I am desperately lacking an education in American history except for the stereotypical and sometimes wrong information we were pumped up with through high school. I just think of pilgrims as those guys that look like the Quaker Oats guy, carrying around muskets.
What pilgrimage were the pilgrims on? Are these the Puritans who came over on the Mayflower seeking religious freedom? What what persecution were they fleeing from? Is there any basis in fact to the Thanksgiving legend of the pilgrims and Indians sitting down to any particular feast?
Ask me about guitars and software but don’t give me a history test.
In addition, it is interesting to note that shortly before these particular Europeans arrived, the native population had been all but wiped out by European diseases for which they had no resistance. In other words, there had most recently been thriving, productive agricultural culture in the area.
Also, these colonists were trying to get to Virginia, but were (obviously) off course.
They were a group of Brownists/primitive congregationalists in Scrooby.
To make a long story short, in England at that time, there was a movement among English Calvinists who thought that the Church of England had held on to too many Catholic ideas, and that the CoE needed to be reformed and Catholic ideas and rituals gotten rid of. This was the “Puritan” movement.
However, within the Puritan movement, there was a man named Robert Browne. Browne argued that the Church of England was unreformable, and that needed to be broken up, and replaced with a congregationalist system…that the mainstream Puritan movement didn’t go far enough A bunch of followers of his set up an illegal congregationalist church in Scrooby. When the government started cracking down on non-conformist churches, a lot of the Scrooby congregation fled to Amsterdam. A lot of them, later, left Amsterdam and came to America, and we know them now as the Pilgrims.
• Most of the passengers on the Mayflower were not Puritans, but ordinary Church of England folk. But the Puritans were the ones who chartered the ship, and were the colony’s leaders.
• The Plymouth pilgrims did not dress all in black, they wore clothing of many colors. Nor did they wear those funny hats with buckles on them.
• They regularly drank alcoholic beverages, although getting drunk was a disgrace.
• Plymouth Plantation was not the first permanent English-speaking settlement in America. Jamestown, Virginia had been settled thirteen years earlier in 1607, and by the time Plymouth Plantation was settled in Massachusetts in 1620, several other plantations along Virginia’s James River had been settled.
They most definitely were not trying to reach Virginia. As an illegal Separatist movement seen as treasonous by the state religion of Engalnd, why would they be trying to reach a Crown-supported colony? They’d be arrested.
The folks at Plimouth Plantation have the scoop on the Pilgrims.
They were, indeed, supposed to be on their way to what was then called Virginia, though not the modern state of Virginia. They had a patent from the Virginia Company of London, the company that controlled Virginia, to settle in part of the territory then controlled by the company. They chose the northernmost part of the territory to put them as far as possible from the established church. That would have put them somewhere near the mouth of the Hudson. Why they didn’t press on south after reaching Cape Cod is a matter of some controversy. Probably the best explanation is the one they gave themselves: that they were turned back by dangerous shoals and contrary winds and were relieved to reach any land after a long and stormy passage.
Cecil has a column on the Pilgrims coming out this week.
Not only had other Europeans been in the general area, but one of the local Indians, Squanto, had been to England and spoke fluent English. And without his help, they’d probably all have died.
I was at a hotel this past weekend where they had a copy of Governor Bradford’s “History of Plymouth Plantation”, and I was reading through it. Interesting stuff – I’ll have to pick up a copy. In one of the very opening pages Bradford quotes the Old Testament (Exodus, I think), and the tranaslation runs “…and they were pilgrims…” It was an offhand bit of literary fancy, and I don’t think the Pilgrims ever referred to themselves in that way, but later historians were taken by the phrase and fastened on it as a convenient label.
(There’s a lengthy appendix dealing with the colony’s efforts to precisely define the crime of “sodomy”, with much quotation in Latin from religious authorities. It was a very live issue, because the punishment was death. They decided that penetration is not a requisite for the rime to occur. Since they spent so much time on it, I assyume this must also have been a real problem in the colony. One of those things you never hear about in school.)
England had no qualms with sending its religious dissidents to North America. They were happy to see them go. Charles I granted a charter for Maryland to Lord Baltimore, a Catholic.
Charles I was definitely a High Churchman, but from all accounts a confirmed Anglican (pun not intended). His sons Charles II and James II were certainly a closet Catholic and an open convert respectively, though.
