Mayflower

account of a typical Puritan Sunday, see Horton Davies’s The Worship of the American Puritans, pp. 51–59. Henry Martyn Dexter speculates on the location of where the Pilgrim women washed in his edition of MR, p. 12, n. 35. For information on blue mussels and shellfish poisoning, I consulted http://www.ocean.udel.edu/mas/seafood/bluemussel.html and http://vm.cfsan.fda.gov/ ~mow/chap37.html. The Pilgrims speak of the whales they saw in Provincetown Harbor in MR, pp. 16, 30; unless otherwise noted, all of the quoted passages in this chapter are from MR. Thomas Morton refers to Miles Standish as “Captain Shrimp” in his New English Canaan, p. 143. John Smith refers to Massachusetts as “the paradise of those parts” in A Description of New England in Complete Writings, vol. 1, p. 340. He tells of his frustrations with the Pilgrims in The True Travels, Adventures, and Observations of Captain John Smith and Advertisements: or, The Path-way to Experience to Erect a Plantation; in addition to complaining about how they insisted that “because they could not be equals, they would have no superiors,” he writes of the way in which their “humorous ignorances, caused them for more than a year, to endure a wonderful deal of misery, with infinite patience; saying my books and maps were much better cheap to teach them, than myself” ; he also writes, “such humorists will never believe well, till they be beaten with their own rod,” Complete Writings, vol. 3, pp. 221, 282, 286. Smith attributed much of the Pilgrims’ foolhardy arrogance to their Separatist religious beliefs and the “pride, and singularity, and contempt of authority” that went with that radicalism. John Canup in Out of the Wilderness: The Emergence of an American Identity in Colonial New England writes insightfully about Smith’s opinion of the Pilgrims and their wanderings about Cape Cod, pp. 92–96. I have also benefited greatly from John Seelye’s probing interpretation of the Pilgrims’ adventures on the Cape in Prophetic Waters, pp. 110–15. Seelye insists that the Pilgrims did not use John Smith’s map and book about New England; if they had, he argues, “it seems doubtful they would have spent so much time looking for a river on the Cape—where none appears—and would instead have headed toward the short but broad waterway which Smith shows opening into the mainland somewhat to the north,” p. 119. But as James Baker points out in a personal communication, Smith’s map and book were part of William Brewster’s library.
    Henry Martyn Dexter judges the Pilgrims’ first day of marching to be closer to seven miles rather than the ten they thought it to be in MR, p. 16, n. 48. Even though there is a possibility that at least some of the Pilgrims had seen either references to Indian corn or the actual plant at the University of Leiden’s botanical garden (see Jeremy Bangs’s “The Pilgrims’ Earball,” forthcoming in New England Ancestors ), Bradford explicitly states that they had “never seen any such before,” OPP, p. 65. On the strangeness of corn to Europeans, see Darrett Rutman’s Husbandmen of Plymouth: “Corn was new and strange, alien and, therefore, to the English mind, inferior to the more traditional grains,” p. 10. See also Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald’s America’s Founding Food: The Story of New England Cooking, which discusses the discovery of a thousand-yearold cache of maize, p. 8. On the Pilgrims’ shallop, see William Baker’s The Mayflower and Other Colonial Vessels, pp. 65–74. On the weather conditions of seventeenth-century New England relative to Europe, see Karen Ordahl Kupperman’s “The Puzzle of the American Climate in the Early Colonial Period” in American Historical Review, vol. 87, 1982, pp. 1262–89. On the seasonal settlement patterns of Native New Englanders, see Kathleen Bragdon’s Native People of Southern New England, pp. 55–63. As John Canup comments in Out of the Wilderness, it is weirdly ironic that the Pilgrims named the place where they stole the Native seed Corn Hill, then met, only a few months later, Squanto, who had formerly lived in the Corn Hill section of London. Canup, following the lead of John Seelye in Prophetic Waters, speaks of the “prophetic meaning” of the Pilgrims’ experience on the