 PAPERS
The Pilgrims: Myth and Reality
by Robert A. Furman,
M.D.
Robert A. Furman, M.D., is Director Emeritus of the Hanna Perkins
Center for Child Development in Cleveland, Ohio. He was for 25 years
a Training Analyst and Supervising Analyst for child and adult analysis
at the Cleveland Psychoanalytic Institute. He is also a past president
of the Cleveland Psychoanalytic Society and the Association for
Child Psychoanalysis.
We would all be better served if
we discarded our need for heroes altogether. But no people in recorded
history have ever been able to do that.
- J.J. Ellis, 1997
All national legends are a blend of myth and reality and that of
the Pilgrims is no exception. Unique, however, with the Pilgrims
is the fact the reality is actually more dramatic and heroic than
the myth, presenting, perhaps, an unusual opportunity to examine
something of the roots of national myths.
One place to begin examining the story of the Pilgrims might be
with the first Thanksgiving of 1621. There is one eye witness account
of this celebration, written by Edward Winslow some weeks after
it occurred, completing his report before the 11th of December 1621.
This description appeared in Mourt's Relation, published
in London the following year and, in its entirety, runs as follows:
Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling
so we might after a special manner rejoice together after we had
gathered the fruits of our labors. They four in one day killed as
much fowl, as with a little help besides, served the company almost
a week. At which time, amongst other recreations, we exercised our
arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, among the rest their
greatest king, Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days
we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five deer,
which they brought to the plantation and bestowed on our governor,
and upon the captain and others. And although it be not always so
plentiful as it was at that time with us, yet by the goodness of
God, we are so far from want that we often wish you partakers of
our plenty.
William Bradford was also present for the occasion, but in his
Of the Plimouth Plantation, 1620-1647 he makes no special
reference to a holiday-like event. In an account written twenty-four
years later he refers to the Pilgrims having gathered "in the
small harvest they had" and to the availability of many types
of fish and game. Undoubtedly thinking of Winslow, he wrote, "which
made many afterwards write so largely of their plenty here to their
friends in England, which were not feigned but true reports."
As you consider these quotations, perhaps you can contrast your
mental picture of the first Thanksgiving with the somewhat sparse
details of the only available eye witness account. There is a great
discrepancy between what Winslow has recorded for us and the national
legend about Thanksgiving that has evolved over the past centuries:
a basically one day, religiously oriented celebration, focused around
a feast of turkey, pumpkin, cranberry.1 It is the contrast between
the legend and the reality of the Pilgrims that will be addressed
here, the Thanksgiving story offering merely an introductory example.
These quotations can serve another purpose and that is to call
attention to two remarkable books, each of which has a fascinating
history of its own. Mourt's Relation is an account of the
Pilgrim's first year in America, written for the express purpose
of enticing others to come join them in the New World. "Relation"
simply means account or story. Who "Mourt" was no one
knows for certain-some believe it refers to George Morton, one of
the wealthier members of the Pilgrim group who came to Plymouth
in late 1623. Who wrote the Relation is not fully clear either,
except for a few signed or initialed chapters, but it is generally
attributed to Winslow and Bradford.
Bradford's Of the Plimouth Plantation was handed down within
the family for generations until shortly before the Revolutionary
War when it was loaned by his great grandson to the Reverend Thomas
Prince. The latter had a small library which he kept in the Old
South Church in Boston. When the British evacuated Boston during
the Revolutionary War, Bradford's hand written book, the only existing
copy, disappeared. It was missing for about seventy-five years until
located in the Library of the Bishop of London in Fulham Palace.
Its route from Boston to London is unknown. Extensive diplomatic
and legal maneuvers over a forty-one year period were necessary
before it returned to Boston in 1897. It is currently in the State
House there in excellent condition.
Mourt's Relation and Of the Plimouth Plantation,
now readily available in printed editions, as well as Willison's
Saints and Strangers (1945) have been my primary source material.
My interest in this period of early American history dates to holidays
spent on Cape Cod. The area contains numerous sites of historical
significance. Provincetown's Pilgrims' Monument proudly proclaims
that the first landing of these pioneers was not on Plymouth's fabled
rock, but rather on the barren, desolate, sandy tip of Cape Cod.
First Encounter Beach in Eastham is a lovely and popular summer
swimming spot where a simple marker tells of the Indian's hostile
greetings to the Pilgrims there with bow and arrow. Corn Hill in
Truro tells a different story, that of the Pilgrims' discovery of
Indian corn and their procuring there the seeds that later made
their survival possible. And at Pilgrim Spring it is still possible
today, when the water table is high enough, to drink from the spring
where the Pilgrims reportedly tasted their first sweet water in
the New World.
All these places told of a story with which I was little familiar
and one that aroused my curiosity. It was the exploration of the
Pilgrims' pre-Plymouth days that led me to the references I have
mentioned and the unusual accounts they contain. To put some limit
on the parts of the story that can be related here, I am going to
focus on the Pilgrim's first three years in America-the time required
for their survival to be ensured. For it is a little known irony
of the first Thanksgiving that after the celebration was over, the
Pilgrims recounted their stores only to discover a gross miscalculation
had been made and that what lay ahead of them were two terrible
years of near starvation.
The Legend
Popular history envisages the Pilgrims as a group of devout pioneers,
fleeing religious persecution to seek a haven in the New World.
They are often thought of as a homogeneous group of pious folk,
armed against and wary of their savage neighbors. Although their
landing at Provincetown is better known today, the image of a Pilgrim
maid setting foot on the Rock at Plymouth is etched irreversibly
in many minds. Their stay at Provincetown is known primarily for
the Mayflower Compact, an agreement between the 41 male members
of the group, which is often presented as if it had been written
to ensure the establishment of revolutionary principles of democratic
government in the new settlement, the first step towards American
independence from English rule. Likewise it is generally thought
that the Pilgrims came to a wild and totally unknown and unexplored
area where they were to carve their home from the wilderness. Their
survival is often attributed to the providence of their God and
their steadfast belief in Him. And, as has been noted above, Thanksgiving
is usually thought to have demarcated the end of their struggle
for survival.
Popular history often recalls the appearance at the colony in the
spring of their first year of Samoset, an Indian sagamore or chief,
who boldly walked into the settlement proclaiming, "Welcome
Englishmen." He introduced the Pilgrims to Squanto, who also
spoke English, and who taught them how to plant their corn, an alewife
or herring buried with each seed for fertilizer. What has always
intrigued me is that so little attention is apparently ever paid,
or explanation ever given, for the bilingual capabilities of these
two natives.
 The Reality
Perhaps this is an appropriate place to leave the popular legend
and turn to reality. Samoset told the Pilgrims that he was from
a region to the north, Pemaquid Point, Maine, on our maps, where
he learned to speak English from the fishermen who frequented the
coastal waters there each summer. Morison, in a footnote to Bradford's
History, estimated there were three to four hundred ships
of many flags fishing there each year. Important for our purposes
is the fact that through correspondence with the skipper of an English
vessel the following year, the Pilgrims were able to obtain life
saving provisions, i.e. they were neither completely isolated nor
self-sufficient, and had landed in an area already well known by
some Europeans.
I will mention here that the Pilgrims knew Cape
Cod by its present name and it is so specified in the Mayflower Compact.
The Cape was named in 1602 by Gosnold while on a voyage seeking, among
other things, sassafras root, popular in England then for medicinal
purposes, specifically for the treatment of syphilis. In the same year
Champlain had mapped and even sounded the harbor at Plymouth, calling it
Port du Cap. In 1614 John Smith first gave Plymouth its present name while
he was mapping the New England coast. When the Pilgrims sent an expedition
from Provincetown Harbor in their shallop or small boat on what was called
their third exploratory trip or Discoverie, one of the Mayflower's
crew directed them towards Thievish Harbor, the name by
which he knew Plymouth from earlier
visits.
Samoset's story also tells us that this land was not so unknown and
unfrequented as legend might lead us to believe. Squanto tells an even
more remarkable tale. Although some authors have thought he had made three
complete round trip trans-Atlantic crossings by the time he met the
Pilgrims, there is sound evidence for only one such round trip, made by
way of the Caribbean and Spain on his way to England and then via
Newfoundland on his way back to Plymouth.
When John Smith was exploring the coast in 1614, Captain John Hunt with
one vessel of his group made his way along the bay or north shore of Cape
Cod. At various stops Hunt lured a total of twenty-seven Indians on board,
Squanto among them, and kidnapped them, selling them into slavery either
in the Barbadoes or Spain. Spanish friars were combating this century-old
practice and apparently intervened, at least to secure Squanto's release.
He made his way to London, where he resided with a "Master John Slanie in
Corn Hill" for at least two years. He returned by fishing boat to the
northern coastal waters and from Newfoundland made his way to the Cape
with Mr. Dermer, an English sailing master, arriving there just four
months before the Pilgrims.
Squanto and perhaps nineteen others of Hunt's captives were from the
Patuxet tribe who inhabited the Plymouth area. During his absence, in
1617, a plague, perhaps of smallpox, killed every member of his tribe. The
origin of such an epidemic is not difficult to understand-one of the
curses of any civilization when introducing itself into a new area. But
the epidemic explains why the Pilgrims found cleared fields and had an
uncontested occupancy when they arrived at Plymouth. Hunt's other captives
were from the Nauset tribe and it was members of this group who, quite
understandably, fired on the Pilgrims in meeting with them at First
Encounter Beach. History can be like a good reconstruction in
psychoanalysis: when all the correct facts are available, many mysteries
seem to be solved at once.
With this introduction to reality by way of Samoset and Squanto, let us
turn to the Pilgrims; who they were, where they were headed and why. Of
the seventy adult passengers on the Mayflower, twenty-seven were
"Saints" or religiously oriented people from the congregation in Leyden,
Holland, and forty-three were "Strangers." The Strangers, who had no
religious interests in the expedition, included personal servants,
indentured servants or seven year slaves, and adventurous pioneers seeking
their fortune in the New World. Such famous historical personages as Miles
Standish and John Alden were Strangers and not Saints. By the end of 1623,
including all the settlers who embarked on the Fortune (1621),
Sparrow (1622), and Anne (1623), there were about one
hundred sixty adults in the settlement of whom less than a third were
Saints.
Understanding this 2:1 preponderance of Strangers to Saints clarifies a
great deal about the Pilgrim's expedition. To obtain the necessary
financial backing, the Leyden congregation had to make arrangements with a
group of London merchants, or "adventurers" as they were known. In return
for support and supply of the colony it was agreed that one half of
everything the colonists made, grew or earned for seven years would go to
the merchants in repayment of the initial investment. These arrangements
made of the expedition a financial venture for gain and profit and in such
spirit the Strangers had come along. When the initial agreement was
finally resolved and clear title to the land passed to the Pilgrims, it
was placed in the name of Bradford. Despite the fact that personally he
had perhaps invested more of his worldly possessions than any other, he
declined the obvious opportunity to make himself a feudal lord over
Plymouth as had Lord Baltimore in Maryland.
The Saints paid a high price for backing, but not because of the
pressure of any immediate religious persecution. This had been harsh in
their previous home of Scrooby, England many years before, but had
essentially ceased on their arrival in Holland. As Bradford clearly
states, "many that came to them and many more that desired to be with them
[in Holland], could not endure the great labor and hard fare, with other
inconveniences which they underwent and were contented with." Like the
untold millions who followed them to America for centuries, they came
seeking a better life and greater opportunities than were available to
them in their adopted land. When all the Saints who wished to do so had
come to Plymouth, there were only five who had known the religious
persecution in Scrooby.
But the presence of the Strangers explains more. The Patent or charter
obtained from the Virginia Company which gave the Pilgrims the approval of
the English government for their settlement was valid in a northerly
direction only to the area around Manhattan and Long Island. No charters
were being issued at the time of their departure for Northern Virginia or
New England as the area north of what is now New York City was then known.
Historians tend to agree that the leadership of the colonists had decided,
but not fully shared with all in the party, that they would settle in New
England, counting on the fact their agents in London would soon obtain a
charter for the new area. And this proved to be the case.
But the Strangers, after the first landfall, realized they were not in
an area covered by the charter through which the Saints had control over
the expedition. There was serious talk of mutiny on the Mayflower.
To keep their authority intact, while riding anchor in Provincetown Harbor
and before any landing was made, the Mayflower Compact was drawn up and
signed by all. Its purpose was to extend to the new area the authority of
the crown because it was through this authority that the Saints could
maintain control of the group.
The reality of the Compact, however, should not detract from the
governing arrangements the Pilgrims developed. Leadership passed in 1621
from John Carver to William Bradford and remained with him for thirty-one
of the next thirty-six years. And lead he did. With a few of the wisest
and most trusted compatriots he shared his responsibilities and anxieties,
but just as with the decision regarding the area for settling, these were
not shared with all the group until the time seemed propitious. As they
said later, "every man was not of sufficiency to know nor fitness to
judge." Eventually, appropriate information was shared in what later
became the model for the New England town meetings.
After their authority had been reestablished by the Mayflower Compact
and a day devoted to putting the women ashore under adequate guard to do
their laundry, the Pilgrims began exploring the area around them. This
they did in three expeditions or "discoveries," and these are described in
full in Mourt's Relation. On the first they spied six Indians with
a dog and in pursuing them in vain came upon the spring mentioned earlier,
whose water tasted "as pleasant unto them as wine or beer had been in
for-times." Working their way back to the shore they came upon mounds
whose exploration yielded the corn also mentioned earlier.
On their second trip they returned to the same area and explored more
mounds, some of which they knew full well were Indian graves. In one they
found the body of a child besides that of a man with "fine yellow hair
still on it," obviously not the body of an Indian. From these graves our
pious forebears removed "sundrie of the prettiest things" as well as a
number of bushels of corn. On the first Discoverie they stated they were
but borrowing the corn and would make it good to the Indians later on,
which in fact they did. They also said they would despoil no graves lest
it offend the Indians, but these niceties were not observed on the second
trip.
The third Discoverie was a much longer trip, eventually taking them the
width of Cape Cod Bay to Thievish Harbor, as the sailor Robert Coffin
called it, or Patuxet or Little Falls as the Indians called it, or
Plymouth as John Smith had named it. On this trip they camped for their
first night on what is now First Encounter Beach and exchanged gun fire
for the arrows of the Indians in their brief "huggery," as they called
it.
Regarding the landing at Plymouth, it might be noted there were no
women on board the shallop for the expedition, and that when they arrived
in a December snow storm, they went aground on an island in the harbor.
They subsequently explored the harbor and the surrounding land, finding
the former suitable for larger ships and the latter good for a settlement.
There were fine brooks and many cleared corn fields which seemed
unoccupied. They returned across the Bay to Provincetown Harbor where
Bradford learned that his wife had died. After a few days of discussion
the decision to settle at Plymouth rather than on the Cape was made and
the Mayflower weighed anchor. Plymouth was reached on December 18th
and the site of their struggle for survival determined.
It was the 25th of December 1620 before they could get a work party
ashore to begin construction of their common or storage house. They viewed
Christmas as a pagan holiday so that working on this day was not the
result of overwhelming need. Bradford, incidentally, viewed the year's end
as occurring in March, and divided the chapters in his history
accordingly, but for our purposes we will see 1621 as the first, 1622 as
the second and 1623 as the third year of their struggle for survival.
The major problem of the first year was the illness that was to take so
many lives that by summer only 52 of the original 102 settlers were still
alive. It is difficult to tell exactly what took such a toll other than
noting their observations about scurvy, exposure and poor nutrition. With
so many ill and weak, construction went slowly, and to provide living and
storage space as well as protection, the Mayflower remained until April, a
cause of great discontent to the London merchants and entrepreneurs who
had supplied the financial backing for the Pilgrim's venture to New
England.
After sickness, their next concern was the Indians whom they feared
would attack when they were too weak to defend themselves. The arrival of
Samoset and Squanto was a relief to them as was the treaty they soon
signed with Massasoit, chief of the Wampanoag Indian Federation, made
possible because of their interpreters. In this agreement both sides said
they would come to the defense of the other if attacked, both would turn
over to the other any that did wrong to the other party, and that "neither
... should injure or do hurt to the other."
This remarkable pact was scrupulously honored for the next forty years
of Massasoit's life and was a major factor in the survival of the
Pilgrims. Within a year of the Chief's death, King Philip's War erupted,
leading to the elimination of the Indians as a significant local power.
Philip was the adopted Anglicized name of Pometacon, Massasoit's second
son and successor following the brief reign of his older brother. The
Wampanoag Indian Federation comprised those tribes who occupied roughly
the area between present day Boston, center of the Massachusetts Indians,
and Narragansett Bay, ruled by the Narragansetts. Although it would not
have been known to the Pilgrims, Verrazzano almost a century before had
found the Wampanoags the "goodliest people" when he had met them on the
eastern shore of Narragansett Bay and dallied over two weeks with them.2
The Wam-panoags feared the warlike Narragansetts from the western shore of
Narragansett Bay, as well as the Pawtuckets, who lived north of the
Massachusetts, although all these groups were considered part of the
Algonquin Indian Nation. The plague that had eliminated the Patuxet or
Plymouth Indians had greatly weakened the Wampanoags and for this reason
they were glad to make allies of the foreigners within their midst. So,
unbeknownst to the Pilgrims, the Indians they so feared in their own
weakened state likewise felt vulnerable for similar reasons.
No matter how much each of the partners in this treaty needed the
other, however, the forty year's peace the agreement brought was a tribute
to the leadership on both sides, Massasoit for the Indians, Bradford and
Winslow for the Pilgrims. In July, 1621 Winslow visited the chief at
Sowams, now Warren, Rhode Island, to request that his braves be deterred
from their frequent visits to Plymouth to sample English cooking because
they were fast depleting the Pilgrim's store of food. Although just in his
mid-twenties, Winslow was a master diplomat who made a firm friend of
Massasoit and earned the respect of all the Indians. When Corbitant, chief
of one of the sub-tribes of the Wampanoags, asked Winslow how he traveled
amongst the Indians without any fear, Winslow was reported to have
replied, "Where true love is, there is no fear."
But all did not go so smoothly in this first year as the Pilgrims
struggled to establish a modus vivendi with the Indians. Corbitant at one
point threatened Squanto and Hobomok, a kind of assistant interpreter, and
was even rumored to have killed Squanto. The settlers felt they could not
let such an insult pass unchallenged. They went to Corbitant's village to
seek him and, before finding out that Squanto was unharmed, managed to
wound a number of Indians in an attack. It turned out the threats had been
a misunderstanding, but the Pilgrims' over-reaction betrayed both their
fear of the Indians as well as the type of response more suited to Miles
Standish than to Edward Winslow. But of this, more unfolds in the next two
years.
Just after the first Thanksgiving towards the end of 1621 and the
Pilgrim's first year, the ship Fortune arrived from England
bringing them great criticism from their backers for having detained the
Mayflower and having sent her back to England empty. The apparently
callous merchants threatened to cut off all supplies and sent a demand
that new and harsh terms of agreement be signed by the settlers, terms
that previously had been in dispute. This they did reluctantly and
dispatched the Fortune back to England with a good cargo of beaver
and wood. Only much later were they to learn the ship was captured by the
French and all its contents stolen.
But by the end of 1621 they had survived their first year, made peace
with the Indians, found in Indian corn a crop they could grow, the seeds
they brought from England having failed them, and had found in beaver
pelts a commodity for export. Most important, however, may have been the
leadership they found in Bradford who was thirty-two when elected to
succeed Governor Carver on the latter's death. The significance of this
transfer of authority, aside from the personality and age of the men
involved, was that Carver had been a church official and Bradford was not.
Henceforth in Plymouth the church was always under the control of the body
politic and not the reverse as was later true of the Puritans. Pilgrim
ministers, for example, were always ultimately responsible to their
parishioners for their behavior as well as their teaching.
The year 1622 began with a threat from the Narragansett Indians who
sent to Plymouth a package of arrows wrapped in a rattlesnake skin, a
challenge to battle. Despite their half rations after the Thanksgiving
miscount of their stores and the arrival of 35 new settlers on the
Fortune, and despite the discouraging state of affairs with their
backers, they dealt calmly with this challenge by returning the arrows to
the Narragansetts accompanied by some bullets. This silenced the
threat.
There is some evidence of discontent within their own group, but this
was just hinted at by the local historians with a report of a fire set to
their common store and vague reports in retrospect of food stealing. There
was even trouble with Massasoit. Squanto had spread a false rumor that
Massasoit had been unfaithful to the Pilgrims and Massasoit had demanded
his head. The Pilgrims were loathe to offend the Chief, feeling his cause
just, but were loathe to surrender Squanto who had been so valuable to
them. They were literally saved in the nick of time by the arrival of a
ship from England, the Sparrow, which disrupted their deliberations
and allowed them to break off discussion with Massasoit's emissaries.
The Sparrow, however, arrived with no provisions for them and a
letter from Thomas Weston, the head of the sponsoring merchants. He stated
that no further supplies would be forthcoming and requested that seven
passengers on the Sparrow, employees of his, be fed until supplies
arrived for them later. To their credit they shared their meager stores
with the newcomers. Regarding the threatened collapse of the ties with the
merchants, this news Bradford kept to himself and a few trusted advisors,
fearing the company would lose heart and give up had he not done so.
But the Sparrow also brought a letter from a ship captain off the
Newfoundland Banks, Captain Huddleston, warning them of a possible Indian
uprising. Sensing a potential friend in a time of dire need, they sailed
north to meet Huddleston and seek food, which he gave them free of charge,
collecting from other boats in the area what they could spare. This supply
enabled the Pilgrims to survive the summer of 1622 until their harvest. It
was as if the greed and nastiness of Weston was matched by the generosity
of Huddleston and the other ship captains in the area.
In mid-summer two more ships arrived, the Charity and the
Swan, both sent by Weston containing settlers he was going to
establish near what is now Weymouth, north of Plymouth. This time some
food was sent the Pilgrims, but again he asked them to shelter and feed
his new company until they could establish themselves. The Pilgrim's
harvest, when it arrived, was a great disappointment and starvation for
yet another year faced them and their unwanted guests. Stealing broke out
and stopped only with the departure of the Weston settlers for Weymouth.
In this new crisis another ship arrived, the Discovery from
Virginia, on her way to England. The Pilgrims felt that the captain of the
ship, in the Weston and not the Huddleson mode, seeing their desperate
plight, drove hard bargains in exchanging beaver pelts for trinkets the
Pilgrims could trade with the Indians for food.
In conjunction with a group of Weston's people, using the latter's
boat, Bradford then visited the Cape Indians to trade the trinkets for
grain. On this trip Squanto died of natural causes, ending their crisis
with Massasoit temporarily. Bradford was well received by the Indians,
brought some grain home and left more for which he had bartered under the
care of the Indians until the settlers could return for it in the
spring.
Their third year, 1623, started badly with reports from Weston's men to
the north that they were starving and were going to attack the Indians.
They were temporarily dissuaded, advised to eat "ground nuts, clams and
muscles" as the Pilgrims were doing. Miles Standish was dispatched to
fetch the corn purchased from the Indians the previous fall. Although the
corn had been faithfully saved for the Pilgrims, this fiery little
military man found insult after trivial insult all along his route where
just months before Bradford had been so well received. In this one trip
Standish was able to terrify and alienate, fortunately not permanently,
almost all their Indian allies.
When Standish returned to Plymouth, Winslow was away visiting Massasoit
who had been erroneously reported as dying. Regardless of the cause of his
illness, Massasoit felt that Winslow and English food had saved his life
and as an ally he never wavered from that day forth. But in Winslow's
absence a war council was held by the settlers and the decision made to go
north to extricate Weston's crew and attack the Indians there because,
once more, Standish felt he had been insulted by them. What ensued was the
saddest chapter in the Pilgrim story. Standish took a small armed band
north with him and, feigning friendship, lured at least four of the
Indians into a hut where he and his men murdered them. The head of the
supposed chief tormentor, Wituwamat, he brought back to Plymouth as a
trophy that was for years mounted on Plymouth's palisades.
Weston's group left after this encounter and there is reason to suspect
that this, rather than the subjugation of the Indians, was the ultimate
goal of the expedition, because with Weston's men gone, the Pilgrim's
source of beaver pelt was once more secure. This episode is lightly
skipped over by Bradford but a blistering letter from their beloved Pastor
in Holland, Mr. Robinson, is on record and leaves no doubt about the
nature of their wrongdoing. It is doubtful if Indian affairs were ever
discussed again without Winslow's counsel or entrusted so completely to
Standish.
Food stayed in short supply as the 1623 harvest was awaited. Organized
fishing for striped bass was possible for the first time because they had
by now obtained proper equipment. When a passing ship, the Plantation,
offered them grain at an exorbitant price, their courage showed once more
and they refused to trade. How badly off they were was graphically
described by the next group of settlers who arrived on the Anne and
Little James. They reported, "[They were] little better than half
naked. [Their] very low condition made [us] fall aweeping, fancying [our]
own miserie in what [we] saw now in the others."
Some provisions came on the Anne, but it was just enough to hold
the new arrivals until after the harvest. A drought ensued to add to their
anxiety. But finally rain came and their crop was saved, their first truly
adequate harvest. What contributed to this success is of interest. In the
spring of 1623 the Pilgrims abandoned the communal farming they had
previously employed, deciding instead to give each family its own plot to
farm, their survival dependent on their success with their crop. Bradford
records a sharp decrease in the malingering, excuses and illnesses that
had kept many from their farming chores before. He also had some very wry
comments to make about the suitability of communal farming.
With the harvest of 1623 the Pilgrims had truly survived and for the
first time were entitled to a Thanksgiving that had the meaning they had
hoped for with their first celebration in 1621.
Discussion
It is hoped that even a brief, condensed account of the Pilgrim's first
three years can convey the truly heroic nature of this group of pioneers.
Their perseverance in the face of endless adversity is self evident. Their
kindness and generosity in sharing with Weston's new arrivals when they
were near starvation themselves are remarkable. The work of Winslow with
Massasoit and the other Indians, and Bradford with the administration of
the colony, provide instructive examples of successful leadership that can
be contrasted with the actions of Miles Standish. The contrasts are
likewise evident in comparing the generosity of Captain Huddleston with
the mean greed of the skippers of the other ships that passed by and tried
to take advantage of their plight, and with the demands of Weston and his
colleagues in London. The sustained courage of this group for the three
years it took to make their survival secure makes our national legend of
the dainty Pilgrim maiden delicately stepping onto Plymouth Rock, and of
the immediate success marked by the first Thanksgiving, seem pallid and
insipid by comparison.
Truth is sometimes stranger than fiction, and certainly in this
instance the reality is more stirring and heroic than the myth. This leads
to the simple question of why this could happen. The answer must be a
complex and multidetermined one. The suggestion will be made here that one
root of the answer might lie in an early work of Freud's, a brief paper of
1909 entitled "Family Romances."
The fantasy of the family romance is well known to all analysts: the
latency child's fantasy that his/her parents actually are some other than
his own. As Freud points out, for the country child the fantasied parents
would be the Lord and Lady of the Manor, for the city child perhaps more
likely in those days the parents would be royalty. Freud points to a
number of developmental factors that propel or underlie this almost
ubiquitous constellation of thoughts and wishes. He begins with the
narcissistic ones, though he does not label them as such. As a child's
world and experiences broaden as he moves into latency, he has to become
aware that the parents he has seen in his prelatency years as all-knowing,
all-powerful, and all-wise are in fact not perfect and may even pale in
comparison with other parents he comes to know about. How the child longs
then to return to the "happy vanished days when his father seemed to him
the noblest and strongest of men, his mother the dearest and loveliest of
women" (p. 241). The diminution of his esteem for his parents is, of
course, a diminution of his own self-esteem-an unacceptable narcissistic
blow that can be blunted or avoided with the fantasy of the real parents
being someone else, a wonderful someone else who could possibly
reconstitute the original overvaluation, restoring the child's self-esteem
in the process.
The second group of factors propelling the family romance are the
sexual ones, the derivatives of the Oedipus complex by which the child
wishes to deny his biological parent's sexuality as responsible for his
being, and deny the failure of his oedipal aspirations.
Along with all the marvelous attributes exhibited by the Pilgrims and
their stalwart leaders, there are in addition some rather grim, earthy,
instinctual ones that perhaps might be too distressing to allow in
national leaders, in our Pilgrim fathers, in national idols. Because along
with all else, the Pilgrims did rob Indians graves on Corn Hill on Cape
Cod in their second Discoverie. There was some food stealing periodically
during the years of starvation. Communal farming just did not work out
because of too much shirking. Miles Standish did go off on that grim foray
that led the Pilgrims not just to murder without provocation, but also to
bring home for prolonged display the severed head of one of their victims.
These breakdowns of conscience, these breakthroughs of instinctuality,
perhaps are just too much humanity to allow in our ancestors as potential
national heroes. Just as the mid-latency child wants to protect himself
from the short- comings and instinctuality of his parents as well as of
himself, so it seems possible that the same mechanisms may be active in a
national sense. Freud himself in this vein noted: "These consciously
remembered mental impulses of childhood embody the factor which enables us
to understand the nature of myths" (1909, p. 238), which does say it
rather succinctly.
Before tracing Freud's thinking in what could be called this charming
paper of his, it might be helpful to stress first the extent and nature of
the romanticization of the Pilgrims, a process that reached its zenith in
the mid 19th century and was centered interestingly on a truly classical
oedipal story, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's (1958), "The Courtship of
Miles Standish."
I would have to believe that every American school child will have
developed his own personal Pilgrim myth from what he or she was exposed to
in school. Thanksgiving is never avoided in the fall curriculum and that
means the Pilgrims that cannot be avoided either. I know my personal myth
had many components of which I will mention three. The first concerns the
large, dramatic canvas of a dour, grim Pilgrim father, his gun across his
arm, marching protectively with his family through the snow laden woods,
obviously, it seemed to me, on the way to or from church service, on guard
as pater familias against any possible danger lurking in the woods. The
presumption would be of an Indian danger despite the fact that none such
existed. My second component is the mental image of the delicate Pilgrim
maiden stepping on Plymouth Rock, in my mind a bit of a wisp of a maiden,
perhaps the epitome of delicate femininity. All this despite the reality
that the Pilgrim's first landing was at Provincetown, that when they came
to Plymouth they ran aground on sand bar in the harbor, and that the men
made the actual first landing on the beach later on. There is a
fascinating story about Plymouth Rock, now safely covered by a fancy
portico on the shore of the harbor. It seems that in 1756 an exclusive
club of descendants decided to honor their ancestor's memory but had no
focus for their planning. One of their number recalled that when he was a
boy of six an elder of the church in his 96th year was wheeled to the
shore to bid farewell to the Rock. It seems that the identification of the
rock may have rested on this elder's memory and rock selection. In any
case, what stays important in my myth components is two obvious quite
oedipal allusions, of the pater familias and the delicate maiden.
This oedipal focus does get solidified by the third element in my
personal myth and that is Longfellow's "The Courtship of Miles Standish."
When I first presented this paper, now over a quarter of a century ago, my
discussant, Arthur Rosenbaum, did a bit of research: 1) when Bradford's
history was first published it was in 1856 it became a "literary
sensation"; 2) Longfellow was a proud direct descendent of the heroes of
the poem, John and Priscilla Alden; 3) this epic poem was most likely
written in response to the appearance of Bradford's history. The poem is
devoid of any devotion to reality, mixing Pilgrims of Plymouth with
Puritans of Boston, events of 1621 with those of 1623 as if they occurred
simultaneously. Longfellow gave his imagination full and unfettered reign
and what emerges is a wildly romantic oedipal tale. In it young John Alden
proposes to Priscilla on behalf of his supposedly shy warrior friend Miles
Standish, some twenty years his senior, but in so doing he betrays his
love for Priscilla and inadvertently conveys all of Standish's faults, few
of his virtues. It is in this exchange that Priscilla has her two immortal
lines: "If I'm not worth the wooing, I'm not worth the winning," and "Why
don't you speak for yourself, John?" The now-betrayed Miles Standish goes
off to war against the Indians, leaving the two young lovers free for each
other when they are told he has died in battle. He returns, however,
forgives them, and John and Priscilla marry and presumably all live
happily ever afterwards, as happy an oedipal conclusion as any romance
could ask for. The poem was an instant literary tour de force that can be
said to have become a classic in its own time.
I do not believe that the oedipal overtones that run so strikingly
through my Pilgrim myth are just a happenstance, particularly if we now
turn back to Freud's "promise" of the elucidation of understanding the
"nature of myths" by focusing on the reparation of the narcissistic wounds
of the oedipal phase and if we recognize the frank oedipal nature of
Longfellow's tale that the appearance of Bradford's book stimulated.
In explaining the family romance, Freud points to its having two levels
or phases, a ubiquitous conscious one common as a transient phenomenon for
all of us perhaps, and a second or "neurotic family romance" which with
varying degrees of consciousness may persist well into puberty in the
neurotic's collection of fantasies. The stimulus for the neurotic fantasy
in the neurotic is the narcissistic wound occurring in the child first in
his disappointments in his parents which is then reinforced by his sexual
frustrations in recognizing his biological parents role in his birth and
being, the ultimate defeat of his oedipal strivings. He deals with these
wounds by saying I am not their child, I was adopted by them. My real
parents are some lofty and flawless pair.
It is clear Freud saw the family romance as a response to the child's
first rather general narcissistic wounds, then later of failed sexual
aspirations. He writes so nicely of the many possibilities inherent in the
family romance structure for a child's many conflicts. The romancer can
fantasize his mother had all his older siblings out of wedlock, allowing
him to become the family heir. He can fantasize that a sister who excites
him too much is also a bastard so he is free of incestuous wishes. He
wryly notes "its many sidedness and its great range of applicability
enable it to meet every sort of requirement" (p. 240).
But much as the family romance can sully his mother's fidelity in
marriage, abandon and turn him away from his father, Freud notes in a
kindly way that the new parents of the family romance will closely
resemble and preserve the original parents and that the fantasy "is no
more than the expression of regret that those happy days are gone" (p.
241), the end of days of idealization of parents from an earlier phase of
development.
In offering an explanation of myths in this paper I have to assume
Freud was offering us the following thought: that the family romance is
like a first myth, a type of primal myth, and through its ties to normal
child development and the oedipal complex, myths will be ubiquitous in
life. Said another way, the ubiquity of myths is based on the ubiquity of
the first myth, the oedipal myth.
Finally, I have a personal fondness for this paper of Freud's which
arises from my 1988 article, "Object Removal Revisited" in which I tried
to describe Freud's unresolved conflict about the resolution of the
oedipal phase. Was it resolved under the threat of violent castration or
was it resolved by the triumph of loving over aggressive feelings in the
ambivalent conflict with the father? In the "Family Romance" paper Freud
seems so much more comfortable with the oedipal complex, seeing all sides,
loving and aggressive, its wide applicability to so many of life's early
troubles, even viewing them with a bit of humor. It strikes me that his
1909 view of the Oedipus complex seems so well modulated and calmly
integrated. Why he ended up with so much conflict in the 1930s I do not
understand.
Notes
1. Deetz and Anderson (1972) have described an English holiday known as
Harvest Home in which, after the main crop had been harvested, "it was
cakes and ale and hang the cost." This became such a rowdy occasion that
early in the 16th century Henry VIII actively tried to get the farmers not
to celebrate until all the crops were harvested. Once this was done, "came
day after day of revelry, sports, and feasts." The Thanksgiving of the
Pilgrims in 1621 would seem to have been celebrated in this spirit. It
should also be noted that the Wampanoags were known to have had a similar
type of harvest celebration each year (Travers, 1957).
2. On a third voyage across the Atlantic in 1528 Verrazzano made a
landfall, probably at Guadeloupe, and rather fearlessly waded ashore alone
to a group of waiting natives. His good fortune with the Wampanoags was
not repeated here as the Indians were cannibalistic Caribs who promptly
murdered him and, in Morison's words, "cut him up and ate his still
quivering body," while his crew off shore looked on helplessly.
References
Bradford, W. (1967). Of Plimouth Plantation, 1620-1647.
New York: The Modern Library.
Deetz, J. and Anderson, J. (1972).
The ethnogastronomy of Thanksgiving. The Saturday Review,
November 25, pp. 29-38.
Ellis, J.J. (1997). American
Sphinx, the Character of Thomas Jefferson. New York. Alfred A.
Knopf.
Freud, S. (1909). Family Romances. Standard
Edition, 9: 237-241.
Furman, R.A. (1988). Object removal
revisited. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 15:
165-176.
Morison, S. (1971). The European Discovery of
America. New York. Oxford University Press.
Mourt's
Relation: A Journal of the Pilgrims at Plymouth (1963). New York.
Corinth Books.
Travers, M.A. (1957). The Wampanoag Indian
Federation. Boston, Christopher Publishing House.
Willison,
G.F. (1945). Saints and Sinners. Kingsport, TN: Kingsport
Press
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