Books: Pious Pioneers

SAINTS AND STRANGERS — George F. Willison—Reynal & Hitchcock ($3.50).

In a virgin land teeming with game, and beside waters teeming with fish, how did New England’s Pilgrim Fathers manage nearly to starve to death?

From such original sources as Edward Winslow (the Pilgrim’s chief spokesman) and Governor William Bradford, a Denver-born author and scholar named George Findlay Willison has pieced together a brisk history of the Plymouth colony which should go far toward answering questions like this one. His Saints and Strangers is a far cry from the textbook story. His Pilgrim Fathers are as inept a crew of pious pioneers as ever tackled a howling wilderness.

London Indian. Of the 104 passengers on the Mayflower when she rounded the hook of Cape Cod and dropped anchor in Provincetown harbor, none knew anything about farming or fishing. Forty-one were members of the Separatist sect, which had fled to Holland from Scrooby England, a dozen years before. Another 40 were good Anglican churchgoers, shopkeepers and clerks from London and Southwestern England, who had jumped at the chance offered them by the expedition’s London backers to pick up a fortune in the new world. The remaining 23, like cooper John Alden, were bonded workmen or indentured servants.

Even in Holland, though they were “industrious and frugall,” they had nearly foundered. In America they would certainly have starved without a cache of Indian corn, which they providentially and promptly appropriated. “Sure it was God’s good providence,” wrote Bradford. When the corn was used up, their first Indian friend and convert, Squanto, providentially appeared. Captured by British sailors some years earlier, Squanto had lived in London and spoke perfect English. He had returned to America six months before the Mayflower. Squanto taught the Pilgrims how to plant their corn in small, properly spaced hills and how to fertilize each hill with a dead fish.

After five weeks in Provincetown harbor, during which exploring parties were sent out to find a suitable settlement, the Mayflower finally moved across the bay to Plymouth. For almost four months the Pilgrims stayed aboard while the men went ashore daily to build their daub and wattle houses.

Constantly hungry on a daily ration (for the whole group) of one peck of meal from the ship’s stores, always cold from exposure, many of them developed scurvy and pneumonia. The Pilgrims, claims Author Willison, blandly ignored the ship’s doctor, Giles Heale. For medical advice they depended solely on one of their own members, Deacon Samuel Fuller. Result: almost every day somebody died. When at last the Mayflower sailed back to England, the harvest came in, and a gift of corn from Squanto increased the group ration by another peck of fresh meal. But the seven acres planted by the Pilgrims themselves were a dismal failure. This, said Bradford, was the fault of “ye badness of ye seed, or lateness of ye season, or both, or some other defecte.”

But despite “ye meagre harvest,” the Pilgrims felt that they had much to be thankful for. They had made a start in the beaver trade, not trapping but buying skins from the Indians. Dissension in the colony itself had measurably lessened. So they decreed a special day of thanksgiving that all “might rejoyce together.” Four men were sent to shoot waterfowl. Friendly Indians presented five deer, so for three days the Pilgrims gorged “on venison, roast duck, roast goose, clams and other shellfish … all washed down with wine ‘very sweete & stronge.’ ” Then they settled down to another winter of malnutrition.

Packed with much unorthodox detail, Author Willison’s book is one of the most readable histories of the Plymouth Colony’s misfortunes.