles)
NARRATOR:
As the new colony disintegrated,
more bad news reached Plymouth,
first that the
Fortune
had been
plundered on her return voyage,
leaving the colony
for a second straight year
with nothing to show for itself,
then that a massive
Indian uprising in Virginia
had killed 347 English colonists
near Jamestown.
BUNKER:
And the Pilgrims feared
that something similar
was about to happen to them.
And there were clear indications
that they were under threat
from some parts of the local
Native American population.
NARRATOR:
In March 1623, news reached
Plymouth that Massasoit himself,
their only ally, lay dying,
and William Bradford
quickly dispatched Edward
Winslow to his bedside.
Under the Englishmen's
skilled care,
the Wampanoag leader
made a rapid recovery,
and in return revealed
that Plymouth
was in the gravest danger
from a region-wide conspiracy
whose aim was to eradicate
all English settlements
in New England.
DONEGAN:
The Massachusetts have a plan,
that they want to wipe out
the Wessagusset trading post.
But they're afraid
of retaliation from Plymouth.
So the plan is
to actually make a coalition,
and wipe out
both Wessagusset and Plymouth.
BRADFORD:
Mr. Weston's colony had by their
evil and debauched carriage
so exasperated the Indians
among them as they plotted
their overthrow.
And because they knew not
how to effect it
for fear we would revenge it
upon them,
they secretly instigated
other peoples to conspire
against us also,
thinking to assault us
with their force at home.
But their treachery
was discovered unto us,
and we went to rescue the lives
of our countrymen,
and also to take vengeance
of them for their villainy.
DONEGAN:
Miles Standish,
and Allerton, and Bradford
decide to make
a preemptive strike.
Miles Standish and others
go to Wessagusset
on the pretense of trade.
And they gather
many of the Indian men
including two leaders
into the trading post,
supposedly for trade.
Lock the doors, and on a signal,
kill these two men.
With their own knives
hanging around their neck.
BAILYN:
Standish was a war veteran,
and the veterans
of the Thirty Years' War
were brutes, hammerers.
And they went up there,
a young Indian boy they hung,
and then the rest
they stabbed to death,
and cut off one of their heads,
and brought it back
and put it on a pole
in the middle of Plymouth.
DONEGAN:
Miles Standish decapitates one
of them, and brings the head,
as a trophy, back to Plymouth,
where he is greeted with joy.
This is Wituwamat.
The head is then erected
on a pike
and placed at the apex
of their fort,
and it stays there for years.
BRADFORD:
By the good providence of God,
we killed seven
of the chief of them,
and the head of one of them
stands still upon our fort
for a terror unto others.
NARRATOR:
When word of the attack
reached Leiden, John Robinson
wrote an anguished letter
back to William Bradford.
JOHN ROBINSON (dramatized):
"Concerning the killing
of those poor Indians.
"Oh!
"How happy a thing had it been
if you had converted some
"before you had killed any.
"Besides, where blood
is once begun to be shed,
"it is seldom stanched
of a long time after.
"You will say they deserved it,
"but upon what provocations
by those heathenish Christians?
"It is also a thing
more glorious in men's eyes,
"than pleasing in God's to be a
terror to poor barbarous people.
Yours truly loving,
John Robinson"
NARRATOR:
The bloodshed at Wessagussett
was a watershed,
permanently altering the balance
of power in the region,
in favor of the Pilgrims and
their allies, the Wampanoags.
Five months later,
William Bradford married
a recently arrived 32-year-old
widow named Alice Southworth,
in a ceremony attended
by the entire community.
DONEGAN:
The Pilgrims usually shun
decoration, ornamentation.
But when Bradford gets married,
people notice one piece
of ornament,
a piece of linen
soaked in Wituwamat's blood.
Visitors to Plymouth
commented upon it.
It's there in letters.
When Massasoit comes with
his band to Bradford's wedding,
he sees Wituwamat's head
on the pike.
Although, to Massasoit,
it was a signal of the strength
of his alliance with Plymouth,
and Plymouth's willingness
to take action against enemies.
NARRATOR:
By 1623, the most immediate
existential threats
to the colony's survival
had started to recede.
But other challenges remained,
and in the long run,
these would prove
even more intractable.
BAILYN:
When you trace Bradford's
thinking through these years,
what strikes me most
is the degree to which
it was a continuous
disappointment.
By 1625, which is, what,
just a few years
from the beginning,
he's already complaining
that the group is dissipating,
that there are troubles,
that strangers and Gentiles
of all sorts are making trouble.
NARRATOR:
In 1626, a gloom fell over
the settlement
when news came from Leiden
that John Robinson had died
the previous winter.
HARDMAN MOORE:
And I think that was
a perpetual disappointment
to Brewster and to Bradford.
They felt the pain
of that very clearly,
that this person who was
the most crucial mentor
for the whole group,
so instrumental
in creating this community,
was never there with them.
NARRATOR:
In 1626, the investors
in London,
convinced the colony
would never show a profit,
filed for bankruptcy
and disbanded
the Merchant Adventurers.
Most of the massive debt
left behind was assumed
by eight of the colony's
most stalwart members,
who, going forward,
would have a monopoly
on whatever trade the company
might be able to establish,
a prospect that by 1626
looked exceedingly bleak,
as most people
On both sides of the Atlantic
now assumed the blighted colony
would soon fail completely.
But it didn't.
Their business model leaned
heavily on the idea that America
was a place of things
of incredible value.
Now, beaver are not quite
as valuable as gold,
but it is still
a valuable commodity.
And the beaver
ends up saving them.
BUNKER:
The Pilgrims certainly
did try to find beaver skins
as soon as they could.
But although beaver skins
were valuable,
the price was relatively low
during the early 1620s.
It rocketed up later on
in 1627, 1628.
It quadrupled, and the Pilgrims
got the benefit of that.
But in order to really get furs
in sufficient quantities,
they needed to get up to Maine.
And Edward Winslow
was the key character in this,
because Winslow had been going
up to Maine for several years
the Kennebec Valley in Maine,
or the Penobscot Valley
in Maine
river valleys where there are
enormous supplies
of beaver fur readily available.
So everything came together
in 1627 and 1628.
The price had gone up,
Pilgrims had found the furs,
the opportunity presented
itself,
and back came beaver skins
in their thousands.
Now, once the Pilgrims had been
able to deliver beaver skins
back to England in sufficient
quantities to turn a profit,
investors in London saw that
if you took this business model
the Pilgrims had developed,
then you might be able to build
a much, much bigger colony,
with not hundreds of colonists,
but thousands of colonists.
And so they took
the Plymouth Colony prototype
and they turned it into
something far, far bigger,
on a far bigger scale.
Which is where you find yourself
with the founding
of New Boston, in 1630.
NARRATOR:
In the spring of 1630,
a ship called the
Arabella,
the first of a massive fleet
of 17 ships,
led by a wealthy Puritan lawyer
named John Winthrop,
left Yarmouth
for the bay of Massachusetts,
60 miles north of Plymouth,
bringing 1,000 well-supplied
Puritan immigrants.
All through the spring and
summer the great ships arrived.
By the end of July,
a church had been established,
the First Church of Boston.
By mid-September,
the new settlement already had
a population of nearly 1,000,
three times larger in ten weeks,
than the tiny community Plymouth
had gathered to itself
in ten years.
HARDMAN MOORE:
The size of the two groups
is massively different.
The ethos is similar: they are
all Reformed Protestants
of a passionate conviction.
But the striking difference
is the people who go to Boston
make an enormous fuss
about the fact that
they are not separating
from the Church of England.
NARRATOR:
In July, Edward Winslow
paid a visit
to their new sister colony.
Whatever their theological
differences, he reported,
William Bradford could take
courage in knowing that
the elders of the new colony
had been urged
to "take advice of them
at Plymouth,"
and to "do nothing
to offend them."
After ten harrowing years, the
future of a Puritan New England,
if not aeparatist one,
seemed assured.
The Pilgrims' experiment,
in that respect at least,
had worked.
Thus out of small beginnings
greater things
have been produced by His hand
that me all things of nothing,
and gives being to all things
that are.
And as one small candle
may light a thousand,
so the light here kindled
hath shone to many.
Yea in some sort
to our whole nation;
let the glorious name
of Jehovah have all the praise.
HARDMAN MOORE:
Well, in some ways, of course,
it is a success story.
Because, completely against
the odds, they survived,
they put down roots,
they established a colony.
So in that sense,
it was a success.
The sense in which it is
poignantly not a success is,
I think for Bradford,
the sense that the community
he had hoped for didn't
materialize in the sweet way
that he had hoped it would.
PHILBRICK:
They wanted to achieve
the ultimate spiritual community
on earth,
and that never happened.
NARRATOR:
In 1630,
not long after the founding
of the colony at Boston,
William Bradford,
40 now and beginning his tenth
year as governor,
sat down to write a history
of Plymouth Plantation,
sensing perhaps from the moment
the new settlement began
how dramatically his own
community would be transformed,
and determined to leave an
account of who his people were,
and what had happened to them,
and why they mattered.
DONEGAN:
I think, for Bradford, the
experiment was not a success.
But as a historian writing
for posterity,
he can tell the story
and preserve the meaning
of their vision
and their implantation.
Even as that vision
is being dissipated,
and not being held by others, he
can preserve it in his history.
BAILYN:
He was aware
of what was going on around him,
acutely aware of things
that were happening.
And he was no fool.
He knew that when the Puritans
started to arrive in 1630,
15,000 of them, the market
for agricultural goods
was going to boom.
Which meant more farms,
farther out, fresher ground,
that would further dissipate
the religious group.
And even those most committed
to its principles
are wandering out into farms
and outlying districts.
The heart of the community
was being lost
because its integrity
was personal
people living together
as a group, praying together,
and sharing their beliefs.
PHILBRICK:
And this is a great despair
for Bradford.
Instead of his little
congregation of saints,
he has his best friend,
Edward Winslow, moving off,
forming other towns,
such as Duxbury,
leaving the mother church.
Oh, poor Plymouth,
how dost thou moan!
Thy children,
all from thee are gone.
And left thou art,
in widow's state
Poor, helpless, sad,
and desolate.
Some thou hast had,
it is well known,
who sought thy good
before their own.
But times have changed,
those days are gone,
And therefore thou
art left alone.
To make others rich,
thyself are poor.
They are increased
out of thy store.
But, being rich,
they thee forsake,
leaving thee poor and desolate.
HARDMAN MOORE:
I wonder with Bradford.
He has had to deal
with so much human frailty,
so many human foibles
in his life as governor,
that perhaps the sense of being
a pilgrim bound for heaven,
rather than a pilgrim
who will reach
their new Jerusalem on earth,
is borne in on him
very strongly
towards the end of his life.
I think there may be something
of that verse from Hebrews 11,
"We are pilgrims and strangers
in the world,"
comes to his heart.
BAILYN:
And at the end of his life, in
what to me is especially moving,
he turned to Hebrew,
he learned Hebrew.
He thought he'd get closer
to God in conversation
with the sacred Script.
Anything to deepen
his understanding
of what was happening.
Though I am grown aged,
yet I have had a longing desire
to see with my own eyes,
something of that most ancient
language, and holy tongue,
in which the law,
and oracles of God were writ.
And in which God, and angels,
spake to the holy patriarchs
of old time,
and what names were given
to things from the creation.
And though I cannot attain
to much herein,
yet I am refreshed to have seen
some glimpse here of
as Moses saw the land
of Canaan from afar off.
My aim and desire is to see
how the words and phrases
lie in the holy text.
And to discern somewhat
of the same for my own content.
(speaking Hebrew)
NARRATOR:
He died on May 9, 1657,
having outlived
all his contemporaries,
and having served as governor
for 31 of the 37 years
he had lived in the New World,
"lamented,"
his first biographer,
Cotton Mather, later said, "by
all the colonies of New England,
as a common blessing
and father to them all."
He was 67 years old.
His body was buried
on the summit of Burial Hill,
near the grave of his mentor,
William Brewster,
and in sight of the sand hills
of Cape Cod.
In the years to come,
the world his people had come to
in search of a new Jerusalem
would be transformed utterly,
with shocking rapidity,
and the Pilgrim experience
itself all but carried under
and forgotten.
Within 15 years of his death,
there were 70,000
English settlers in 110 towns
along the New England coast,
and fewer than 20,000
Native Americans left
in half a dozen tribes, and only
at most 1,000 Wampanoags.
In 1675, Massasoit's own son,
Metacom
called Phillip by the settlers
helped lead a desperate
last ditch effort
to drive the English colonists
from their territory
before their world
was obliterated completely.
BRUCHAC:
In the aftermath
of King Philip's War,
a day of thanksgiving
was declared to celebrate
that King Philip was now dead,
and his head was stuck
on a pole in the middle
of Plymouth.
Which, I think,
is why Native people instituted
a day of mourning
at Thanksgiving.
Because had the Plymouth
colonists not survived,
later colonization
might not have happened
without those coastal
settlements
that created a toehold
and dug in.
And once they were there, it was
impossible to extricate them.
NARRATOR:
As time went on,
the manuscript William Bradford
had left to his sons and heirs
on his deathbed
was carefully handed down
in the family
from one generation to the next,
until a century after his death
it found its way
into the library of the
Old South Church in Boston.
It was still there in 1767,
when the last royal governor
of the colony,
Thomas Hutchinson,
consulted it for a history
he was writing, after which
the Revolution came,
and the manuscript vanished
into thin air.
DONEGAN:
And so Bradford's book was lost.
It was taken from there
in 1777 by the British,
during the Revolutionary War.
And people tried to recover it,
people tried to find it,
people tried to trace it.
And nobody knew what
had happened to their history,
their great gospel
of the founding of the nation.
NARRATOR:
For 80 years
following independence,
the missing Bradford text
was lamented
by scholars in the North
as the shadow of
American history lengthened,
and as a bitter
sectional dispute
between North and South
intensified,
fought in part over whether
the nation's deepest roots
lay in slaveholding Virginia
or Puritan New England.
LEPORE:
There's this tremendous battle
in the 19th century
between New England historians
and Virginia historians
about which is the first
American settlement:
Jamestown or Plymouth.
NARRATOR:
All hope of the book's recovery
had been lost,
when in 1855 a scholar browsing
in a bookstore in Boston
chanced upon a recently
published English history
of the Anglican Church
in America,
and his eye fell on
an unmistakable quotation
from the missing
Bradford journal.
Excited inquiries revealed
that the long lost manuscript
had somehow found its way
No one knew how
into the library of the Bishop
of London at Fulham Palace.
The bishop refused
to surrender the manuscript,
but consented to have
a hand-written copy made,
and sent back to Boston,
where it was published in 1856,
spawning a pre-war Pilgrim craze
across the North,
on the eve of the bloodiest war
in American history,
in the midst of which,
as the death toll mounted,
Abraham Lincoln established
the last Thursday in November
as a national day
of Thanksgiving
in honor of the Pilgrim fathers,
and by the end of which,
the Pilgrim narrative
had been officially anointed
as the true founding moment
of America.
DONEGAN:
Eventually they petitioned to
bring the book back to America.
That petition was granted.
And when the text itself
returned,
it was a scriptural event.
And it came back with such
ceremony, and such gratitude,
and such honor, that the history
was coming home again.
So it was another
kind of plantation,
it was reimplanting that
first history back in its home,
and nationalizing that story.
NARRATOR:
In the spring of 1897,
the little manuscript bound
in brittle vellum
was finally brought home again
for the first time in 120 years,
and installed with great fanfare
in the statehouse of the
Commonwealth of Massachusetts
in Boston, in a ceremony
attended by dozens
of prominent politicians
and dignitaries.
In a long and rousing
keynote speech,
Senator George Hoare extolled
William Bradford's journal
as a work unequaled
in the annals of human history
"since the story of Bethlehem"
and his final words,
ringing through the statehouse,
brought the packed assembly
to its feet.
"Massachusetts," he called out,
"will preserve it until the time
"shall come that her children
are unworthy of it;
and that time shall come,
never!"
The Pilgrims' story
was complete.
The journey was over,
and the Pilgrims themselves
250 years on, had prevailed.
Somewhere, William Bradford
might have smiled.
BRADFORD:
But them a place
did God provide,
in wilderness,
and did them guide
unto the American shore,
where they made way
for many more.
They broke the ice,
themselves alone,
and so became a stepping stone
for all others, who in like case
were glad to find
a resting place.
(birds squawking)
MAN:
Now, you told me there was
an interesting story.
♪
♪
ANNOUNCER:
"American Experience:
The Pilgrims"
♪