Mayflower

with provisions.” The terrible weather persisted throughout the following day, making it impossible to begin work on the houses. In the meantime, the wind-lashed Mayflower had become a grim hospital ship. In addition to colds, coughs, and fevers, scurvy tormented the passengers. James Chilton had died even before the Mayflower arrived in Plymouth Harbor. That Thursday, Richard Britteridge passed away, followed two days later by Christopher Martin’s stepson Solomon Prower. On Friday morning Mary Allerton gave birth to a stillborn son.
    Not until Saturday, December 23, were they able to transport a work party from the Mayflower to shore. With their axes and saws they felled trees and carried the timber to the building site. The fact that Monday, December 25, was Christmas Day meant little to the Pilgrims, who believed that religious celebrations of this sort were a profanation of the true word of Christ. Of more importance to them, December 25 was the day they erected the frame of their first house. “[N]o man rested that day,” Bradford wrote. But toward sunset, the familiar cries of Indians erupted in the surrounding forest. The Pilgrims took up their muskets and stared tensely into the deepening darkness as the cries echoed briefly and died away.
    Ahead of them was an unknown wilderness that they could not help but inhabit with all their fears. Behind them was the harbor and the distant Mayflower, lights beginning to twinkle through her cabin windows, a smudge of smoke rising up from the galley stove in the forecastle. What would have astounded a modern sensibility transported back to that Christmas Day in 1620 was the absolute quiet of the scene. Save for the gurgling of Town Brook, the lap of waves against the shore, and the wind in the bare winter branches, everything was silent as they listened and waited.
    The Pilgrims’ intensely felt spiritual lives did not prevent them from believing in witches and warlocks and living with the constant fear that Satan and his minions were out there, conspiring against them. It was a fear that must have been difficult to contain as they stared into the deepening gloom of the American night.
    After waiting a few more tense minutes, they decided to send the shallop back to the Mayflower, leaving the usual number of twenty ashore. That night they were drenched by yet another rainstorm.
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    It took them two more weeks to complete the first building, a twenty-foot-square “common house.” It didn’t have a proper foundation—there just wasn’t the manpower or the time for such a luxury. Known as an earthfast house, the Pilgrims’ first structure probably possessed walls of hewn tree trunks interwoven with branches and twigs that were cemented together with clay. This wattle-and-daub construction was typical of farmers’ cottages in rural England, as was the building’s thatched roof, which was made of cattails and reeds from the nearby marsh. The house’s tiny, barely translucent windows were made of linseed-coated parchment. The chimney—if, in fact, the house did have a chimney instead of a simple hole in the roof—was a primitive ductwork made of four soot-blackened boards that funneled the smoke from an open fire on the dirt floor. It was a most dark and smoky space, but for the first time, the Pilgrims had a real roof over their heads.

    A steeple-crowned beaver hat attributed to Constance Hopkins

    A cooking pot that may have come to America with Miles and Rose Standish

    The wicker cradle reputed to have been brought to America by William and Susanna White

    William Bradford’s silver drinking cup, made in England in 1634

    A writing cabinet said to have been brought on the Mayflower by the White family in 1620

    A chest reputed to have been brought aboard the Mayflower by William Brewster
    On the morning of Thursday, December 28, they turned their attention to the high hill, where they began to construct a wooden platform on which to mount the various cannons they had brought with them aboard the Mayflower. This was also the day they started to plan the organization of the settlement. But first they needed to decide how many houses to build. It was determined that “all single men that had no wives to join them” should find a family to live with, which brought the total number of houses down to nineteen. From the beginning, it was decided that “every man should build his own