Mayflower

house, thinking by that course, men would make more haste than working in common.”
    Miles Standish appears to have had a hand in determining the layout of the town. At lectures on military engineering at the University of Leiden, soldiers could learn from the Dutch army’s chief engineer that the most easily defended settlement pattern consisted of a street with parallel alleys and a cross street. The Pilgrims created a similar design that included two rows of houses “for safety.” For the present, Plymouth was without a church and town green, the features that came to typify a New England town.
    In the weeks ahead, the death toll required them to revise radically their initial plans. Instead of nineteen, only seven houses were built the first year, plus another four buildings for common use, including a small fortlike structure called a rendezvous. The houses were built along a street that ran from Fort Hill down to the sea. Known today as Leyden Street, it was crossed by a “highway” running from north to south down to Town Brook. Around this intersection, the town of Plymouth slowly came into being, even as death reduced the newcomers to half their original number.
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    Thursday, January 11, was “a fair day.” Given the uncertainty of the weather, they knew they must make as much progress as possible on the houses—especially since, it was still assumed, the Mayflower would soon be returning to England.
    The frantic pace of the last two months was beginning to tell on William Bradford. He had suffered through a month of exposure to the freezing cold on the exploratory missions, and the stiffness in his ankles made it difficult to walk. But there was more troubling him than physical discomfort. Dorothy’s passing had opened the floodgates: death was everywhere. It pursued them in the form of illness, and it had been waiting for them here on the blighted shores of Plymouth. Now, in the midst of winter, he could only wonder if he would ever see his son again.
    That day, as Bradford worked beside the others, he was “vehemently taken with a grief and pain” that pierced him to his hipbone. He collapsed and was carried to the common house. At first it was feared Bradford might not last the night. But “in time through God’s mercy,” he began to improve, even as illness continued to spread among them. The common house soon became as “full of beds as they could lie one by another.” Like the Native Americans before them, they must struggle to survive on a hillside where death had become a way of life.
    In the days ahead, so many fell ill that there were barely half a dozen left to tend the sick. Progress on the houses fell to a standstill as the healthy ones became full-time nurses—preparing meals, tending fires, washing the “loathsome clothes,” and emptying chamber pots. Bradford later singled out William Brewster and Miles Standish as sources of indomitable strength:
    And yet the Lord so upheld these persons as in this general calamity they were not at all infected either with sickness or lameness. And what I have said of these I may say of many others who died in this general visitation, and others yet living; that whilst they had health, yea or any strength continuing, they were not wanting to any that had need of them. And I doubt not that their recompense is with the Lord.
    At one point, Bradford requested a small container of beer from the stores of the Mayflower, hoping that it might help in his recovery. With little left for the return voyage to England, the sailors responded that if Bradford “were their own father he should have none.” Soon after, disease began to ravage the crew of the Mayflower, including many of their officers and “lustiest men.” Unlike the Pilgrims, the sailors showed little interest in tending the sick. Early on, the boatswain, “a proud young man,” according to Bradford, who would often “curse and scoff at the passengers,” grew ill. Despite his treatment of them, several of the passengers attended to the young officer in his final hours. Bradford claimed the boatswain experienced a kind of deathbed conversion, crying out, “Oh, you, I now see, show your love like Christians indeed one to another, but we let one another die like dogs.” Master Jones also appears to have undergone a change of heart. Soon after his own men began to fall ill, he let it be