Monument to the first English-Wampanoag encounter - a rain of arrows

Pilgrim leadership included wealthy aristocrat William Bradford, who, years after being saved by them, described the Wampanoags as “savage people, who are cruel, barbarous, and most treacherous,”[viii] an opinion completely at odds with the sophisticated yet ancient culture that first greeted him, and that he would come to rely on for years afterward.

Despite today’s continued usage of the term “New World,” the Mayflower arrived at a Native community which, having been essentially rebuilt from scratch following the smallpox epidemic, included villages, horse paths, drinking systems, maritime resources and other clear signs of civilization. None of that stopped the Pilgrims from, by Bradford’s own admission, robbing their homes and graves, uncovering several burial sites over several days.

The Wampanoags were heavily involved in maritime trade; the graverobbers found cloth britches, steel knives, iron pots and pans and handbaskets made of crab shells. They even found a “fort or palisade.” One desecration seemed to deeply upset the Pilgrims: the grave of a recently deceased blonde European and child who had apparently been given Native burial rites for reasons unknown. Historian David Silverman, whose 2019 opus This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving is required reading, notes their anxiety about this well-documented discovery is “palpable even at the distance of four centuries.”[ix]

The newly arrived colonists attempted to put back some of what they stole and cover their tracks, as they “thought it would be odious unto them,” but unbeknownst to the separatists, they had already made their first impression. Two weeks later, on a scouting expedition to modern Eastham, where Christopher and Sarah Strout would make their home decades later, the English were set upon by Wampanoag arrows from the woods. The colonists shot blindly into the dark until the attackers retreated, then they scurried back to Plymouth.

Today, this site is generously known as First Encounter Beach.

Friends Meetinghouse in Sandwich, MA, cite of frequent Quaker persecution

Bradford rotated Governor duties in Plymouth’s first three decades along with evangelist Edward Winslow and his young follower Thomas Prence, who once procured a servant for his office from a defendant’s criminal punishment for “disorderly living” and Sabbath-breaking.[x]

Plymouth leadership also included the vicious Miles Standish, who had been a military officer in the Netherlands before the Mayflower group fled Holland. They included among their ranks Stephen Hopkins, who had already lived in Jamestown with the Powhatan tribe before boarding the Mayflower. Also among their leaders was John Alden, whose daughter married Standish’s son and whose wife is an ancestor to this author’s Strout lineage.

Alden was not one of the Holland “immigrants,” but a hired hand on the Mayflower who received permission to settle in Duxbury outside of Plymouth’s puritan community. Even so, he became one of the primary legal and financial representatives and, eventually, co-owners of Plymouth Colony.

After Bradford’s death, Prence and Alden oversaw a campaign of religious persecution against not just the Native Americans but the newly arriving Quakers. Residents in Sandwich and Scituate were jailed for aiding Quakers or not reporting what they knew about Quaker activity in the area. At his 1657 sentencing hearing for refusing to swear loyalty to the King (oaths are against their religion), Quaker Humphrey Norton raged against the hypocrisy of the Pilgrims’ decision to publicly whip him for discussing his religious beliefs in public.

Norton called Prence a “malicious man” who “has bent thy heart to work wickedness” and “perverted justice,” and he referred to Alden as merely Pence’s “pack horse” who holds the “cursed purse.” (Alden was essentially the colony’s treasurer.)

Prence responded by proposing the death penalty for any Quaker caught in Plymouth, an act that drew shocked responses from the otherwise Quaker-intolerant British. Prence withdrew the proposal.

Depiction of 17th century farmers in Holland

To be sure, the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay Colony were also quite fond of religious persecution and, unlike Plymouth, did publicly execute Quakers in Boston’s town square. (More on that in Origins Pt. 2.) The colonies of Rhode Island and Pennsylvania were established by English separatists (Roger Williams and William Penn, respectively) who were fleeing other English separatists.

In other words, the Pilgrims were not exactly huddled masses when they set sail, but they were poor. While in England they were, in truth, persecuted separatists, and fled to the religious freedom of Holland, not America. That freedom was granted. What they didn’t count on was how much work went into a Dutch existence.

“The hardness of the place and country,” complained Bradford years later, “the great labor and hard fare” put too high a price on their freedom. “Yea, some preferred and chose the prisons in England rather than this liberty in Holland with these afflictions,” wrote Bradford.[xi]

As historian Carlos Mayo points out, their decision to leave for America was carefully debated and regretfully undertaken, not “because they were Puritans but rather because they were poor.” They set out to convert Native Americans out of self-preservation, but they were hardly missionaries. These Brits “were at odds with the sea” and “lacked the curiosity of explorers,” not to mention the “blind confidence” and “almost boundless optimism” seen in settlers further south over the preceding decade. [xii]

While much of the Pilgrim myth concerning their religious persecution is overblown, their experience in England was real and negatively influenced their attitude and treatment toward those they considered ‘others.’ The evidentiary record holds that they not only continued the cycle of violence but employed both the law and religion to spin off the darkness of Reformation into some of America’s original, inescapable sins.

Ch. 2 SOURCES:

[viii] Bradford, W. (1912). History of Plymouth Plantation, 1620-1647. United States: Massachusetts Historical Society.

[ix] Silverman, D. J. (2019). This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving. India: Bloomsbury Publishing.

[x] Turner, J. G. (2020). The Yoke of Bondage: Slavery in Plymouth Colony. The New England Quarterly, 93(4), 634-654.

[xi] Bradford, W. (1912). History of Plymouth Plantation, 1620-1647. United States: Massachusetts Historical Society.

[xii] Mayo, C. (1976). Reluctant Pilgrims. American Studies International, 15(2), 52-62.