Saints, Strangers, the Wampanoag, the Powhatans and "Jane"

 

In the US today is the day of Thanksgiving.  Various regions claim primacy in the establishment of this treasured American holiday.  In Canada it is quite another day celebrated earlier in the Autumn,

The American holiday celebrates the survival of the first Anglophone settlements in the 17th Century.

The chronology:

Jamestown - 1607.  Famine the first couple of years, first Indian onslaught (Powhatans) in 1609, The population eventually began to grow and by 1620 there were 1200 English at Jamestown.  The importation of Africans did not begin until the 1660s or thereabout.  The first Blacks were sold into the colony by the Dutch as indentured servants with a limited term of servitude.  As a result there are African-Americans whose ancestors were never slaves. There was a massive surprise Indian attack one Sunday morning in 1622 that killed 25% of the colonists in an hour or so.  A large number of European women were taken into slavery by the Indians and never seen again.

Plymouth - 1620.  There were 102 passengers  brought to America in an old cargo ship, the Mayflower.  Half were separatist members of a pietistic Protestant sect and the others were useful people embarked because of the desire of the London investors in the venture to have some people in the group who would do more than pray, write sermons  and sing psalms.  My five ancestors on board were in the more or less secular group.   They all arrived in what is now eastern Massachusetts at a moment in which most of the coastal Indians had very recently died of diseases contracted from European cod fishermen.   These fisherman operated fish processing camps on the Maine coast in which they split and dried cod for transport to Europe.  The Indians had little resistance to what were common European diseases.  80 to 90% mortality is reported in some areas.  These Indians had died before the arrival of colonists.  The colonists (the Pilgrims) stupidly managed to arrive in November and by Spring half were dead including two of mine.  At that point fate intervened and the local Wampanoags decided that they needed the remaining English as allies against the Narragansetts, Mohigans and other tribes who had not suffered so much in the plagues.  That saved the colony.  The Wampanoags signed a treaty with the Plymouth survivors and provided an Indian agricultural adviser, a man named Squanto, who had worked for the English fishermen, who spoke good English and had visited Europe.  The colony never really prospered and after 10 years (1630) had 300 inhabitants.

Massachusetts Bay - 1630.  In that year a mass immigration from England to the Boston area began.  This was created by the Puritan notables of England.  The effort was highly organized, well financed and it brought many thousands of godly people, and some who were not so godly.  In accord with Calvinist thinking, potential immigrants were screened for resources, church membership or other essential qualities before being allowed to enroll in the migration.  The immigrant stakeholders brought money, servants and continuing support from the Puritan establishment in England.  The settlement grew very rapidly and soon absorbed Plymouth.  Mass migration ended in 1650.  The colony was a grand financial success.  Among my many ancestors at the Massachusetts Bay was Major John Mason who arrived early and by 1637 was the over all colonial commander in the Pequot War in Connecticut.  He. like Miles Standish at Plymouth, was a long serving English soldier from the wars in the Netherlands where little quarter was asked or given and he gave little to the Pequots.  Most of Mason's "troops" in this struggle for eastern Connecticut were Narrragansetts and Mohigans, the very men the Wampanoags had feared. 

Because of the literary gifts of William Bradford, the long serving governor at Plymouth that colony has somehow become the mythological place of foundation of what became the US.  In fact it was a rather insignificant place that had been narrowly saved from extinction through the medium of the necessities of Indian tribal politics.

My mother's people were among the founders of New France from 1617 onward until about 1670, but that is a different story.

The young woman pictured above has been given the name "Jane" by the archeologist researchers at Jamestown, Virginia  She was from the south coast of England.  She was 14 years old in 1609 and had been in Virginia only a few months when she died of starvation that terrible winter.  Her bones were found in a buried trash pit along with horses, dogs, cats, etc.  Her dead body had been butchered and eaten by people who had known her.  The injuries involved in the butchering process tell the scholars that she was quite dead before they started to cut her up and that the people who did this could not stand to look at her face while cutting her up and breaking into the back of her skull.

The restoration pictured above was made from her reconstructed skull.  

What were you saying about the Pilgrims?  pl 

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/pilgrims/player/?flavour=mobile

http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/saints-and-strangers/

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/jamestowns-dark-winter-full-episode/2427/

Comments

[David Habakkuk]

Colonel Lang,

I can never escape being in two minds about the Puritans.

Your reference to your ancestor, Major John Mason, reminded me of another long-serving veteran of the wars in the Netherlands, Captain Philip Skippon, as he was when he returned to England in 1638.

Most mornings, I walk the dog along the road where in November 1642 he led the London Trained Bands out to reinforce the Earl of Essex at Turnham Green, and across what were then fields and are now a park to where the Royalist Army approaching London stopped.

It was one of the most consequential non-events in British history, as Charles I then retreated back up the Thames Valley and made his headquarters in Oxford. He would never again come so close to capturing London and winning the war.

One of a number of several placards put up around the site to explain the battle in recent years records the brief remarks that Skippon addressed to his – inexperienced and undertrained – men, who were positioned between Essex's more experienced regiments:

'Come my boys, my brave boys, let us pray heartily and fight heartily. I will run the same hazards and fortunes with you. Remember the cause is for God, and for the defence of yourselves, your wives, your children. Come, my honest brave boys, pray heartily and fight heartily, and God will bless us.'

An underlying issue was I think that raised by Cromwell, when not long before he had written to John Hampden – also present at Turnham Green:

'Your troopers are most of them old decayed servingmen and tapsters; and their troopers are gentlemen's sons, younger sons and persons of quality; do you think that the spirits of such base and mean fellows will ever be able to encounter gentlemen that have honour and courage and resolution in them?'

Like Skippon, Cromwell was both himself of gentry family, and of intense Puritan conviction. His answer to the problem he had accurately defined was to appoint officers of relatively humble origins, but similar intense religious conviction.

When the 'New Model' was formed in 1645, Cromwell's troops were the basis of the cavalry, of which he was Lieutenant-General. The Major-General of Foot was Skippon, who commanded the centre at the decisive battle of Naseby in June 1645, staying on the field after being dangerously wounded by a musket-ball.

Like his commander at Naseby, the Lord General Sir Thomas Fairfax, Skippon would go a long way with Cromwell, but not to the end. Both would be among those commissioned to judge Charles I, but neither attended the sessions. (Fairfax would be instrumental in making possible the Restoration.)

The issues involved in those events would echo on through the centuries, in their different ways, on both sides of the Atlantic. They are not dead yet.

[YT]

When driven by hunger, folks will do anything...

I recall a great famine during the late Qing

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Chinese_Famine_of_1876%E2%80%9379

Good Lord, the poor Africans...

😢

[turcopolier]

YT

Africans? pl

[YT]

Sir, I recall Ethiopia in the 80s when I was a wee lad...

[William R. Cumming]

SQUANTO kidnapped by the Portugese and somehow got to England and then returned to America.

[Wyoming]

pl

We are cousins! My ancestors arrived in Plymouth in 1622. Also members of the fundamentalist sect. Eddy's. Family history indicates that they were a little to strong in their beliefs and were eventually 'invited' to depart the colony and then temporarily resided in Rhode Island and eventually Pennsylvania. Like you I expect, I am related to about half of the historical figures from the time.

[turcopolier]

Wyoming

Priscilla Mullens, John Alden - 9th great grandparents, Richard Warren, 10th great grand father. Her parents - 10th great grand parents. Yup, small world. pl

[Medicine Man]

Your story about the woman "Jane" brings to mind the North-East Indian's legends about the Wendigo. While I'm sure it wasn't evil spirits that drove the colonists to such desperate lengths, it is nevertheless a chilling thought.

[The Twisted Genius]

This stuff still permeated our New England lives in the 1950s and 60s. I grew up in the old glebe house for the Congregational church on the other side of the town green. My friends and I would often hike and camp along the Regicides trail named after three of Cromwell's judges who sentenced Charles I to death. We often visited Judges Cave where Edward Whalley and William Goffe lived for several months hiding from the men of Charles II sent to apprehend them. The people of New Haven sympathized with the Regicides hiding them and providing them with supplies. Whalley and Goffe were eventually chased out of the cave by a mountain lion and moved on the western Massachusetts.
I can't claim any ancestors among the early Americans. My forefathers were still living in the deep Baltic forests hedging their bets between the old forest spirits and this new Christian God the priests spoke of.