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

the two creeks, they went looking for Corn Hill the next morning. The snow made it difficult to find the stores of buried corn, but after brushing aside the snowdrifts and hacking at the frozen topsoil with their cutlasses, they located not only the original bag of seed but an additional store of ten bushels. For Master Jones, this was just the excuse he needed to return to the warmth of the Mayflower ’s cabin. He decided to take the corn, along with several men who were too sick to continue on, back to the ship. Once the corn and the sick men had been loaded aboard the shallop, he set sail for Provincetown Harbor. The shallop would return the next day for the rest of them.
    standish was once again in charge. The next morning, he led the eighteen remaining men on a search for Indians. But after several hours of tramping through the woods and snow, they had found nothing. The Native Americans moved with the seasons—inland in the winter, near the water in the summer—which meant that the Pilgrims, who were staying, for the most part, near the shore, were unlikely to meet many Indians during their explorations of Cape Cod.
    On their way back to the harbor, standish and his men found “a place like a grave, but it was much bigger and longer than any we had yet seen.” There were boards positioned over the grave, suggesting that someone of importance had been buried here. They “resolved to dig it up.”
    They found several additional boards and a mat of woven grass. One of the boards was “finely carved and painted, with three tines ... on the top, like a crown.” This may have been a carving of Poseidon’s trident, suggesting that the board originally came from a ship—most probably the French ship that had wrecked on this coast in 1615. Farther down, they found a new mat wrapped around two bundles, one large and one small.
    They opened the larger bundle first. The contents were covered with a fine, sweet-smelling reddish powder. Along with some bones, they found the skull of a man with “fine yellow hair still on it, and some of the flesh unconsumed.” With the skull was a sailor’s canvas bag containing a knife and sewing needle. Then they turned to the smaller bundle. Inside were the skull and bones of a small child, along with a tiny wooden bow “and some other odd knacks.”
    Was this a castaway from the French ship and his Indian son? Had this particular sailor been embraced by the local Indians and died among them as a person “of some special note”? Or had the Indians killed and buried the sailor “in triumph over him”?
    The Pilgrims had left Holland so that they could live like Englishmen again. But here was evidence that there were others in America who must be taken into account. Otherwise, they might share the fate of this yellow-haired sailor, whose bones and possessions had been left to rot in the sand.
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    â—†â—†â—† Later that day, just a short distance from Cold Harbor, standish and his men found some Indian houses whose occupants had clearly left in a great hurry. The description of what they found, recorded in a brief book about their first year in America cowritten by William Bradford and Edward Winslow, is so detailed that it remains one of the best first-person accounts of an Indian wigwam, or wetu, that we have:
    The houses were made with long young sapling trees, bended and both ends stuck into the ground; they were made round, like unto an arbor, and covered down to the ground with thick and well wrought mats, and the door was not over a yard high, made of a mat to open; the chimney was a wide open hole in the top, for which they had a mat to cover it close when they pleased; one might stand and go upright in them, in the midst of them were four little trunches [i.e., Y-shaped stakes] knocked into the ground and small sticks laid over, on which they hung their pots ...; round about the fire they lay on mats, which