Mayflower

Beginnings and Ann Uhry Abrams’s The Pilgrims and Pocahontas: Rival Myths of American Origin. My brief account of the voyage of the Seaflower is indebted to Jill Lepore’s The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity, pp. 150–70. As Lepore points out, in addition to slaves from Plymouth Colony, there was a group from Massachusetts, requiring the Seaflower ’s captain to have certificates from both Plymouth governor Josiah Winslow and Massachusetts governor John Leverett. Winslow’s “Certificate to Thomas Smith concerning the transportation of Indian prisoners, August 9, 1676” is in the Stewart Mitchell Papers II at MHS. As Almon Wheeler Lauber makes clear in Indian Slavery in Colonial Times within the Present Limits of the United States, the Seaflower was one of many New England ships that transported Native American slaves to Bermuda and the Caribbean during and after King Philip’s War. See also Margaret Newell’s “The Changing Nature of Indian Slavery in New England, 1670–1720” in Reinterpreting New England Indians and the Colonial Experience, edited by Colin Calloway and Neal Salisbury, pp. 128–29. In a letter dated November 27, 1683, and cited by Lepore in The Name of War, the Puritan missionary John Eliot refers to some Indians who may have been part of the Seaflower ’s cargo: “A vessel carried away a great number of our surprised Indians, in the time of our wars, to sell them for slaves; but the nations, wither they went, would not buy them. Finally, she left them at Tangier; there they be, so many as live, or born there. An Englishman, a mason, came thence to Boston: he told me, they desired I would use some means for their return home. I know not what to do in it,” MHS Collections, vol. 3, p. 183. James Drake in King Philip’s War: Civil War in New England, 1675–676 writes convincingly about the degree to which New England was a bicultural community prior to the war: “By 1675 Indian and English polities had so intermeshed that in killing one another in King Philip’s War they destroyed a part of themselves,” p. 196; Drake also insists that “it should not be assumed that the English and the Indians had invariably been headed toward a dramatic confrontation,” p. 3. William Hubbard in HIWNE writes of the region’s Indians being “in a kind of maze,” p. 59. Douglas Leach in Flintlock and Tomahawk: New England in King Philip’s War tells of the proposal to build a wall around the core settlements of Massachusetts, pp. 165–66. For statistics on the death toll and carnage from King Philip’s War, see Eric Schultz and Michael Tougias’s King Philip’s War: The History and Legacy of America’s Forgotten Conflict, pp. 4–5; James Drake’s King Philip’s War, pp. 168–70; and Neal Salisbury’s introduction to Mary Rowlandson’s SGG, p 1.
    CHAPTER ONE- They Knew They Were Pilgrims
    I have adjusted the spelling and punctuation of all quotations to make them more accessible to a modern audience—something that had already been done by the editors of OPP and MR. When it comes to dates, I have elected to go with the Julian calendar or “Old Style” used by the Pilgrims, with one exception. The Pilgrims’ new calendar year began on March 25; to avoid confusion, I have assumed the new year began on January 1. To bring the dates in synch with the calendar we use today, or the “New Style,” add ten days to the date listed in the text.
    My account of the Mayflower ’s voyage to America is largely based on OPP, pp. 58–60, and MR, pp. 4–5. The two dogs are mentioned in MR, p. 45. W. Sears Nickerson’s Land Ho!— 1620 : A Seaman’s Story of the Mayflower, Her Construction, Her Navigation, and Her First Landfall is an indispensable analysis of the voyage. Nowhere in OPP or MR is the name of the ship that brought the Pilgrims to America mentioned. If not for the 1623 land division, in which is listed the land given to those who “came first over in the May-Floure,” we might not know it today, although there has been plenty of research that corroborates the name of the Pilgrim ship. Concerning the state of the Mayflower ’s bottom, Nickerson writes that it “must have been extremely foul with grass and barnacles from being in the water all through the hot months,”