Mayflower

decades in the future. For now, the Pilgrims had no use for anyone who dared to favor the heathen over the godly. Bradford decided to send Standish on yet another raid to the north—not to kill any Indians but to seize this “Lord of Misrule.”
    Morton quickly discovered what the Pilgrims had become in the years since Wessagussett. He had already learned from the Massachusett Indians of the viciousness of Standish’s earlier attack and the fear it had unleashed in the region. After being taken by Standish and his men, who “fell upon him as if they would have eaten him,” Morton began to question who were now the true savages in this land. “But I have found the Massachusetts Indians more full of humanity than the Christians,” he wrote, “and have had much better quarter with them.”
    Morton wasn’t the only Englishman to be astonished by the vindictiveness of the Pilgrims. In 1625, the former Plymouth resident Roger Conant was forced to intercede in an altercation between Standish and some fishermen on Cape Ann. Conant was so appalled by the violence of the Plymouth captain’s manner that he later described the incident in great detail to the Puritan historian William Hubbard. Echoing Robinson’s earlier concerns, Hubbard wrote, “Capt. Standish…never entered the school of our Savior Christ…or, if he was ever there, had forgot his first lessons, to offer violence to no man.” As Morton and Pecksuot had observed, it was almost comical to see this sort of fury in a soldier who had been forced to shorten his rapier by six inches—otherwise the tip of his sword’s scabbard would have dragged along the ground when he slung it from his waist. “A little chimney is soon fired,” Hubbard wrote; “so was the Plymouth captain, a man of very little stature, yet of a very hot and angry temper.”

    A German-made rapier attributed to Miles Standish
    In 1624, Holland purchased Manhattan from the Indians and established the colony of New Netherland. Since many of the Pilgrims knew the language, it was perhaps inevitable that Plymouth established a strong relationship with the Dutch colony. In 1627, the Dutch trading agent Isaack de Rasiere visited Plymouth, and his description of the English community on a typical Sunday provides fascinating evidence of just how strong Standish’s influence continued to be:
    They assembled by beat of drum, each with his musket or firelock, in front of the captain’s door; they have their cloaks on, and place themselves in order, three abreast, and are led by a sergeant without beat of drum. Behind comes the Governor, in a long robe; beside him on the right hand, comes the preacher with his cloak on, and on the left hand, the captain with his side-arms and cloak on, and with a small cane in his hand; and so they march in good order, and each sets his arms down near him. Thus they are constantly on their guard night and day.
    Seven years after the Mayflower had sailed, Plymouth Plantation was still an armed fortress where each male communicant worshipped with a gun at his side.
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    The fall of 1623 marked the end of Plymouth’s debilitating food shortages. For the last two planting seasons, the Pilgrims had grown crops communally—the approach first used at Jamestown and other English settlements. But as the disastrous harvest of the previous fall had shown, something drastic needed to be done to increase the annual yield.
    In April, Bradford had decided that each household should be assigned its own plot to cultivate, with the understanding that each family kept whatever it grew. The change in attitude was stunning. Families were now willing to work much harder than they had ever worked before. In previous years, the men had tended the fields while the women tended the children at home. “The women now went willingly into the field,” Bradford wrote, “and took their little ones with them to set corn.” The Pilgrims had stumbled on the power of capitalism. Although the fortunes of the colony still teetered precariously in the years ahead, the inhabitants never again starved.
    By 1623, the Pilgrims had goats, pigs, and chickens; that year Winslow sailed for England and returned with some cows; soon to follow were more cattle and some horses. Despite Winslow’s claim that Plymouth was a place where “religion and profit jump together,” the colony was unable to