Henry F. Howe is author of Prologue to New England, New York, 1943, and Salt Rivers of the Massachusetts Shore, New York, 1951, both published by Rinehart & Co., Inc. Much of the material here presented is condensed from these volumes.
The cover decoration, which is reproduced from the London 1614 translation of Bartholomew Pitiscus, Trigonometry: or the doctrine of triangles, shows not only early seventeenth century ships but seamen using a cross-staff and casting a lead.
Printed in offset by The Meriden Gravure Company, Meriden, Connecticut
Composition by The Anthoensen Press, Portland, Maine
Early Explorers of Plymouth Harbor,
1525–1619
Visitors to Plymouth are often amazed to learn that the Mayflower was not the first vessel to drop anchor in Plymouth Harbor. The “stern and rock-bound coast” of Massachusetts was in fact explored by more than twenty recorded expeditions before the arrival of the Pilgrims. At least six of these sailed into Plymouth Harbor. Plymouth appeared on five good maps of the Massachusetts coast by 1616, one of them a detailed map of Plymouth Harbor itself, made by Samuel de Champlain in 1605. The Harbor had been successively called Whitson Bay, the Port du Cap St. Louis, and Cranes Bay by English, French and Dutch explorers, but the name Plimouth, bestowed on it by Captain John Smith in 1614, was the one the Pilgrims perpetuated.
The Pilgrim voyage was the successful culmination of a century of maritime efforts along the New England coast by Spanish explorers, Portuguese fishermen, French and Dutch fur traders, and Elizabethan English “sea dogs.” All the western ports of Europe seethed with ambitious shipmasters in search of opportunities for profit in commerce or fishing, free-booting, the slave trade, warfare or piracy. Some, like Henry Hudson, visited New England primarily as geographers looking for a Northwest Passage through North America. A few were probing out possibilities for a colonial beachhead in the New World. One of these, led by French Jesuits, had, like the Pilgrims, a religious motive. Three or four others attempted New England colonies, but failed. Only the Pilgrims succeeded in hanging on, through the inevitable preliminary disasters of the first year or two, to found a permanent colony.
Indians of Massachusetts probably first saw Europeans during the four Vinland voyages of Leif Ericsson and his successors between 1003 and 1015 A.D. There is good reason to suppose that these voyages touched the shores of Cape Cod and the islands about Martha’s Vineyard, but no direct evidence connects them with Plymouth Harbor. Continuous contact with Europeans did not begin until nearly five hundred years later when John Cabot’s second Newfoundland voyage coasted North America southward to the Carolinas in 1498. The Portuguese nobleman, Miguel Cortereal, a castaway on a voyage of exploration, may have lived among the Indians at the head of Narragansett Bay from 1502 until 1511. Certainly these Indians, the ancestors of Massasoit, were visited in 1524 by Giovanni da Verrazano, whose French expedition spent two weeks in Narragansett Bay in that year. Verrazano wrote that he was met by about twenty dugout canoes filled with eager people, dressed in embroidered deerskins and necklaces. The women wore ornaments of copper on their heads and in their ears, and painted their faces. These Indians were delighted to trade furs for bright bits of colored glass. They lived in circular houses “ten or twelve paces in circumference, made of logs split in halves, covered with roofs of straw, nicely put on.” From the description, these people were no doubt the Wampanoags, who a hundred years later were such friendly allies to the Pilgrims at Plymouth, only thirty miles away.
Verrazano did not enter Massachusetts Bay. But in the spring of 1525 a Spaniard, Estevan Gomez, cruised for two months on the New England coast. While he left no narrative of his voyage, “Tierra de Estevan Gomez” appeared immediately on Spanish maps of the period, notably that of Ribero, 1529. An indentation of the bay shore behind his “Cabo de Arenas” sufficiently suggests Plymouth Harbor and Cape Cod Bay to make one speculate whether this is not in fact the first record of a visit to Plymouth, ninety-five years before the landing of the Pilgrims. What has been interpreted as Boston Harbor on this Ribero map bears the name “Bay of St. Christoval,” but the indentation that suggests Plymouth remains nameless. It seems likely that Estevan Gomez was the discoverer of Plymouth in 1525.
After these first Massachusetts discoveries, there follows a period of seventy-five years of documentary obscurity so far as Massachusetts is concerned. Maritime activities about Newfoundland, the St. Lawrence River, and Nova Scotia steadily grew. Cartier founded, and then had to abandon, his French colony at Quebec. Jehan Allefonsce, one of his shipmasters, was blown southward from the Newfoundland banks in 1542, into “a great bay in latitude 42°,” but Massachusetts Bay is not mentioned during the rest of the century. Both French and English built up an increasing fur trade on the Maine coast, especially about the Penobscot and in the Bay of Fundy. Fishermen from all the maritime nations of Europe crowded in increasing numbers to the Newfoundland banks, carrying back apparently inexhaustible supplies of codfish to feed Catholic Europe in the season of Lent. By 1578 as many as 350 fishing vessels were making the transatlantic voyage, usually twice each year. Since fishermen and fur traders rarely left written records, we can only assume that with the increased volume of shipping, some of these vessels found their way to Massachusetts shores. But we have no documentary evidence of their visits.
