Mayflower

days of struggle along the New England coast, must have soon retired to his cabin.

    Many of the passengers were no doubt eager to set foot on land once again. All were thankful that they had finally arrived safely in America. And yet it was difficult for them to look to the future with anything but dread. There were three thousand miles of ocean between them and home. The closest English communities in America were more than five hundred miles away. They knew that Master Jones was already impatient to get them off his ship and head the Mayflower back for home. But the land that surrounded them was low and sandy—a most unpromising place for a plantation. Bradford called it “a hideous and desolate wilderness.” They knew they had friends back in Holland, but if Thomas Weston’s reaction was any indication, the Merchant Adventurers in London could not be counted on for much support—financial or otherwise. Of more immediate concern was the attitude of the Native people of this place, who they feared were “readier to fill their sides full of arrows than otherwise.”
    Years later, Bradford looked back to that first morning in America with wonder. “But here I cannot stay and make a pause,” he wrote, “and stand half amazed at this poor people’s present condition….[T]hey had now no friends to welcome them nor inns to entertain or refresh their weatherbeaten bodies; no houses or much less towns to repair to, to seek for succor.” In the next four months, half of them would be dead. But what astonished Bradford was that half of them would somehow survive. “What could now sustain them,” Bradford wrote, “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 came 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.’”
    It was time to venture ashore. They had brought with them an open boat that could be both rowed and sailed, known as a shallop. About thirty-five feet long, it had been cut up into four pieces and stored below—where it had been “much bruised and shattered” over the course of the voyage. It would take many days for the carpenter to assemble and rebuild it. For the time being, they had the smaller ship’s boat. Loaded with sixteen well-armed men, the boat made its way to shore. It was only a narrow neck of land, but for these sea-weary men, it was enough. “[T]hey fell upon their knees,” Bradford wrote, “and blessed the God of Heaven who had brought them over the vast and furious ocean, and delivered them from all the perils and miseries thereof, again to set their feet on the firm and stable earth, their proper element.”
    They wandered over hills of sand that reminded them of the Downs in Holland. Amid the hollows of the dunes they found growths of birch, holly, ash, and walnut trees. With darkness coming, they loaded their boat with red cedar. The freshly sawed wood “smelled very sweet and strong,” and that night aboard the Mayflower, for the first time in perhaps weeks, they enjoyed the pleasures of a warm fire.
    It had been, for the most part, a reassuring introduction to the New World. Despite the apparent sterility of the landscape, they had found more trees than they would have come across back in Holland and even coastal England. But there had been something missing: nowhere had they found any people.

CHAPTER THREE
Into the Void
    A BOUT SIXTY MILES southwest of Provincetown Harbor, at the confluence of two rivers in the vicinity of modern Warren, Rhode Island, lived Massasoit, the most powerful Native leader, or sachem, in the region. He was in the prime of his life—about thirty-five, strong and imposing, with the quiet dignity that was expected of a sachem.
    Despite his personal vigor and equanimity, Massasoit presided over a people who had been devastated by disease. During the three years that the Pilgrims had been organizing their voyage to America, the Indians of southern New England had been hit by what scientists refer to as a virgin soil epidemic—a contagion against which they had no antibodies. From 1616 to 1619, what may have been bubonic plague introduced by European fishermen in modern Maine spread south along the Atlantic seaboard to the eastern shore of Narragansett