Seeds of Change: The Mayflower, Part II
Today’s class was devoted to the continuing story of The Mayflower’s journey, and what happened when the passengers landed in Patuxet (which they renamed Plymouth in the grand colonizer tradition of naming places that already had names) and met the Wampanoag who had lived in the area for 12,000 years. If you missed class last week, you can read about it here.
First, let’s talk a little about the end of the Mayflower voyage.
First we did a little geography quiz. From History Smashers: The Mayflower, “The patent that the Pilgrims received gave them permission to settle in the Northern part of the Colony of Virginia, near the mouth of the Hudson River.” Virginia in 1620 (the last of the three pictures shown above) was way larger than the Virginia we know today (middle picture). Even so, by settling in Massachusetts, the Pilgrims were hundreds of miles away from their intended destination. Most history books and resources say this change in plans was due to bad winter storms (see an example here). But in Lies my Teacher Told Me, James Loewen provides an alternate theory. He believes, as do other historians, that the Mayflower ended up in Massachusetts on purpose. The Dutch separatists (35 of the 102 Mayflower passengers) might have bribed the Mayflower captain to land north of Virginia so they would be far from Anglican control (there was already an established British colony in Virginia at that time) and could more easily shape the community to their liking. They set sail with maps and guide books of Massachusetts, and they spent six weeks sailing around the coast of Massachusetts looking for the best place to build their community- that doesn’t sound like people looking to land immediately to get ready for winter, especially because the weather would have been milder the farther south they sailed. Loewen writes that textbooks could present the evidence to kids and let them decide for themselves what they think, but instead they skip over the controversy in favor of making the Pilgrims seem more pious and moral.
The hijacking theory might be one way of explaining how the Mayflower Compact came to be written. We know that the passengers on the ship were fighting- one textbook theorizes that this is because the non-separatist majority were unhappy that they weren’t landing in Virginia, where they had planned to seek their fortunes. The Mayflower Compact, which said that every male on board, regardless of religion or economic status, was called to join in the creation of a ‘civil body politic,’ may have been adopted to appease these angry passengers.
Anyway, the Pilgrims finally settled on Plymouth for their new home, which they chose:
“because of its beautiful cleared fields, recently planted in corn, and its useful harbor and brook of fresh water. It was a lovely site for a town. Indeed, until the plague, it had been a town, for “New Plimoth” was none other than Squanto’s village of Patuxet. The invaders followed a pattern: throughout the hemisphere Europeans pitched camp right in the middle of Native populations. Throughout New England, colonists appropriated American Indian cornfields for their initial settlements, avoiding the backbreaking labor of clearing the land of forest and rock.”
So they built their new homes in Patuxet, and explored abandoned houses and took what they wanted. They found a stash of buried corn seed and took that too, and even dug up graves and plundered items that had been buried with the dead. The Pilgrims famously had lots of help from Squanto, whose actual name was Tisquantum. This history has not been definitively proven, but it is believed that Tisquantum had been kidnapped by an English captain when he was a boy and brought to England where he worked for nine years before arranging passage back to his homeland. Then, and this part is widely accepted as fact, he was kidnapped again, this time in 1614, and sold into slavery in Spain. He escaped, made his way back to England, and was again able to secure passage back to Cape Cod. When he finally, finally made it back again, he found that everyone in his village had died of the plague that swept through Indigenous communities in 1616-1619. What a story! Tisquantum was instrumental in helping the Pilgrims survive- they very likely couldn’t have done it without him. He taught them how to grow crops they had never seen or eaten before and he introduced them to the Wampanoag and helped broker a peace and trade agreement between them. This blog post sums up the interaction between the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag:
“For a moment of history, the interests of the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag aligned. When the Pilgrims landed in New England, after failing to make their way to the milder mouth of the Hudson, they had little food and no knowledge of the new land. The Wampanoag suggested a mutually beneficial relationship, in which the Pilgrims would exchange European weaponry for Wampanoag for food. With the help of an English-speaking Patuxet Indian named Tisquantum (not Squanto; he spoke English because he was kidnapped and sold in the European slave trade before making his way back to America), the Pilgrims produced a bountiful supply of food that summer. For their part, the Wampanoag were able to defend themselves against the Narragansett. ”
We talked about this history in class today and then played a game of spot-the-errors-and-omissions in this children’s book!
See how many issues you can find! For some context, this book is 80 pages long and Native Americans are only mentioned on nine of those pages, and only briefly on about half of those.
While we were discussing this history, the kids were invited to construct a little version of The Mayflower out of paper, LEGOs, or any other materials they wanted. Our plan is to work on this ship for the next couple of weeks and to fill the ship with facts about the real history of the Mayflower, the Pilgrims, the Wampanoag, and the first Thanksgiving.
The link to the file for this template is here. We encourage you to print these out and record some facts to store in your homemade Mayflower model, then share what you’ve learned with your family during Thanksgiving.
