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CHAPTER SIX

THE MAYFLOWER AND THE COVENANT

There is something of the Ark about the Mayflower. On 6 September 1620, 102 people set off from Plymouth in Devon on the south coast of England. This boat, the Mayflower, was ninety feet long and twenty-five feet wide. Today you can see a full-scale replica berthed in Plymouth, Massachusetts. It is a thing of beauty, gleaming, perfect: and very small.

In 1620 it leaked, stank, bulged with people and furniture, livestock and stores and forced its way across the storm-stricken North Atlantic for sixty-six days. To imagine that small vessel in the turbulence of a Northern Atlantic late autumn is to be reminded of Noah. When the Flood came to drown the earth, God told Noah to build a wooden ark, and in this he put the birds and the beasts and men and women who would survive the Flood and begin God’s work on earth once more.

Thirty-five of those on board the Mayflower would have embraced the comparison and sought strength from it. These thirty-five believed that they were God’s favoured people, heirs to the Israelites of the Old Testament. They had entered into a covenant with each other and with God who expected greater service from them than from anyone else. Their religion was based on Calvinism: they were Separatists, they were the Elect. It is likely that most of them took the Geneva Bible, and their reading of the Bible told them so.

Like the King James Version, it was largely based on the work of Tyndale. When the King James Version took over, which it did in a few years, there was not much that was new. The disturbing marginal notes had gone. But the Separatists would then ink in their own marginal notes. They were the ‘Chosen’ and they watched every step they took. Few groups in history can have taken their calling with such fearless seriousness. It was those qualities as much as their faith which put their stamp on the language, the constitution and the morality of America. These people of the book were the crucible in the making of the new nation. They made it as a tribute to the book.

They also made it, as they saw it, through God’s providence. The following is one of the only known primary source accounts of the journey of the Mayflower, written by William Bradford in his Of Plymouth Plantation. The extract begins when the Mayflower finally set sail successfully, having been beaten back to Plymouth by violent storms:

September 6. These troubles being blown over, and now all being compact together in one ship, they put to sea again with a prosperous wind, which continued divers days together, which was some encouragement unto them; yet according to the usual manner many were afflicted with sea sickness. And I may not omit here a special work of God’s providence.

There was a proud and very profane young man, one of the seamen, of a lusty, able body, which made him the more haughty; he would always be condemning the poor people in their sickness, and cursing them daily with grievous execrations, and did not let to tell them, that he hoped to help to cast half of them overboard before they came to their journey’s end, and to make merry with what they had; and if he were by any gently reproved, he would curse and swear most bitterly. But it pleased God before they came half seas over, to smite this young man with a grievous disease, of which he died in a desperate manner, and so was himself the first that was thrown overboard. Thus his curses light on his own head, and it was an astonishment to all his fellows, for they noted it to be the just hand of God upon him.

In this next extract, besides once more showing the hardships of the voyage, a more benevolent God is revealed:

And as for the decks and upper works they would caulk them as well as they could, and though with the working of the ship they would not long keep staunch, yet there would otherwise be no great danger, if they did not overpress her with sails. So they committed themselves to the will of God, and resolved to proceed. In sundry of these storms the winds were so fierce, and the seas so high, as they could not bear a knot of sail, but were forced to hull, for divers days together. And in one of them, as they thus lay at hull, in a mighty storm, a lusty young man (called John Howland) coming upon some occasion above the gratings, was, with a seele of the ship thrown into the sea; but it pleased God that he caught hold of the topsail halyards, which hung overboard, and ran out at length; yet he held his hold (though he was sundry fathoms under water) till he was hauled up by the same rope to the brim of the water, and then with a boat hook and other means got into the ship again, and his life saved; and though he was something ill with it, yet he lived many years after, and became a profitable member both in church and commonwealth.

Finally at their destination, they had no doubt what must be done before all else: ‘Being thus arrived in a good harbour and brought safe to land, they fell upon their knees and blessed the God of heaven, who had brought them over the vast and furious ocean, and delivered them from all the perils and miseries thereof, again to set their feet on the firm and stable earth, their proper element.’

After sixty-six days, after one death and one birth, they had landed near what they called Plymouth Rock. On rocky ground they built their church. They faced a winter of which one of their number wrote: ‘they that know the winters of that country know them to be sharp and violent, and subject to cruel and fierce storms, dangerous to travel to known places, much more to search an unknown coast. Besides, what could they see but a hideous and desolate place, full of wild beasts and wild men – and what multitudes there might be of them, they knew not.’

By the end of that first winter, half of them had died.

They were woefully unprepared for the task of settlement. The author Bill Bryson has written: ‘You couldn’t have had a more helpless group of people to start a new society. They brought all the wrong stuff, they didn’t really bring people who were expert in agriculture or fishing. They were coming with a lot of faith and not a great deal of preparation.’ These people had travelled before – to the Netherlands where they had sought refuge for their godly task. But in that country there was a language and an economy with which they were familiar.

They saw alien peoples and the uncultivated wilderness. Yet it was their destination and they sturdily called it ‘New England’. Out of this desert walked their saviour. He was an Indian, Tisquantum, nicknamed Squanto. The settlers would have had every justification for adding his appearance to the calendar of miracles. His knowledge, intelligence and kindness got them through that winter and beyond.

Squanto had been kidnapped by English sailors fifteen years before and taken to London where he was trained to be a guide and an interpreter for the fishermen who regularly travelled the 3,000 miles across the North Atlantic to bring back rich hauls from the teeming, scarcely harvested seas of the North Atlantic and Cape Cod. Squanto escaped, and trekked back to his tribe. He found it all but wiped out by one of the European diseases that were to bring successive plagues to the Native Americans. He travelled on and you might feel justified in saying, ‘God alone knows how,’ he ended up next to the same rock as the helpless colonists from Devon. As Bill Bryson notes: ‘He taught them not only which things would grow but also how to fertilise corn seed by adding little pieces of fish – the fish would rot and actually fertilise the seed – and he taught them how to eat all kinds of things from the sea.’

He spoke English and helped the settlers to reach a balance of accommodation with the tribes whose lands they had moved in on. Some of the settlers thought it beyond mere good fortune and saw it as providence. This was the Promised Land and God had held out His hand to them.

Charles I had succeeded his father, James, in 1625. His increasing encouragement of Catholic practices drove out more and more colonists and Separatists. The King badly underestimated the historical and the visceral fear of Roman Catholics. The Pope was considered to be the literal Antichrist: his Church the Empire of Evil, his mission satanic. By 1640, scores of ships had brought over a community of about 25,000 in and around new Plymouth. They came largely from the east of England – especially Lincolnshire, Essex, Kent and London – and the Midlands, particularly Nottinghamshire. Overwhelmingly, they came to stay and they dug in.

They were proud to be English. The place names alone show that: a small selection includes Cambridge, Ipswich, Norwich, Boston, Hull, Bedford, Falmouth and Plymouth, of course. This was evidence of homesickness perhaps, but also a determination to keep the connection and hold faith with the faith of those they had left behind. It was a new baptism, but also an assertion of their Englishness. There were many who came for reasons other than a search for a place in which to plant a purer Puritan faith. But for many generations it was the religious self-exiles who dominated. By the time the make-up of the population of the New World had grown and changed and its history been forged in godliness, slaughter, injustice and risk, it was these founding Puritans and Separatists who had put down their mark. Their covenant with each other through their faith in the teaching and in the language of the Bible had made its harsh Protestant character the first draft of the new America.

There was something else going on, more profound and, I think, difficult to grasp in our age. There grew with increasing force in seventeenth-century England, among the Puritans, the belief, frightening to these faith-filled souls, that ‘God was leaving England’.

In this, as in so much about the seventeenth century, I am indebted to Christopher Hill. Here is a quotation with which he opens the chapter called ‘God Is Leaving England’, in his book The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution. He begins with a reference, one of many, taken from the Old Testament.

‘The Lord hath a controversy with the inhabitants of the land, because there is no truth, nor mercy, nor knowledge of God in the land.’ The land referred to was now thought to be England. The fear was growing that the threat of Catholicism and the Antichrist was not being countered with sufficient rigour. Charles’s court flirted with Catholicism and it was becoming dangerously drawn back into its orbit.

In Europe the Thirty Years War between Protestants and Catholics was swinging perilously and savagely against the Protestants. England refused to get involved. Just as Israel had faced the larger powers of Egypt and Babylon, so England now faced the far greater powers of France and Spain. The Puritans thought that their country was not alive to the danger. Why did King Charles not take up arms against the Catholics? God would not stay with people who did not deserve Him.

In 1622, John Brinsley, in his influential The Third Part of the True Watch, wrote: ‘The withdrawing of the Lord’s precious presence from his church is both an evident sign of his displeasure and a manifest threatening of his departure.’ England needed to repent its sins. Preacher after preacher called out, but in vain. A verse of one new hymn ran:

Preserve this hopeless place

And our disturbed state

From those that have more wit than grace

And present counsels hate.

Less than a decade later, in 1631, Thomas Hooker, in a sermon called ‘The Danger of Desertion’, left no one in any doubt. ‘As sure as God is God, God is going from England . . . Stop him at the town’s end and let not thy God depart . . . God makes account that New England still be a refuge . . . a rock and a shelter for his righteous ones to run to.’

Which they did; the hundreds turned into thousands. There were those who remained to continue the fight in the Puritan cause in the Civil War and to see their triumphant victory and the Protestant ‘Commonwealth’ under Oliver Cromwell. This seemed to promise to reunite New and Old England for ever. But before that, the decisive transatlantic shift, the flight which was to create the character of America, had been made. The dreadful warning, that ‘God is leaving England’, had been heeded and taken literally. And as a consequence the New World was founded on the rock of a tough, Bible-bound, deep-thinking Protestantism.

There had been expeditions and attempted settlements in America before the Pilgrim Fathers – in Virginia, for instance, under Walter Raleigh in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. There was Jamestown, established in 1607. This was Anglican, rather middle class and more easy-going than those fanatically driven communities further north. Not that the English gentry avoided going to the north. The immigrants of the 1630s were a wide social mix, but it was the Puritans who were dominant for a sealing length of time. ‘From the beginning,’ as Diarmaid MacCulloch the distinguished theological historian has written, ‘they were a ‘Commonwealth’, whose government lay in the hands of godly adult males who were the investors and the colonists.’ Most of them were Puritans: the Separatists – extreme Puritans – were a minority, but, in the early days, disproportionately influential.

The first Governor of Massachusetts, John Winthrop, like his Puritan contemporary Oliver Cromwell, was an East Anglian gentleman. One of the most striking things these Puritans did was to set up a university college, Harvard, in a town they named Cambridge. It was for the training of new clergy. In 1650 Massachusetts had one minister for every 415 persons. In Virginia it was one for 3,239. And by law every householder in Massachusetts had to pay a tax for the church or meeting house and by law go there for two hours twice on Sundays and for a two-hour lecture in the week.

This and their devotion to the daily study and reading of the Bible and other religious works made them, MacCulloch again, ‘possibly the most literate society then existing in the world’. Almost every Puritan town had a school. What bound them was the central notion of ‘the covenant’ they had made with God, with each other and with the future. What lined their minds was the Bible, by now, the 1630s, the King James Version.

Their implacable stance saw life as a battle between God and Satan. This set in motion yet another persisting strain in American life: persecution. If you were not with them you were against them, as Jesus Christ Himself had said. And if you were against them you were to be attacked, defeated and, if necessary, destroyed. They used the Old Testament but also English common law to justify the persecution of what they saw as ‘immorality’. This included breaking the Sabbath or blasphemy, which were criminalised. Hysterical insanity could take over. In 1642, the New Haven authorities examined a piglet whose face, they said, bore a resemblance to one George Spenser. He was convicted of bestiality. He confessed and was hanged; and so was the sow.

Non-Puritans were not encouraged to come to New England and one of the leading men of the Chosen spoke of ‘the lawlessness of liberty of conscience’. Dissenters were given, as another Puritan said, ‘free liberty to keep away from us’. When the intellectually adventurous Quakers came, they were prosecuted and their ears were cropped and they were expelled. When four of them returned between 1659 and 1661, they were hanged.

One unexpected consequence of this was that Roger Williams, a minister in Salem in the 1630s, was moved to say that the Puritans had gone too far. He fled to found what became Rhode Island, unique in the English-speaking world for welcoming exiles and Dissenters, Anglicans, Baptists, Quakers and also those from another religion – one both deeply allied and historically alien – Jews.

These New England Puritans hunted down witches. It was a period when medicine was primitive and when magic and ‘signs’ would be sought out to fill the gaps in knowledge. The devil was held to be ceaseless in his attempts to deform, damage, disrupt, distort and dismantle the plans and purposes of the best of God’s people. It was a time of the dramatically inexplicable and in that fear-fraught and fortressed society, vengeance seemed an essential defence. And though ‘vengeance is mine, saith the Lord’, the Old Testament furnished many dramatic examples not only of a vengeful God but also of vengeful Israelites and their enemies. It was there in the book and so it could be followed as an example.

Witches were a prime target. Overwhelmingly women and mostly of the poorer class. These were usually women canny in their knowledge of traditional country cures. They were powerless and easy to capture. For those in authority they were useful, perhaps in some primitive way: they were essential victims. For such furious and strained endeavours as the Puritans were undertaking, perhaps sacrifices were needed to satisfy the tribe – blood sacrifices, human sacrifices.

Puritan New England was persistent in the matter of witches. In Virginia, there were nine cases, only one suspect and he sentenced to a whipping and banishment. In the north ninetythree were tried, sixteen executed.

Then came Salem in 1692. Accusations by feverish adolescent girls were taken seriously and acted upon. Hundreds, mostly women, were accused by them. Eighteen were hanged. Sense returned only when the accusers turned their venomous hysteria on the ruling elite, including the governor’s wife. That went too far. ‘Further trials were suppressed,’ the historian Alan Taylor writes. ‘Regarded as a fiasco, the Salem mania became a spectacular flame-out that halted the prosecution of witches in New England.’

But the stain remained. Salem is dead but not buried. Arthur Miller’s play, The Crucible, keeps it alive; Senator McCarthy’s search for communists in the 1950s was called a ‘witch hunt’.

These English, soon to be joined by Irish, Scots and Welsh, Puritans, and other hard-line Protestants, brought to New England a fanaticism allied with righteousness which would begin to clear the new continent of its natives. It would go on to build a capitalist democracy, global industries, new technologies, weaponry, and it would encourage mass education, equality, and princely philanthropy. The dark side led the settlers into the deceits, injustices and crimes of all dominating empires. The King James Version was there, every step of the way, for better and for worse, often the latter.

In 1789, George Washington took his oath of office and opened the Book of Genesis to passages that included Joseph’s dying reminder that God had promised the Israelites a new land. ‘So help me God,’ he said, as has every President of America since. The core tribe among the ‘Israelites’ in America were the Puritans and, deeper still, the Separatists. At the heart, what drove them was the binding Word of God in the King James Version.

It was the Bible that founded the English language over the Atlantic. It appears to have occurred to scarcely any of them that they should ‘go native’ and adopt the language of the tribes whose lands they occupied.

Their approach rested on their attitude to the King James Version. Quite simply, it was their book and its words belonged to them. In the 1630s, it began its centuries of dominance as by far the biggest selling and widest read book in America. The words were holy. They were aware that the Old Testament had been written in Hebrew, the New in Greek, the whole in Latin and that modern European nations had put it in their own languages. But the English translation was the supreme authority on all matters, the Book of Books.

They found poetry in it as well as wisdom and their guidance to the Kingdom of Heaven. They read it aloud every day. They took its names for their names, made its parables as their own, swore by it, lived and died by it. It provided meat for their daily conversation and proofs of their earthly destiny. They were married to it and no one could put them asunder.

Their behaviour to other languages echoed that of the Germanic tribes who had brought what became ‘English’ to the eastern counties of England in the fifth century. It was partly from these eastern counties that the first tide of pilgrims came to the east coast of America. The fifth-century Germanic tribes were in a vulnerable minority among the Celts, as were the Pilgrim Fathers among the American Indians. Yet they had held on to their own language and taken a very modest number of words from the hoard of British-Celtic words of the natives.

Much the same happened in New England 1,100 years later. In America they found new plants, new animals, new geographical features for which they needed new words. Some – comparatively few – came from local tongues. Others in the main came from inventive combinations of English words.

The settlers came largely from flatlands and so the new, often mountainous landscape called out for new words. They invented ‘foothill’, ‘notch’, ‘gap’, ‘bluff’, ‘divide’, ‘watershed’, ‘clearing’ and ‘underbrush’. When they had to bring in native words they did, but they anglicised them to ‘raccoon’, ‘skunk’, ‘opossum’ and ‘terrapin’, always simplifying them. For native foods they took in ‘squash’ for the variety of pumpkins. Sometimes there would be more straightforward borrowings, like ‘squaw’ or ‘wigwam’, ‘totem’, ‘papoose’, ‘moccasin’ and ‘tomahawk’.

Some of the settlers were not immune to the beauty of the native language. William Penn the eminent Quaker wrote: ‘I know not a language spoken in Europe that hath words of more sweetness and greatness in Accent and Emphasis than this.’ Many place names came from Indian words and numerous rivers including the Susquehanna, the Potomac and the Miramichi. But all of these were minor additions.

The English and, soon following, the Scots and Irish stuck to the language in the book and were reluctant to stray very far away from it. They would coin English words for natural things rather than take them from the Indian – ‘mud hen’, ‘rattlesnake’, ‘bullfrog’, ‘potato-bug’, ‘groundhog’, ‘reed bed’. Even when describing Native American life, they preferred their own words as in ‘warpath’, ‘paleface’, ‘medicine man’, ‘peace pipe’, ‘big chief’. Their attitude to language reinforced their religious conviction. They had the Words of God through His prophets and His Son: what more could they possibly need save a few phrases which speeded up commonplace understanding?

English had taken on thousands of words from several other languages since about AD 500. It had been promiscuous. But in its beginnings in America it was very prudent. Perhaps Squanto spoiled them. Perhaps the Indian languages were just too difficult. ‘Squash’ for instance was ‘asquat-asquash’, ‘raccoon’, like many other animals, had several names. In this case they included ‘rahaugcum’ ‘raugroughcum’, ‘arocoune’ and ‘aroughcum’.

This was a group of people obsessed by the power of the word. Improper speech, blasphemy, slander, cursing, lying, railing, reviling, scolding, threatening and swearing were crimes. Curse God and you were in the stocks. Deny the Scriptures and you would be whipped and possibly hanged. These colonists set out to honour the language and it started in the schoolrooms. This began with the New England Primer, which sold over 3 million copies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Every English-speaking family in America must have worked their way through this clear and well-constructed teaching aid. It was stocked from the Bible.

A.In Adam’s Fall we all sinned

B.Heaven to find, the Bible mind

C.Christ crucify’d for sinners died

D.The Deluge drowned the earth around

E.Elijah hid by ravens fed

F.The judgement made Felix afraid

G.As runs the grass our life doth pass

H.My book and Heart must never part

J.Job feels the rod, yet blesses God

Some commentators would call this propaganda. Some have said its effect on the minds of the young could be called ‘child abuse’. It set out to promote literacy and you were being made literate in order to study the Bible. But the law of unexpected consequences was to take that literacy far away from study of the King James Version.

The King James Version became an Anglo-American literary story and, more widely, an English-speaking story – Australia, Canada, South Africa, New Zealand, parts of India and Africa. There would be developments which took America further away from the English of the Pilgrim Fathers and other early settlers. There would be great seams of new words from other European and then Eastern immigrants who poured into the United States.

American English, extended and embellished by all these new Americanised tongues, would go on and soon deliver its own greatness in books and speeches and songs. But the genesis of the country’s language lay in the King James Version. The vital early achievement of letting no other language speak for this New World was down to the early Puritan settlers. And it could be credited, through the centuries, with making that enormous, patchwork, multiracial continent into a single and often a cohesive force.

John Adams, who would become the second President of the United States, prophesied in a letter in 1780: ‘English is destined to be in the next and succeeding centuries more generally the language of the world than Latin was in the last or French in the present age. The reason for this is obvious, because of the increasing population in America, and their universal connection with all nations, will, aided by the influence of England in the world, whether great or small, force their language into general use.’

While the early colonists were digging English into New England, back in the mother country the King James Version became a crucial factor in civil war and revolution.