A time for sharing> Forgotten Pilgrims recalled for season of Thanksgiving

loading...

Thirty-five million Americans have an ancestor who was among the 102 passengers on the Mayflower, the little ship that landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620. But how many of the original Pilgrims can you name?

Maybe Capt. Myles Standish, Gov. William Bradford, Elder William Brewster, John Alden. That’s four.

Women? We know Priscilla Mullins, but only because the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow described her as asking John Alden why he didn’t speak for himself.

Children? Probably just Oceanus Hopkins, born on board during the two-month trip across the Atlantic.

There’s nothing wrong with knowing the men’s names best. They organized the trip and wrote the Mayflower Compact, the document that not only served well the Pilgrims – sometimes mistakenly called Puritans – but was the forerunner of the U.S. Constitution.

Over the years, a few historians have tended to assume all early members of the Plymouth Colony were passengers of the Mayflower. A 19th-century book print purchased at an antique show contains a picture labeled “Landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock, Mass.”

Below the artwork, a dozen scrawled names are titled “Facsimiles of the Signatures of the Principal Passengers of the May-Flower.” Actually, only five of the 12 names belong to people who came over on the Mayflower in 1620: Bradford, Edward Winslow, Brewster, Standish and Isaac Allerton.

Thomas Prence and Thomas Cushman came over the next year on the Fortune, for example, and Nathaniell Morton was a passenger on the Anne in 1623.

Still, the signatures represented a distinguished group. Like Bradford, Prence became governor. Allerton, a tailor and merchant, represented the colony on trips to London, and Cushman followed Brewster as elder, serving for 42 years.

Countless history books record the accomplishments of the Mayflower men, but say little about the several women in the group, and the nearly one-third of the passengers who were children – at least 14 of them under age 10.

One of the families comprised Isaac and Mary Allerton and three of their four children – 8-year-old Bartholomew and sisters Remember, 6, and Mary, who was just 4. Baby sister Sarah stayed behind with an aunt for two years.

There was much more to the trip’s confinement than the 66 days it took the Mayflower to cross the Atlantic. The Allertons were among those on the companion ship, the Speedwell, which left Leyden in July for Southampton, England. It would be two months before the Pilgrims could leave England permanently, because repeated serious leaks caused the Speedwell to founder.

Many of those on the Speedwell, including the Allertons, transferred to the Mayflower because only the one ship was seaworthy. With a deck estimated at 96 feet in length, the craft was to accommodate 102 passengers and 25-30 crew. Games, precious little exercise and prayer were all the group had to keep occupied the youngest Pilgrims.

The ship was a scary abode on occasion. John Howland fell overboard at one point, but held fast to a rope and was pulled to safety. Later, at anchor in the New World, Dorothy Bradford fell off the ship and drowned.

Cape Cod came into view in early November, but it would be six weeks before the band began to make its settlement at what would become Plymouth. It would be a very long year before their first Thanksgiving in 1621.

Oceanus Hopkins was born at sea, and Peregrine White was born aboard the Mayflower. But no name was recorded for the baby stillborn during a winter gale to Mary Allerton in December.

The event was recorded in “Mourt’s Relation: A Journal of the Pilgrims of Plymouth,” from a manuscript that William Bradford and Edward Winslow sent to George Morton in London: “But the next morning being Thursday, the 21st of December, it was stormy and wet, that we could not go ashore; and those that remained there all night could do nothing, but were wet, not having daylight enough to make them a sufficient court of guard, to keep them dry. All that night it blew and rained extremely. It was so tempestuous that the shallop could not go on land so soon as was meet, for they had no victuals on land. About eleven o’clock, the shallop went off with much ado with provision, but could not return, it blew so strong; and was such foul weather that we were forced to let fall our anchor, and ride with three anchors ahead.

“Friday the 22nd, the storm still continued, that we could not get a land, nor they to come to us aboard. This morning Goodwife Allerton, was delivered of a son, but dead born.”

The next day, several passengers went ashore at Plymouth in the shallop, and immediately set to cutting wood for use in building the common house. Lots were laid out for the families. During the first months, the passengers continued to “live” on the Mayflower in large part.

Over the first year, the “great sickness” killed about half the group, and the Allertons were not spared. The young children lost their mother in February, a couple of months after the stillbirth. Fourteen of the 18 Mayflower wives died the first year.

The Allerton children would be motherless until Isaac married Fear Brewster in 1626. Beginning that same year, their father was absent a good part of the time, on trips to England for merchant purposes.

In October 1621, the Pilgrims enjoyed a Thanksgiving feast of venison and fowl, shellfish, cornbread, wild plums and berries with the Wampanoag Indians, but the harvest was small. It would be two more years before a really good harvest and the arrival of the Anne with more provisions. The Fortune landed just after the first Thanksgiving, bringing more people but no food and few other necessities.

During the first hard year, when so many died, the Mayflower children fared better than the adults. By 1623, there were 52 children in the colony, according to Oliver Stoddard Hayward, who wrote an article on the subject for the November 1988 issue of The Mayflower Quarterly. Forty-seven of those children married and produced 288 children of their own.

Hayward was fascinated with a poem some of the children supposedly wrote between 1623 and 1627, “New England’s Annoyances.”

The poem indicates the children were “annoyed” by the cold weather, by the birds and squirrels that vandalized crops, by thinning garments that needed endless “clouting” with patches, and by having to put up with pumpkin at every meal. Patience, however, would compensate those who undertook the adventure, they concluded:

But you whom the Lord intends hither to bring,

Forsake not the honey for fear of the sting;

But bring both a quiet and contented mind

And all needful blessings you surely will find.

Hayward placed young Mary Allerton among the top dozen “most likely authors” of the poem, along with the Priest, Warren, Cooke and Hopkins children.

Bartholomew Allerton eventually went back to England and became a minister. He married twice and had four children. Remember Allerton stayed in the New World, married Moses Maverick and had seven children.

As for little Mary, at age 20 she married a young boy who had come over on the Fortune, Thomas Cushman. They were married 55 years and had eight children. Widowed in 1691, Mary Allerton Cushman died in Plymouth at the end of November 1699. Of the 102 passengers to leave England, she was the last survivor.