An historical record of the Puritan conquest of New England

“What should we call it?” asked Isaac Allerton as the Pilgrims stepped onto the New World’s shore for the first time. This great, blank continent had one name and no features, and it was their duty to fill the space with squiggly lines and tiny letters and decide what belonged to whom.

Let’s name it Brewsterland!” suggested William Brewster. “Or Brewsterworld!”

“Plymouth,” is all that William Bradford said, and it took a while for everyone else to catch on, being pulled apart by the wind on the freezing North American shores.

“Plymouth is where we came from!” shouted William Brewster.

“This will be New Plymouth,” said Stephen Hopkins.

“No,” said Bradford. “This is Plymouth.” And they all agreed that it was a fine idea.

As if they were still at home, and they had never left.

Or perhaps as if it were all a part of the same transcontinental city: the English port from which they had departed and the barren sandy beach on which they stood now and the months of unforgiving ocean in between. Borders pushing outward, and the first great act of conquest.

________

The next day, they explored the surrounding area. They badly needed food, but they didn’t know where to find it buried under all this snow.

No one would speak of the uncanny feeling that wherever they went, they were being watched.

They found a tiny village of round abandoned huts. “They look like breasts!” William Brewster shouted. He was scolded by James Chilton, who had been suppressing the urge to murder everyone since September and didn’t know how much longer he could hold out.

“‘Let’s wait until the spring to leave,’ said James Chilton,” said James Chilton. “‘That way, we can be sure that the land will be supple and ripe and we can count on a plentiful supply of rations to carry us through the season while we prepare for our first winter in an unknown land,’ he said,” he said. “And do you remember what William Bradford said to that?”

“William Bradford said that we never should have let you come,” said William Bradford, who had never in fact said such a thing before, though he had been thinking it several dozen times a day.

“‘Nah, screw it,’ William Bradford said,” James Chilton said. “‘We’ll leave in the early fall, I wanna get there early so we can start worshipping freely right away.’ And what a plan!”

“We were being persecuted.”

“Well in a couple of hours when we all meet God in person and he asks us what we’re doing up here so early, you can tell him that we were so anxious to meet him, we moved to a barren frozen wasteland in the middle of winter and starved ourselves to death.”

“If we starve to death, will we still be hungry in Heaven?” asked William Brewster.

“When we get to the village,” William Bradford began “we will make peaceful overtures to the natives and ask them for shelter and food, or we will kill them and take both, depending on how much energy we have.” But it would only be a few more steps before they were close enough to realize that the village was empty.

They checked every square inch of the native settlement and couldn’t find a sign of life. No fires and no ashes, no footprints, no pelts or feathers or whatever else these primitive peoples believed were important. The doors of the little buildings swung open and snow had piled up in the corners. The place had been untouched for months, years maybe, maybe forever. As if the modest little huts had been naturally occurring, and nobody had found them yet. Or as if the whole landscape was inhabited by ghosts who lived and breathed and passed through the walls without leaving a trace.

“May as well move in,” said William Bradford after the group had reconvened in the center of the new little town.

“What if people live here?” asked John Billington.

“No one lives here,” said Bradford. “If someone lived here, they would be here, or they would have left something behind.”

“So what is this place?”

No one said anything for a long time, until William Brewster noticed some large pill-shaped mounds a few yards away, and wondered aloud what they were for.

William Bradford could have kissed the man right then, because it all made sense. “These are their summer homes,” he said, “and those piles are where they store their food during the winter!”

“Why would they store their food during the winter when they need it and dig it up and eat it during the summer when they can grow it, you fucking idiot,” called James Chilton, but everyone had already dashed for the piles and was doing the best they could to dig into them with their stiff, frozen hands.

Hours later, John Turner found something. “A bone,” he said. The disappointment almost killed them right then.

“‘There’s not going to be anything here,’ James Chilton said,” James Chilton said. “And what did it turn out to be? Their fucking barbeque pit. Beautiful score, Bradford.” And then he screamed and fell over backwards and tried to scuttle away on all fours because he had been digging too and he found a human skull.

Everyone stopped. Then they kept digging a little more to make sure, and uncovered more rotting yellow bones, some with bits of skin and fat still dangling off.

“They are watching us,” someone finally whispered, which is what all of them had been trying to ignore for days.

“Hey, I found some food in this one!” called someone digging in another mound a few yards away. He pulled out a brown, frozen hunk of meat. “Few hours on the fire and we’ll be eating like kings!”

“These piles are either for storing meat or burying the dead or both,” deduced Bradford. Most everyone nodded.

“What should we do?”

Bradford thought, then quickly decided on a course of action, then pretended to think about it some more. “No sense in leaving behind perfectly good meat while we’re suffering. Better check all the piles and take whatever meat we can find.”

“But whose meat is it!” shouted William Brewster, not because he respected the people to whom the meat truly belonged, but he thought it would at least be polite to share.

“Doesn’t matter,” said Bradford, and they all agreed and they all started digging again.

They found a few pieces of meat and even some frozen vegetables, but most of the piles were filled with the bones of the dead, and the beads and trinkets of the living who saw fit to honor them. When they had collected all of the food they would find, Bradford said that they had to prepare it immediately, so most of the bones were just thrown onto what remained of the piles, where those that were not scattered by the wind remained until the settlers had left and the natives returned. Some were collected and kept with the beads the settlers found with the idea that they might be useful for commerce with the natives.

The remains and the trinkets the Pilgrims ransacked from the graves would be passed down from generation to generation. Years later, it would all be traded back for nothing less than a piece of land called Manhattan, and the natives would take their half of the offer and promptly rebury it and spend days praying to their ancestors for forgiveness, and it never occurred to any one of them that they got the worse half of it, and they would make the trade again today if they had to.

________

Finally in March, everyone moved ashore. It had been torture for the men on land, but it had been worse for the people left behind on the ship, who bobbed up and down and weathered storms the best they could for months, within sight of the land the whole time.

William Bradford was the governor, and the people who had resisted him before had seen their resistance buffed away by the unforgiving winds and unyielding cold and the starvation, or else they had died.

________

They had survived the winter (the ones who had survived the winter, anyway). A cause for celebration. They scared up all the food they could find and prepared enough for a party twice their size, as if they expected to be joined by the dead.

“Greetings.” A native.

“You speak English.” Though it was surprising enough that they had finally come down from wherever they had been hovering since the party had landed, watching their new neighbors die off one by one by one.

Behind him, dozens of natives emerged from the woods and the bushes and from the roofs of the cabins and from under the long wooden tables and one stepped out of the honorable governor’s pocket. There may have been a hundred or two hundred of them by the time they all took their places behind their leader. They shifted their weight from foot to foot, almost in unison, as if stopping would make them disappear.

William Mullins began to sweat. George Soule felt like sobbing. No one attended to Elizabeth Hopkins, who had fainted.

“I represent the” something “tribe of” someplace, talking about Plymouth, or the surrounding area.

“So you’re the chief then?” Short pause. “My name is William Bradford. I’m the governor. We have governors.”

“Where are your people from?”

Short pause. Bradford, who was already smiling, smiled. A wave of his arm. This land is our land.

The chief was asked where he learned to speak such beautiful English. “I was a slave in England.”

“I see.”

The chief was silent for just a second, so that the settlers knew he was waiting for an apology. When no one said anything, he smiled and stood on his tiptoes for just a second.

“Whatcha got back there, some food, I see?” He had been making great progress with his colloquialisms.

“Yes, we were preparing a feast because we didn’t die this winter.”

“We very rarely die in the winter.”

Long pause. Leaves grew. A squirrel inspected the food. Elizabeth Hopkins briefly regained consciousness.

The chief spoke again. “Looks like you made a lot of food.”

“Yes we did. The Lord has been—”

“Looks like you made enough food to feed yourselves and all of us.”

Short pause.

“Hey! Look at this! Local meats, plants and vegetables.”

“Yes, we don’t have so much to learn from you savages after all.”

“I see you don’t have any of this,” and before the word this, two natives on either side, each holding something that looked like a phallus with an unspeakable disease. John Lancemore scratched himself.

“What is that stuff, some kind of food?” asked Bradford.

“Oh. Oh my yes. And a more delicious food you will not find on this continent, believe you me.”

“What is it?”

“This? This is just a little treat we like to call maize.”

At the word maize, Bradford scrunched up his face in disgust. The Pilgrims behind him began muttering. The chief was confused and a little worried he had said something to offend.

“Maize?” asked Bradford finally. The chief nodded. “No, tell you what. That’s corn, OK?” The chief turned around briefly, looking for something called corn. “No, that stuff you’re holding, that’s called corn.” The Pilgrims behind him made noises of assent and approval. Corn.

“Oh, I understand,” said the chief, struggling to understand. “You have this back where you come from and you call it corn.”

“No,” said Bradford. “No, I’ve never seen that before. Never seen anything like it either, it’s really quite unique.” Turning around for agreement from the settlers. They nodded. “Yeah, but, uh, it’s corn. OK? It’s name is definitely corn.”

“I’m not sure I understand, I mean our ancestors have been calling this maize since we first domesticated it thousands of years ago—OK, how about this,” said the chief, looking to compromise. Inside, Bradford smiled, recognizing this to be the first sign of defeat. “You can call it corn and we’ll still call it maize.”

Bradford pretended to consider the offer, then shook his head. “No. No, how about this. We take all of your land, kill every single one of you and then we call this stuff whatever the hell we want to call it. How does that sound to you—I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name.”

“My name? Uh, well, my name is Tisquantum.”

“Tis—what? No, you know what? That doesn’t do it for me either. Tell you what. Your new name is Running Ox, OK?”

“Running Ox? That’s not a name, that’s an animal preceded by a participle.”

“Well it’s your new name, so learn to love it, guy, all right?”

The settlers could have been crushed right there, but perhaps Tisquantum knew that they would only be replaced by more settlers who would be even more rigid and even angrier and even more heavily armed. And perhaps he thought these were men, and men could be reasoned with. So they all sat down at the table and enjoyed a feast together, and then the natives left.

On the way back to their village, tucked away deep in the Berkshires, looking down on the little valley where the Pilgrims had congregated, the natives began coughing, and they found that their skin was covered with all these itchy red lumps.