1491_ New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus - Charles C. Mann [29]
Growing up, I was always tickled by this raffish personal connection to history: part of the Puritans, but not actually puritanical. As an adult, I decided to learn more about Billington. A few hours at the library sufficed to convince me that some aspects of our agreeable family legend were untrue. Although Billington was in fact hanged, at least two other Europeans were executed in North America before him. And one of them was convicted for the much more interesting offense of killing his pregnant wife and eating her. My ancestor was probably only No. 3, and there is a whisper of scholarly doubt about whether he deserves to be even that high on the list.
I had learned about Plymouth in school. But it was not until I was poking through the scattered references to Billington that it occurred to me that my ancestor, like everyone else in the colony, had voluntarily enlisted in a venture that had him arriving in New England without food or shelter six weeks before winter. Not only that, he joined a group that, so far as is known, set off with little idea of where it was heading. In Europe, the Pilgrims had refused to hire the experienced John Smith as a guide, on the theory that they could use the maps in his book. In consequence, as Smith later crowed, the hapless Mayflower spent several frigid weeks scouting around Cape Cod for a good place to land, during which time many colonists became sick and died. Landfall at Patuxet did not end their problems. The colonists had intended to produce their own food, but inexplicably neglected to bring any cows, sheep, mules, or horses. To be sure, the Pilgrims had intended to make most of their livelihood not by farming but by catching fish for export to Britain. But the only fishing gear the Pilgrims brought was useless in New England. Half of the 102 people on the Mayflower made it through the first winter, which to me seemed amazing. How did they survive?
In his history of Plymouth colony, Governor Bradford himself provides one answer: robbing Indian houses and graves. The Mayflower hove to first at Cape Cod. An armed company of Pilgrims staggered out. Eventually they found a deserted Indian habitation. The newcomers—hungry, cold, sick—dug open burial sites and ransacked homes, looking for underground stashes of food. After two days of nervous work the company hauled ten bushels of maize back to the Mayflower, carrying much of the booty in a big metal kettle the men had also stolen. “And sure it was God’s good providence that we found this corn,” Winslow wrote, “for else we know not how we should have done.”
The Pilgrims were typical in their lack of preparation. Expeditions from France and Spain were usually backed by the state, and generally staffed by soldiers accustomed to hard living. English voyages, by contrast, were almost always funded by venture capitalists who hoped for a quick cash-out. Like Silicon Valley in the heyday of the Internet bubble, London was the center of a speculative mania about the Americas. As with the dot-com boom, a great deal of profoundly fractured cerebration occurred. Decades after first touching the Americas, London’s venture capitalists still hadn’t figured out that New England is colder than Britain despite being farther south. Even when they focused on a warmer place like Virginia, they persistently selected as colonists people ignorant of farming; multiplying the difficulties, the would-be colonizers were arriving in the middle of a severe, multiyear drought. As a result, Jamestown and the other Virginia forays survived on Indian charity—they were “utterly dependent and therefore controllable,” in the phrase of Karen Ordahl Kuppermann, a New York University historian. The same held true for my ancestor’s crew in Plymouth.
Inexperienced in agriculture, the Pilgrims were also not woods-people; indeed, they were