The Pilgrims
Eleven generations ago my ancestor, Edward Doty, came to North
America on the Mayflower. As a tribute to him and all the
others who made that voyage, I offer this abbreviated account of their
adventure, why they came and how they managed, under extremly difficult
conditions, to establish a small colony on the coast of New England.
Edward Doty was not one of the people who came to the New World
because of religious convictions. In spite of that, he was
a Pilgrim in every sense of the word.
James The first of England came to the throne in 1603. There is a
considerable amount of written history recording the life and times of
his reign. There was, at that time, much known about the world
outside Europe. There had been voyages of discovery to the North
and South American continents as much as one hundred years
earlier. There had been annual expeditions by fishermen to the
Grand Banks off Newfoundland for many years. People had attempted
to establish settlements on the shores of the New World at various
times and at various places. It wasn't until 1608 that the first successful settlement was
established in Virginia. In the same year the French established
a colony near where the city of Quebec now stands.
Seventeenth century England was a land of great wealth and a land of
great poverty. Noble land owners were powerful and respected and
they exerted a great deal of influence over the government of the
country. They were, however, but a small minority of the
population. For most Englishmen life was hard. Most men
were field workers. They had little income, and their homes were
mud huts with packed earth for floors. Thousands, 
perhaps hundreds of
thousands, depended on charity for life necessities. Towns people
were not much better off. The three hundred thousand who lived in
London and the thirty thousand who lived in Bristol (the next largest
city) enjoyed higher wages than their country cousins, but they were
constantly threatened by disease which was present everywhere in large
communities.
Because of these conditions Englishmen listened with keen interest when
enthusiastic travelers told them about New England, where every man
might own his own piece of land. Some wanted to
leave England for religious reasons, to escape persecution and
find a place where they could worship as they saw fit. Religious
differences had been the cause of friction in England since the reign
of Elizabeth 1 in 1558. By the time James The First came to the
throne there were three main factions involved. There were Anglicans who were the state Protestants. They
accepted the Anglican Church as the established Church of England, with
the Monarch as head of the church. Then there were the Puritans,
zealous Anglicans who wanted to purify the church, which they thought
contained too much of the Catholic doctrine. They were, however,
willing to acknowledge the King as head of the church and thus avoid
persecution.There were also the Roman Catholics.
Most of the population fell into the second category, state Protestants
who accepted the Monarch as their religious leader and because of this
were able to carry out reforms to remove possible links with
Catholicism.
There was also a small but growing group of people who thought the
Anglican Church could never be sufficiently purified and that a
separate church with totally different structures should be
formed. These people became known as Separatists. They
stressed the importance of the individual's right to interpret the
bible for himself and believed that priests should be chosen by those
they served.
King James was quick to realize that these sincere reformers posed a
real threat to all established order and interpreted their denial of
the church as disloyalty to the Monarch. The refusal of the King
to allow the separatists to worship in their own way made them even
more determined than ever to reform their church.
Secretly many small groups continued to practice
their religion. These groups were harried and oppressed by the
King and his ministers. They persecuted this little group in much
the same way as the they persecuted the Catholics, whom they so much
despised. It was impossible to find freedom in England and to these
people the idea of colonies overseas must have seemed like a
dream.
They decided that if they couldn't reform the church they would have to
abandon it. They had read the stories about the clean rivers and the
abundant forests on the east coast of the New World, and many of them
did indeed plan to escape.
William Brewster was a Puritan
who held the office of Post at Scrooby in Nottinghamshire. He was
a deeply religious man and was attracted by the doctrines of the
separatists. He began to gather about him a small congregation of
like-minded people who wished to worship in their own way. They were
determined to find freedom of worship and to face the risks involved.
James The First's campaign
against the separatists was thorough and many years later in his book
called "The History of the Plantation", William Bradford
described how the little Scrooby congregation “were so persecuted
on every side, so as their former afflictions were as flea bitings in
comparison of those which now came upon them. For some were
clapped into prison, others had their houses beset and watched, night
and day, and hardly escaped their hands. And most were
feign to flee and leave their houses and habitations and their means of
livelihood. Yet seeing themselves thus molested and that there
was no hope of their continuance there by a joint consent they resolved
to go to the low countries, where, they had heard, was freedom for all
men. As also, how sundry from London and other parts of the land
had been exiled and persecuted for the same cause and forgone thither
and lived in the low land."
In 1607 a group of pilgrims made arrangements to sail secretly to
Holland. They sold their possessions and walked sixty miles to
the port of Boston on the east coast of England, lead by their pastor
Clifton. But they were betrayed by the Captain who had agreed to
take them on his ship and they were imprisoned for
their attempted escape. But when they were released their
determination to flee abroad was stronger than ever and their second
attempt the following spring, the spring of 1608, was successful.
Upon their arrival in Holland the Scrooby congregation and others with
them found themselves completely overwhelmed by their surroundings, and
"the strongly flowing abundances of all sorts of wealth and riches" was
not to their liking. Amsterdam was a city larger than London, and
they found that "all the pedlars of religion have leave to vend their
toyes". But finding employment was harder than finding
freedom. They were mostly farmers who had to make do with ill
paid unskilled work in industries. They were helped by other
English exiles already living there but soon fell out with them and
made application then to move to the city of Lyden.
So the Scrooby congregation went to Lyden. They elected Robinson
as their leader and they stayed in Lyden for some time. But their
life there was also hard and many feared that the atmosphere of this
university town with its lively student population might corrupt their
children. They also were concerned that their children were
growing up in the knowledge and use of the Dutch language and many of
them were beginning to abandon the English language.
Remember that these people were in search of a place where they could
worship freely out of the reach of their home government, yet continue
to live as self-governing free Englishmen. They felt that once
they were beginning to become like the Dutch people they had better
leave that land. There is no doubt that, since they lived in a
university city, they had at hand books that described the travels of
various adventurers. It is quite possible that it was through
their research of these books that they decided to attempt to
leave old Europe and old England for the New World.
Representatives were dispatched to London to negotiate with a company
of merchant adventurers, who agreed to put up the funds for an
expedition to found a settlement in New England. In return the
colonists pledged their labour and its produce for seven years.
King James accepted this idea and, as he was keen to expand the
colonies, welcomed the pilgrim's departure. They had driven a
hard bargain, The price of freedom was high, but the pilgrims
felt it was worth paying.
On July 20th, 1620, sixteen men, eleven women
and nineteen children set sail from Delpfshaven aboard the sixty ton
vessel the Speedwell, bound for Southampton. There they were
joined by another larger group of people who were mainly poor emigrants
who were looking for a new life overseas, not so much for religious
reasons, but for economic ones. Edward Doty was not travelling to
Virginia for religious reasons. He was a servant, indentured to
Steven Hopkins, a tanner who was seeking a better life for himself and
his family in the New World.
Immediately friction started
between the two groups. The two groups, by their own designation,
were known as the "saints", who were people seeking religious freedom,
and the "strangers", who were leaving England for economic reasons.
In August the two groups set out from Southampton aboard the Speedwell
and the larger Mayflower. Bad luck plagued them and twice the
Speedwell was forced to return for repairs. Finally, it was
decided to abandon the Speedwell. The Mayflower was crammed with
102 people and, at the worst time of the year, set out to cross
the stormy North Atlantic.
The Mayflower was a cargo
ship. There
were no passenger ships at that time She was 160 tons, 90
feet long and 26 feet broad at her waist. Armed with 12
cannons she ploughed on at a little over 2 knots for over 3000
miles. Her 102 passengers were tossed around for 60 days and they
suffered horribly from seasickness, all the while trying to keep their
spirits up with prayers and psalms. Only one man died and the
Pilgrims must surely have felt that God was watching over them.
It is said that at one point a huge wave washed a man overboard and a
moment later
washed him back again! One of the storms was so violent that it cracked
the main beam of the ship. The pilgrims proved their
resourcefulness in the circumstances and,
with the aid of a large screw
on board, were able to repair the broken beam. Some say this
screw was part of the printing press they had brought with them in
their flight from Holland.
The storms which they had encountered had driven the little vessel far
off course. They had originally planned to land at Virginia, but
when they finally sighted land they were hundreds of miles north of
their intended landing. They turned southward along the coast,
but as they rounded Cape Cod they encountered strong winds and high
seas. They turned back north and into the shelter of Cape Cod
Bay. It was here that they went ashore in the new world for the
first time. It was here, too, that they signed the document that
was to become known as the Mayflower Compact, and thus established how
they would govern themselves.