Mayflower

on how the Reformation of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries increased a sense of “Satan’s immediacy”: “For Englishmen of the Reformation period the Devil was a greater reality than ever…. Influential preachersfilled the ears of their hearers with tales of diabolic intervention in daily life…. Hugh Latimer assured his audience that the Devil and his company of evil spirits were invisible in the air all around them,” p. 561.
    On the construction techniques the Pilgrims employed that first winter, I have relied on the James Deetz and Patricia Deetz’s The Times of Their Lives, pp. 171–84. My thanks to Pret Woodburn and Rick McKee, interpretive artisans at Plimoth Plantation, for their insights into the construction techniques employed by the Pilgrims. On the configuration of the town, see “The Meersteads and Garden Plots of [Those] Which Came First, Laid Out 1620,” reproduced in Arber’s The Story of the Pilgrim Fathers, p. 381. Jeremy Bangs writes of the possible Dutch military influence on the town plan of Plymouth in Pilgrim Life in Leiden, p. 36. Robert Wakefield carefully weighs the evidence in determining how the Pilgrims were divided up among the first structures during the first year in “The Seven Houses of Plymouth,” Mayflower Descendant, January 1994, pp. 21–23.
    On English mastiffs see “The History of the Mastiff” at http://www.mastiff web.com/history.htm. On eastern cougars see http://staffweb.lib.jmu.edu/users/ bolgiace/ECF/abouteasterncougars.htm. William Cronon’s Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England contains excellent chapters about the Indians’ land management; see especially pp. 19–33. On the background of Miles Standish, see Robert Anderson’s The Pilgrim Migration, pp. 451–57; Standish refers to getting cheated out of his rightful inheritance in his will. John Lyford refers to Standish as a “silly boy” in a letter referred to by William Bradford in OPP, p. 156. Bradford’s remarks concerning John Billington’s “opprobrious speeches” was recorded in Thomas Prince’s A Chronological History of New England, vol. 3, p. 38. The ages of those orphaned during the first winter (some of which are estimates) are from PM. Concerning the Pilgrims’ attempts to create the impression that they were stronger than they actually were, Phineas Pratt in “A Declaration” writes, “[T]hey were so distressed with sickness that they, fearing the savages should know it, had set up their sick men with their muskets upon their rests and their backs leaning against trees,” MHS Collections, vol. 4, 4th ser., p. 478. On the demographics of death during the first winter, see John McCullough and Elaine York’s “Relatedness and Mortality Risk during a Crisis Year: Plymouth Colony, 1620–1621” in Ethology and Sociobiology, vol. 12, pp. 195–209; their findings indicate that those who were part of a family had a slightly better chance of survival and that children with one or more surviving parents had a much greater chance of survival. John Navin also provides a useful analysis of how the deaths of the first winter impacted the makeup of the colony in Plymouth Plantation, pp. 392–418. James Thacher in his appendix to The History of the Town of Plymouth tells of how a “freshet” revealed the bones of the Pilgrims during the first winter, p. 327. My thanks to James Baker for bringing this reference to my attention.
    For information on the Pilgrims’ “great guns,” see Harold Peterson’s Arms and Armor of the Pilgrims, pp. 24–27. Richard Rath in How Early America Sounded writes suggestively about the importance the colonists placed on thunder and lightning, pp. 10–42. MR describes Samoset as simply saying “Welcome” to the Pilgrims, but Prince, whose chronology was apparently based on Bradford’s original (now lost) notes, has him saying, “Welcome, Englishmen! Welcome, Englishmen!” in A Chronological History of New England, vol. 3, p. 33.
    CHAPTER SIX- In a Dark and Dismal Swamp
    Unless otherwise noted, all quotations are from MR, pp. 50–59, and OPP, pp. 79–87. Although the Pilgrims did not comment on Samoset’s skin color, they later noted that the Indians are “of complexion like our English gypsies,” MR, p. 53. John Humins in