The Mayflower Pilgrims

Sifting Fact from Fable

Derek Wilson

• Publisher: SPCK Publishing
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780281079148
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

'Compelling reading' - Alison Weir'A fresh and admirably unsentimental account' - Peter MarshallThe voyage of the Mayflower in 1620 has come to typify those qualities that many believe represent the best of America and the values it holds up to the rest of the world. And yet, if they lived today, the courageous men, women and children who made that journey would not recognize themselves in the romantic retelling of their story in popular books and movies of the last century or so.So what were the motivating forces behind this momentous voyage? Derek Wilson strips away the over-painting from the icon to discover the complex range of religious, political and commercial concerns that led this group of hopeful but fallible human beings to seek a new life on the other side of the world.

1

A new world

All Europeans thought geography and history to be sub specie aeternitatis. The Bible laid down fundamental truths about the planet, humanity’s temporary residence in it and God’s ultimate purpose for it: ‘The earth is the Lord’s . . . and they that dwell therein’ (Psalm 24.1 KJV); ‘this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world . . . and then shall the end come’ (Matthew 24.14 KJV); ‘I saw the new Jerusalem come down from God in heaven. A voice from the throne declared, “Now God’s home is with mankind and they shall be his people”’ (Revelation 21.2–3, paraphrased). This apocalyptic vision was fundamental to all Christians, Catholics and Protestants alike, but during the sixteenth century it, perforce, underwent reinterpretation as human knowledge of the planet changed.

Thinking people living in England in the early sixteenth century, when they reflected on the world they lived in, could scarcely avoid being aware of that change. Most obviously, this related to their physical environment. The planet on which they lived was not the one their forebears had inhabited. It was bigger, stranger, altogether more replete with marvels. If what mariners were reporting and geographers were calculating were true, old assumptions and convictions needed adjustment – perhaps they needed to be rejected. Yet more disturbing – or intriguing – or exciting, for those who permitted themselves to reflect on such things, were changing concepts of spiritual reality – the life of the human soul and its ultimate destiny. Daring innovators, proposing new understandings of Christian faith based solely on their reading of the Bible, were no less adventurous than the sailors who steered their fragile craft across uncharted oceans, as they dangerously departed the haven of traditional belief. The story we have to tell concerns men and women who shared a ‘new world’, in both senses.

Let us start that story a little over a hundred years before the 180-ton Mayflower slipped anchor in Southampton Water, her sails filling with a ‘prosperous wind’. In 1516, no sane English captain would have set a westerly course from that haven in the confident hope of making landfall before his crew’s food and water ran out. That does not mean English mariners were uninterested in transoceanic expeditions; simply that they lacked the knowledge, the experience and, more importantly, the backers for such speculative enterprises.

It was Bristol that provided the home base for England’s more enterprising mariners. Annually, small fleets set out for the north-west Atlantic in pursuit of the shoals of cod that fed and bred in those waters. Fish made up an important part of the English diet and rewards could be substantial for those braving the icy waters. Some reached the coast of Newfoundland. The most significant discoveries are connected with the voyages of father and son John and Sebastian Cabot, Bristolians who hailed originally from Venice. Mystery and controversy surround the discoveries claimed by the Cabots or on their behalf by contemporary authors, but what is clear is that these were not just fishing expeditions. They were mercantile voyages, undertaken in the hope of discovering new lands with marketable resources or inhabitants with whom it would be possible to trade. The pioneers of overseas exploration were the Spanish and the Portuguese, who, on the cusp of the sixteenth century, crossed the ocean in lower latitudes, seeking seaways to the Orient. As we all know, they stumbled on the Americas and discovered the route around Africa to the lands of silks and spices. The Cabots’ activities were contemporaneous and confined to northern waters, but they were pursuing the same objectives. Between 1494 and (possibly) 1516, the elder Cabot, and subsequently his son, coasted along the Newfoundland land mass. No one knew how far it extended to north or south; only that it presented a barrier preventing access to the potentially lucrative oriental markets. Sebastian ventured close to the Arctic Circle in search of a north-west passage, then followed the American coastline southwards, possibly as far as Chesapeake Bay. Much of this is conjecture, doubtless due in part to the explorer’s desire to keep his discoveries secret.

For a few years, the attention of mariners and scholars was focused on the activities of Christopher Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci and Juan del Cano (who completed the first circumnavigation of the earth after the death of the expedition’s leader, Ferdinand Magellan). Gradually, the realization filtered through European society that the occupants of the Indo-European land mass shared their planet with a vast geographical entity called the ‘New World’. The term itself came into existence in 1503 when the Florentine explorer Vespucci wrote a letter to his patron, Lorenzo de Medici, describing his adventures in the terrestrial paradise of the Novum Mundum. Within months, this epistle was translated into several vernaculars and was being rushed off printing presses throughout Europe. Readers were enthralled by the descriptions of strange peoples and a multitude of wondrous animals, birds, trees and flowers. Four years later, Martin Waldseemüller, a geographer from the Upper Rhineland, made a globe and wall-map that astonished everyone by being the first new representation of the world since the Geographia of Ptolemy, produced thirteen-and-a-half centuries earlier. It was accompanied by a text the full title of which revealed its breathtakingly spectacular claim: Introduction to Cosmography With Certain Necessary Principles of Geometry and Astronomy to which are added the Four Voyages of Amerigo Vespucci, a Representation of the Entire World, both in the Solid and Projected on the Plane, including also Lands which were unknown to Ptolemy and have been Recently Discovered. Waldseemüller may be said to have invented America, for, although he represented the New World as being contiguous with the Old World with no intervening Pacific Ocean, he did give that New World the name by which it would always be known – America – and he did map, with a remarkable degree of accuracy, its eastern seaboard.

These scholarly descriptions, combined with the travellers’ tales brought back by sailors now venturing further across the great oceans and with the revelations of fabulous wealth just waiting to be torn from the earth of Central and South America, spurred generations of conquistadors and colonists to seek their fortunes in the New World. But more important in terms of this present study is the impact of all this on the imagination of Europeans. These revelations occurred during what cultural historian Jacques Barzun identified as ‘the age of indispensable literacy’.¹ The print revolution had been gathering momentum for 50 years. No town of any importance in Europe was without at least one printworks and, by 1500, there were millions of books in circulation. Among them were many accounts of the wonders to be observed in exotic lands. Vespucci sought to impress his readers with paradisal visions reminiscent of the garden of Eden. In these regions, there were simple folk who painted their naked bodies. They possessed gold and wonder-working drugs:

The soil is very pleasant and fruitful, full of immense woods and forests and is always green, for the foliage never drops off. The fruits are so many that they are numberless and entirely different from ours.

The birds are so numerous and of so many different kinds, and of such various-coloured plumage that it is a marvel to behold them.

What should I tell of the multitude of wild animals, the abundance of pumas, panthers . . . of so many wolves, red deer, monkeys and felines, marmosets of many kinds, and many large snakes?²

The traveller, in his chronicling of wonders, did not hesitate to challenge preconceived ideas, though we may wonder if he appreciated that he was teetering on the edge of heresy when he commented that the animal species he observed were too numerous to have been accommodated on Noah’s ark.

That reflection hauls us back to a truth which is absolutely fundamental to our understanding of the early voyages of discovery. For serious adventurers and scholars who commented on their exploits, what mattered more than the wonders they encountered (except insofar as these were evidences of the handiwork of the Creator) was how the New World was to be understood in relation to the outworking of the divine plan.

The major political reality of the sixteenth century that overshadowed all other interstate relations was the conflict between Christianity and Islam. Since the fall of Constantinople, capital of Eastern Christendom, in 1453, intermittent warfare had waged in the borderlands between the two religions. The Ottoman Turks pressed against the land borders of the Holy Roman Empire and, from bases on the North African littoral, menaced the Mediterranean sea coasts. The fightback was spearheaded by the rulers of Aragon and Castile who wanted to drive the Muslims from Spain. For Christian rulers, the ultimate prize – if Bible prophecy was to be fulfilled and the Church’s international mission was to be completed – was Jerusalem. When this was wrested from infidel hordes and the gospel proclaimed to those people in thrall to the Ottoman sultan, then, and only then, would the end come. Strategically, if the champions of the Christian faith were to get to grips with their enemy, they would have to overcome the formidable barrier that confronted them in the East. Their path was blocked either by Islamic territory or insurmountable sea and land barriers. That was why mariners and geographers sought routes to the Orient. Trade with the fabled lands of Cathay and Zipangu was, of course, a powerful lure, but the apocalyptic vision was seldom far below the surface of their thinking. Their knowledge of the world had changed, but the divine imperatives, as laid down in Scripture, still applied. The enemies of the cross had to be overpowered. Jerusalem had to be regained in readiness for the Second Coming. The gospel had to be preached to ‘all people’ so that the longed-for ‘end time’ could be hastened.³

Christopher Columbus was steeped in apocalyptic prophecy and the cause to which he devoted his life was gaining a leading position in the outworking of God’s great design: ‘God made me a messenger of the new heaven and the new earth of which he spoke in the Apocalypse of St John after having spoken of it through the mouth of Isaiah.’⁴ So he wrote to a supporter at the Spanish court after his third voyage. It was no coincidence that, after years of hawking his grand vision around the monarchs of Europe, he eventually achieved the backing of Ferdinand and Isabella, who also interpreted their purge of Iberia as a part of the end-time scenario. To the end of his days, Columbus believed that he had made landfall on the coast of Asia so others following his lead would convert the indigenes. ‘I believe that they would become Christians very easily,’ he noted in his diary.⁵ By converting the ‘Indians’ and making powerful allies among their rulers, it would be possible to converge on the infidel Turks from the east as well as the west and reclaim the Holy City in readiness for Armageddon. In his will, the mariner left a legacy to his son for the express purpose of establishing a fund for the reconquest of Jerusalem.

The discovery that the new-found continent was large and divided from Asia by yet another vast ocean put an end to this particular version of the last days, but in no way did it invalidate the biblical prophecy for Christian believers. Rather, it simply encouraged reinterpretation. There was nothing new in that. The Church has always been faced with the task of understanding past prophecy about future events in terms of present knowledge but, in what I am tempted to call the ‘Reformnaissance’, new questions and fresh enlightenments tumbled over one another, demanding reinterpretation of God’s purposes for his creation. This was the century of Nostradamus, Mother Shipton, the Prophecies of Merlin and John Dee’s conjurations. It was the age when everyone from kings and queens downwards consulted astrologers and when printed almanacs began to appear.

We might think that encounters with hitherto unknown or inaccessible races would have deterred the missionary endeavours of Christian commentators. Far from it. If preaching the gospel ‘to every creature’ was a prerequisite of the Second Coming, they reasoned, then the sooner preachers followed in the footsteps of explorers and conquistadors, the better. The Catholic Church responded warmly to this new challenge. As we shall see, by the time Protestant mariners began to explore ‘heathen lands afar’, the imperative to engage in holy mission had become somewhat less urgent. But the imaginations of English venturers were not dimmed; nor was their determination to reach (and exploit) those lands to which the arrogant Iberians laid exclusive claim.

It would not be until the reign of the first Elizabeth that a new breed of English sailors challenged the maritime supremacy of the Spanish and Portuguese pioneers and asserted their ownership of coastal and inland bases in the Caribbean and along the Atlantic seaboard. But though the practicalities of long-distance sailing and the establishment of faraway settlements proved, for the time being, too daunting, English ambitions were nonetheless fired by tales of strange lands and peoples. Just as the space race of the 1960s and 1970s gave a boost to sci-fi books and films, so, half a millennium ago, people were eager for (and largely uncritical of) stories of societies that might be found in lands the existence of which was now being discovered.

But phantasy cannot exist without reality. Unfamiliar marvels are marvels because they are unfamiliar – because they contrast with the world as we know it. It is but a short step from contrast to comparison, from what might exist in lands yet unexplored, to what could – or should – exist in one’s own land. The best science-fiction adventures turn out to be reflections on terrestrial affairs, commentaries on the good and bad in human society. The year in which our story starts – 1516 – saw the publication of a book that is a literary ancestor of the time-and-space phantasy genre.

The lawyer and soon-to-be royal councillor Thomas More wrote Utopia (literally ‘Nowhere’), a book that, at first sight, seemed to be a work of moral philosophy wrapped in a cloak of whimsy. The plot, such as it is, concerns the travels of the fictional Portuguese mariner Raphael Hythloday, a companion of Amerigo Vespucci, who continued his voyage after the Florentine had returned to Europe and discovered, in the South Atlantic, the island of Utopia. Its inhabitants had developed a peaceful and harmonious society that, if not perfect, exhibited a higher level of rational communal living than anything yet attained in Christian Europe. But to take Utopia as an erudite reflection on the world as it is and the world as it might be is to miss the darkness and bitterness at its heart. Seven years earlier, More had welcomed the accession of the youthful bon-vivant Henry VIII with a sycophantic coronation ode in which he contrasted the harsh, intrusive, avaricious regime of Henry VII with the prospect of a new, golden reign. He assured the new king, ‘All are equally happy. All weigh their earlier losses against the advantages to come.’⁶ It had not taken him long, however, to reassess his opinion of the second Tudor monarch. He confided to his son-in-law William Roper, ‘I believe he doth as singularly favour me as any subject in his realm. However . . . I have no cause to be proud thereof, for if my head would win a castle in France, it would not fail to be struck off.’⁷ In 1517, Henry VIII had yet to reveal the full bestiality of which he was capable, but to More, the signs of tyranny were clear.

Utopia is written in two parts. Book One is a conversation between More and Hythloday covering the condition of European society and the ills that need to be redressed – harsh laws, grasping landowners, warring monarchs and so on. By putting these complaints into the mouth of Hythloday, the author avoids the direct criticism that would certainly get him into trouble. The point is driven home when the participants debate the responsibility of royal advisers. Surely, More suggests, philosophers should seek to enter the councils of kings in order to guide them. Hythloday rejects this firmly. Numerous works of political philosophy had been written from classical times to his own day, but rulers rarely chose to be swayed by them. Why should the wise scholar pit himself against such wishful ignorance?

If I should propose to any king wholesome decrees, doing my endeavour to pluck out of his mind the pernicious original causes of ...

Table of contents

• The Mayflower Pilgrims
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of plates
• Introduction
• 1 A new world
• 2 The idea of commonwealth
• 3 The genie out of the lamp
• 4 Home truths from abroad
• 5 Lollardy to lectureships
• 6 Mission and money
• 7 Divided we stand
• 8 The Midlands nursery
• 9 New king, old problem
• 10 John Robinson and Co.
• 11 America 1600–1620
• 12 To boldly go
• Notes
• Select bibliography
• Index