JOHN PORY
John Pory (1572-1635)
John Pory had led a full life before he visited Plymouth and New England in 1622, on his way home from a three-year term as Secretary to the Governor and Council of Virginia. Born into the family of a Norfolk gentleman, a graduate of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, he had been an apprentice to the great historian of English seafaring, Richard Hakluyt. After producing a successful book on Africa in 1600, he left the scholarly life, served eminent men as private correspondent on news from London, sat in Parliament from 1605 to 1611, acted as aide to various diplomats, went on missions for King James I and his Privy Council, and traveled in Ireland, France, Italy, Greece, and Turkey. By 1619, when he received his Virginia appointment, he had many friends, a restless foot, large girth, and fondness for wine.
The New World was a strange one for Pory, but always optimistic, he turned his back on conviviality and news of the capital to accept water and good books with enthusiasm. He also made a name for himself as an explorer on a small scale and earned lasting fame as the very able speaker of the first colonial assembly, called in 1619.
Even before leaving England for America, Pory embroiled himself in the party strife which led to the downfall of the Virginia Company in 1624. Appointed by the “ins,” at the request of his cousin, Gov. Yeardley, Pory ultimately sided with the group led by the Earl of Warwick, the “outs” from 1619 to 1624. He earned an appointment to the panel of Commissioners to inspect affairs in Virginia for the Privy Council in 1624, and on his return, received a place on the board chosen to establish royal government in the colony. He spent several years at his old occupation of London correspondent before he made his home in Lincolnshire, where he died in 1635.
John Pory stopped at New England on his way back to England partly on Company business. Ships had often gone north from Virginia to fish, before the king granted monopoly rights over fishing to the Council for New England, created in 1620. The Virginia Company thought its interests damaged, continued to sell licenses to fish in the disputed area, and futilely protested the monopoly in the Privy Council. Pory was to get the Company firsthand information about the fishing business in New England, see what the Council for New England was actually doing, and assess the prospects of the Plymouth settlement. The extracts from his letters which follow were probably written as reports.
The originals of Pory’s letters are gone, as far as anyone knows. What exists is a copy, probably made by Richard Norwood, surveyor of the “Summer Isles” (Bermudas). The manuscript is unsigned, undated and consists of extracts from two letters by John Pory and a description of Bermuda by Norwood. It is in the John Carter Brown Library, Providence, Rhode Island. The whole text, edited, annotated, and introduced by Champlin Burrage, was printed under the title, John Pory’s Lost Description of Plymouth in the Earliest Days of the Pilgrim Fathers (1918). This edition, plus photostats of the manuscript, were used in the preparation of the text printed here.
John Pory to the Earl of Southampton[1]
January 13, 1622/1623, and later.
By whom this New Plymouth (situated, according to Captain Jones[2] his computation, in 41 degrees and 48 minutes) is now presently inhabited, your Lordship and the honorable Company do know better than myself. For whom how favourably God’s providence in thought and in deed, quite besides any plot or design of theirs, hath wrought, especially in the beginning of their enterprise, is worthy to be observed. For when, as your Lordship knows, their voyage was intended for Virginia, being by letters from Sir Edwin Sandys and Mr. Deputy Ferrar recommended to Sir Yeardley[3] (then Governor) that he should give them the best advice he could for trading in Hudson’s River, whether it were by contrariety of wind or by the backwardness of their master or pilot[4] to make (as they thought it) too long a journey, they fell short both of the one and the other, arriving first at that stately harbour called Cape Cod,[5] called by Indians “Pamet”; from whence in shallop the pilot, a more forward undertaker than performer, promised to bring them to be seated in a pleasant and fertile place called Anquam,[6] situate within Cape Ann,[7] about forty leagues from Plymouth. After some dangerous and almost incurable errors and mistakings, he stumbled by accident upon the harbour of Plymouth; where, after the planters had failed of their intention, and the pilot of his, it pleased Almighty God (who had better provided for them than their own hearts could imagine) to plant them on the seat of an old town which divers [years] before had been abandoned of the Indians. So they both quietly and justly sate down without either dispossessing any of the natives, or being resisted by them, and without shedding so much as one drop of blood. Which felicity of theirs is confirmed unto them even by the voices of the savages themselves, who generally do acknowledge not only the seat, but the whole seigniory[8] thereto belonging, to be, and do themselves disclaim all title from it; so that the right of those planters to it is altogether unquestionable—a favor which, since the first discovery of America, God hath not vouchsafed, so far as ever I could learn, upon any Christian nation within that continent. Yet can it not be denied but that these of the Summer Islands[9] are blessed with the same privilege according to the saying of St. Paul, “If the firstfruits be holy, the lump is also holy.”[10]