Mayflower

the open shallop, The wind was out of the northeast, and the shallop had a difficult time weathering the point within which the Mayflower was anchored. After being blown to the opposite side of the harbor, they spent the night tucked into an inlet that is now part of Pilgrim Lake. The tidal flats along the shore were becoming more than just a nuisance; as the temperatures dipped to well below freezing, their wet shoes and stockings began to freeze. “[S]ome of our people that are dead,” Bradford wrote, “took the original of their death here.”
    Cape Cod is well to the south of England (indeed, the Cape is about the same latitude as Madrid, Spain), but so far they had experienced temperatures that were much colder than back home. As they soon discovered, New England has a very different climate from England. Weather along the eastern seaboard of North America usually comes from the continent to the west, while in England it comes from the Atlantic Ocean. Since land absorbs and releases heat much more quickly than water, New England tends to be colder in the winter and hotter in the summer than England.
    Adding to the disparity between American and English winters is the Gulf Stream, which continually warms the British Isles. But in 1620 there was yet another factor at work. North America was in the midst of what climatologists have called the “little ice age”—a period of exceptional cold that persisted well into the eighteenth century. As a result, the Pilgrims were experiencing temperatures that were cold even by modern standards in New England, and they were more than a month away from finding a place to live.
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    By morning, there were six inches of snow on the ground. By the time they’d sailed south back to Pamet Harbor in modern Truro, they were so frostbitten and numb that they had no choice but to name the inlet Cold Harbor. Jones decided to explore the northern and largest of the two creeks by land. But after several hours of “marching up and down the steep hills, and deep valleys, which lay half a foot thick with snow,” the master of the Mayflower had had enough. At fifty years old, he was most certainly the eldest of the group. Some of the Pilgrims—perhaps led by the recently demoted Standish—wanted to continue, but Jones insisted it was time to make camp under several large pine trees. That night they feasted on six ducks and three geese “with soldiers’ stomachs for we had eaten little all that day.”
    Cold Harbor, it was decided, was too shallow to support a permanent settlement. Giving up on any further exploration of the two creeks, they went looking for Corn Hill the next morning. The snow made it difficult to find the stores of buried corn, but after brushing aside the drifts and hacking at the frozen topsoil with their cutlasses, they located not only the original bag of seed but an additional cache of ten bushels. For Master Jones, this was just the excuse he needed to return to the warmth of the Mayflower ’s cabin. He must get the corn, along with several men who were too sick to continue on, back to the ship. Once the corn and the invalids had been loaded aboard the shallop, he set sail for Provincetown Harbor. The boat would return the next day for the rest of them.
    Standish was once again in charge. The next morning, he led the eighteen remaining men on a search for Indians. But after several hours of tramping through the woods and snow, they had found nothing. The Native Americans’ seasonal settlement pattern—inland in the winter, near the water in the summer—meant that the Pilgrims, who were staying, for the most part, near the shore, were unlikely to encounter many Indians during their explorations of Cape Cod.
    On their way back to the harbor, not far from where they had come across some burial sites the week before, Standish and his men found “a place like a grave, but it was much bigger and longer than any we had yet seen.” Only the week before they’d decided it was wrong to violate the Indians’ graves; this time they could not help themselves. There were boards positioned over the grave, suggesting that someone of importance had been buried here. They “resolved to dig it up.”
    They found several additional boards and a mat made of woven grass. One of the boards was “finely carved and painted, with three tines…on the top, like a crown.” This may have