Mayflower

a few yards of the Mayflower, “as if she had been dead.” It was just too much of a temptation. As a small crowd looked on, two muskets were loaded, but when the first was fired, the barrel burst into fragments. Amazingly, no one was injured, and the whale, after issuing “a snuff,” swam leisurely away.
    The shallop was proving to be a problem. Instead of days, it was going to be weeks before the boat was completed. Some of the passengers began to insist that they should launch an overland expedition. When the Mayflower first sailed into the harbor, the mouth of a river had been sighted several miles to the southeast. Some of them, probably headed by Captain Miles Standish, advocated that a small party be rowed to shore so that they could investigate this potential settlement site.
    The risks of such a venture were considerable. So far they had seen no local inhabitants, but for all they knew, huge numbers of hostile Natives might be waiting just a few miles down the Cape. “The willingness of the persons was liked,” Bradford wrote, “but the thing itself, in regard of the danger, was rather permitted than approved.” Perhaps with an eye to reining in some of his military officer’s obvious impatience for action, Carver provided Standish with “cautions, directions, and instructions.” Standish’s party comprised sixteen men, including Bradford, Stephen Hopkins (whose experience in Virginia might help them if they should encounter any Indians), and Edward Tilley. Each of them was equipped with a musket, sword, and corselet, a light form of body armor that included a metal breastplate.
    On Wednesday, November 15, they were rowed ashore. Provincetown Harbor, as well as much of the bay side of the lower Cape, is characterized by wide tidal flats. Even a small boat runs aground many yards out, requiring the passengers to wade through the shallows to shore. In November, with the temperature on the verge of freezing, it was a long, cold slog to the beach, especially weighted down with armor and weapons.

    John Smith’s map of New England
    Standish soon had them marching single file along the shore. He was not a tall man—in the years ahead he won the sobriquet “Captain Shrimp”—but his courage and resolve were never questioned. Before leaving for America, the Pilgrims had contacted another potential candidate for the position of military leader: the redoubtable Captain John Smith. No one in England knew more about America than Smith. He had been at the founding of Jamestown in 1607; in 1614 he had led a voyage of exploration to what he named New England, creating the most detailed map of the region to date. (It had been Smith’s associate on that voyage, Thomas Hunt, who had abducted Squanto.) When the Pilgrims approached him in London, Smith wanted desperately to return to America, particularly to “the country of the Massachusetts,” which he described as “the paradise of those parts.” But the Pilgrims decided that they wanted no part of him. Smith bitterly related how they had insisted that his “books and maps were better cheap to teach them than myself.”
    Smith’s fatal flaw, as far as the Pilgrims were concerned, was that he knew too much. In the beginning of the settlement, they would have had no choice but to do as he said, and this could be dangerous. Smith possessed a strong personality, and a man of his worldly nature might come to dominate what they intended to be an inherently religious enclave. “[T]hey would not…have any knowledge by any but themselves,” Smith wrote, “pretending only religion their governor and frugality their counsel, when indeed it was…because…they would have no superiors.”
    If the Pilgrims perceived Standish as a cheaper and more tractable alternative to Smith, they were now paying the price for their misjudgment. Standish was full of martial pugnacity, but he had no idea where he was leading them. If the Pilgrims did possess Smith’s map of New England, they failed to make good use of it. Rivers were considered essential to a settlement site, and Smith’s map clearly indicated that the nearest available navigable waterway was the Charles River, less than a day’s sail to the northwest at present-day Boston. The Pilgrims, however, insisted on exploring the entire bay side of Cape Cod, even though there was no evidence on Smith’s map