Mayflower summary

Landing in Massachusetts meant scouting a location for the new colony in unknown territory. Miles Standish, the Pilgrim’s hired soldier, led small scouting parties along the frozen shore. While conditions were terrible on land, they were far worse on the ship. Disease and starvation claimed more and more lives.

Unnervingly, despite traveling for weeks to locate a safe harbor, they’d seen no people. Where passengers expected to see crowded villages, they saw only empty land. In part, this was due to seasonal migration patterns of native tribes inland during the winter. But in 1620, there was another reason.

When the tall, naked Samoset introduced himself, it was as sachem of a people near Monhegan Island in Maine. This area was frequented by English fishermen, and it was from them that he’d learned English. He told the Pilgrims their new home was once a thriving village, wiped out by plague. He told them about the leader of the region, the sachem Massasoit, who lived with the Pokanoket about 40 miles south. Massasoit was kindly disposed toward their settlement, but other sachems weren’t. The Pilgrims had offended their regional rivals, the Nauset, for instance, by stealing corn the previous year.

During that long first winter, Massasoit had watched the English struggle. He listened as a former native abductee, Squanto, warned the Pokanoket not to attack the English. Squanto claimed that colonists had barrels of plague hidden under their houses as a weapon. A survivor of English captivity, Squanto spoke perfect English, and spread rumors amongst local tribes about the English to leverage his own position as interpreter.

But even as the settlement prospered, things in New England were changing. Ships of additional colonists sent by the London merchant’s association arrived in Massachusetts, and these newcomers were very different from the devout Pilgrims. Mostly secular young men, they changed the colony’s culture enough for the devout puritans to take notice and offense.

When news of a vicious native massacre at Jamestown made its way to Plymouth, Miles Standish, who provided security for the settlement, promoted the idea of building a wooden fort for defense. Meanwhile, Squanto was spreading contradictory rumors between local native groups and the English, looking to gain power. Claiming the Pokanoket had betrayed their English allies and were about to attack, Squanto almost started a war.

As things in New England shifted radically, so too did things in England. If the Puritans had once been separatists because of the excesses of the Church of England, the English Civil War saw Oliver Cromwell and his armies impose puritanism on England itself. Where they’d once had reason to flee their homeland to practice their religion, now all of England was under puritan rule – and the reason for their suffering to establish a colony seemed for naught. Many colonists returned to England to join the conflict.

In 1646, now Governor Winslow was dispatched to England on another diplomatic mission for the colonists and came to the notice of Cromwell himself. Winslow kept delaying his return to the colony, effectively abandoning them. Miles Standish left Plymouth to found another colony in Duxbury, where he died in 1656. With so many of the original colonists back in England or elsewhere, by 1650 many declared the Plymouth experiment to be over.

If the children of the Mayflower passengers had little understanding of what their parents had endured to establish the colony, their ignorance extended to the vital role that indigenous neighbors played in their survival. The intervening decades had seen Massachusetts Bay colony far better situated as a deep water harbor and prosperous trading port. Meanwhile, Plymouth colony bore witness as intertribal politics and infighting claimed the lives of their closest native allies. When the first armed conflict in what became known as King Philip’s War broke out in June 1675, this shared history was all but forgotten.

As raiding bands of native warriors fell on settlement towns and villages, burning them to the ground, the militarized retaliation by the colonists and English forces was swift and terrifying. Indigenous people who surrendered were deported to internment camps and brutalized. Cowed by his dwindling forces, Philip fled to upstate New York, hoping to ally himself with the French to gain ammunition and the fierce Mohawk tribe to replenish his army. When Philip attempted to gain an alliance with the Mohawks through deception – by attacking a small band of their warriors and blaming it on the English – he was found out. Ultimately, Philip was disgraced and defeated.

When the Pilgrims set sail in the Fall of 1620, they had no idea what hardships and alliances awaited them in a new world. Initially dependent on their native neighbors, in just a single generation conflicts and racism escalated. The brutal war that resulted was devastating on all sides and led to a new era of subjugation and enslavement for the Pilgrim’s native allies.