“The Mayflower and Before” by Bill Bryson

The image of the spiritual founding of America that generations of Americans have grown up with was created, oddly enough, by a poet of limited talents (to put it in the most magnanimous possible way) who lived two centuries after the event in a country three thousand miles away. Her name was Felicia Dorothea Hemans and she was not American but Welsh. Indeed, she had never been to America and appears to have known next to nothing about the country. It just happened that one day in 1826 her local grocer in Rhyllon, Wales, wrapped her purchases in a sheet of two-year-old newspaper from Boston, and her eye was caught by a small article about a founders’ day celebration in Plymouth. It was very probably the first she had heard of the Mayflower or the Pilgrims. But inspired as only a mediocre poet can be, she dashed off a poem, “The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers (in New England),” which begins

The breaking waves dashed high
On a stern and rock-bound coast
And the woods, against a stormy sky,
Tneir giant branches toss’d

And the heavy night hung dark
The hills and water o’er,
Men a band of exiles moor’d their bark
On the wild New England shore

and carries on in a vigorously grandiloquent, indeterminately rhyming vein for a further eight stanzas. Although the poem was replete with errors—the Mayflower was not a bark, it was not night when they moored, Plymouth was not “where first they trod” but in fact marked their fourth visit ashore—it became an instant classic, and formed the essential image of the Mayflower landing thatmost Americans carry with them to this day.*

The one thing the Pilgrims certainly didn’t do was step ashore on Plymouth Rock. Quite apart from the consideration that it may have stood well above the high-water mark in 1620, no prudent mariner would try to bring a ship alongside a boulder in a heaving December sea when a sheltered inlet beckoned nearby. If the Pilgrims even noticed Plymouth Rock, there is no sign of it. No mention of the rock is found among any of the surviving documents and letters of the age, and indeed it doesn’t make its first recorded appearance until 1715, almost a century later.¹ Not until about the time Ms. Hemans wrote her swooping epic did Plymouth Rock become indelibly associated with the landing of the Pilgrims.

Wherever they landed, we can assume that the 102 Pilgrims stepped from their storm-tossed little ship with unsteady legs and huge relief. They had just spent nine and a half damp and perilous weeks at sea, crammed together on a creaking vessel small enough to be parked on a modern tennis court. The crew, with the customary graciousness of sailors, referred to them as puke stockings, on account of their apparently boundless ability to spatter the latter with the former, though in fact they had handled the experience reasonably well.’ Only one passenger had died en route, and two had been added through births (one of whom ever after reveled in the exuberant name of Oceanus Hopkins).

They called themselves Saints. Those members of the party who were not Saints they called Strangers. Pilgrims in reference to these early voyagers would not become common for another two hundred years. Even later was Founding Fathers. It isn’t found until the twentieth century, in a speech by Warren G. Harding. Nor, strictly speaking, is it correct to call them Puritans. They were Separatists, so called because they had left the Church of England. Puritans were those who remained in the Anglican Church but wished to purify it. They wouldn’t arrive in America for another decade, but when they did they would quickly eclipse, and eventually absorb, this little original colony.

It would be difficult to imagine a group of people more ill-suited to a life in the wilderness. They packed as if they had misunderstood the purpose of the trip, They found room for sundials and candle snuffers, a drum, a trumpet, and a complete history of Turkey. One William Mullins packed 126 pairs of shoes and thirteen pairs of boots. Yet they failed to bring a single cow or horse, plow or fishing line. Among the professions represented on the Mayflower’s manifest were two tailors, a printer, several merchants, a silk worker, a shopkeeper, and a hatter—occupations whose indispensability is not immediately evident when one thinks of surviving in a hostile environment.³ Their military commander, Miles Standish, Was so diminutive of stature that he was known to all as “Captain Shrimpe”⁴—hardly a figure to inspire awe in the savage natives, whom they confidently expected to encounter. With the uncertain exception of the little captain, probably none in the party had ever tried to bring down a wild animal. Hunting in seventeenth-century Europe was a sport reserved for the aristocracy. Even those who labeled themselves farmers generally had scant practical knowledge of husbandry, since farmer in the 1600s, and for some time afterward, signified an owner of land rather than one who worked it.

They were, in short, dangerously unprepared for the rigors ahead, and they demonstrated their incompetence in the most dramatic possible way: by dying in droves. Six expired in the first two weeks, eight the next month, seventeen more in February, a further thirteen in March. By April, when the Mayflower set sail back to England,* just fifty-four people, nearly half of them children, were left to begin the long work of turning this tenuous toehold into a self-sustaining colony.⁵

Word list

damp                                         fuktig

perilous                                    farliga

vessel                                         fartyg

en route                                   på färden

exuberant                               översvallande

snuffers                                     släckare

manifest                                   passagerarlista

merchants                              handelsmän

hatter                                        hattmakare

hostile                                       fientlig

diminutive of stature       liten till växten

awe                                             fruktan

savage                                        vilda

natives                                      infödingar

encounter                               stöta på

labelled themselves          sa sig vara

scant                                          mycket lite

husbandry                              jordbruk

rigours                                      strapatser

manifest                                   uppenbara

incompetence                      oduglighet

in droves                                  i mängder

expired                                     dog

tenuous                                    obetydlig

toehold                                    fotfäste

self-sustaining                      självhushållande

remove                                     steg

conceive                                  förstå

hapless                                      olycklig

kindred                                     av samma sort

vast                                             vidsträckt

hue                                              utseende

mien                                           utseende

fast                                              starka

corn                                            majs

thriving                                    lyckades bra

agglomerative                      som har gyttrats ihop

formidable                             väldiga

clusters                                     klungor

untutored                               olärda

primer                                       nybörjarbok

feat                                              prestation

incidentally                           händelsevis

gifted                                         begåvade

linguists                                   språkvetare

convenient                             bekväma

assurance                                säkerhet

into the bargain                  med på köpet

straggly                                     spretigt

perished                                   gått under

aptly                                           passande

cod                                              torsk

stocks                                        lager

declined                                   tackade nej

prey on                                     plundra

presumption                         antagandet

sluggish                                    långsamma

booty                                         byte

privateers                                kapare

the distinction

of being                                    särskiljer sig pga

reconnoitring party          rekogniseringstrupp

alas                                              tyvärr

incorporated                        tagit in

tongue                                      språk

fate                                              öde

durable                                     varaktiga

ever-precarious                   alltid osäkra

unimaginably                       otänkbara

bounteous                              rikliga

replenish                                 fylla på

stocks                                        lager

scarcely                                    knappast

relic                                            minnesmärke

cast-iron                                  smidesjärn

crass                                           kolossal

injudiciousness                   omdömeslöshet

captivity                                  fångenskap

terra incognita                     okänd mark

endure                                      återstår

diligently                                 noggrant

taking heed                            tagit i akt

of his own devising            som var hans eget påfund

consummate                         fulländad

brown-nosing                       inställsamhet, fjäsk

heir apparent                        trolig arvinge

humbly entreating            ödmjukt fråga

posterity                                  eftervärlden

with relish                              med förtjusning

whimsical                               egendomlig

took his fancy                       föll honom i smaken

implausible                            osannolik

interpreter                             tolk

smallpox                                  smittkoppor

disgruntled                            missnöjda

inadvertently                        av misstag

exterminated                        utrotade

 

 

Questions

1. Give three examples of how the Pilgrim Fathers were unprepared for the new life in America.
2. What, according to Bryson, is the reason that some of the pilgrims managed to survive in the new country?
3. Why was it improbable that the English had learned how to speak the natives’ language?
4. Give two reasons for why the English began sailing to America.
5. Queen Elisabeth established a colony in Virginia to provide a supply base for privateers. What happened to this first colony?
6. Explain how one of the Indians, Samoset, had learned English.
7. Why were many of the places in New England given English names instead of Indian?
8. Give reasons for the fact that the native Squanto had every reason to be disappointed in the English.

 

 

 

 

 

Answers

 

 

1. They didn’t bring tools that could help them survive. They were not used to hunting. They had little knowledge of farming.

 

2. That they got help from the Indians on how to hunt and grow plants.

 

3. Because it was such a hard language to learn and that the pilgrims were hardly used to learning new languages. Furthermore, two of the Indians spoke English so the pilgrims didn’t have to learn their language.

 

4. British fishermen lost access to the fishing grounds off Iceland and discovered the cod-rich waters off Newfoundland. There were also English ships that sailed to America to prey on Spanish treasure ships.

 

5. It was deserted. At least some of the English must have joined Indian tribes and had children with the women.

 

6. Samoset had learned English from the fishermen who came to the area to dry fish, replenish stocks of food and water etc.

 

7. Because John Smith asked Charles Stuart (the heir apparent) if he could change the Indian names to English names connected to the Royal family.

 

8. He might have been forced into travelling to England where he worked for nine years. He was kidnapped by another Englishman and sold as a slave in Malaga. When he came back to America his tribe had been wiped out by a plague (probably smallpox that came with the English).