Read Online The Mayflower and the Pilgrims' New World* by Nathaniel Philbrick - Free Book Online Page A

risks. They were, after all, taking something of obvious value from a people who had done their best, so far, to avoid them. The Pilgrims might have decided to wait until they had the chance to speak with the Indians before they took the corn, but the last thing they had was time. They told themselves that they would pay back the corn’s owners as soon as they had the chance.
    They poured as much corn as would fit into a kettle, which they hung from a tree branch, and with two men shouldering the burden, they started back to the Mayflower. They planned to retrieve the rest of the corn once the shallop had been completed. They also hoped to explore more of the two creeks. If some earlier European visitors had thought the location suitable for a settlement of some sort, perhaps it might serve their own needs.
    By dusk it was raining. After a long, wet night spent within a quickly constructed barricade of tree trunks and branches, they continued on to the north only to become lost, once again, in the woods. Deep within a grove of trees, they came across a young sapling that had been bent down to a spot on the ground where a Native-made rope encircled some acorns. stephen Hopkins explained that this was an Indian deer trap similar to the ones he’d seen in Virginia. As they stood examining the device, William Bradford, who was in the rear, stumbled upon the trap. The sapling jerked up, and Bradford was snagged by the leg. Instead of being annoyed, Bradford could only marvel at this “very pretty device, made with a rope of their own making, and having a noose as artificially made as any roper in England can make.” Adding the noose to what soon became a collection of Native specimens and artifacts, they continued on to the harbor, where they found a welcoming party on shore headed by Master Jones and Governor Carver. “And thus,” Bradford wrote, “we came both weary and welcome home.”
    â—†â—†â—† It took another few days for the carpenter to finish the shallop, and when it was done on Monday, November 27, yet another exploring mission was launched, this time under the direction of Christopher Jones instead of standish. As the master of the Mayflower, Jones was not required to help the Pilgrims find a settlement site, but he obviously thought it in his best interests to see them on their way.
    There were thirty-four of them, twenty-four passengers and ten sailors, aboard the open shallop. The wind was out of the northeast, and the shallop had a difficult time getting away from the point within which the Mayflower was anchored. After being blown to the opposite side of the harbor, they spent the night tucked into an inlet that is now part of Pilgrim Lake. As the temperatures dipped to well below freezing, their wet shoes and stockings began to freeze. “[s]ome of our people that are dead,” Bradford later wrote, “took the original of their death here.”

    â—† A drawing of John Smith’s shallop, which was used to map Chesapeake Bay in 1608 and would have been very similar to the Pilgrims’.

    By morning, there were six inches of snow on the ground, and by the time they’d sailed south back to Pamet Harbor in modern Truro, they were so frostbitten and numb that they named the inlet Cold Harbor. Jones decided to explore the northern and largest of the two creeks by land. But after several hours of “marching up and down the steep hills, and deep valleys, which lay half a foot thick with snow,” the master of the Mayflower had had enough. At fifty years old, he was certainly the eldest of the group. some of the Pilgrims wanted to continue, but Jones insisted it was time to make camp under several large pine trees. That night they feasted on six ducks and three geese “with soldiers’ stomachs for we had eaten little all that day.”
    Cold Harbor, it was decided, was too shallow for a permanent settlement. Giving up on any further exploration of