Making Haste from Babylon Read online

  This book is dedicated to Margaret E. Mahoney,

  president of the Commonwealth Fund of New York,

  1980–95

  Crueltye and bloodde is in our streetes, the lande abowndeth with murthers slawghters Incestes Adulteryes, whoredom dronkennes, oppression and pride … even the leaste of these, is enowghe, and enowghe to make haste owte of Babylon.

  —AN ENGLISH PURITAN GIVING REASONS FOR MIGRATION TO AMERICA, 16291

  Contents

  List of Maps

  Author’s Note

  Prelude: THE BEAVER OF MAWOOSHEN

  Part One: THE HEAVENS AND THE SEA

  One: THE YEAR OF THE BLAZING STAR

  Two: MR. JONES IN PLYMOUTH SOUND

  Three: CROSSING SINAI

  Part Two: ORIGINS

  Four: TROUBLECHURCH BROWNE

  Five: MEN AND WOMEN OF THE CLAY

  Six: THE MAKING OF A PILGRIM

  Part Three: SEPARATION

  Seven: THE ENTRAILS OF THE KING

  Eight: DISOBEDIENCE AND CONTEMPT

  Nine: STALLINGBOROUGH FLATS

  Part Four: THE PROJECT

  Ten: THE TOMB OF THE APOSTLE

  Eleven: WHY THE PILGRIMS SAILED

  Twelve: THE BEAVER, THE COSSACK, AND PRINCE CHARLES

  Thirteen: IN THE ARTILLERY GARDEN

  Part Five: AMERICA

  Fourteen: COMFORT AND REFRESHING

  Fifteen: THE MYSTIC AND THE THAMES

  Sixteen: DIABOLICAL AFFECTION

  Seventeen: IF ROCHELLE BE LOST

  Part Six: THE WAYS OF SALVATION

  Eighteen: THE PROPHECY OF MICAIAH

  Nineteen: THE FIRST BOSTONIANS

  Twenty: THE EXPLODING COLONY

  Epilogue: THE LAST SHAMAN

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Further Reading

  Maps

  Canoe Routes of the Eastern Abenaki

  The Pilgrim Quadrilateral, 1600

  Mayflower London

  Southeastern New England, 1616–40

  Author’s Note

  A pest, a fanatic, and a hypocrite, worse than a cattle thief: that was a Puritan, said King James I of England. Despite his many talents, the king had many flaws, and we cannot trust him to describe men and women whom he loathed. We have to find a less insulting way to define them, briefly but with fairness. Without such a definition, what follows will make very little sense.

  The word “Puritan” first appeared early in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, in about 1565. Puritans were people who believed that she failed to go far enough when she established a Protestant Church of England. They urged her to abolish every last trace of Roman Catholic ritual that still lingered within it. They also wished to see an end to the hierarchy of bishops that the queen had left intact.

  Her Majesty had not the slightest intention of agreeing to these demands. So, if Puritans could not have the kind of official religion they wanted, they chose to look for God in private. As the law required, they went to their parish church every Sunday, but at home they prayed, discussed sermons, and studied the Bible.

  Mainly, Puritans read the book of Genesis, the letters of Saint Paul, and the Psalms. In the New Testament, they also paid special attention to the Acts of the Apostles. Here they found the story of the early Church, and a portrait of Christianity in what seemed to be its most authentic form. Free from distortion by popes and cardinals, it offered a model they felt obliged to copy.

  Before the English Civil War, almost every single Puritan was also a Calvinist. What did this label signify? It meant that they followed the teachings of the French reformer John Calvin, who died in 1564. A lawyer by training, Calvin began by precisely defining the nature of God. Then, with the austere logic of a judge, he explained the fearful consequences of divinity.

  For Calvin, God was an absolute monarch, a king who created the universe and then sustained it at every moment by a supreme act of will. But if God was almighty, and foresaw everything that occurred, then before the beginning of time he must have decided already the fate of each human soul. This was called the doctrine of double predestination.

  Like Calvin, English Puritans believed that God had divided the human race in two. Before they were born, those chosen to receive the gift of faith were set apart for eternal life. They were called the elect. The remainder of humanity were doomed to punishment forever. Try as they might, they could never obtain salvation, and so they were known as the lost.

  Did these ideas make men and women fatalistic? If human beings could not change the mind of God, why bother with faith, hope, and charity at all? In fact, Calvinists reached the opposite conclusion. If Christians wanted to be sure that they belonged to the elect, it was all the more important to do good deeds and to worship correctly. To persevere in holiness gave them the best evidence that they were saved.

  Among the Puritans in England, some of those who persevered the most were a small minority known as Separatists. In terms of theology, they were strict Calvinists too, but they carried Puritan beliefs as far as they would go. They argued that the Church of England was beyond redemption because of its Roman Catholic past. In their eyes, it bore the marks of Satan, not those of Jesus Christ.

  Because of this, Separatists felt compelled to do more than read and pray in private. They decided to leave the established Church entirely and set up alternative congregations. Untainted by the influence of Rome, these assemblies would be pure in their membership, and in the way they worshipped. In 1593, Parliament and Queen Elizabeth made Separatism a crime.

  Rivers: from Gulf of Maine Watershed Map, Maine State Planning Office, 1991. Canoe routes: from David S. Cook, Above the Gravel Bar (3rd edition, 2007).

  Prelude

  THE BEAVER OF MAWOOSHEN

  The planters heare aboutes, if they will have any beaver, must go 40 or 50 myles into the country, with their packes on their backes.

  —AN ENGLISH SETTLER ON THE COAST OF MAINE, JUNE 16341

  Seventy miles from the Atlantic, in the central lowlands of Maine, if you head west along Route 2 and cross the Sandy River you will see a line of mountains far away upon your right. Built of slate, they rise to more than three thousand feet. They reach their finest color on a winter’s day, when the air is sharp and cold and the sunlight turns their eastern slopes from gray to blue. Above the modern town of Farmington, they form the outlying ramparts of a dark massif.

  Here the influence of the ocean ends, and the American interior begins. Behind the blue ridge, the high ground extends for sixty miles, as far as the frontier with Canada. Between hills black and shaggy with spruce but dusted white with snow, the road ascends an esker, a ribbon of gravel, dropped into place by a glacier fourteen thousand years ago.

  The esker makes a platform for Highway 27. Along the road, you climb until you reach a narrow pass and a chain of lakes. Beyond them lies a gloomy wetland, called Hathan Bog, where in the dusk moose wander from the swamp across the asphalt. Then, a little farther on, the highway arrives at a plateau, and a liquor store, and a customs post, at a hidden place named Coburn Gore, where day and night the Frenchmen thump back over the border in their logging trucks. Like the valleys of West Virginia, the pass supplies an aperture, an entry into the land beyond the mountains, at the northern end of the Appalachian barrier.

  At places such as this, the west begins: but where did America start for new settlers arriving from England in the 1620s or the 1630s? Maybe they saw it first from ten miles out on the ocean, with a glimpse of sandy cliffs along the eastern rim of Cape Cod, or at forty miles, if their first sighting was Cadillac Mountain, above Bar Harbor, visible to any ship bound in from Newfoundland. Or did the New World really begin later? Did its strangen
ess dawn upon them when they saw ice jamming a river mouth as late as April, or a belt of white wampum beads, or a field of maize, or a man in deerskin breeches, with a shaved head and a torso painted purple? The point at which the alien was glimpsed for what it was, alarming, uncanny, or sublime, might occur at any of these moments, or at none of them. Half of the early migrants simply faded and died.

  There was another point when America began. The moment took place when new settlers crossed a different kind of boundary, when for the first time they could be certain that their colony was going to endure. So far as the Mayflower Pilgrims were concerned, this moment occurred in the territory in Maine that lay below Coburn Gore, in the year 1628. Eight years earlier, they had landed at Provincetown, Massachusetts, at the extremity of Cape Cod. Soon afterward they founded their settlement across the bay at New Plymouth. That was another beginning, but it was tenuous and frail. It took far longer for the Plymouth enterprise to make itself permanent, and to open the way for the foundation of Boston to the north, by colonists in far larger numbers.

  Fraught with risk, the Mayflower project endured a long period of trial, experiment, and error. Deeply in debt to their backers in London, and chronically short of supplies to keep their feet shod, their muskets loaded, and their small boats afloat, they needed a commodity to send back to England to be swapped for silver coins or used to redeem their IOUs. They eventually found it, in the quantities they needed, up here in Maine. They bought it from the people who lived in the country below the watershed between what we now call Quebec and the United States. This was where the moment of maturity occurred: the place where they passed across an emotional frontier, the line that separates insecure ambition from likely success.

  There was only one way in which the Pilgrims could find the money to pay their debts and finance new supplies from home. They needed the fur of Castor canadensis, the North American beaver. No other colonial product fetched so high a price, in Paris, in London, or in Holland. What made the skins so precious? That will be the subject of a later chapter. All we need know for the time being is that during the 1620s the price of a beaver pelt increased fourfold, to reach a peak of nearly forty shillings. That was enough to rent nine acres of English farmland for a year.

  Until they had pelts, the colony at New Plymouth remained a fragile outpost, a tiny corn-growing settlement wedged between the forest and the sea. For it to become something more, the seed or nucleus for a much larger inflow of the English, they had to find beaver skins, and in Maine the valleys and the high ground supplied a vast habitat for the mammal.2

  As many as fifty beavers may have lived in each square mile, or even more densely in places such as Hathan Bog. Alongside the esker, on every stream beavers built their dams and lodges. Today the animals have left a chain of beaver meadows, dried-up ponds, strung out along the side of Highway 27. Take the surface area of Franklin County, Maine, around and beneath the bog and the highway, and multiply it by fifty. You come to an estimate of ninety thousand of the creatures in that one county alone.

  Why did the beavers of Maine become the target of exploitation, and not those of another region? The Pilgrims might have gone elsewhere, and sometimes did. Beavers will live in any setting with the trees they like to gnaw, the quaking aspen or the willow, and streams that flow down gradients a few degrees above the level. As for the date, why did it take so long for the Pilgrims to begin to penetrate the deep interior? Because it was only in 1628, and in Maine, that chance and circumstance combined to make it feasible. Access, demand for the skins, the legal right to settle, the technology of transport, the command of language, a supply of trading goods, and the presence of people able and willing to hunt: these were essential too.

  As we shall see, the very early history of New England contains many hidden, forgotten corners, niches quite as remote as Coburn Gore. Most often, these spots of vagueness or omission arise because, in the British Isles, the evidence lies neglected, scattered in odd places in dozens of archive collections.

  They contain a wealth of overlooked material about the origins of the Mayflower project and its place in the wider history of England under King James and his son the future Charles I. For the most part, British scholars have either left these very early sources untouched or failed to see their significance. They have done what the Pilgrims did not do, and left America to the Americans. This is why so much of the Pilgrim narrative remains in shadowy monochrome, like a photograph in sepia or a silent film, deprived of color, light, and sound.

  Among the gaps in the story, one of the most serious concerns the trade in beaver pelts, shipped back in their thousands by way of the ports of Barnstaple, Bristol, and Plymouth in the west of England. That is why we start in Franklin County. We might begin by imagining its character, not by way of fantasy, but with the aid of available resources, scientific and archaeological, and verbal too. To help us, we might imitate the native people of the region. We might invoke the spirit of a bird to function as an airborne guide.3

  Today more than four hundred pairs of bald eagles breed in the state of Maine. When Charles I sat on the throne, doubtless their numbers were far greater. What might she have seen, an eagle, if in the spring of 1628she swung her head around through three-quarters of a circle and scanned the country below Coburn Gore? She saw the land of Mawooshen. That was the name given then to the region: mountain, river, valley, plain, and coast, and among them the Eastern Abenaki, who lived between the blue ridge and the ocean.

  THE BALD EAGLE’S NEST

  From her zenith, at four thousand feet, she sees the Sandy River bending back and forth. Fed by streams cascading down off the massif, the river swings around and doubles back but never ceases to drop toward the sea. Beyond its broad, flat valley, to the south the ground rolls out to form a plain covered by birch woods and pine, with strewn on the earth beneath them hundreds of pale gray boulders. They were abandoned, like elliptical cannonballs, by the same retreating glaciers that formed the esker.

  As the ice melted and the Atlantic rose, the sea reached this far inland, laying down thick beds of silt and sand. Even now, the ocean is far closer than it seems. In the seventeenth century, long before men dammed the rivers of Maine, salmon swam all the way up from the sea to Farmington to spawn.

  If our eagle of 1628 leaves her nest at the top of a tall white pine, and goes looking for game along the valley, she comes to a spot where the Sandy meets another river, deeper and wider. Before it begins its own final descent toward the sea, it flows in a sequence of long, quiet reaches between sets of falls and rapids. Each one marks a geological division, ten or fifteen miles apart, where the river suddenly alters course. For this reason, the river bears the name Kennebec. In the native language of the country the word gwena means “long,” while the syllable bague refers to a placid stretch of water.4

  Hovering above the Kennebec, the eagle probes with her eyes for a leaping fish or a squirrel breaking cover. When she finds one, she swoops down at the spot where the Sandy River meanders in from the west, near the site of the modern town of Madison. Beneath a bluff, the water forms a calm, deep pool, tinted in spring by a drifting haze of pollen from the pines. As she skims the amber surface and then swings back up into the sky with a fish in her talons, she flies over a place where the woods have been cleared, to make a wide, flat open space on a terrace thirty feet above the river.

  As she climbs, the eagle pays little heed to the village of Naragooc, or the human beings stooping down to collect Maine fiddleheads, edible wild ferns gathered at this season. She ignores the circular huts along the bluff, the wooden longhouse, or the people moving to and fro between cooking fires, storage pits, and the fields of maize that loosely encircle the settlement. Instead, she rises steeply again. From her highest altitude, she can see as far as eighty miles. With the dense packing of nerve cells in her retina, she can pick out objects three or four times smaller than those detected by a human eye.

  Far to the north, she sees the mountain esca
rpment and the dark smudge marking the site of Hathan Bog. Bare summits and icy mountain streams offer little by way of food, and so she turns toward the south. On the way to the sea, the landscape becomes a mottled rug, made up of ridges of gravel between elongated lakes. They point toward the site of the modern city of Augusta, forty miles away, with the Atlantic visible far beyond it as a distant rim of silver.

  This was Mawooshen. Even the English called the country by that name. They did so in a document compiled in about 1607, most likely as a briefing paper for a failed attempt to found a colony at the mouth of the Kennebec, at Fort St. George. The word apparently referred to a confederacy of some thirteen towns and villages of the Eastern Abenaki, scattered across the zone between the Sandy River and Cadillac Mountain.5

  Among them, the deepest inland was Naragooc, located at the junction of the Sandy and the Kennebec. Today its name survives on a modern map in the altered form of Norridgewock. When the English manuscript was written, Naragooc provided a home to as many as four or five hundred people, led by a Zegeme, or sachem, a chief by the name of Cocockohamas. His clan occupied a spot where the earth was unusually good. A fine olive brown tilth called Hadley loam, it formed a narrow carpet along both banks of the river, like the rich soil of exactly the same kind along the Connecticut valley, coveted by later English settlers.

  At Naragooc, the Abenaki lived at the northernmost point where at the time the climate permitted the cultivation of maize. They also sat on the perimeter between the northern hardwoods, spruce, and fir and the softer oaks and pines of southern New England. Accessible by water, Naragooc was poised between corn country and the hunting spaces of the north.6 And so in spring, when our imaginary eagle saw the village, the people who lived there would be skinning hundreds of dead beavers. Late winter was the time to catch them, with a spear driven through the melting ice, when the animals were most hungry and least cautious and their pelts were thickest.