Dan Snow's History Hit - Mayflower 400

Episode Date: September 14, 2020

I am joined on the podcast by a series of historians, writers and storytellers, to talk about the 400th anniversary of the journey of the Mayflower. Travelling from Southern England to North America in September 1620, we discuss why the settlers left, and we examine the contested legacy of the Mayflower for the descendants of North American communities.Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Hello everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. It's a very special episode of the podcast today because this week marks the 400th anniversary of the departure. Ten weeks later the 102 passengers and around 30 crew arrived near the tip of Cape Cod. They then endured a brutal first winter where they were sustained by the Aboriginal Americans, the First Nations that they met, notably the Wampanoag tribe. This is a podcast we've put together with the team at Mayflower 400. They are leading the commemorations and for the first major commemorations they are looking not just at the experience of the European crew and settlers but of the impact on this journey on the Native American peoples. For this podcast we're talking to descendants both of the Native Americans and also the European settlers on the Mayflower.

We're also talking to historians, writers and broadcasters to tell the story of the Mayflower and talk about its consequences. We've also here at History Hit produced a documentary, which you can see on our History Hit TV channel, as ever. We're also going to broadcast it live on Timeline, History's biggest and best YouTube channel. That broadcast will go out live at 6pm on the 16th of September, UK time. That's 1pm Eastern Time and 10 o'clock Pacific Time. That will be available to watch free for the rest of the year. It's also available to watch free, as I said, on History Hit TV. Just go to historyhit.tv and it will be outside the paywall. And please visit mayflower400.org for even more history

and information surrounding the commemoration. I'll be there on the anniversary itself, so watch out on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. But in the meantime, enjoy the podcast. The traditional interpretation of the Mayflower and the settlement of North America was, of course, of a new world, a virgin land, with perhaps a few savages dotted about. But we now know that is completely inaccurate. North America was settled. There were vibrant communities of Native Americans there that suffered a series of extraordinary demographic and military catastrophes after the European settlers arrived. The first person we interview is Stephen Peters. He's a member of the Mashapi Wampanoag tribe, who were the group of people that the Mayflower settlers depended on for their survival through the first grim winter in the New World. So pre-European contact, which would have been

well before the Mayflower had come over, because there had been quite a bit of contact with European explorers and traders prior to the early 1600s. I really like to think that it was a really idyllic setting for my ancestors to be in. They did live very much in tune with nature. And so they took what nature gave and they lived by the water in the summer and they moved further inland in the winter, following the food sources, living in home styles that were efficient for the weather as well. And they also as well had a very structured form of government. And we know this because when the Europeans did start to come over, they did realize that there was an organization behind it and there was a way for the people to

live in harmony. And, you know, they had a structure of government that worked very well for them. We also know as well that a lot of the diseases and sicknesses that the Europeans had been dealing with were not something that we had here. You know, those were all introduced in the 1600s. They were very difficult for the tribes because they ripped through in very fast fashion. So, you know, I do like to look back and think that it was mostly an idyllic way of life for my ancestors prior to the Europeans coming over. Next up, Anna Scott to tell us what Europe was like in the 17th century. So Europe at that time in the 1500s and the 1600s, there's an awful lot going on.

There's a lot of changes happening, religious changes, political changes, changes in authority and power. And a lot of that stems from the Reformation. In the run-up to the period that we're thinking about when the pilgrims were starting to be active and travel themselves there are lots of different changes in the monarchy so it's quite a turbulent time there's a lot of turmoil and it also causes lots of conflict wars so things are quite unsettled. It's quite easy to talk about the church and religious views and think of it perhaps as something that's separate. Sometimes it is separate for people today. Church is something that some people do but not everybody does it. Back then

everybody had to go to church, it was the law, and you had to go to your local church. You weren't allowed to go to a different church, perhaps in a different village, if you were living in a village. That was called gadding about if you went to somebody else's church and you weren't meant to do it. And you could be fined if you broke some of these church rules. So your beliefs, your religion, was part of your everyday life. Within the Protestant tradition, there are the Puritans who have clearer ideas about wanting to get rid of some of the

rituals that they saw as associated with the Catholic Church they wanted things to be quite plain and simple but the separatists those people who want to separate themselves from the church are probably further along in that spectrum so I suppose you could describe them as more extreme and they took the decision in the end that actually you can't stay within the church and try and change it from within you just want to be out of it completely which is an issue when you start to think about who the head of the church is so the head of the church at that time is the king as it is now the head of the church of England is the monarch If you are in charge of that church and there are people who reject that hierarchy

or who don't agree with it, then they are effectively challenging your authority. Your authority is head of the church, but also your authority is head of the state, which is potentially dangerous. Let's also hear from James Evans, who's been on the podcast before. He's an author and historian specialising in the migration of Europeans to North America in the 17th century. It's interesting, the word Puritan, like lots of words, it starts as an insult and gets proudly used and adopted by the Puritans themselves. There isn't a very clear ideological difference which separates Puritans from other Protestants. It's more the intensity of their belief, the fact that the Bible infuses their every thought,

their every word. There are certain things that they believed. So they objected to things like wearing particular robes, which they were required to wear, and they didn't want to make the sign of the cross at baptism, for example, and so they could be fined. You could be fined for not going to church, going to the wrong church

preaching in a church if you weren't didn't have permission to do that so only particular people were allowed to do that you had to have had the right kind of training and education to be allowed to speak to people about god and so the the people who were starting to object to that were breaking those rules and they were preaching to people not necessarily always in the context of churches so they were starting to do those things in their own homes as well and that's where some of the risks would have developed so it's thought that William Brewster who became known as an elder of the pilgrims who went to America it's thought that he had a group who would meet in his home,

which was Scrooby Manor in North Nottinghamshire. There was another congregation formed in Gainsborough. John Smith was the leader of that group, and it's thought that they may have met in Gainsborough Old Hall also to worship in secret. Where you start to see problems for the separatists are where people are saying so-and-so is doing this and they shouldn't be doing it. And then they get in trouble with the church courts. They could be fined. They could be imprisoned. And in some of the more urban areas in the period not long before, people were being executed or could die.

We think of the journey of the Mayflower beginning in southern England and ending in North America but there's a whole prequel the story of these evangelicals escaping from England and heading to the continent in search of a place to safely practice their religion. Let's hear from Jo Loosemore who's working with the Mayflower 400 team. I think sometimes we really focus on this Atlantic journey and the 66 days from Plymouth to landing in what became Provincetown. But I think what we have to remember is that for all of these passengers, their journey began before that, either in Holland or in London or in other places. So actually they've been travelling for a very, very long time. A few of them got on a barge on the River Trent to sail up the Trent to the

Humber across to Stalingborough, which is near Immingham, to get on a Dutch ship to escape to Amsterdam. They lived in tenement houses by canals, which were described as being subject to stinking. These were very polluted, quite unpleasant places to live at the time. The emigre community in Leiden grew to be about 500 strong. One of the other attractions of Leiden for some of the leading men is the fact that it's got the university there, so they can become involved in teaching.

William Brewster is involved in setting up his printing press, not necessarily to make money, but because they're interested in spreading the word of what they believe and promoting the kind of arguments that they want to continue having, those debates they want to continue having about how religious practice should be. They're actually in Holland for 12 years before they go to America, and so they start to feel that their children are becoming a bit too Dutch.

They see themselves very much still as English. I think they have that identity as English people. And they are also a bit concerned about some of the other beliefs that people have so you're in a place that perhaps is more liberal and people are tolerated for their different practices and Leiden is known as the city of migrants there are lots of people that travel to Leiden from all different areas and so there are these different churches and different traditions. But it seems as though the pilgrims themselves that are not very tolerant of some of these other practices

which is quite ironic because they are all about wanting religious tolerance for themselves but they aren't necessarily tolerant of how other people do things. People are starting then at that time to talk about going to this new world. New for them certainly. Here's historian Dr Catherine Gray on what they did know about North America. They were really aware of the earlier colonies that had been settled in North America and we know this because they write about it in the first publication that they write, March Relation. So they know what's happened in Jamestown, and they know that Jamestown has the only successful English colony in the North American landscape at this time.

There is an opportunity to set yourself up as a new community and perhaps have a bit more autonomy. That becomes an attractive idea to the pilgrims they want this religious tolerance but they effectively don't want to be influenced by other people or have their children around other people who they don't necessarily agree with they understood that there are different ways to settle colonies and jamestown being the only success story that they were aware of was the model that they would have to depend upon. And interestingly, one of the passengers on the Mayflower, Stephen Hopkins,

had been to Jamestown, so he's already made the transatlantic journey already, and he's brought in by the merchant adventurers, I guess, to help the colonists. Setting up colonies was a way of increasing economic opportunities for people back in those cities, for those merchants who were sponsoring people to go. They were looking for groups who would be willing to do that, but they were giving them terms which were sometimes quite onerous. So the pilgrims did get themselves involved in a deal which was a seven-year debt, effectively. They had seven years to pay back the debt from them being set up to be able to go over to America. They bought a ship, they bought the Speedwell in Holland,

and they sailed to Southampton where they met the Mayflower, which had been hired for the journey. And they were still negotiating terms where they were in Southampton. After Southampton, they called the port or two along the coast until they reached Plymouth, where the curator of the Mayflower 400 galleries at the Box Museum in Plymouth, Joe Loosemore, takes up the tale. Often it's suggested that Plymouth really welcomed the passengers of the Mayflower and the Speedwell.

And there's certainly a suggestion that Plymouth was a Puritan town at this time. So the city had one church, which was St Andrews, and the minister there was Henry Wallace. And he's often described as a Puritan preacher. And we also know at this time that banned Puritanical texts were coming in to the town. So I think because we have that background, there is a feeling that the people who arrived here in late August, early September of 1620, were welcomed. I'm not so sure about that, because ultimately this group of people were still strangers. They had ambitions to cross the Atlantic,

but at a terrible time of year. And Plymouth is a maritime city now it was a working maritime town then and I've always had the impression that probably people who lived in Plymouth in 1620 probably thought that these people were incredibly ambitious possibly foolhardy, because they were attempting to cross the Atlantic at a truly terrible time. It was just too late in the year, because every seafarer in Plymouth knew that the best time to be on the New England coastline

or the Newfoundland coastline was April or May. And that to attempt to make the crossing in the autumn was dangerous. 400 years ago this week, they set off. Jo describes the scene. Victorian imagery would have us believe that there were lots of people on the quayside. I think the scene might have been really very different because actually we don't know how many people were in Plymouth. We know that 102 travelled, but we don't know how many were in the town. Here's James Evans again.

They made several attempts to leave with two ships, but the speedwell was found to be too leaky. It was described as being as leaky as a sieve. And while they went back to Plymouth to try and conduct repairs on it, the repairs were obviously not sufficiently good and what they ended up doing was cramming on board the Mayflower. What you have is a group of people, men, women and children, all together on one deck of this ship.

In height, they have about five feet. Each person has about a six-foot space by about three foot, because the space that they're in is only about 75 feet long and about 20, 25 feet wide. So if you divide that up by 102 people of different ages, different classes, different kinds of family, you have 19 family groups. So they divide up the space into almost makeshift cabins, I suppose.

That's with canvas. But you've got people people you've got families you've got luggage you've also got arms and armor you've got a much smaller boat that is in bits also on this deck so you've got a group of people who are brought together to travel in really, really challenging conditions. But a great many of the people on board the Mayflower had probably never been at sea before ever. And to suddenly be in an Atlantic storm, I mean, you know, the levels of kind of seasickness and just the sheer horror of it, it's hard to believe. Most of these people couldn't swim, if you remember. I mean, you know, they knew that it would be completely fatal if they fell into the water.

One man, John Howland, is lost overboard and is pulled back from the water. Another man, William Button, dies within sight of land. One of the sailors, who many of the passengers didn't like very much at all, and who, it sounds, perhaps had baited some of them for a long time, he also dies during the journey. But I think one of the most significant events has to be a birth on board. Three pregnant women travel, and Elizabeth Hopkins gives birth to a son on board.

He's named Oceanus after the incredible ocean that they're endeavouring to conquer. After 10 gruelling weeks at sea, they spotted North America in early November. Here's James Evans and Dr Catherine Gray. There must have been a sense of extraordinary excitement in relation to having seen the coast of a new continent for the first time after, as I say, over two months of being at sea and experiencing the conditions that they had. But what they did realise was that they were not in the part of America that they hoped to be.

They should have been a little bit further south where their patent, which is the legal document that they take with them to officially, in English eyes and European eyes, settle a particular part of North America. They'd landed too far north because the storms had blown them off course a little. So when they did initially land and realised where exactly they were, initially they tried to sail south as far as the Hudson, but they found that too difficult to do, so they sailed south for a bit and then sailed north again.

So they were very much in the wrong place at the wrong time. But imagine what it would have been like seeing land after all that time. It also brought a challenge to them because 64 days at sea all together in one small space inevitably had led to fractious relationships. And I think when they saw land, they realised that actually this journey was now real and that they had a potential to settle. But on this ship you had people with very different motivations,

very different aspirations, and I think the difficulties had really started to come through and so we get the descriptions of people arguing, disagreeing and not being sure about what would happen next. So they come up with an agreement, which over time has become known as the Mayflower Compact. Whether it was the beginning of self-governance in America, or whether it was merely a pragmatic way of working together, is debatable. But what it gave them was a way of coming together, working together, and accepting that they were all in it together.

They spent months on this boat together in cramped quarters. And anyone that was not a pilgrim that was on that boat, the pilgrims just referred to as strangers. How long can you call someone a stranger when you live that close to each other and, you know, rely on each other for all this, which is why it's not surprising that the compact had to be drafted so quickly to keep the rebellion down within the Mayflower, and that it was not something that was signed by all men on the boat either. When the ship arrived in Cape Cod in November 1620, it was more of a hospital ship. Here's Jo Lucemore. People have not eaten well.

People have not been outside. People probably haven't had enough to drink, certainly not fresh water. And lots of people were unwell. And I think how they were when they arrived also determines what they're able to do on arrival. And what they tell us is that people were sick. And actually, in many cases, they were dying. sick. And actually, in many cases, they were dying. There were a lot of negative experiences with Europeans prior to the arrival of the Mayflower in 1620. And you had a couple instances, both in Patuxet, where you had 27 young men that were taken slave from there in 1614. You also had between then and 1618, 1619, you had quite a few skirmishes with the Nasset tribe,

which was located now in present-time Provincetown or near Provincetown. Those instances resulted in deaths on both the European side and on the native side as well. When they see land, they realise they have to get to it. So they start to re-establish their small boat, which enables them to go out and do recces, really, around this new landscape, which is unknown to them. And so what you have is a series of small explorations of about six to eight men led very often by their military captain Miles Standish and they go out to explore this new territory. After that brutal voyage the pilgrims had arrived in what they called the new world for the Wampanoag and other Native American tribes, it was, of course, a very old and familiar world. And it's also worth remembering that for these Native Americans, these would not have been the

first Europeans that they'd come across. Let's hear more now from Stephen Peters. You know, there's no written history from the Nauset side of that event, but we can know absolute with certainty that they were watching. You don't have a ship dock on your front yard and not take notice of it. So the settlers are in dire straits, but the Wampanoag also have huge challenges that they faced. What emerges is a sort of alliance of necessity,

as academic and historian Catherine Gray and Stephen Peters tell us. Before the Mayflower even set sail, you know, disease has swept through this particular region and the Wampanoag have been particularly affected by disease. And we know that Patuxet, which is the place where the Plymouth colony is finally settled had been a Native American village before that, a thriving Native American village, until that European contact, until the disease had spread through that area. You know, obviously the pilgrims looked at it as an act of God that came through and allowed that village to be abandoned and wiped out due to a plague

that had ripped through from 1616 to 1619. You know, obviously, we don't look at that as an act of Godhead, but more as a really dark point in the history of our people where hundreds of thousands of Wampanoag were wiped out in the course of just two or three years. When they arrived at the village, all were gone, and they had to sweep away the bleached bones of the dead to make it habitable for them. That, to us, shows just how quickly and how devastating that plague was that came through, because we did not have time to bury the bones of our dead. And there's estimates that, you know, 70 to 80 percent of the Wampanoag nation died during 1616 and 1619. We had conflicts going on with our neighboring tribes as well, who now were looking at us as vulnerable and could expand

their territory. So we had all of those things happening at that same point when the pilgrims arrived. And I don't think that had those situations happened, that in 1620, the pilgrims would have arrived on our shores, and they would have been welcomed. We were in need. You know, our ancestors needed support, they needed an ally. So we make that assumption that that is the backdrop to that sort of peaceful moment between the pilgrims and the Wampanoag. Because at that point, the pilgrims needed support. They were sick. They were hungry. They were cold. They were not in Virginia, where they intended to be. And the Wampanoags, in the same respect, were depleted in our numbers and our resources, and we were being attacked by our neighbours.

So you had two groups that needed each other at that particular moment in time and history. So over the course of the first few months, we have English-speaking Indigenous people arrive in the colony. Samoset and Tisquantum, or Squanto as he's called. And with that ability to translate and to communicate, they begin to understand a little bit more about the Wampanoag and there's a process of communication.

They speak English because they've been taken themselves, taken as slaves by some of those earlier explorers, brought back to Europe. They learn English on the way back. They manage to get themselves back. And so they're able to come up to the pilgrims, speak to them, and they help them to survive in that first year and help them to establish crops.

So with the benefit of indigenous interpreters and translators, they are able to establish a close alliance i would say with the wampanoag people and they begin to understand a little bit more and they teach the colonists you know how to survive really so if we go through the first year and and by november of 1621 a whole year later they're taking in the first harvest and they're taking in the first harvest because the wampanoag have helped them do that. The minute the Europeans no longer needed that alliance, it quickly broke down. You had conflicts between both a Wampanoag government that was very much a democracy,

where the leaders in the Wampanoag nation answered to the people instead of reversal where the people answered to a king or a queen. And it was also a matriarchal society as well, where women were often rising up to the highest level of government in the Wampanoag Nation. That would have definitely been a struggle for our pilgrims to wrap their heads around. And they would not have enjoyed having to communicate

on a government-to-government relationship with women. And once that need on the European side had broken down and once their new need was to expand their land base for their cattle, for their farms. It required them to further approach on the land of the Wampanoags. And that's where you really started to see some conflicts and ultimately the King Philip's War. The story of the Wampanoag really has a sad ending, which is a generation later, the so-called King Philip's War saw European settlers annihilate Wampanoag and other coastal tribes, driving any survivors into the interior. It was the beginning

of a centuries-long genocide that would eventually see Native Americans confined to a tiny minority in a continent that they had for so long dominated. But that story isn't really told. What's more remembered is the story of Thanksgiving. I talked to a friend of this podcast, the great historian Sarah Churchwell. She's herself a descendant of the Mayflower settlers. And she was able to tell me about Thanksgiving, its genesis, and about what the Mayflower story means today and how that meaning has changed. I have always been fascinated by that part of my family's history. I was raised to be interested in it. I was raised in a family that is interested in it, that is interested in

American history generally. But the ways in which, you know, it's a funny thing when you're taught something in school as this thing that happened of historic importance, and then to go home and, you know, have your mother literally say to you, oh, but that's us, you know, you're descended directly from that, particularly when you're young and impressionable. It's kind of extraordinary. And so it absolutely shaped my sense of myself as an American and certainly heightened my interest in history as a young girl,

but particularly in the mythologized aspects of American history, which I've always been really, really interested in. So Thanksgiving, that's what's so fascinating to me, is actually that feels like a too-good-to-be-true Disney moment, but actually that's something that happened. Yeah, absolutely. So when we now go back to reconsider our earlier and very simplistic and very Western European Anglo-orientated version of the histories, which basically says the pilgrims came and they brought God and they brought civilization to the savages, which is the earliest version of it. And of course, that's the version that gets

mythologized in Westerns and becomes incredibly, I mean, that's 19th century stories, but still the same logic that this civilization is being brought by the Europeans to the savages in the wilderness. We have finally acknowledged that we need to considerably complicate that story and that we're by no means the good guys in this story. And that obviously, as is always the case with histories of settler colonialism, you're talking about great violence, you're talking about the destruction of ways of life, about, you know, destruction of ancient religions and ancient languages and ancient cultures, and also ancient ways of inhabiting the environment, all of which has, you know, huge consequences for how we live today. And so that

becomes a story about tension and a story about violence and a story about intercultural violence and indeed genocide when we get to the way that the European settlers eventually treated the natives. But at the beginning, they didn't, which is really quite a remarkable story. That was Professor Sarah Churchwell. It is fascinating that it has taken 400 years of commemorations, of regular commemorations, for this to be the first one that is attempting to be a bit more even-handed,

talking both about the settlers and their descendants, but also of the native experience of the Wampanoag and the other tribes who would suffer so terribly at the hands of these European arrivals. If you want to know more about this subject, we have got a full-length documentary going live on both those platforms, Timeline and History Hit TV, on Wednesday afternoon, so go and check that out.

Thanks to Mayflower 400 for supporting this podcast. If you're interested in the 400th anniversary of Mayflower, there is a fantastic website. Go to www.mayflower400uk.org. See you next time.