Mayflower

showed the rest of the settlement that it was indeed possible to start anew. Susanna had lost her husband, William, on February 21; Edward had lost his wife, Elizabeth, on March 24. Just a month and a half later, on May 12, Edward and Susanna became the first couple in Plymouth to marry. Six weeks may seem too short a time to grieve, but in the seventeenth century, it was quite normal for a widow or widower to remarry within three months of his or her spouse’s death. Children needed to be cared for; households needed to be maintained. And besides, these were exceptional times. If all the deaths had failed to inure them to grief, it had certainly alerted them to the wondrous necessity of life.
    In accordance with “the laudable custom of the Low Countries,” Edward and Susanna were married in a civil ceremony. Bradford, who presided over the union, explained that “nowhere…in the Gospel” did it say a minister should be involved in a wedding. In the decades to come, marriages in Plymouth continued to be secular affairs, one of the few vestiges of their time in Holland to persist in New England.
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    By the beginning of July, Bradford determined that they should send a delegation to visit “their new friend Massasoit.” They had not, as of yet, had an opportunity to explore the interior of the surrounding countryside, and it was time they made their presence known beyond Plymouth and Cape Cod. They also needed to address an unexpected problem. Ever since establishing diplomatic relations with Massasoit in March, the Pilgrims had been beset by a continual stream of Indian visitors, particularly from the village of Nemasket just fifteen miles to the west in modern Middleborough. If they continued to entertain and feed all these guests, they would not have enough food to survive the next winter. They proposed an ingenious solution: They would present Massasoit with a copper chain; if the sachem had a messenger or friend he wanted the Pilgrims to entertain, he would give the person the chain, and the Pilgrims would happily provide him with food and fellowship. All others, however, would be denied.
    On July 2, Edward Winslow and Stephen Hopkins left the settlement at around 9 A.M. , with Squanto as their guide. Besides some gifts for Massasoit (the copper chain and a red cotton horseman’s coat), they carried their muskets and a cooked partridge for sustenance. They might have a horseman’s coat, but they did not, as of yet, have any horses. Like the Indians, they must walk the forty or so miles to Pokanoket.
    They soon came upon a dozen men, women, and children, who were returning to Nemasket after gathering lobsters in Plymouth Harbor—one of countless seasonal rituals that kept the Indians constantly on the move. As they conversed with their new companions, the Englishmen learned that to walk across the land in southern New England was to travel in time. All along this narrow, hard-packed trail were circular foot-deep holes in the ground that had been dug where “any remarkable act” had occurred. It was each person’s responsibility to maintain the holes and to inform fellow travelers of what had once happened at that particular place so that “many things of great antiquity are fresh in memory.” Winslow and Hopkins began to see that they were traversing a mythic land, where a sense of community extended far into the distant past. “So that as a man travelleth…,” Winslow wrote, “his journey will be the less tedious, by reason of the many historical discourses [that] will be related unto him.”
    They also began to appreciate why these memory holes were more important than ever before to the Native inhabitants of the region. Everywhere they went, they were stunned by the emptiness and desolation of the place. “Thousands of men have lived there,” Winslow wrote, “which died in a great plague not long since: and pity it was and is to see, so many goodly fields, and so well seated, without men to dress and manure the same.” With so many dead, the Pokanokets’ connection to the past was hanging by a thread—a connection that the memory holes, and the stories they inspired, helped to maintain.
    At Nemasket, they enjoyed a meal of corn bread, herring roe, and boiled acorns. Squanto suggested that they push on another few miles before nightfall to give themselves enough time to reach Pokanoket the next day. Soon