Made In America - Bill Bryson [9]
Other settlements followed, among them the now forgotten Popham Colony, formed in 1610 in what is now Maine, but abandoned after two years, and the rather more durable but none the less ever-precarious colony of Jamestown, founded in Virginia in 1607.
Mostly, however, what drew the English to the New World was the fishing, especially along the almost unimaginably bounteous waters off the north-east coast of North America. For at least 120 years before the Mayflower set sail European fishing fleets had been an increasingly common sight along the eastern seaboard. Often the fleets would put ashore to dry fish, replenish stocks of food and water, or occasionally wait out a harsh winter. As many as a thousand fishermen at a time would gather on the beaches. It was from such groups that Samoset had learned his few words of English.
As a result, by 1620 there was scarcely a bay in New England and eastern Canada that didn’t bear some relic of their passing. The Pilgrims themselves soon came upon an old cast-iron cooking pot, obviously of European origin, and while plundering some Indian graves (an act of crass in-judiciousness, all but inviting their massacre) they uncovered the body of a blond-haired man, ‘possibly a Frenchman who had died in captivity’.17
New England may have been a new world to the Pilgrims, but it was hardly terra incognita. Much of the land around them had already been mapped. Eighteen years earlier, Bartholomew Gosnold and a party described as ‘24 gentlemen and eight sailors’ had camped for a few months on nearby Cuttyhunk Island and left behind many names, two of which endure: Cape Cod and the romantically mysterious Martha’s Vineyard (mysterious because we don’t know who Martha was).
Seven years before, John Smith, passing by on a whaling expedition, had remapped the region, diligently taking heed of the names the Indians themselves used. He added just one name of his own devising: New England. (Previously the region had been called Norumbega on most maps. No one now has any clear idea why.) But in a consummate display of brown-nosing, upon his return to England Smith presented his map to Charles Stuart, the sixteen-year-old heir apparent, along with a note ‘humbly intreating’ his Highness ‘to change their barbarous names for such English, as posterity might say Prince Charles was their Godfather.’ The young prince fell to the task with relish. He struck out most of the Indian names that Smith had so carefully transcribed and replaced them with a whimsical mix that honoured himself and his family, or that simply took his fancy. Among his creations were Cape Elizabeth, Cape Anne, the Charles River and Plymouth. In consequence when the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth one of the few tasks they didn’t have to manage was thinking up names for the landmarks all around them. They were already named.
Sometimes the early explorers took Indians back to Europe with them. Such had been the fate of the heroic Squanto, whose life story reads like an implausible picaresque novel. He had been picked up by a seafarer named George Weymouth in 1605 and carried off – whether voluntarily or not is unknown – to England. There he had spent nine years working at various jobs before returning to the New World as interpreter for John Smith on