The women Who Came in the Mayflower 2

The women Who Came in the Mayflower 2

Many of the women who were pioneers at Plymouth had suffered severe

hardships in previous years. They could sustain their own hearts and

encourage the younger ones by remembrance of the passage from England to

Holland, twelve years before, when they were searched most cruelly, even

deprived of their clothes and belongings by the ship’s master at Boston.

Later they were abandoned by the Dutchman at Hull, to wait for fourteen

days of frightful storm while their husbands and protectors were carried

far away in a ship towards the coast of Norway, “their little ones

hanging about them and quaking with cold.”[5]

 

There were women with frail bodies, like Rose Standish and Katherine

Carver, but there were strong physiques and dauntless hearts sustained

to great old age, matrons like Susanna White and Elizabeth Hopkins and

young women like Priscilla Mullins, Mary Chilton, Elizabeth Tilley and

Constance Hopkins. In our imaginations today, few women correspond to

the clinging, fainting figures portrayed by some of the painters of “The

Departure” or “The Landing of the Pilgrims.” We may more readily believe

that most of the women were upright and alert, peering anxiously but

courageously into the future. Writing in 1910, John Masefield said:[6]

“A generation fond of pleasure, disinclined towards serious thought, and

shrinking from hardship, even if it may be swiftly reached, will find it

difficult to imagine the temper, courage and manliness of the emigrants

who made the first Christian settlement of New England.” Ten years ago

it would have been as difficult for women of our day to understand

adequately the womanliness of the Pilgrim matrons and girls. The

anxieties and self-denials experienced by women of all lands during the

last five years may help us to “imagine” better the dauntless spirit of

these women of New-Plymouth. During those critical months of 1621-1623

they sustained their households and assisted the men in establishing an

orderly and religious colony. We may justly affirm that some of “the

wisdom, prudence and patience and just and equall carriage of things by

the better part”[7] was manifested among the women as well as the men.

 

In spite of the spiritual zeal which comes from devotion to a good

cause, and the inspiration of steady work, the women must have suffered

from homesickness, as well as from anxiety and illness. They had left in

Holland not alone their loved pastor, John Robinson, and their valiant

friend, Robert Cushman, but many fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters

besides their “dear gossips.” Mistress Brewster yearned for her elder

son and her daughters, Fear and Patience; Priscilla Mullins and Mary

Chilton, soon to be left orphans, had been separated from older brothers

and sisters. Disease stalked among them on land and on shipboard like a

demon. Before the completion of more than two or three of the one-room,

thatched houses, the deaths were multiplying. Possibly this disease was

typhus fever; more probably it was a form of infectious pneumonia, due

to enervated conditions of the body and to exposures at Cape Cod.

Winslow declared, in his account of the expedition on shore, “It blowed

and did snow all that day and night and froze withal. Some of our people

that are dead took the original of their death there.” Had the disease

been “galloping consumption,” as has been suggested sometimes, it is not

probable that many of those “sick unto death” would have recovered and

have lived to be octogenarians.

 

The toll of deaths increased and the illness spread until, at one time,

there were only “six or seven sound persons” to minister to the sick and

to bury the dead. Fifteen of the twenty-nine women who sailed from

England and Holland were buried on Plymouth hillside during the winter

and spring. They were: Rose Standish; Elizabeth, wife of Edward Winslow;

Mary, wife of Isaac Allerton; Sarah, wife of Francis Eaton; Katherine,

wife of Governor John Carver; Alice, wife of John Rigdale; Ann, wife of

Edward Fuller; Bridget and Ann Tilley, wives of John and Edward; Alice,

wife of John Mullins or Molines; Mrs. James Chilton; Mrs. Christopher

Martin; Mrs. Thomas Tinker; possibly Mrs. John Turner, and Ellen More,

the orphan ward of Edward Winslow. Nearly twice as many men as women

died during those fateful months of 1621. Can we “imagine” the courage

required by the few women who remained after this devastation, as the

wolves were heard howling in the night, the food supplies were fast

disappearing, and the houses of shelter were delayed in completion by

“frost and much foul weather,” and by the very few men in physical

condition to rive timber or to thatch roofs? The common house, twenty

foot square, was crowded with the sick, among them Carver and Bradford,

who were obliged “to rise in good speed” when the roof caught on fire,

and their loaded muskets in rows beside the beds threatened an

explosion.[8]

 

Although the women’s strength of body and soul must have been sapped yet

their fidelity stood well the test; when _The Mayflower_ was to return

to England in April and the captain offered free passage to the women as

well as to any men who wished to go, if the women “would cook and nurse

such of the crew as were ill,” not a man or a woman accepted the offer.

Intrepid in bravery and faith, the women did their part in making this

lonely, impoverished settlement into a home. This required adjustments

of many kinds. Few in number, the women represented distinctive classes

of society in birth and education. In Leyden, for seven years, they had

chosen their friends and there they formed a happy community, in spite

of some poverty and more anxiety about the education and morals of their

children, because of “the manifold temptations”[9] of the Dutch city.

 

Many of the men, on leaving England, had renounced their more leisurely

occupations and professions to practise trades in Leyden,—Brewster and

Winslow as printers, Allerton as tailor, Dr. Samuel Fuller as say-weaver

and others as carpenters, wool-combers, masons, cobblers, pewterers and

in other crafts. A few owned residences near the famous University of

Leyden, where Robinson and Brewster taught. Some educational influences

would thus fall upon their families.[10] On the other hand, others were

recorded as “too poor to be taxed.” Until July, 1620, there were two

hundred and ninety-eight known members of this church in Leyden with

nearly three hundred more associated with them. Such economic and social

conditions gave to the women certain privileges and pleasures in

addition to the interesting events in this picturesque city.

 

In _The Mayflower_ and at Plymouth, on the other hand, the women were

thrust into a small company with widely differing tastes and

backgrounds. One of the first demands made upon them was for a

democratic spirit,—tolerance and patience, adaptability to varied

natures. The old joke that “the Pilgrim Mothers had to endure not alone

their hardships but the Pilgrim Fathers also” has been overworked. These

women would never have accepted pity as martyrs. They came to this new

country with devotion to the men of their families and, in those days,

such a call was supreme in a woman’s life. They sorrowed for the women

friends who had been left behind,—the wives of Dr. Fuller, Richard

Warren, Francis Cooke and Degory Priest, who were to come later after

months of anxious waiting for a message from New-Plymouth.

 

The family, not the individual, characterized the life of that

community. The father was always regarded as the “head” of the family.

Evidence of this is found when we try to trace the posterity of some of

the pioneer women from the Old Plymouth Colony Records. A child is there

recorded as “the son of Nicholas Snow,” “the son of John Winslow” or

“the daughter of Thomas Cushman” with no hint that the mothers of these

children were, respectively, Constance Hopkins, Mary Chilton and Mary

Allerton, all of whom came in _The Mayflower_, although the fathers

arrived at Plymouth later on _The Fortune_ and _The Ann_.

 

It would be unjust to assume that these women were conscious heroines.

They wrought with courage and purpose equal to these traits in the men,

but probably none of the Pilgrims had a definite vision of the future.

With words of appreciation that are applicable to both sexes,

ex-President Charles W. Eliot has said:[11] “The Pilgrims did not know

the issue and they had no vision of it. They just loved liberty and

toleration and truth, and hoped for more of it, for more liberty, for a

more perfect toleration, for more truth, and they put their lives, their

labors, at the disposition of those loves without the least vision of

this republic, or of what was going to come out of their industry, their

devotion, their dangerous and exposed lives.”

 

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Footnote 1:

 

Relation or Journal of a Plantation Settled at Plymouth in New-England

and Proceedings Thereof; London, 1622 (Bradford and Winslow)

Abbreviated in Purchas’ Pilgrim, X; iv; London, 1625.

 

Footnote 2:

 

Bradford’s History of Plymouth Plantation; ch. 9.

 

Footnote 3:

 

“The Mayflower,” by R. G. Marsden; Eng. Historical Review, Oct., 1904;

The Mayflower Descendant, Jan., 1916.

 

Footnote 4:

 

Relation or Journal, etc. (1622).

 

Footnote 5:

 

Bradford’s History of Plymouth Plantation; ch. 2.

 

Footnote 6:

 

Introduction to Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers (Everyman’s

Library).

 

Footnote 7:

 

Bradford’s History of Plymouth Plantation; Bk. II.

 

Footnote 8:

 

Mourt’s Relation.

 

Footnote 9:

 

Bradford’s History of Plymouth Plantation, ch. 3.

 

Footnote 10:

 

The England and Holland of the Pilgrims, Henry M. Dexter and Morton

Dexter, Boston, 1905.Footnote 11:Eighteenth Annual Dinner of Mayflower Society, Nov. 20, 1913.