Chapter I: Front Matter

Transcriber’s Note: Italics are enclosed in _underscores_. Additional notes will be found near the end of this ebook.

Early
Explorers of
Plymouth Harbor
1525–1619

by
Henry F. Howe

Published jointly by
Plimoth Plantation, Inc.
and the Pilgrim Society

Plymouth, 1953
]

_Copyright by Plimoth Plantation, Inc., and the Pilgrim Society_, 1953

HENRY F. HOWE is author of _Prologue to New England_,
New York, 1943, and _Salt Rivers of the Massachusetts
Shore_, New York, 1951, both published by Rinehart
& Co., Inc. Much of the material here presented is
condensed from these volumes.

The cover decoration, which is reproduced from the
London 1614 translation of Bartholomew Pitiscus,
_Trigonometry: or the doctrine of triangles_, shows not
only early seventeenth century ships but seamen using a
cross-staff and casting a lead.

_Printed in offset by The Meriden Gravure Company, Meriden, Connecticut_

_Composition by The Anthoensen Press, Portland, Maine_

_Early Explorers of Plymouth Harbor_,

1525–1619

Visitors to Plymouth are often amazed to learn that the _Mayflower_ was not the first vessel to drop anchor in Plymouth Harbor. The “stern and rock-bound coast” of Massachusetts was in fact explored by more than twenty recorded expeditions before the arrival of the Pilgrims. At least six of these sailed into Plymouth Harbor. Plymouth appeared on five good maps of the Massachusetts coast by 1616, one of them a detailed map of Plymouth Harbor itself, made by Samuel de Champlain in 1605. The Harbor had been successively called Whitson Bay, the Port du Cap St. Louis, and Cranes Bay by English, French and Dutch explorers, but the name _Plimouth_, bestowed on it by Captain John Smith in 1614, was the one the Pilgrims perpetuated.

The Pilgrim voyage was the successful culmination of a century of maritime efforts along the New England coast by Spanish explorers, Portuguese fishermen, French and Dutch fur traders, and Elizabethan English “sea dogs.” All the western ports of Europe seethed with ambitious shipmasters in search of opportunities for profit in commerce or fishing, free-booting, the slave trade, warfare or piracy. Some, like Henry Hudson, visited New England primarily as geographers looking for a Northwest Passage through North America. A few were probing out possibilities for a colonial beachhead in the New World. One of these, led by French Jesuits, had, like the Pilgrims, a religious motive. Three or four others attempted New England colonies, but failed. Only the Pilgrims succeeded in hanging on, through the inevitable preliminary disasters of the first year or two, to found a permanent colony.

Indians of Massachusetts probably first saw Europeans during the four Vinland voyages of Leif Ericsson and his successors between 1003 and 1015 A.D. There is good reason to suppose that these voyages touched the shores of Cape Cod and the islands about Martha’s Vineyard, but no direct evidence connects them with Plymouth Harbor. Continuous contact with Europeans did not begin until nearly five hundred years later when John Cabot’s second Newfoundland voyage coasted North America southward to the Carolinas in 1498. The Portuguese nobleman, Miguel Cortereal, a castaway on a voyage of exploration, may have lived among the Indians at the head of Narragansett Bay from 1502 until 1511. Certainly these Indians, the ancestors of Massasoit, were visited in 1524 by Giovanni da Verrazano, whose French expedition spent two weeks in Narragansett Bay in that year. Verrazano wrote that he was met by about twenty dugout canoes filled with eager people, dressed in embroidered deerskins and necklaces. The women wore ornaments of copper on their heads and in their ears, and painted their faces. These Indians were delighted to trade furs for bright bits of colored glass. They lived in circular houses “ten or twelve paces in circumference, made of logs split in halves, covered with roofs of straw, nicely put on.” From the description, these people were no doubt the Wampanoags, who a hundred years later were such friendly allies to the Pilgrims at Plymouth, only thirty miles away.

Verrazano did not enter Massachusetts Bay. But in the spring of 1525 a Spaniard, Estevan Gomez, cruised for two months on the New England coast. While he left no narrative of his voyage, “Tierra de Estevan Gomez” appeared immediately on Spanish maps of the period, notably that of Ribero, 1529. An indentation of the bay shore behind his “Cabo de Arenas” sufficiently suggests Plymouth Harbor and Cape Cod Bay to make one speculate whether this is not in fact the first record of a visit to Plymouth, ninety-five years before the landing of the Pilgrims. What has been interpreted as Boston Harbor on this Ribero map bears the name “Bay of St. Christoval,” but the indentation that suggests Plymouth remains nameless. It seems likely that Estevan Gomez was the discoverer of Plymouth in 1525.

After these first Massachusetts discoveries, there follows a period of seventy-five years of documentary obscurity so far as Massachusetts is concerned. Maritime activities about Newfoundland, the St. Lawrence River, and Nova Scotia steadily grew. Cartier founded, and then had to abandon, his French colony at Quebec. Jehan Allefonsce, one of his shipmasters, was blown southward from the Newfoundland banks in 1542, into “a great bay in latitude 42°,” but Massachusetts Bay is not mentioned during the rest of the century. Both French and English built up an increasing fur trade on the Maine coast, especially about the Penobscot and in the Bay of Fundy. Fishermen from all the maritime nations of Europe crowded in increasing numbers to the Newfoundland banks, carrying back apparently inexhaustible supplies of codfish to feed Catholic Europe in the season of Lent. By 1578 as many as 350 fishing vessels were making the transatlantic voyage, usually twice each year. Since fishermen and fur traders rarely left written records, we can only assume that with the increased volume of shipping, some of these vessels found their way to Massachusetts shores. But we have no documentary evidence of their visits.

TIERA DE AYLLON
TIERA DE ESTEVA GOMEZ
TIERA NOVA: DE CORTEREAI

Map of the North American Coast, a portion of the World Map made by Diego Ribero in 1529, showing the results of the explorations of Estevan Gomez in 1525

Reproduced from the Map Collection, Yale University Library]

Inevitably the tremendous growth of all this free-lance commercial shipping, in the fur trade and fisheries, must lead to attempts to organize it either into colonial administrations under government control, or business companies privately financed. Everyone could see that permanent bases were needed in the New World. International quarrels and actual piracy were already appearing in the Newfoundland fisheries. Sir Humphrey Gilbert determined to make Newfoundland an English colony. But in 1583 his well-organized expedition came to grief by shipwreck. His half brother, Sir Walter Raleigh, renewed the attempt, this time at Roanoke in the Carolinas, but was unable to maintain the colony’s supply, once it was established. The project failed. But the idea was right, and men in England like Raleigh and Richard Hakluyt, the historian of English voyages, kept preaching the necessity of overseas colonies. Similar ideas were growing in the western ports of France.

The turn of the century marked the beginning of a concerted campaign on the part of both France and England to establish plantations in New England. The first move was made by a group of free-lance English merchants who in 1602 sent out Bartholomew Gosnold on a commercial voyage with thirty-two men in the bark _Concord_. Its objective was twofold, to get sassafras (a medication thought to be “of sovereigne vertue for the French poxe”) and to establish an outpost somewhere in the area described by Verrazano seventy-five years before. Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s son Bartholomew was among the company. After brief landings on Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard, the expedition built a hut on the islet in the pond on Cuttyhunk Island in Buzzards Bay, there traded with the Indians, cut a cargo of sassafras root and cedarwood, and after a minor altercation with the natives pulled up stakes and sailed back to England with two enthusiastic narratives of the country and its commodities.

Less than nine months later, and obviously because of the success of the Gosnold voyage, a new expedition of two vessels, _Speedwell_ and _Discoverer_, with forty-four men and boys, sailed to Massachusetts from Bristol under command of Martin Pring, a Devonshire skipper. This voyage was instigated by Richard Hakluyt, together with some merchants of Bristol. Robert Salterne, pilot of the Gosnold voyage, was assistant to Pring. Deliberately avoiding the long sail around Cape Cod, Pring entered Massachusetts Bay, coasted its North Shore looking for sassafras, and finding none, sailed across to “a certaine Bay, which we called Whitson Bay.” It had a “pleasant Hill thereunto adjoyning,” and a “Haven winding in compasse like the Shell of a Snaile,” with twenty fathoms at the entrance, and seven fathoms at the land-locked anchorage. Here was a “sufficient quantitie of Sassafras.” This was Plymouth Harbor in 1603.

Ashore, Pring’s men built a “small baricado” or watchtower and kept it manned with sentinels while the crew worked in the woods. They also took ashore with them two great mastiff dogs, of whom the Indians were mortally afraid. Indians appeared in considerable numbers, “at one time one hundred and twentie at once.” One of the crew delighted the natives by playing a guitar and they sang and “danced twentie in a ring” about him and gave him gifts of tobacco, tobacco pipes, snakeskin girdles and “Fawnes skinnes.” They had black and yellow bows, and prettily decorated quivers of rushes filled with long feathered arrows. They used birch-bark canoes “where of we brought one to Bristoll.” Their gardens were planted with tobacco, pumpkins, cucumbers and corn. The men wore breech clouts, and feathers in their knotted hair; the women “Aprons of Leather skins before them down to the knees, and a Bears skinne like an Irish Mantle over one shoulder.”

Reproduced from J. P. Abelin, _De Wytheroemde Voyagien der Engelsen_ (Leiden, 1727) in the Boston Athenæum]

For the story of the latter days of their seven weeks’ stay at Plymouth, we can scarcely do better than read Pring’s narrative in the original: “By the end of July we had laded our small Barke called the Discoverer with as much Sassafras as we thought sufficient, and sent her home into England before, to give some speedie contentment to the Adventurers; who arrived safely in Kingrode about a fortnight before us. After their departure we so bestirred ourselves, that our shippe also had gotten in her lading, during which time there fell out this accident. On a day about noone tide while our men which used to cut down Sassafras in the woods were asleep, as they used to do for two houres in the heat of the day, there came down about seven score Savages armed with their Bowes and Arrowes, and environed our House or Barricado, wherein were foure of our men alone with their Muskets to keepe Centinell, whom they sought to have come down unto them, which they utterly refused, and stood upon their guard. Our Master like-wise being very careful and circumspect, having not past two with him in the shippe, put the same in the best defence he could, lest they should have invaded the same, and caused a piece of great Ordnance to bee shot off to give terrour to the Indians, and warning to our men which were fast asleepe in the woods: at the noyse of which peece they ... betooke them to their weapons, and with their Mastives, great Foole with an halfe Pike in his mouth, drew down to their ship; whom when the Indians beheld afarre off with the Mastive which they most feared, in dissembling manner they turned all to a jest and sport and departed away in friendly manner, yet not long after, even the day before our departure, they set fire on the woods where wee wrought, which wee did behold to burne for a mile space, and the very same day that wee weighed Anchor, they came down to the shore in greater number, to wit, very neere two hundred by our estimation, and some of them came in theire Boates to our ship, and would have had us come in againe, but we sent them back, and would none of their entertainment.” One would love to know more than is provided in Martin Pring’s brief narrative in order to estimate fairly whether the English had given provocation to the Indians for this threatened attack at Plymouth. The only hint of provocation is the taking of a canoe back to England.

Had Plymouth been populated by two hundred Indians in 1620 it seems unlikely that the Pilgrims could have survived. The English adventurers transferred their explorations to the coast of Maine, where in 1605 George Waymouth, and in 1606 Martin Pring, made investigations preparatory to the major colonization attempt of the English Plymouth Company at Sagadahoc, the mouth of the Kennebec River. This colony failed after a year through a breakdown in leadership. For our purposes it is significant that the English sent no further explorations into Massachusetts waters for eight years after the voyages of Gosnold and Martin Pring. It looks as though the enmity of the Massachusetts Indians dissuaded English merchants from further plans to set up a colony in that region.

Plymouth’s next visitor was that great French explorer and empire builder, the founder of Canada, Samuel de Champlain. A group of French merchants organized by the governor of Dieppe, that old French port which had been sending fishermen to America for more than a century, succeeded in 1603 in getting from Henri IV a commission to found a colony. After spending the summer of 1603 exploring the St. Lawrence, the leaders decided that a more southern climate was desirable. Accordingly in 1604, De Monts and Pont-Grave, with Samuel de Champlain as geographer and chronicler of the expedition, explored the Bay of Fundy and founded a colony on Dochet Island in Passamaquoddy Bay. Half the colonists died during the first winter, and the colony was moved across the Bay to a better site at what is now Annapolis, Nova Scotia. Meantime Champlain spent the summers of 1605 and 1606 exploring the New England coast, familiarizing himself with all the shores as far south as Woods Hole in Massachusetts. He wrote a splendid account of these expeditions, which is still good reading; and for the first time produced a good map of the Massachusetts coast, with detail maps of Gloucester, Plymouth, Eastham and Chatham harbors.

_Legends on Champlain’s Map of Port St. Louis with comments_

A. SHOWS THE PLACE WHERE VESSELS ANCHOR

The figures show the fathoms of water. The depths are now much less
than those indicated on the map, and the difference may represent
an actual change.

B. THE CHANNEL