Mayflower

Josian, ordered an appraisal. She was found to be worth just £128, less than a sixth her value back in 1609. Her subsequent fate is unknown, but she was probably broken up for scrap, the final casualty of a voyage that had cost her master everything he could give.
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    Soon after the Mayflower departed for England, the shallow waters of Town Brook became alive with fish. Two species of herring—alewives and bluebacks—returned to the fresh waters where they had been born, creating a roiling, silver-backed blanket of fish that occasionally burst through the river’s surface as the herring worked their way up the brook to spawn.
    Squanto explained that these fish were essential to planting a successful corn crop. The land surrounding Plymouth was so poor that it was necessary to fertilize the soil with dead herring. Although women were the ones who did the farming (with the sole exception of planting tobacco, which was considered men’s work), Squanto knew enough of their techniques to give the Pilgrims a crash course in Indian agriculture.
    The seed the Pilgrims had stolen on the Cape is known today as northern flint corn—eight-rowed with kernels of several colors—and was called weachimineash by the Indians. Using mattocks—hoes with stone heads and wooden handles—the Indians gathered mounds of earth about a yard wide, where several fish were included with the seeds of corn. Once the corn had sprouted, beans and squash were added to the mounds. The creepers from the beans and squash attached to the growing cornstalks, creating a blanket of shade that protected the plants’ roots against the searing summer sun while also discouraging weeds. Thanks to Squanto, the Pilgrims’ stolen corn thrived while their own barley and peas suffered in the alien soils of the New World.
    In April, while laboring in the fields on an unusually hot day, Governor Carver began to complain about a pain in his head. He returned to his house to lie down and quickly lapsed into a coma. A few days later, he was dead.
    After a winter of so many secret burials, they laid their governor to rest with as much pomp and circumstance as they could muster—“with some volleys of shot by all that bore arms.” Carver’s brokenhearted wife followed her husband to the grave five weeks later. Carver’s one surviving male servant, John Howland, was left without a master; in addition to becoming a free man, Howland may have inherited at least a portion of Carver’s estate. The humble servant who had been pulled from the watery abyss a few short months ago was on his way to becoming one of Plymouth’s foremost citizens.

    A chair once owned by William Bradford
    Carver’s passing could not have come at a worse time. Just as the settlement was emerging from the horrors of the first winter, it had lost the man on whose judgment and counsel it had come to depend. The Pilgrims had hoped to load the Mayflower with goods, but that had been impossible given their sufferings that winter. With half the settlers dead and only a pile of ballast stones and a few Native artifacts to show for an outlay of thousands of pounds, the Merchant Adventurers might begin to doubt the profitability of the settlement and withdraw further financial support.
    The new treaty with Massasoit had greatly reduced the threat of Indian attack, but there was still dissent inside the settlement. Billington had recently railed against Standish; there had been angry words from others throughout that terrible winter. In June, Stephen Hopkins’s servants Edward Doty and Edward Leister injured each other in a duel and were sentenced to have their heads and feet tied together. There was a desperate and immediate need for strong and steady leadership.
    Bradford was the natural choice, but he was still laid low by illness. With Isaac Allerton, a thirty-six-year-old widower and former Leidener, serving as his assistant, he agreed to take on the greatest challenge of his life. In addition to Allerton, he had William Brewster, Edward Winslow, and Miles Standish to look to for advice. But as governor, he inevitably came to know the loneliness of being Plymouth’s ultimate decision maker. More than ever before, Bradford, who had left his son in Holland and lost his wife in Provincetown Harbor, was alone.

CHAPTER SEVEN
Thanksgiving
    A FEW WEEKS AFTER Bradford’s election to governor, Edward Winslow and Susanna White