Betty Alden: The first-born daughter of the Pilgrims

by Jane G. Austin

With the Governor of Plymouth came Elder Brewster, and Captain Standish, Thomas Prence, and Doctor Fuller, who was already well and gratefully known by many of the new settlers; for when the pestilence broke out in Salem about a year before, Governor Endicott dispatched Roger Conant to beg, in the name of Christian fellowship, that the doctor of Plymouth, who had already met the grim enemy at home, would come and aid his brethren. Fuller was not slow to respond, and not only cured some of the sufferers in spite of the deadly methods of his day, but so set forth the religious beliefs and practices of the church of the Pilgrims that Endicott, who was still a Puritan Churchman, and soon to be a Puritan Independent, wrote a cordial letter to Bradford, telling how glad he was to find that the Separatists were not so bad as he had supposed them to be.

Again, when in the summer of 1630 the settlers at Charlestown, Boston, Dorchester, and the neighboring country fell into the same disaster, and with the earliest victims lost Doctor Gager their only physician, Plymouth was appealed to for assistance, and Doctor Fuller at once responded. But the scanty stock of drugs brought by the emigrants was already exhausted, and Fuller’s own supply soon went, so that his treatment was principally confined to blood-letting, and after writing a homesick letter to his brother-in-law Bradford, he returned to Plymouth.

At the wooden wharf where the Pilgrims disembarked in Charlestown, they were met by Governor Winthrop, Dudley his Deputy and successor, and the Reverend Master Wilson, who, as he cordially grasped Elder Brewster by the hand, cast a hurried glance over the group of visitors, and felt a sensible relief at not perceiving the face of Ralph Smith among them. For this reverend gentleman, persecuted out of Salem for opinion’s sake, and refused shelter in Boston or Charlestown, had found an asylum among the liberal Pilgrims who presently invited him to the position of their first ordained minister.

Mr. Wilson need not, however, have been alarmed, since Bradford, whose character singularly united the wisdom of the serpent with the innocence of the dove, had not thought best to include a person so likely to be unwelcome to his hosts in this visit, at once friendly and official; for the Governor of Plymouth had been invited to assist at the first formal session of the Bay authorities, convened at the Great House built by Thomas Grove, the architect “entertained” by the Massachusetts Company under whose auspices the new colony came out.

To this inauguration feast came also Governor Endicott from Salem, with Master Isaac Johnson, whose wife, the Lady Arbella, lay sick unto death in her new home, and never more would don the brave attire in which Alice Bradford had expressed such womanly interest. With these were assembled Sir Richard Saltonstall, Master Bradstreet, soon to be Governor of the Bay Colony, and Pynchon, ancestor, perhaps, of Hawthorne’s Hester; all the magistrates in fact of New England, all the representatives of legal or spiritual authority upon this side of the broad seas; for these men were about to test their right to self-government, and to exercise jurisdiction over the liberty, the property, the persons, nay, the very lives of others, and doubtless felt that in case this right were to be called in question from the throne or the Star Chamber, it might be well to secure the strength of numbers and authoritative consensus.

But we, like Bradford and his company, are only guests at Mishawum, as they still called Charlestown, and must hasten back to Plymouth. Enough to briefly note that Morton of Merry Mount, who had audaciously returned to his “old nest” and his old ways, after Allerton had been forced to dismiss him from his house in Plymouth, was brought before the magistrates, somewhat unfairly tried, and sentenced to be “set in the bilboes,” and afterward sent prisoner to England. His entire property was to be confiscated, and his house burned in presence of the Indians whom he had robbed and insulted, and so speedily was the first portion of the sentence carried out that, as the court left the Great House at noon, they passed close beside the criminal already seated in the stocks with a party of Indian squaws staring at him, half in dismay, half in satisfaction.

“This way, Bradford! Don’t look upon him; ’tis no punishment for a gentleman,” muttered Standish, seizing the governor’s arm and dragging him in a sidelong direction, while Parson Wilson, and Increase Newell the Elder of the Charlestown church, stopped to administer a “word in season” to the defenseless prisoner.

The business of the Bay Colony finished, Governor Bradford begged the attention of his fellow magistrates to an affair in his own jurisdiction: one as important as life and death could make it, for it was a question of enforcing the death penalty upon a murderer, fully convicted and offering no plea of extenuating circumstances.

The culprit was John Billington, already notorious as the first person the Pilgrims had felt called upon to punish. Since that early day he had more than once come under discipline of the law, but now his offense exceeded all human bounds of forgiveness, and by the stern code of Old Testament justice merited nothing short of death.

The victim was a young man named John Newcomen, a somewhat rough and lawless companion, who had persisted in trapping and shooting over ground which Billington claimed as his own monopoly, although neither man made any pretense of ownership. The end was a bitter quarrel, after which Billington armed himself, and, lying in wait until Newcomen appeared, deliberately shot and killed him.