In the late fall of 1620, the 102 men, women, and child passengers aboard for the Mayflower found themselves behind schedule and seriously off course. They were supposed to be in Virginia Colony (the colony that famously kidnapped Pocahontas), which was founded thirteen years earlier. That wasn’t the oldest European settlement on the eastern seaboard—those honors go to St. Augustine, Florida, which was founded – with a thriving slave market – in 1565. Many other short-lived Spanish settlements date back to the early 1500s. In the west, Santa Fe was ten years old.
The indigenous people of New England were already familiar with Spanish, French, Portuguese, and English fishermen who had been fishing the Grand Banks for a hundred years, many of whom had ventured south to what would become Massachusetts. The Europeans knew the coastline was heavily populated; they saw the villages and cornfields in the daytime and lights of fires reflecting on the water at night. Along the shore, there was no suitable village site unoccupied. They didn’t come to settle; just to fish and trade.
But, unbeknownst to the Pilgrims, that changed in 1617. An epidemic wiped out the majority of Natives for two hundred miles along the coast. Many villages were abandoned.
When the Pilgrims arrived on November 21, 1620, they made their initial landing at today’s Provincetown, at the tip of Cape Cod. Delayed by mishaps along the way, they were low on supplies and winter was setting in. To survive, they raided Nauset gravesites where corn had been buried with the departed, and took maize from a village cache while the local residents were away. After several peaceable and one not-so-peaceable interaction with the Nauset, the Pilgrims concluded they needed to find another place to settle.
On December 16, they arrived at the village of Patuxet. It was abandoned. They renamed it Plymouth. Here’s what they found:
The place where we now live is called Patuxet, and that about four years ago all the inhabitants died of an extraordinary plague, and there is neither man, woman, nor child remaining, as indeed we have found none… great mortality which fell in all these parts about three years before ye coming of ye English, wherein thousands of them dyed, they not being able to bury one another; their skulls and bones were found in many places lying still above ground where their houses and dwellings had been; a very sad spectacle to behold. – Edward Winslow
[They] were sore afflicted with the plague, so that the country was in a manner left void of inhabitants. –Ferdinando Gorges
and the bones and skulls upon several places of their habitations made such a spectacle after my coming into these parts, that, as I traveled in the Forest near the Massachusetts, it seemed to me a new found Golgotha. – Thomas Morton
… the bodies all over were exceeding yellow, describing it by a yellow garment they
showed me, both before they died and afterwards – Daniel Gookin
The Indians in those parts had newly, even about a year or two before, been visited with such a prodigious pestilence, as carried away not a tenth, but nine parts of ten (yea, ’tis said, nineteen of twenty) among them: so that the woods were almost cleared of those pernicious creatures, to make room for a better growth. Our first planters found the land almost covered with their unburied carcasses. – Reverend Cotton Mather
The Pilgrims essentially built Plymouth over the footprint of Patuxet and took over their abandoned corn fields. Without this epidemic, it is unlikely the Pilgrims would have been able to settle anywhere in the region.
Almost four centuries later, scholars still debate the disease which may have emanated from a French fishing vessel that visited Cape Cod. The list of possibilities includes plague, yellow fever, influenza, smallpox, chickenpox, typhus, typhoid fever, trichinosis, cerebrospinal meningitis, Hepatitis B, Hepatitis D, and leptospirosis complicated by Weil syndrome. With a 90-95% mortality rate (based on the Cotton Mather report), it is probably the most severe plague ever reported in the Americas, though its geographic extent was limited to just the coastline. Inland, the Narragansett were largely untouched by the plague.
The Wampanoag, Massachusett, Abeneki, Penobscot, and Nauset were devastated. The indigenous population of New England fell eighty-six percent between 1616 and 1639.
The passengers of the Mayflower suffered as well. Only fifty-three (slightly more than half) survived the first winter, which they spent huddled onboard the Mayflower at anchor near shore.
This set the stage for the arrival of Tisquantum (Squanto) and an alliance between two groups of people struggling to survive: the Wampanoag (under Great Sachem Massasoit) and Plymouth Colony.
These will be covered in coming blog posts (hyperlinks above).
Memories of the People 