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Mayflower

    MAYFLOWER HISTORY, PART III

    The Duality of Being a Mayflower Descendant

    ‘Descendants feel joy and sadness about history’

    By

    PROVINCETOWN — Two things Provincetown’s Cheryl Andrews disliked as a child: history and Thanksgiving. History, she said, was “boring as dust” — with its rote memorization of dates, wars, and names. Thanksgiving was “too many people; too much food; too much stress.”

    That all changed 20-odd years ago when, inspired by her grandmother, Andrews started tracing her family’s genealogy. Bit by bit, she learned the stories of her ancestors and of Cape Cod. And it occurred to her: “These people,” she said, “probably went all the way back to The Boat.”

    “The Boat,” of course, was the Mayflower, which anchored 400 years (plus a couple of weeks) ago in Provincetown Harbor before the people it carried deemed the Outer Cape unlivable and headed to greener pastures in Plymouth.

    Andrews did her homework, submitted it to the General Society of Mayflower Descendants, a lineage organization that dates from 1897, and received confirmation: she is descended from both William Brewster, a postman-turned-minister who became the Separatists’ senior elder, and Stephen Hopkins, a merchant who came to America’s shores seeking financial gain, not religious freedom.

    Suddenly, for Andrews, history came alive. “These weren’t just names and dates anymore,” she said. “These were real, exciting stories, and real people” — people in whom she could see something of herself. As for Thanksgiving, “It’s actually my favorite holiday now.”

    Andrews’s experience isn’t unique; an estimated 35 million Mayflower descendants roam the globe today. One of them is Jane Hurt, who is a descendant six times over (she has traced roots to William White, his wife Susanna, their son Peregrine — born on board in Cape Cod Bay — Richard Warren, Francis Cooke, and his son John Cooke). Hurt currently serves as the governor general of the General Society.

    Cheryl Andrews’s view of history changed when she found out she was a descendant of the people on “The Boat.” In this photo, she’s at the helm of the Tyrone in the 2018 Great Schooner Regatta. (Photo Nancy Bloom)

    In a concrete sense, being a Mayflower descendant “makes you a part of history,” Hurt said. And that’s at once a good thing and a bad one. Recent years, particularly this one, have seen fierce scrutiny and deep rethinking of many foundational American myths. Historians have debunked nearly every detail of the elementary-school-pageant-style Mayflower story, from the travelers’ outfits to their homogeneity to the name we call them (they weren’t “Pilgrims” until about 200 years after they landed), to, crucially, their relationship with the indigenous people on whose land they arrived.

    Being a Hurt-style Mayflower descendant, for whom history feels personal, comes with the need to reckon with the fact that that personal history isn’t all idealism and exceptionalism, but “much harsher and more difficult,” said Andrews.

    That realization can be hard to handle, she said. In Andrews’s opinion, the darker parts of the Mayflower and Thanksgiving stories are hugely important.

    “The pendulum is swinging in a direction where we’re very focused on all the bad things that happened,” she said. “I understand that because they got ignored for so many years. It’s appropriate to gain a more realistic understanding of history. But over time, I hope we can figure out how to look back on these events, understand the history from all different perspectives, and then figure out the way to differentiate between commemoration and celebration.”

    Hurt agreed. Her history is “not all good or all bad,” she said. “But it’s what we’re made of. All we can do is take that information and make ourselves better as we go forward. All of the descendants feel a joy and a sadness about our history.”

    And when it comes to the difference between celebration and commemoration, she sides more with the former. “I am proud to be a descendant of a Mayflower Pilgrim,” she said. “I am proud of my history, even though some of it is bad.”

    Not all Mayflower descendants jump so quickly to their ancestors’ defense. For the Rev. Rebecca Pugh, minister of the First Church Ipswich, who is, like Andrews, a descendant of William Brewster (and whose family also descends from the Haudenosaunee, also known as the Iroquois Confederacy), Thanksgiving calls much more for commemoration than it does for celebration.

    “We’ve always enjoyed the family part of Thanksgiving,” she said. “But have always worried and struggled with and felt uncomfortable with the really clear devastation that was wrought by the Pilgrims and other settlers.”

    Pugh, like her relative Andrews (the two women have never met), agreed that contextualizing history is ultra-important, and that more people than ever are doing so. One upside of the pandemic’s shrinking of Thanksgivings, Pugh said, is that people across the nation had more time to reflect on the nuances of the stories we pass down.

    And nuance, Pugh stressed, is key. She can, she said, be proud of William and Mary Brewster — Separatists who took in children of the community whose parents had died — without glorifying the damage that the Mayflower’s passengers did.

    “My people took land, food, seed grain, and lives from the people who lived here before them,” she said. “And I am devastated to have that be part of my past.”

    OP-ED

    Wamsutta Frank James Made Good Trouble

    The music teacher who awakened us to real history

    By

    One story surfacing this Thanksgiving tells of a search party from the Mayflower, anchored in Provincetown Harbor, raiding a gravesite near Corn Hill in Truro. About 10 bushels of corn and beans were found by the party and brought to their hungry shipmates.

    As a descendant of those hungry shipmates, I’m grateful they found nourishment and survived. I have a sense of their desperation and the relief the buried harvest must have brought. But clearly this land was inhabited by an organized people who had stored part of their life-sustaining crops. This was someone else’s food.

    History is full of invasions and land grabs by powerful adventurers and colonizers. Yet our national narrative continues to characterize the Mayflower passengers as people on a high-minded quest to bring democracy to a barren land, not looters and thieves of precious winter stores. Real history is complicated.

    Another story going around this year is about what happened in 1970. How did Wamsutta Frank James wake up non-native people by not delivering a speech before a prestigious group assembled to commemorate the 350th anniversary of the arrival of the Mayflower in Cape Cod Bay?

    James
    Wamsutta Frank James speaking in Plymouth, at the statue of Massasoit.

    The Commonwealth of Massachusetts invited schoolteacher Frank James, the beloved leader of the Nauset Regional High School band and orchestra, to address a Boston banquet as a representative of the Indians. Mr. James, as I knew him in school, told the Cape Codder that, on receiving the invitation, he wrote a speech and was asked to submit it to be checked for grammar and spelling for a press release about the event.

    James was told his speech was “too inflammatory” and would make people uncomfortable. He was provided an alternate speech. Someone from the State House drove to James’s house in Chatham, where they spent hours attempting to reconcile the two speeches, the one James wrote with the one state officials wanted him to read. He decided to withdraw from the event.

    The headline in the Codder read “Wampanoag Skips 350th Banquet; Won’t Speak With Forked Tongue.” A substitute Indian was found to address the banquet. He wore a Sioux-Dakota war bonnet.

    James’s speech was published in full in the Cape Codder. It began:

    I speak to you as a man — a Wampanoag man. I am a proud man, proud of my ancestry, my accomplishments won by a strict parental direction (“You must succeed — your face is a different color in this small Cape Cod community”).

    And it continued:

    History wants us to believe that the Indian was a savage, illiterate, uncivilized animal…. Two distinctly different cultures met. One thought they must control life; the other believed life was to be enjoyed, because nature decreed it….

    High on a hill, overlooking the famed Plymouth Rock, stands the statue of our great Sachem, Massasoit. Massasoit has stood there many years in silence. We, the descendants of this great Sachem, have been a silent people. The necessity of making a living in this materialistic society of the white man caused us to be silent.

    Although time has drained our culture, and our language is almost extinct, we the Wampanoags still walk the lands of Massachusetts…. Our spirit refuses to die.

    When James wrote his speech, a 19-month occupation had begun of the old prison on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay by the American Indian Movement.

    I have no doubt that the Indians have had things right about challenging the U.S. history of imperialism, enslavement, and all those broken treaties. Right to call U.S. policies and practices toward the Indians nothing less than genocide. And they’ve been right about living in sacred harmony with the natural world.

    Frank James reminded us with his speech about honor, about building trustworthy relationships, and about the heart-sickening betrayals by the U.S. government that still continue.

    Scholars like Daniel J. Silverman and Ian Saxine have studied who the Wampanoag were and how they responded to the English who anchored first in Provincetown Harbor. This past summer, the Eastham Public Library and the Eastham 400 Commemoration Committee (eastham400.org) organized a full season of virtual sunset and campfire stories, shared by local residents: Mayflower and Wampanoag descendants and others. These interviews can be viewed still.

    After the undelivered speech was published, Frank James and his tribal colleagues met on Cole’s Hill above Plymouth Rock. There, he read his speech and they declared Thanksgiving to be a National Day of Mourning.

    The National Day of Mourning has continued every Thanksgiving for 50 years as both a sacred and a very political event. It is preceded by fasting from sundown the day before. The mourning will continue until mutual respect and real equity are all of ours to share.

    MAYFLOWER HISTORY, PART II

    For Some, It Wasn’t a Pilgrimage but Pure Hustle

    John Howland’s unlikely rise from servant to patriarch

    By

    On Nov. 11, 1620, the Mayflower arrived in Provincetown Harbor. Four hundred years later, we — most of us, anyway, on the Outer Cape and all across the nation — think of the ship’s passengers as one homogeneous group of capital-P-Pilgrims: a tribe of big-buckled, big-dreaming religious dissidents. They abandoned their homeland for the sake of high ideals; they washed ashore in search of unprecedented freedom. We call them “Pilgrims” and “Puritans” interchangeably, and, either way, they dominate near every telling of our early history.

    But we often overlook this key, if not-as-charming, part of the story: only about half of the Mayflower’s passengers even remotely fit that description.

    Conflicting accounts of the number of children aboard the Mayflower make precise record-keeping difficult. But of the 102 passengers aboard the ship, only 37 were Separatists, English Protestants who fled to Leiden during the Twelve Years’ Truce, then became America’s Puritans.

    Thirty passengers (among them Miles Standish, Richard Warren, Stephen Hopkins, and John Billington) were non-Separatists. And another 17 were indentured servants, apprentices, and wards. Those two groups, which combine to account for the majority of the “Pilgrims,” actually had a fair amount in common.

    The non-Separatists were largely recruited by London merchants to assist the fledgling colony; they were driven to America’s foreign shores not by religious fervor but by pure economic incentive.

    Some of the servants, apprentices, and wards aboard the vessel would have likely subscribed to their masters’ religious beliefs; some would likely have had very little say in their voyage to a new world. But some of the servants, apprentices, and wards had the same reasons for coming to America as did the wealthier non-Separatists. They wanted new starts, adventure, the chance to make something of themselves in a fresh and foreign land. Except they lacked something crucial: money.

    So, a number of them struck deals with the Mayflower’s better-off passengers. In exchange for the payment of their fare, they’d become indentured servants, committing a certain number of years (in most cases, that specific figure has not survived history) to working for the payer’s family.

    The drive here was not high-blown idealism. This was not the pursuit of unprecedented freedom. This, from some of America’s earliest European settlers, was pure hustle.

    One of the indentured servants who bartered his way across the sea was a man from Fenstanton, Huntingdonshire, England, named John Howland, who would have been in his early 20s during the ship’s passage. Records of his early days are few, but it seems that his opportunity to set sail to America arose from pure coincidence.

    “John Carver, the first governor of Plimoth Colony, lived in Leiden with the rest of the Separatists,” said Peter Arenstam, executive director of the Pilgrim John Howland Society, a lineage organization for Howland’s descendants. “Carver went to London to make final arrangements for the Mayflower to depart, and that’s likely where he met John, who convinced him to take him on as an indentured servant, essentially paying his passage in exchange for labor.”

    The Mayflower passage was not a pleasant experience for any of the passengers. Space was limited; food was abysmal; seasickness reigned. Howland, though, had a particularly miserable time. According to William Bradford’s journal, Howland — a “lusty young man” — came above decks during a storm and, with a great heel of the ship, was thrown overboard.

    The crew’s negligence saved Howland; he grabbed hold of a topsail halyard trailing in the water, and sailors hauled him back to the Mayflower’s decks. He managed to stay out of the water for the remainder of his journey to Provincetown, then Plymouth.

    Historians haven’t been able to determine how many years of work Howland owed to the Carver family. But it doesn’t really matter. Half of the Mayflower’s passengers died during their first winter in Plymouth. John Carver and his wife, Catherine, were among the unlucky, and left no Carvers to carry on their legacy — or the terms of Howland’s contract. Which left him a freeman and the owner of the Carvers’ house by the spring of 1621, after serving barely half a year of his indenture.

    From there, Howland moved quickly. He married Elizabeth Tilley — daughter of John Tilley and Joan Hurst, Separatist Mayflower passengers, in 1623. She was 16, he likely 28. They had 10 children, each of whom survived to adulthood, no small feat in 17th-century New England.

    Howland — among the lowliest Mayflower passengers — made a name for himself in Plymouth colony. He served as a personal secretary to Gov. Carver before his death, was elected deputy to the Plymouth General Court twice, served as a sort of one-man draft board, approving men to fight in King Phillip’s War, and, in Arenstam’s words, “just ended up owning an awful lot of land.”

    The second generation of Howlands consisted of 88 grandchildren; now, there are an estimated two to two-and-a-half million Howland descendants roaming the planet. Ever wondered what Alec Baldwin, Humphrey Bogart, George H.W. Bush (as well as Jeb and W., of course), Sarah Palin, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Mary Chapin Carpenter have in common? It’s Howland blood. Mayflower descendants all, but not — and least not until later generations — the ones you read about in school.

    EASTHAM 400

    1620 Events to Focus on First Encounter With Nauset

    Replica of Pilgrims’ shallop will visit Rock Harbor

    By

    EASTHAM — History will be docking at Rock Harbor this summer. Tying up next to the Coast Guard boat that rescued 32 sailors from the Pendleton shipwreck in 1952 will be a craft similar to the one that brought men from the Mayflower’s anchorage in Provincetown Harbor in 1620 to Eastham for their first live encounter with the indigenous Nauset people.

    “We’ll have some ceremonies and possibly some trips out into the bay” in the replica vessel, the shallop Elizabeth Tilley, select board member Peter Dibble said at the Feb. 24 meeting of the Eastham 400 Commemoration Committee. Built in 2000 by Peter Arenstam, the boat will be towed from Plymouth to Provincetown early in July for festivities there before being towed or sailed to Rock Harbor for a stay of several days.

    Eastham 400 shallop
    Select board member Peter Dibble displays a model, built by Richard C. Ellington, of the shallop that carried 10 Separatists and eight sailors from the Mayflower to their “first encounter” with the Nauset in December 1620. (Photo Ed Maroney)

    At last week’s meeting, Dibble displayed Richard C. Ellington’s scale model of the shallop, built to mark the 400th anniversary of the Dec. 8, 1620, event at modern-day First Encounter Beach. “It’s perfect,” Dibble said.

    In another event planned by the committee, historian Ian Saxine, whose book The Story of the “First Encounter” at Nauset has sold out its first edition and is being reprinted, will speak at Nauset Regional High School on March 27.

    “We’re trying to find as many points of interaction as possible, so teachers are able to address things while bringing in another layer of authenticity,” NRHS Principal Christopher Ellsasser said. “We’re trying to weave together this opportunity with the learning that’s already happening.”

    Visitors to the Cape Cod National Seashore can do their learning while sitting on the sand at First Encounter Beach from Memorial Day weekend through the summer. The “109 nights,” as committee vice chair Tom Ryan described the program, will commence with the ringing of a bell 15 minutes before sunset and continue with a daily 10-minute presentation of “some fragment of our history” and a reading from Saxine’s book, plus a preview of coming events.

    On the nine Sundays of July and August, a “sunset series” will offer interactive programs around an electronic “campfire” at the beach. “Campfires are not bonfires,” Ryan said. “This is an electronic device approved by the fire department [that sits] like a bowl in the sand.”

    Also in the works is a tour of Cove Burying Ground, where three Mayflower passengers are interred. It’s hoped that high school students could be involved in all three programs.

    The committee voted to request $25,000 from town meeting in May: $12,000 for two part-time coordinators for the beach events, $6,000 for the cost of bringing the shallop to Rock Harbor and housing its crew, $4,000 for reprinting Saxine’s book, $2,000 for printing signs and beach sticker insignias, and $1,000 for rack cards.

    At the meeting, the committee reviewed other groups’ marking of the 400th anniversary. The Eastham Historical Society, which will open the First Peoples exhibit at its 1869 Schoolhouse Museum on May 1, has been working with an archaeologist to catalog its collection and is planning an extensive speaker series. The Cape Cod National Seashore will have three new outdoor exhibits: on Wampanoag use of salt marshes, on the Pilgrims’ search for water, and on the signing of the Mayflower Compact. The Federated Church of Orleans, which traces its history back to the congregational society founded in Eastham in the 1640s, will hold an open house during December. Eleven boxes of historical records from the church have been digitized and are available through the archives of the Eastham Public Library, which is planning a roster of special events.

    Ryan said that the Wellfleet Historical Society “has focused on their Native American collection and discovered they have representative items from all 10,000 years of documented habitation of Nauset. They’re doing a special exhibit all summer.” Over in Orleans, he said, the historical society “will focus on the seven [settler] families that came here. The focus isn’t how they related to Native Americans, or their faith structure — it’s their clothing and habitation.”

    The Cape Cod Genealogy Society will hold a free event at the Eastham library and the Chapel in the Pines next door on March 29 from 11:45 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. There will be talks on Mayflower descendants, Native American genealogy, and researching female ancestors, as well as 20-minute genealogical consultations for those interested in possible links to the Mayflower.

    For further details on 400th anniversary events, go to easthamthefirstencounter.org.

     

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