Nooks and Corners of the New England Coast

by Samuel Adams Drake

"Yet at the first landing at Cape Cod, being an hundred passengers, besides twenty they had left behind at Plimouth for want of good take heed, thinking to find all things better than I advised them, spent six or seven weeks in wandering up and downe in frost and snow, wind and raine, among the woods, cricks, and swamps, forty of them died, and three-score were left in a most miserable estate at New Plimouth, where their ship left them, and but nine leagues by sea from where they landed, whose misery and variable opinions, for want of experience, occasioned much faction, till necessity agreed them."

It is not easily understood why they should have remained in so unpromising a location after a better knowledge of the country had been obtained. To the north was Massachusetts, called by Smith "the paradise of those parts." South-west of them was the fertile Narraganset country, with fair Aquidneck within their patent. In thirteen or fourteen years the whole of Plymouth colony would not have made one populous town. But there are indications that a removal was kept in view. Their brethren in Leyden, who saw the hand of God in their first choice, advised them not to abandon it. In 1633 they established a trading-house on the Connecticut, and when afterward dispossessed by Massachusetts, alleged as a reason for holding a post there that "they lived upon a barren place, where they were by necessity cast, and neither they nor theirs could long continue upon the same, and why should they be deprived of that which they had provided and intended to remove to as soon as they were able?"[180] Yet, like fatalists they continued on the very shores to which Providence had directed them.

When the Pilgrims explored the bay, they were at first undetermined whether to make choice of Clark's Island, the shores of the little river at Kingston, or the spot on the main-land which became their ultimate abode. The high ground of Plymouth shore, the "sweete brooke" under the hill-side, and the large tract of land ready cleared for their use, settled the question; the high hill from which they might see Cape Cod, and withal very fit for a citadel, clenched their decision.

It did not seem to occur to the Pilgrims that to pitch their residence in a place desolated by the visitation of God was at all ill-omened. In their circuit of the bay they did not see an Indian or an Indian wigwam, though they met with traces of a former habitation. Added to the sadness and gloom of the landscape, the frozen earth, the bare and leafless trees, was a silence not alone of nature, but of death. The plague had cleared the way for them; they built upon graves.

This terrible forerunner of the English is alluded to by several of the old writers. It swept the coast from the Fresh Water River to the Penobscot, with a destructiveness like to that witnessed in London a few years later. Sir F. Gorges tells us that the Indians inhabiting the region round about the embouchure of the Saco were sorely afflicted with it, "so that the country was in a manner left void of inhabitants." Vines, Sir Ferdinando's agent, with his companions, slept in the cabins with those that died; but, to their good fortune, as the narrative quaintly sets forth, "not one of them ever felt their heads to ache while they stayed there." This was in the year 1616-'17. Levett says the Indians at "Aquamenticus" were all dead when he was there. Samoset explains, in his broken English, to the Pilgrims that the lawful occupants of Patuxet had, four years before, been swept away by an extraordinary plague. The Indians had never seen or heard of the disease before. Villages withered away when the blight fell upon them; tribes were obliterated, and nations were reduced to tribes. Doubtless, this disaster had much to do with the peaceable settlement of Plymouth, Salem, and Boston. Had the Pilgrims been everywhere resisted, as at Nauset, they could hardly have planted their colony in Plymouth Bay.

There was another cause to which the English owed their safety, as related to them by many aged Indians. A French ship had been cast away on Cape Cod. The crew succeeded in landing, but the Indians, less merciful than the sea, butchered all but three of them. Two were ransomed by Dermer, one of Sir F. Gorges's captains. The other remained with the savages, acquired their language, and died among them. Before his death he foretold that God was angry, and would destroy them, and give their heritage to a strange people. They derided him, and answered boastfully, they were so strong and numerous that the Manitou could not kill them all. Soon after the pestilence depopulated the country. Then came the Englishmen in their ships. The savages assembled in a dark swamp, where their conjurors, with incantations lasting several days, solemnly cursed the pale-faces, devoting them to destruction. Thus the English found safety in the superstitious awe of the natives. The story of the terrible plague is as yet unwritten. Governor Bradford says that when Winslow went to confer with Massasoit, he passed by numbers of unburied skulls and bones of those who had died.

Captain Levett is corroborative of the Pilgrims' settled intention to depart from their original place of settlement. He observes in his "Voyage into New England:" "Neither was I at New Plymouth, but I fear that place is not so good as many others; for if it were, in my conceit, they would content themselves with it, and not seek for any other, having ten times so much ground as would serve ten times so many people as they have now among them. But it seems they have no fish to make benefit of; for this year they had one ship fish at Pemaquid, and another at Cape Ann, where they have begun a new plantation, but how long it will continue I know not."

It is evident from the testimony that the settlement at Plymouth was ill-considered, and that the Pilgrims were themselves far from satisfied with it. In this, too, we have the solution of the rapid overshadowing of the Old Colony by its neighbors, and the fading away of its political and commercial importance.

There is no manner of doubt that Plymouth had been visited by whites long before the advent of the Mayflower's band. Hutchinson erroneously says De Monts "did not go into the Massachusetts bay, but struck over from some part of the eastern shore to Cape Ann, and so to Cape Cod, and sailed farther southward." Definite is this!

It was the object of De Monts to examine the coast, and his pilot seems to have kept in with it as closely as possible, making a harbor every night where one was to be found. The Indian pilot proved to have little knowledge of the shores or of the language of the tribes to the westward of the Saco; for on being confronted with the natives of the Massachusetts country, he was not able to understand them. Gorges recounts that his natives from Pemaquid and from Martha's Vineyard at first hardly comprehended each other.