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The Four Women Who Cooked the First Thanksgiving

The four women who cooked that first Thanksgiving probably didn’t feel all that thankful when their husbands invited 90 guests, all Wampanoag men, to eat with them.

They were the only women left after the first deadly winter that killed half of Plymouth Colony. They died of exhaustion, starvation, pneumonia, scurvy and cold. By springtime, 14 women had perished. Remarkably, the four women left managed to feed 143 people without kitchens, ovens, wheat, spices or butter.

This 1899 painting, The First Thanksgiving 1621 by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris has a number of inaccuracies. It shows the four women who cooked the first Thanksgiving with smiling faces.

Their dinner guests may have shown up unexpectedly, as the Native people had a tendency to appear when food was served. Or perhaps their menfolk had invited them to seal a peace deal. The meal itself – or rather meals, because they stayed for three days – served as more of a harvest celebration than a Thanksgiving.

The Four Women Who Cooked the First Thanksgiving

The women faced another challenge: getting along with each other. Cooking for so m any people required cooperation among the four, who had different backgrounds and aspirations. They included a Saint, a Goodwife, a Traveler and a Troublemaker.

The colonists referred to themselves as “Saints” and “Strangers” or “Travelers.” The devout Saints wanted to separate from the Church of England and crossed the Atlantic for religious freedom. Strangers came for adventure and opportunity. That both Saints and Strangers signed the Mayflower Compact shows the inclusiveness of the colonists.

Signing the Mayflower Companct 1620 by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris.

That first Thanksgiving was cooked by two Saints, Mary Brewster and Susanna Winslow, and two Strangers, Elizabeth Hopkins and Eleanor Billington.

But they probably all deserved sainthood for cooking all that food. The men just “feasted and entertained,” according to one of their husbands.

Goodwife Susanna Winslow

That husband, Edward Winslow, had married Susanna White in May, about five months earlier. He would serve as Plymouth’s governor and diplomat, and together they would prosper.

Edward Winslow, husband of one of the four women who cooked the first Thanksgiving

So at 29, Susanna Winslow was a rising figure in the little colony, a goodwife who would grow into a mistress.

Historians can’t tell for sure whether Susanna arrived as a Saint or a Stranger. Her first husband had a common name, and women didn’t leave much of a record. So no one seems to really know which Englishman named William White boarded the Mayflower.

Susanna and William brought their young son, Resolved, about five years old. Susanna was pregnant, and gave birth to their second son, Peregrine, below decks on the Mayflower as it lay at anchor in Massachusetts Bay. Odd as “Resolved” and “Peregrine” may seem, their names were typical of the Puritans. They suggest Susanna was a Saint.

William died in February and Elizabeth Winslow in March. Forty-eight days after Elizabeth died, Edward married Susanna. He brought to the union a daughter, Margaret, about three years old.

Edward and Susanna had practical and emotional reasons for marrying so soon after their spouses died. As Martyn Whittock points out in Mayflower Lives, “Shared faith, shared history, mutual respect, and, no doubt, physical as well as emotional attraction drew them together. And there is plenty of evidence for loving physical union enhancing partnership in the godly marriages.”

A portrait of Edward Winslow suggests a happy marriage. In his hand he holds a letter. The last three lines read, “From your loving wife, Susanna.” The portrait was painted in 1651, 30 years after their wedding.

Mary Brewster, Saint

Puritans believed in social hierarchy, so one can easily guess who took charge of the cooking operation:

52-year-old Mary Brewster, wife of the Saints’ spiritual leader, William Brewster.

William Brewster

Mary probably wished she had the help of her two daughters, Patience, 21, and Fear, 15, to cook for all those people. But the Brewsters left their daughters behind. They believed, like many of the colonists, that the weaker sex might not survive the journey. That explains why so few women cooked the first Thanksgiving.

That Mary joined her husband tells us something about her grit, her courage and her deep religious faith.

The Brewsters did bring their two boys with them, Love and Wrestling, about 11 and 7 at the first Thanksgiving. They would have helped prepare the meal, along with little Resolved White and Margaret Winslow. Richard More, their seven-year-old servant, would have helped, too.

Richard had come with three siblings, all dead by the time of the first Thanksgiving. Known as one of the Mayflower Love Children, Richard’s legal father had sent the children to America when he discovered he was not their biological father.

Patience and Fear arrived in Plymouth a few years later, along with older brother Jonathan.

Fear married another saint, Isaac Allerton. Her great-great-great-grandson, Zachary Taylor, served as the 12th president of the United States.

Elizabeth Hopkins, Traveler

Two years before boarding the Mayflower, Elizabeth Hopkins, married one of the most interesting Plymouth colonists, Stephen Hopkins. She was 33, he a 36-year-old widower with three children. He had already survived a shipwreck in the Caribbean and taken part in the settlement of Jamestown before returning to England. His adventure as a castaway on a Caribbean island probably inspired Shakespeare to create the character Stephano in The Tempest.

stephen-hopkins-caliban-stephano-trinculo

Calilban, Stephano and Trinculo from the painting The Tempest by Johann Heinrich Ramberg

Stephen, a rough-and-ready sort, planned to return to Virginia with his family. His family included Constance, 14, and Giles, 12, the two surviving children from his first marriage. Little Damaris, about three, may have been conceived before the marriage. Elizabeth was pregnant at the outset of the voyage.

She probably hoped to have her baby on land, but crosswinds and storms extended the unpleasant Mayflower voyage. She gave birth to Oceanus in a dark, cramped berth below the decks of the gyrating vessel.

Stephen, though a Traveler, held a position of importance in the colony. Because of his time in Jamestown, he could hunt and he knew about Native Americans. When the English-speaking Native American Samoset came to Plymouth, Elizabeth and Stephen put him up that night in their tiny house (the 1749 Court House Museum in downtown Plymouth stands on the site).

The house had at the very most three rooms, cramped quarters four adults, three children and the Hopkins’ two servants, Edward Doty and Edward Leister. The crowding probably didn’t help anyone’s temper. The two servants had fought and wounded each other in a sword-and-dagger duel a few months before that Thanksgiving.

Stephen was not the godly sort, and we can imagine Elizabeth wasn’t, either. They would have five more children, run a tavern and occasionally get into trouble with the authorities. Stephen had to pay fines for allowing drinking and shuffleboard on Sunday, for overserving and for overcharging customers.

But theirs seems to have been a successful partnership. When Stephen died in 1644 his will directed he be buried as close as possible to Elizabeth.

Eleanor Billington, Troublemaker

Eleanor Billington, on the other hand, was a troublemaker from a troublemaking family. The younger of her two sons, Francis, nearly burned down the Mayflower as it lay anchored in Plymouth Harrbor in December of 1620. He’d set off some homemade fireworks with his father’s gunpowder.

Eleanor had a hard time controlling her sons, if she even tried. Both tended to wander off unsupervised. In one case her older son John roamed into a camp of Nausets, who had clashed with the colonists upon their first arrival.

William Bradford

Gov. William Bradford described Eleanor’s husband, John Billington, as “a knave.” Billington contemptuously challenged Capt. Myles Standish’s orders during a militia drill in March 1621.Had he not begged forgiveness, the Plymouth authorities would have punished him. In 1630, he did get punished – hanged for murdering a neighbor.

Bradford then described the Billingtons as one of the “profanest families among them.” He could not understand how the Pilgrims had allowed them to join them from London.

Eleanor Billington also caused trouble. In 1636, she went to the stocks and received a whipping for slandering another Plymouth citizen, John Doane.

But troublemakers have to eat, too, and Eleanor Billington undoubtedly pitched in to make that giant feast.

The Others

Five teenaged girls survived the winter, and they would have worked alongside the four Thanksgiving cooks. Mary Chilton was 14 when she came ashore from the Mayflower, the first woman to set foot on Plymouth soil.

The oldest, Priscilla Mullins, at 19 had lost her mother, father and brother during the winter. She would soon marry John Alden after a courtship immortalized by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, their descendant. Other descendants include John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Marilyn Monroe and Calvin Coolidge.

Illustration of John Alden and Priscilla Mullins

Constance Hopkins (13 or 14), Elizabeth Tilley (14 or 15) and Dorothy, an unnamed maidservant, perhaps 18 or 19, would have helped prepare the meal as well.

They probably also had to keep an eye on the children, who included Bartholomew, Mary and Remember Allerton, Humility Cooper, Samuel Eaton and Desire Minter. The older ones would have helped.

Perhaps they minded fires, turned spits, carried water, plucked wildfowl or shucked shellfish. Maybe the lucky ones got the easy job of setting the tables – rough boards covered with cloth. They had just knives and spoons, as the first fork wouldn’t arrive in America until 1633. Tableware would have included pewter or wooden trenchers, tankards and lots and lots of napkins. Since they ate roast meat with their hands, napkins were a must.

Football, But No Pumpkin Pie

While the women cooked, the men entertained their guests. They showed off their military drills for the Wampanoags. And they probably played a version of football on the beach with the Natives, using a deerskin ball stuffed with deer hair.

At least they’d brought food. Bradford ordered four (probably including Stephen Hopkins) to shoot wildfowl. They blasted their muskets for the benefit of the Wampanoags, who outnumbered them.

The first Thanksgiving — the preferred version for many.

They may have shot some turkey, but they most likely got duck, geese, swans and maybe even carrier pigeon. The women would have plucked, trimmed and trussed them, then spit-roasted the small birds and boiled the larger ones.

They may have stuffed the birds with onions and herbs from their garden, and maybe chestnuts from the woodss. The next day, they would have taken the leftover meat and made a broth or a potage in their Dutch ovens.

The Wampanoags killed five deer and brought them as gifts. The women would have also cooked them on spits outdoors. Vegetables like corn, turnips, cabbages and carrots went into Dutch ovens on the hearths.

They would have eaten lobster, mussels and clams without butter, because cows didn’t arrive until later. Cod, bass and eels likely appeared on the tables.

They probably also served native fruit—cranberries, wild plums, melons and grapes – as well as walnuts, beechnuts and chestnuts.

Pumpkin, called pompion, undoubtedly would have appeared on the menu. The early colonists ate vast quantities of the stuff. In fact, the first American folk song is a lament about how much pumpkin they ate.

The four women who cooked the first Thanksgiving most certainly did not make pumpkin pie. With no flour, sugar or baking ovens, they probably just stewed it.

But at least they had football.

Need some new ideas for your Thanksgiving feast? How about trying something old — and authentic — from the New England Historical Society’s latest ebook. Available from Amazon (click here).

With thanks to Mayflower Lives: Pilgrims in a New World and the Early American Experience by Martyn Whittock. This story was updated in 2022.

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The Wellfleet Oyster: A Brief History of the Precious Mollusk

Diamond Jim Brady once spat out an oyster served him at New York’s Delmonico’s restaurant. “That’s not a Wellfleet oyster!” exclaimed the Gilded Age gourmand.

Discriminating diners have long prized the Wellfleet oyster for its merroir—the flavor that comes from the clear air and salty, plankton-rich seawater it ingests. Plump and clean, the Wellfleet oyster has a briny sweetness with an undertone of seaweed.

For centuries, the tasty meat and the hard gray shell of the Wellfleet oyster attracted an indigenous settlement, which gave way to a town. From Wellfleet’s immense oyster beds, fortunes were made, a culture developed and commercial networks spread along the Eastern seaboard. Wellfleet oysters wrapped in copper wire traveled across the Atlantic to royal tables. In tin cans they rumbled overland in covered wagons to the prairies and mountains of the West. They even contributed to the epic U.S. victory in the 1980 Olympics.

But in the centuries since the English, the French, the Africans and the Finns came to Wellfleet, the oyster has gone through dark days. Pre-Revolutionary gluttons doomed the wild Wellfleet oyster to extinction. The beds recovered, but so many oysters slid down so many gullets that they nearly disappeared again.

Wellfleet Oyster

Wellfleet lies just above the elbow of Cape Cod, and wraps like a fishhook around harbor, five miles long, two miles wide and open to the south.

Estuaries, clear and cold, feed into the harbor and the Atlantic. The Herring River, Blackfish Creek and Duck Creek carry diatoms and protozoa from the rich salt meadows along the border. Big, fast moving tidewaters feed the oysters twice a day, and at low tide the oysters are exposed to air, which makes them hardy.

Thousands of years ago, a year-round Native American community lived near the immense Wellfleet shellfish beds. Unlike most coastal New England Indians, the Native people didn’t migrate to the interior during the winter. They called themselves the Pononakanet, a branch of the Nausets, and in 1979 a discovery of 56 Native skeletons in an ossuary dated their bones to the 11^th century.

They piled shells along the forest edge to protect against storms and make it easier to get to the shore. Henry David Thoreau saw Native shell middens in nearby Truro during a visit to Cape Cod. He found oysters, clams, cockles, and other shells, mingled with ashes, and the bones of deer and other quadrupeds. “I picked up half a dozen arrowheads, and in an hour or two could have filled my pockets with them.”

Europeans Arrive

Samuel de Champlain sailed into Wellfleet Harbor in 1606, and the tremendous oyster beds so impressed him he called it Port aux Huistres.

A decade after Champlain’s visit, a terrible plague swept the Massachusetts coast. When the Plymouth colonists arrived they found so many indigenous people had died they couldn’t bury their dead. “Their skulls and bones were found in many places lying still above the ground,” wrote William Bradford, Plymouth’s governor.

The Mayflower had sailed past Wellfleet before anchoring in Plymouth Harbor, but soon enough the colonists discovered the oyster beds. They reminded them of Billingsgate, the London fish market famous for its foul-mouthed fish wives. So “Billingsgate” it was.

Billingsgate fish market in 1736 by Arnold van Haecken .

By 1644, the Plymouth settlers set their sights for another settlement on the Lower Cape from Truro to Chatham, the wrist to the elbow. They called it Eastham.

‘Then I do’

Bradford, the story goes, looked out to Billingsgate Island and asked the Pononakanet sachem, George, “Who owns that?” “No one,” replied George. “Then I do,” Bradford said.

William Bradford

Over time, the Europeans edged out the indigenous people. Some of those who survived the white man’s diseases converted to Christianity and moved to a Praying Indian town.

The last of the tribe, Delilah Sampson Gibbs, a widow, died sometime after 1838.

Billingsgate Bivalves

The European settlers learned how to tong for oysters. They’d lean over the side of a flat-bottomed boat with clumsy, 20-foot poles and grab them with the gripping teeth at the end.

In 1665, a randy Portuguese whaler and oysterman named Jacobus Loper started hauling Billingsgate oysters in his sloop. He had an easy sail from the protected harbor to Boston and Salem, and oysters travel well. Unlike scallops and soft-shelled clams, they can live for long periods in the shell outside of water.

Others quickly caught on to the oystering business. In the decades before the American Revolution, the burgeoning towns along the coast consumed vast quantities of the cheap, nutritious and highly portable Wellfleet oyster.

The town jealously guarded its beds from interlopers. By 1674 Eastham Town Meeting voted to apprehend any out-of-towners taking oysters from Billingsgate Bay.

Wellfleet Oysterman

In 1849, Henry David Thoreau and his friend Ellery Channing made their famous trek along the Lower Cape and learned about the extinction of the Wellfleet oyster.

They stayed at the home of John Young Newcomb and his family. Thoreau mistook the 87-year-old oysterman for a scarecrow. He immortalized him as the Wellfleet Oysterman in the posthumously published Cape Cod.

John Young Newcomb house. Photo courtesy Library of Congress, Historic American Buildings Survey collection.

The merry old man loved to talk. His conversation, coarse and plain, would have suited Rabelais, Thoreau noted. He told story after story, ejecting his tobacco juice right and left. The old man’s shots seasoned breakfast of eels, applesauce and green beans.

Newcomb was born in 1762, when Billingsgate still belonged to Eastham. He remembered hearing the guns at Bunker Hill and seeing George Washington ride down a Boston street, bowing gracefully to the crowd.

When Newcomb was a year old, Billingsgate broke off from Eastham. Billingsgate chose to change its name to “Wellfleet” after the famous “Wellfleet” or “Wallfleet” oysters of England’s Blackwater Bay. The revolution loomed as Newcomb reached his teens, but the town was more concerned about the disappearance of the oyster.

First Encounter Beach in Eastham

In 1773, the town voted to regulate the oyster fishery.“ That meant keeping outsiders off the beds.

Some people said the split caused the oysters to go away. Others blamed God’s wrath, ground frost, or pollution from a stranding of pilot whales.

Newcomb said Wellfleet’s quarrel with the neighboring towns about gathering oysters, yellow specks appeared in them. Providence then caused them to vanish. At least that was the most common explanation.

The real reason the oysters went away: probably the harvesters who stripped the beds. They didn’t realize juvenile oysters needed to attach themselves to something hard, like a shell, to survive. Instead, they burned the oyster shells for fertilizer and plaster. They also cut down the forest, which caused blowing sand to smother the young oysters.

American Revolution

After the Wellfleet oyster disappeared, the town’s population fell to 1,113 in 1790, down from 1,235 when the American Revolution broke out.

But Wellfleet’s oyster industry gradually recovered with the help of oysters from away. Aquaculture had gone on since the Romans did it in the first century, and Wellfleetians found they could do it too.

Oystermen began bringing oysters from Buzzard’s Bay and Narragansett Bay, fattening them up in Wellfleet’s estuaries and giving them time to acquire that special Wellfleet relish. Then they started bringing oysters in coastal schooners from the Chesapeake Bay.

jonathan carnes corners the pepper market

Salem during the American Revolution, as imagined by engraver Balthazar Frederic Leizelt; produced for the European market.

In 1802, 40-year-old John Young Newcomb bought a share in the schooner Lydia, and then opened an oyster shop in Salem.

By the time Thoreau came to visit in 1849, Wellfleet natives supplied and kept nearly all the oyster shops and stands in Massachusetts. Newcomb told him the business was still good and improving.

Wellfleetians positioned themselves throughout the oyster industry even beyond Massachusetts. There were Atwoods, Dyers, Holbrooks and Freemans working in Boston, Philadelphia, Portland, New York and Providence, Dover, N.H., Lewiston and Saco, Newburyport and Lynn.

The Golden Age of the Wellfleet Oyster

“In the palmy days of the Wellfleet oyster business, forty or fifty sail of vessels were engaged each winter in transferring the product to the Boston market,” wrote historian Simeon L. Deyo.

From 1830-1870, Wellfleet monopolized the oyster business in New England. And what a business it was, thanks to the tin can and a widespread frenzy for oysters.

During the Napoleonic Wars, the British and the French invented canning so they could feed their armies on the march. Canning then found its way to Boston by the 1840s. There, the William Underwood Company canned large volumes of Wellfleet oysters. Union Army soldiers during the Civil War developed a taste for them; so did the pioneers migrating west.

Mawhinney Oyster Saloon in Philadelphia

By then, oystermania had taken hold of America. Starting around 1820, oyster cellars, oyster bars, oyster lunchrooms and oyster parlors sprang up all over the Eastern seaboard. Many were just plain eating dens with big heavy tables and floors covered with sawdust. They served booze and cheap oysters, raw or roasted on the half shell, oyster stew, maybe some clams, some toast or some pie.

Oyster cellars, a few steps down from street level, meant adult fun– beer, nightlife, the demimonde, the sporting life, prostitution. Charles Dickens relished his visit in 1842 to an oyster cellar in New York’s seedy Five Points neighborhood.

Ever-ready Resource

In 1848, Boston had 69 oyster houses and oyster peddlers went door to door. According to Rambles in Old Boston,

Oystermen usually appeared in the evening, carrying their heavy burden, in the shell, on their shoulders in a kind of saddle-bag, crying, “Oys! Finey Oys! Buy any Oys?” They opened the bivalves at the purchaser’s door, throwing the shells into another part of the bag.

In 1857, an Englishman named Charles MacKay visited the United States and commented on the only class difference in America: Some people washed down their oysters with champagne, some with beer.

Elegant restaurants served oysters, but so did housewives of modest means. They were cheap and nutritious. Homemakers viewed them as “the ever-ready resource” because of their “suitableness for all occasions.”

Fresh oysters were shipped west, first in wagons full of ice and then in train cars. In Illinois, a congressman named Abraham Lincoln used to hold oyster orgies in which huge quantities of the bivalve were consumed.

Big Business

In 1826, Hawes Atwood opened Atwood’s Oyster House on Union Street – still in business as the Union Oyster House. Daniel Webster often ate there, downing six dozen Wellfleet oysters at a sitting. Atwood built an imposing house in Everett, a town he helped found.

Union Oyster House

In New York City, Wellfleet’s Libby family established the famous Libby’s Oyster House on Fulton Street in 1839. It lasted more than a century. Unpretentious, Libby’s had chefs and waiters described as “despotic and opinionated but highly skilled.” It served Daniel Webster fish chowder on Wednesdays and Fridays, served New England clam chowder every day and had a hard-and-fast rule: No Manhattan Clam Chowder served in here.

Isaac Rich, born poor in South Wellfleet in 1801, built a fortune on oysters. He started off with an oyster stall on Boston’s City Wharf, then moved into warehousing, shipping and banking. In 1869, Rich cofounded Boston University.

The oyster also gave Brigham and Women’s Hospital its start. Peter Brigham, a Vermonter, began selling oysters and fish in Boston while still in his teens. Eventually he amassed enough money to leave $1.3 million for a new hospital after his death.

Oyster Wealth

The Wellfleet oyster made Wellfleet a real town. Local businessmen built Commercial, Enterprise, Mercantile wharves to service the vessels along the busy waterfront.

First Congregational Church

The Duck Creek Shipyard produced schooners, The white clapboard Congregational Church went up in 1850 with a town clock that still chimes ships’ time. Houses floated over to Commercial Street from Chequasset Neck, Griffin Island and Bound Brook. Tradesmen built shops along the long main street. Timothy Daniels ran a store across from Uncle Tim’s Bridge – a favorite motif of plein air painters – connecting Hamblen Island to the village.

There were still oil works for rendering oil from the pilot whales that washed ashore, saltworks to make salt for cod, chandleries to supply the ships.

Aquaculture

Then in 1870, the Old Colony Railroad opened to Wellfleet. The town gathered, celebrated, listened to speeches and poems. One speaker said the railroad would do for the Cape’s fisheries what it had done in Chicago for midwestern grain.

It didn’t. The railroad instead carried Wellfleetians to the mainland — to stay. The population declined along with the oyster beds.

That year, Wellfleet selectmen took notice. They began requiring permits to work the beds. Then in 1876, they adopted the grant system, leasing sections of flats to people who then cultivated and bedded oysters.

It got harder to bed oysters from the south, as northern oyster dealers had caught on to the idea. They found it cheaper for them to bed their own oysters nearby than to pay for freight from Wellfleet.

Wellfleetians then tried to plant oysters – that is, deposit seed, or spat, onto a bed of cultch. E.P. Cook got the first grant. He scattered shells along the sandy bottom, then caught and planted spat. He moved the young oysters around to different water depths to enhance their growth.

Oyster spat

But oyster planting was an inexact science, and often it failed.

In 1878, S.R. Higgins deposited seed from the Taunton River, and it lived and thrived. Oyster planting slowly increased. In 1889, Wellfleet had 30 acres of grants. Twenty years later, it had 2,400.

It wasn’t enough. Simeon Deyo in 1890 wrote, “the oyster and the oysterman are, so far as these shores are concerned, slowly, but surely, passing away.”

The harbor filled in. People moved away, as they had been every decade since 1840. The fish began to disappear.

In 1898, Fred Snow brought the last load of fish aboard the schooner Pleiades into Wellfleet Harbor.

Sealshipt

In 1911, a big, modern oyster company called Sealshipt came to Wellfleet.

Actually, it was a trust, and in 1910 the New York Times reported that the Sealshipt Oyster System was trying to monopolize the Atlantic Coast oyster business.

Sealshipt had developed a sanitary container for shipping oysters and marketed it heavily through its 25,000 retail agents. That was a big deal at the time. Exposes of adulterated and unsanitary food had riled the public, and Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906.

Sealshipt employed up to 125 people, who worked six days a week from 7 am to 5 pm. Another 600 worked at the Sealshipt office in Boston. They only got Thanksgiving and Christmas off, worked by the light of kerosene lamps and shipped 50 barrels of oysters a day.

Things were looking up for the Wellfleet oyster. In 1909, 22,500 bushels of Wellfleet oysters were harvested from the flats – about a fifth of the haul during the palmy days of the Wellfleet oysters. Still, an improvement.

Sealshipt lasted three years. In 1914, the business was sold at foreclosure.

Lorenzo Dow Baker

Lorenzo Dow Baker, the Banana King, came into this world on Bound Brook Island in 1840. He founded the Boston Fruit Company, which evolved into United Fruit, which evolved into Chiquita Banana.

Baker envisioned a different future for his hometown, one based on tourism and aquaculture.

Lorenzo Dow Baker

In 1886, he built the luxurious 62-room Chequasset Inn on Mercantile Wharf, which had served the now defunct mackerel fleet. Baker brought his Jamaican staff in the summer north from his Titchfield Inn, which he ran in Jamaica in the winter. He billed the Chequasset as a cruise without the seasickness.

Sportsmen and their families came for the duck hunting, fishing, tennis and billiards. Guests could stroll among the fashionable elite along the boardwalk. A full orchestra entertained dinner guests.

Then in 1905, Baker added a funny little shed with a pitched roof to the side of the Chequasset Inn. He let a Dr. David Belding conduct his shellfish research from what was actually the Massachusetts Department of Fisheries Shellfish Laboratory and Quahog Hatchery.

David Belding

Belding, a brilliant shellfish biologist and a medical doctor, laid the foundation for modern aquaculture in that shed. He wrote groundbreaking reports on bay scallops, quahogs, oysters and soft-shell clams that have yet to be surpassed. Belding also served in the Army Medical Corps in World War I, wrote books and worked as Professor of Bacteriology and Experimental Pathology at (appropriately) the Boston University School of Medicine

It would be a long time before Belding’s research bore fruit. The Wellfleet oyster continued its slide.

Things got worse. A typhoid epidemic in 1924 was blamed on oysters, while Prohibition closed the oyster cellars and taverns where they were so gleefully consumed. In 1936, David Atwood closed Wellfleet’s last oyster company. The town turned to tourism, improving the roads, creating a dump, bringing in electricity.

The Return of Dr. Belding

Scallops and quahogs overtook oysters as Wellfleet’s main crop during the Depression. Then during World War II, the Army set up a training camp for amphibious landing craft at Wellfleet. The vessels churned up so much silt they smothered the oyster beds.

By 1956, Wellfleet oysters were only planted by individuals doing it as a side hustle on small private beds. The good news was that people started following Dr. Belding’s advice, and it seemed to work. The town bought seed from the state and encouraged fishermen to bring in their shells to one section of the flats so they could collect oyster seed.

In 1966, Dr. Belding, then in his 80s, returned to Wellfleet to join the newly created Shellfish Advisory Board. Wellfleet worked with other Cape towns and the state to revive the Wellfleet oyster. They started a cultching program, planting bushels of scallop shells to catch oyster seed.

Wellfleet Harbor today

Miracle on Ice

In 1980, an artist, entrepreneur and fisherman named Paul Suggs formed the Mud Hake Oyster Company. It signaled a new era and new energy in the Wellfleet oyster industry. Suggs got a grant, and he got good at shucking. Two days a week he’d take his oysters on the road to sell them.

Suggs then decided to sell Wellfleet oysters at the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid. He bought up the local product in the weeks beforehand – 80 bushels of oysters, 25 bushels of mussels and 40 bushels of clams.

In a rented U-Haul, he led friends, wives and children to Lake Placid. They set up a raw bar at the Ancient Mariner Hotel and started selling shellfish as fast as they could shuck them. One day Suggs was walking through the Ancient Mariner restaurant wearing a Wellfleet oyster T-shirt. Someone yelled, “Hey Wellfleet, hey Wellfleet!” The voice belonged to a member of the U.S. hockey team.

Suggs got to talking with the hockey players, who told him how much they wanted to win their game against the Soviet team the next day. The Soviets had dominated Olympic hockey through the 1970s, and their army had just invaded Afghanistan.

Suggs said he held the key to victory. He would give them all the Wellfleet oysters and clams they could eat for free, if they promised not to have sex that night and dissipate all that energy. He guaranteed they’d win if they kept their promise.

Both sides kept their end of the deal, and the next day the U.S. hockey team won in the last 10 seconds of the game – the Miracle on Ice.

End Notes

With thanks to The Famous Beds of Wellfleet, A Shellfishing History, by D.B. Wright. according to History of Barnstable County, Mass., 1620-1637-1686-1890 by

Images: Wellfleet oysters by Paula O via Flickr, CC by 2.0. Map of Wellfleet, Boston Public Library via Flickr, CC by 2.0. Miracle on Ice magazine cover By Copyright by Sports Illustrated/Photographed by Heinz Kluetmeier, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25356046. Union Oyster House by By Swampyank at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20434529. Wellfleet’s First Congregational Church By ToddC4176 at the English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16093285. Oyster spat By CSIRO, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35474428. First Encounter Beach By ToddC4176 at the English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16093177. This story updated in 2022.

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Myles Standish and the Lost Colony of Massachusetts

In March 1623, leaders of the struggling Plymouth Plantation dispatched their paid military leader Myles Standish to a coastal settlement 25 miles north. They gave him a savage mandate: return with the head of a troublesome warrior named Wituwamat.

Wituwamat was the perceived leader of a rumored multi-tribal strike against a failed English trading post and possibly Plymouth itself.

Supposedly a portrait of Myles Standish painted in 1625, but first published in 1885 and of questionable authenticity.

With a handful of men and a Native ally named Hobbamock, Myles Standish ambushed Wituwamat, a powerful brave named Pecksuot and two other Natives in a locked room. He then engaged in a running battle with another group of warriors in present-day Weymouth, Mass. A few others joined them–members of the trading colony established a year earlier by London investor Thomas Weston. Weston and his Merchant Adventurer partners wanted to capitalize on the profitable beaver trade with the Massachusetts tribe.

A few days later, Standish proudly impaled Wituwamat’s head on the stockade at the entrance to Plymouth Plantation—a stark warning to the local Native populations.

It was an important moment in American history–although largely forgotten. The attack clearly established the primacy of the Pilgrims. Today, the event—and the actual physical reminders of it—are being examined and reinterpreted by historians, archaeologists and descendants of the original actors.

Myles Standish, Condemned

The local tribes that had quarreled with the new English settlers quickly dissipated, clearing the way for a massive Puritan migration to the Massachusetts Bay Colony anchored at Boston. The Natives feared the Pilgrims’ guns, their ruthlessness, and their rumored ability to unleash a deadly plague on command. Yet the violent preemptive strike was condemned even by the Pilgrims’ own spiritual leader, John Robinson, who had remained at their safe haven in Holland.

The first Thanksgiving — the preferred version for many.

The necessity of the strike is still debated. America prefers to remember the banquet between the Pilgrims and the local Natives, formally proclaimed as Thanksgiving by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863. There was indeed a feast, albeit a strained affair, between the Pilgrims and a group of Natives, called the Pokanoket Wampanoags, who had sought a military alliance to stave off possible annihilation by the rival Narragansett tribe.

How It All Started

The story of how tensions escalated to the murder and decapitation of Wituwamat begins with the arrival of the first Europeans in present-day Massachusetts. Capt. John Smith of Jamestown fame explored the region in 1614 with several vessels. One of his commanders, Thomas Hunt, captured several Natives to sell as slaves. That action negatively impacted English and Native relations for years to come, in Smith’s view.

One of the captured natives, a brave named Squanto, later returned. The first Europeans spread infectious diseases that obliterated some coastal populations. Disease wiped out a village called Patuxet, once Squanto’s home.

In 1615, the Natives took revenge on a wrecked French ship, killing most of the sailors and keeping a few as slaves. One of the Natives participating in the butchery was Pecksuot. He later taunted Weston colonists and Standish with his gruesome account. Later, sailors of an English ship reportedly murdered several members of the Wampanoags. They then responded by attacking a party led by an explorer and gold prospector named Thomas Dermer.

Treaty

In his best-selling book titled Mayflower, Nathaniel Philbrick wrote: “When the Mayflower arrived at Provincetown Harbor in November, it was generally assumed by the Indians that the ship had been sent to avenge the attack on Dermer. In the weeks ahead, the Pilgrims did little to change that assumption.”

A Pilgrim landing party raided a buried supply of corn seed, ripped through a gravesite and fled from the beach under a hail of arrows. The scouting party, sailing up the coast, found a spot with a harbor, fresh water and a hill for a fort. They then started to build homes.

The settlement at Plymouth had inadequate provisions, and 52 of the 102 who arrived on Cape Cod died by spring. Squanto, who had learned to speak English, befriended the Pilgrims. He then helped establish a treaty with Massasoit Ousamequin of the Pokanoket Wampanoags.

But Corbitant, sachem of the Pocasset tribe of the Wampanoag, challenged Massasoit’s treaty with the Pilgrims. The treaty seemed like a straightforward military alliance. However, it actually undercut long-standing tribal legal tradition, according to Paula Peters, a present-day activist for the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe.

An 1873 lithograph depicting the expedition against Nemasket led by Standish and guided by Hobbamock.

The Pilgrims dispatched Myles Standish to a village called Nemasket with less than a dozen men. His mission: to kill and behead Corbitant, who escaped. Later, the Narragansetts, also unhappy with the Pilgrims, sent Plymouth Plantation a bundle of arrows wrapped in a snakeskin, a threat. Standish ordered construction of a palisade fence surrounding their homes, and beefed up other fortifications.

Unhappy Investor

Meanwhile, the Pilgrims were struggling to feed themselves, let alone return a profit to the London investment group that paid their way. The initial plan to farm communally failed completely. Only 26 acres were planted in 1621. In 1623, each family received permission to plant privately, with the amount of land determined by family size.

“The Pilgrims, in their quest to be stepping-stones for freedom, had almost everything go wrong as they attempted to plant a colony in the new world. By the time they reached the shores of New England, they were poor, had barely enough provisions for the first winter and began to die at an alarming rate,” wrote Dr. Paul Jehle, executive director of the Plymouth Rock Foundation.

The Mayflower

The Mayflower returned to London in 1621 empty of cargo. Weston was not happy. A return ship carried this message to Plymouth Gov. William Bradford: “The life of the business depends upon the lading of this ship, which if you do to any good purpose, that I may be freed from the great sums I have disbursed for the former and must do for the latter (the Fortune), I promise you I will never quit the business.”

Wessagusset

Despite his commitment, Weston bailed on the Plymouth investment. Instead, he created another venture: a trading colony of some 60 men. No religious separatists this time. No women. And no children. Just men, albeit a rough group, who would engage in profitable beaver trade with the Massachusetts tribe.

His traders arrived at Plymouth in the fall of 1622 poorly provisioned and not prepared to establish a settlement. They left for an area on the coast that the Natives called Wessaguscus, and they called Wessagusset.

They were greeted by the local sachem Aberdikes, who welcomed the idea of trade. But the situation soon deteriorated. The alert of an emerging crisis came from a man named Phineas Pratt, a member of the Weston Colony at Wessagusset. He chronicled his story in 1664, when he petitioned the colonial government for the financial benefits accorded “First Comers.”

He was the only first-person witness to make a written record. But he was not present for the battle. That account comes from Edward Winslow of Plymouth Plantation in a detailed report to London titled Good Newes From New England. Details were also provided in accounts from Bradford (Of Plymouth Plantation) and Thomas Morton (New English Canaan). Winslow was the de facto agent with Massasoit as well as with the investors who had funded the Pilgrims trip.

Phineas Pratt’s Account

The account of Phineas Pratt went like this: When the Weston party of 60 men arrived at Wessagusset in 1622 “there was a great plague among the savages &, as themselves told us, half their people died thereof…The savages seemed to be good friends with us while they feared us, but when they saw famine prevail, they began to insult.”

Gravestone of Phineas Pratt in Charlestown, Mass.

Pecksuot sought to intimidate the newcomers with boasts of how the tribe had subdued the shipwrecked French crew. “We made them our servants. They wept much…We took away their clothes. They lived but a little while.”

Aberdikes, the local sachem, later approached the colony with several armed braves and accused one of the men of stealing corn. They retreated when they saw men armed with muskets behind a fence palisade surrounding the fort and houses.

According to legend, the Weston colonists hanged a proxy for the crime, an older man who was deathly ill.

The colonists then buttoned up the palisade and consumed what food they had left while braves watched.

‘Tomorrow I will go’

Pratt continued: “When we understood that their plot was to kill all English people in one day when the snow was gone, I would have sent a man to Plymouth, but none were willing to go. Then I said if Plymouth men know not of this treacherous plot, they & we are all dead men; therefore, if God willing, tomorrow I will go.”

Pratt made a successful escape to Plymouth, where he found preparations already under way for a military expedition to Wessagusset.

Edward Winslow

Edward Winslow had just arrived after a healing mission to Massasoit, who told of a multi-tribal plan to attack Plymouth and the Weston Colony. Spurred by the warning of Massasoit and later confirmed by Pratt, the Pilgrims sent Myles Standish to ambush the tribal leaders.

Myles Standish Battles the Natives

Standish and his men took a small vessel called a shallop and arrived at Wessagusset where the colonist ship, the Swan, lay anchored. No one was on board, and Standish fired a musket. Several men suddenly appeared.

Surprised to find Myles Standish, they said there was no imminent threat from the tribe. In fact, many of the colonists were cohabitating with them.

Standish collected colonists in a hilltop stockade and told them of his plan to lure Natives inside and then kill them. The Natives perceived the threat and only Wituwamat, Pecksuot and two other men ventured into the fort.

Myles Standish promised them a feast and invited them into a house. He then locked the door, grabbed Pecksuot’s knife and killed him. Then his other soldiers killed and decapitated Wituwamat. They hanged a third brave.

The George Soule house at Plimoth Patuxet, probably similar to the house where Myles Standish killed Wituwamat and three other Natives.

Aberdikes approached with warriors, and the conflict debouched into a running battle in the surrounding area. The Natives, outgunned, disappeared into the tall cattails of a marsh. At the end of the day, seven Natives were killed. No English died in combat.

The settlement was evacuated, with most colonists sailing the Swan to a fishing outpost in Maine. Most of the local tribes pulled up stakes and fled the area, fearing another attack.

Aftermath

Bradford lamented the lost ability to profit from further beaver fur trade— at least for a while. The events were later mythologized by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his 1858 narrative poem, “The Courtship of Miles Standish.”

Samuel Butler recalled the proxy hanging in his satirical poem titled “Hudibras” published in the mid-17th century.

The peace that prevailed in the area was short lived. Massasoit’s son Metacom planned to continue friendly relations with the English and took the name of Philip. But tensions over land use and diminished game erupted in the 1670s, leading to an armed conflict called King Philip’s War. Colonial militia overwhelmed the tribal coalition, and there was slaughter on both sides. Metacom was killed by militia in 1676.

King Philip’s War (illustration)

Today

The tribes have a modest presence in Massachusetts today. The Wampanoags, led in part by Paula Peters, made a (so far) failed bid for a federal casino license.

The Massachusetts tribe is greatly diminished, but one group still holds tribal meetings at Ponkapoag near their ancestral home in the Blue Hills area south of Boston. Many were segregated in areas such as “Indian Row” in Brockton, Mass. In the 2010 census, just 85 people identified as Ponkapoag Massachusetts.

Tensions between the tribal groups continue to this day. Ren Green, one of the sachems, or leaders, of the Ponkapoag Massachusetts, confronted Paula Peters of the Wampanoags in a standing room only meeting at the Weymouth Public Library in 2017. There, Peters claimed the Wampanoags’ territory had included the Blue Hills area of Boston. Green called it an attempt to claim the Boston area site for a casino. Peters called it a misunderstanding.

Today, on some days, you can talk to an historical actor portraying Phineas Pratt at Plimoth Patuxet, the name of the well-done tourist site recreating the Plymouth Colony and a nearby Wampanoag site.

Wigwam and Wampanoag guide at Plimoth Patuxet

The Reincarnation of Phineas Pratt

On a sunny spring day, I found a youthful Pratt working a field at the bottom of a hill. He was surprised and excited that someone wanted to speak with him. He was particularly surprised that I lived in Wessagusset, which is still dealing with its odd place in history.

Yes, he told me, he had arrived at Plymouth from Wessagusset. Yes, Standish had spiked Wituwamat’s head and stank in the sun. And yes, he had escaped the troubles and alerted the colonists.

The Plymouth settlement is commemorated at Plymouth Patuxet and at historical sites in the town of Plymouth. A recent high-tech archaeological dig by faculty at the University of Massachusetts-Boston campus identified the site of a palisade wall near the fort that protected the settlement.

Finding the Lost Weston Colony

The Weston Colony site is another matter. It had rapidly disintegrated after Myles Standish and his soldiers departed on their shallop. Per local tradition in the mid-19th century, the site was located near a freshwater creek feeding into a cove on what today is called the Fore River.

John Winthrop commissioned this map showing three structures near Hunt’s Hill with the word “Wessaguscus.” Henry F. Waters “discovered” the map in the British Museum and sent photos to the Boston Public Library.

In 1884, a map created in 1633 or 1634 by Gov. John Winthrop of the Massachusetts Bay Colony came to light in the British Museum. It showed three structures next to a cove where the Fore River opens to a large bay today called Hingham Bay.

Historian Charles Francis Adams did a deep dive into the subject in the 1880s. He armed himself with the Winthrop map, a few descriptions of the topography in the Phineas Pratt account and a dollop of common sense.

Hunt’s Hill

Adams figured the Weston fort was best located on a hill that offered views of the bay and the mouth of the river. It also needed a freshwater source. There was a hill on a hook of land jutting into a cove next to the houses on the Winthrop map. And there was a spring and a swamp nearby that could have been the one mentioned by Pratt.

Adams was convinced this site, called Hunt’s Hill, was the location of the Weston Colony. His logic remains to this day the generally accepted wisdom.

The most widely accepted location for the Weston Colony: a hilly peninsula that extended into a cove near the mouth of the Fore River. The hill was removed in the 1890s for fill used to create the South Boston Marine Terminal. A private dock is on the site today. This photo was taken from King’s Cove Park, adjacent to the controversial Weymouth compressor station.

But Wait…

In the early 1890s, a salvage company needed fill for a large marine park under construction in South Boston. The hill on the cove was for sale. Adams strenuously objected, but the hill was sold with no effort at archaeological excavation.

Today a group called the Plymouth Archaeological Rediscovery Project is having second thoughts about the Hunt’s Hill site. Its director, an archaeologist named Craig Chartier, says the Winthrop map could have identified buildings put up after the Weston Colony was abandoned. He identifies four other sites in the immediate area that are possibilities. One is particularly interesting. Two sets of bodies were dug up in graves either in or adjacent to that site. It meets the key criteria: hilltop, ocean frontage, freshwater access and a nearby swamp, as described by Phineas Pratt.

A Weymouth historian named G. Stinson Lord reported in a commemorative book in 1972 on the discovery of seven bodies at one gravesite and two decapitated bodies in another.

Stories That Need To Be Told or Retold

Today, there is a strong feeling that the stories of Native Americans in the area need to be better represented. For example, the living history exhibit at Plymouth dropped the word “Plantation” in 2020 and replaced it with the word “Patuxet.” And it made plans to improve the adjacent Wampanoag site.

The Massachusetts state seal depicts the arm of Myles Standish brandishing a saber above the head of a Native American standing at peace. Courtesy Doug Smock.

The Massachusetts state seal incorporates an image of Myles Standish’s arm brandishing a sword. It hovers above a Native American with arrows pointed downward. In January an appointed commission set about developing a new state seal. In 1999, Weymouth Town Meeting voted to purchase a tract of land in Wessagusset for conservation and historical purposes. A memorial garden built with private funds raised by local resident Jodi Purdy, a descendent of Myles Standish, commemorates Massachusetts Natives killed or displaced by the colonists.

Descendants of John Saunders, the second governor of the Weston Colony, then installed another memorial.

Descendants of John Saunders, second governor of the Weston Colony, received permission from the Weymouth Historical Commission to place a commemorative marker in Wessagusset Park in 2004.

Peace, Finally?

I started an effort two years ago to place a town historical marker at the park. The town approved the proposal, but then shelved it due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Weymouth Town Meeting approved purchase of Wessagusset land in 1999 to create a park that would recognize the nearby site of the Weston Colony. Myles Standish descendent Jodi Purdy led efforts to buy the land and build a memorial garden in hopes the Weston colonists and Massachusetts tribe “have reconciled their differences and found peace.”

One of the Native American memorials in the park reads: “On Oct. 21, 2001, these puddingstone memorials were dedicated as symbols of hope that the souls of the first inhabitants of Wessagusset, the Massachusett Indians, and the first settlers of Weymouth, the Weston colonists, have reconciled their differences and found peace.”

Need some new ideas for your Thanksgiving feast? How about trying something old — and authentic — from the New England Historical Society’s latest ebook. Available from Amazon (click here).

The author of this story, Doug Smock, is a retired newspaper reporter and magazine editor who has always loved history, particularly forgotten yet important events. His next project is “Young George Washington and the Battle of Braddock”. He is the coauthor of two business books, including “Straight to the Bottom Line”. Smock has lived in the Wessagusset neighborhood of Weymouth for the past eight years. He will present his Myles Standish story to a class at UMass Boston’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute.

Images: Wampanoag wigwam and guide By Swampyank at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18002766; Edward Soule house By Swampyank at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18002664. Phineas Pratt gravestone By Darcyjae – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=74569178. Wessagusset map: Lauren Chen, reference librarian, Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library. Images of park, Hunt’s Hill, Saunders memorial and state seal courtesy Doug Smock.

This story updated in 2023.

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Alice Bishop, Pilgrim Murderess, Kills her 4-Year-Old Daughter

The mystery of why Alice Bishop cut her four-year-old daughter’s throat in Plymouth Colony still lingers 370 years later.

Alice didn’t deny that she did it. In fact, she confessed right away when a neighbor saw the pool of blood on the floor of her home.

She had, apparently, been a good Pilgrim mother up until then. But she did it, and she hanged for it in the fall of 1648 at the Duxbury Fair.

A Fair Puritan, chromalithograph, by Pery Moran (detail)

Donna A. Watkins, a descendant of Alice Bishop, tells the story of her life in her book Diverse Gashes. Though Watkins doesn’t have a definitive answer, she does sort through the difficulties the Pilgrims’ endured just to survive. She especially focuses on the struggles faced by Pilgrim women to run the house and family while remaining subservient to men and achieving godly perfection—all under the prying eyes of the neighbors.

Alice Bishop

Alice first appears in the historical record as “Alice Martin” on the day she married George Clarke–Jan. 22, 1639 (N.S.).

Watkins believes Alice Bishop may have been related to William Bradford, who served as Plymouth’s governor on and off for 30 years and wrote Of Plimoth Plantation. How, or when, she arrived in Plymouth—or even whether she was born there—isn’t known. But her absence from the Pilgrims’ records suggests she didn’t cause trouble or engage in ‘unseemly behavior,’ Watkins argues.

Alice’s new husband George Clarke had bought a 10-acre plot of land with a small wooden house on it in a neighborhood called Playne Dealing, two miles north of Plymouth. George farmed, Alice tended the house. That meant getting up before dawn, building a fire, cooking over an open hearth, hauling water, spinning hemp or flax or grinding corn.

She gave birth to their first child, Abigail, in 1643. Her second, the ill-fated Martha, was born in 1644. George Clarke died, probably suddenly, around then.

A replica house in Plymouth Colony, similar to the one Alice Bishop lived in.

On Dec. 5, 1644, the widowed Alice Clarke married Richard Bishop, a hired man. It wasn’t unusual for widowed spouses to remarry quickly in colonial New England. The Bishops’ daughter Damaris was born in 1646. Richard and Alice seemed to get along, as no records exist of trouble between them.

Alice Bishop, Murderess

On Saturday, July 22, 1648, Alice Bishop would have been cooking meals for two days, since the Pilgrims forbade cooking on Sunday. Her husband was probably working in the fields. Abigail, then six, may have helped her mother with the chores.

Then a neighbor, 23-year-old Rachel Ramsden, stopped by the house to visit. Rachel noticed four-year-old Martha asleep on her bed. Alice gave her a kettle and asked her to borrow some buttermilk from Goodwife Winslow.

Alice had seemed normal, Rachel later testified. But when she returned, Alice seemed ‘sad and dumpish.’ Then Rachel noticed blood at the foot of the ladder leading to the attic. She asked about the blood. Alice pointed upstairs and told her to look.

Rachel, not seeing Martha in the bed, feared Alice had killed her, so she ran home to tell her parents. Her parents notified William Bradford, who quickly assembled three other men into a posse and went to the Bishop’s house.

The men later declared to the court what they saw: “…at the foot of a ladder which leads into an upper chamber, much blood; and going up, all of us, into the chamber, we found a woman child of about four years of age lying in her shift upon her left check with her throat cut with diverse gashes cross ways[.]”

The men then described the savagery of the attack: “…the wind pipe cut and stuck into the throat downward, and a bloody knife lying by the side of the child[.]”

They concluded that Alice Bishop had killed the child with the knife, and she confessed to them that she had.

But Why?

Donna Watkins notes that the court records tell us nothing about why Alice Bishop killed Martha Clarke. One possible explanation: Her older daughter did it, and Alice took the fall for it.

But Watkins delves further into another explanation. Perhaps Alice just suddenly lost control under the demands of constant physical labor, motherhood, marriage, a mixed family, snooping neighbors and the community’s expectations of perfect behavior. And to make it even harder to live in that overcontrolled Puritan environment, Alice Bishop as a woman only ranked as a second-class citizen.

The Pilgrims, Watkins noted, expected complete domestic harmony. Court records show plenty of actions against neighbors, but few against family or household members. “They controlled their emotions at home at the expense of their relationships with their neighbors,” wrote Watkins.

She speculated that Rachel Ramsden, the neighbor, could have said something critical of Alice Bishop. Perhaps Martha should have been up and awake by then. And perhaps four-year-old Martha misbehaved, which caused Alice Bishop to suddenly fly into an uncontrolled rage and take a knife to her daughter’s throat.

William Bradford

William Bradford, then governor, may have had Alice Bishop in mind when he wrote about the reasons for evil to appear in Plymouth Colony. “…[A]s it is with waters when their streams are stopped or dammed up. When they get passage they flow with more violence and make more noise and disturbance than when they are suffered to run quietly in their own channels.”

William Bradford

Bradford wrote those words between 1648 and 1650, around the time Alice Bishop went to the gallows for murdering her daughter. At that time, Bradford had sunk into sadness and despair. Many of the original Pilgrims had died, Plymouth had shrunk and settlers had scattered into new towns. It was then that he stopped writing Of Plimoth Plantation.

Watkins argues, plausibly, that the murder of Martha Clarke and the hanging of Alice Bishop, possibly his relatives, contributed to his depression.

Donna A. Watkins in her book Diverse Gashes: Governor William Bradford, Alice Bishop, and the Murder of Martha Clarke, Plymouth Colony, 1648, explores the reasons Alice Bishop may have slashed her four-year-old daughter’s throat.

Images: House and fence in Plimoth By Ben Franske – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4459090.

This story was updated in 2022.

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The Dutch in New England: More Than Sinterklaas and Koekjes

Today the remnants of the colonial Dutch in New England are pretty much limited to the region’s outer rim: At Smith’s Castle in North Kingstown, R.I., in Vermont’s oldest house in Pownal, on Leyden Street in Plymouth, Mass. and on a historic sign in Castine, Maine.

But the Dutch had more of a presence in early New England than along the perimeter, and far more than commonly acknowledged. The Dutch claimed much of Connecticut, for example, before English settlers crowded them out. The early Plymouth and Massachusetts colonists might not have survived had the Dutch not brought trade goods like tools and cheese, cannon and livestock. Rhode Islanders had an especially cozy relationship with Dutch traders, and the Dutch claimed part of Downeast Maine.

Don’t forget King William III was also a Dutch staedtholder.

When thinking about the history of British North America It’s easy to forget that William of Orange seized the English throne in 1688 with the help of Dutch troops. King Williams was not only a French prince but also a staedtholder – a Dutch earl or a duke — of Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht, Guelders and Overijssel in the Dutch Republic.

Decades later, the English Parliament decided to tax tea to discourage the Dutch from smuggling the stuff into the colonies – hence the Boston Tea Party. The Dutch were also the first to salute the American flag and, therefore, the first to acknowledge the independence of the United States on November 16, 1776.

The Dutch in New England

In early 17^th century New England, colonists depended on Dutch traders because they had to. England was still recovering from Henry VIII’s shenanigans and had some catching up to do. Amsterdam, not London, had grown into the European capital of shipping, banking and finance.

“The British government and the British commercial world had not yet got their colonial act together,” wrote Charlotte Wilcoxen. The country ‘was still inexperienced at coordinating the production and distribution of goods,’ she wrote. “Her American colonies, victims of this ineptitude, were forced to look to the Dutch for supplies.”

A Dutch trading vessel, known as a fluyt.

In the 16^th and first half of the 17^th centuries, the Dutch were leading traders in the world, with outposts in Thailand, Brazil, Africa, Indonesia and the Caribbean.

Dutch merchants may have traded on the coast of New England as early as 1598. And they didn’t differ from the other European powers in wanting to expand in North America. One big reason: soft gold, otherwise known as beaver.

Beavers

From about 1550, all the best people in Europe had to have a beaver hat. They were soft, attractive, durable and expensive. The beaver hat craze nearly drove the Eurasian beaver to extinction, and sent trappers and traders to North America from Europe.

Nice hat. The Laughing Cavalier by Franz Hals.

Dutch traders set up trading posts along the coast from Maryland to Maine, and up the Hudson, Connecticut and Delaware rivers. They bought beaver furs from Indians in exchange for trade goods. They learned from the Pequot how to use wampum, or zewant, and then taught the Pilgrims at Plymouth Colony how to do it.

In 1621, the Dutch government chartered the West India Company to, among other things, exploit the beaver trade and colonize North America. Three years later the Netherlands sent colonists to try to settle a wide swath Northeast territory.

In addition to New Amsterdam (New York) and Fort Nassau (Albany) the Dutch in New England eventually had a fort in Hartford, called Fort Hope. They also built a fort called Roduins, or Red Dunes, at the mouth of the Housatonic River. They had a trading post on Quetenis, what is now Dutch Island in Jamestown, R.I., and briefly set up a fort and a warehouse in Old Saybrook, Conn. The Dutch may also have settled along the coast of Maine.

Traces of the Dutch presence in the eastern part of upper New York State can be found in the Mooar-Wright House. Built around 1762, it has a Dutch frame around a typically English layout.

Mooar-Wright House

Bye-Bye Beaver

If beaver mortality is any indication, New England and Europe kept up a brisk trade during the first half of the 17^th century.

Europe’s insatiable appetite for beaver fur kept New England’s Indians busy trapping the creatures. The Dutch in New England tried to keep up with their demand for knives, axes, glassware and wool. From 1626 to 1632, the Dutch sent 52,584 beaver pelts back to the Netherlands.

It only got worse for the beaver. By 1650, trappers and traders were sending 80,000 beaver pelts a year to England and the Netherlands. Fifty years later, the once-plentiful beaver had disappeared completely from Massachusetts, and soon after vanished from Vermont and Connecticut.

Massachusetts

In 1635, a Dutch vessel stopped in Marblehead with 140 tons of salt and 10,000 pounds of tobacco. They probably sold salt to Marblehead’s cod fishermen before sailing back to Europe to unload their tobacco.

Dutch merchants also bought tobacco from Plymouth Colony. The Pilgrims, after all, had lived for about a dozen years in Leiden, about 30 miles southwest of Amsterdam, and undoubtedly spoke at least some Dutch. When they arrived in Plymouth they built houses on Leyden Street in 1620. It’s still there.

Leyden Street in the 1800s

Plymouth Gov. William Bradford reported ‘profitable commerce’ with the New Amsterdam Dutch for ‘diverse years.’ Plymouth colonist Isaac Allerton brokered the sale of a Dutch ship from two Dutchmen in New Amsterdam.

Next door in Massachusetts, Gov. John Winthrop noted in his journal that the two colonies often traded with the ‘Dutch at Hudson’s River’ for sheep, beaver, cannon, sugar, wine and linen. Massachusetts, in fact, did so much trade with the Dutch that the colony used Dutch currency and passed a law in 1643 regulating its use.

One reason Massachusetts had to use Dutch currency was that the English Civil War, which started in 1642, pretty much ended trade between England and the colonies for a while. Colonists who needed supplies had to go Dutch — or perhaps Venetian or Spanish.

Today The Dutch House in Brookline, Mass., serves as a memorial of sorts to the Dutch in New England. Built as a pavilion in the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, Brookline resident Charles Brooks Appleton saw it, bought it and had it moved to his hometown.

Rhode Island, aka Roode Eylandt

On the shore of Mill Cove off Narragansett Bay stands a large, plain, wooden house in a clearing. A Rhode Island merchant named Richard Smith, Jr., built it in 1678, after Narragansett Indians burned down the previous house during King Philip’s War. Smith fortified the big old colonial with two small cannons, thus earning the name “Smith’s Castle.” Today it’s a house museum, which in 2019 scheduled a holiday event, Christmas at the Castle, celebrating ‘Dutch influence on colonial life.’

Rhode Islanders like Smith got rich trading with the Dutch in New England. Dutch explorer Adriaen Block had explored Rhode Island and the interior of Connecticut in 1614, naming Block Island after himself and probably naming Rhode Island “Roode Eylandt.” The Dutch even tried to claim Rhode Island as a colony.

Smith Castle

Trading With the Dutch in New England

Nevertheless, Rhode Island probably had the most sustained and cordial trade relations with the Dutch in New England, according to Charlotte Wilcoxen. Rhode Islanders who did business with the Dutch included William Coddington, William Brenton, John Underhill, John Throgmorton and the father and son pair of Richard Smith.

Richard Smith, Sr., had set up a trading post in a place they called Cocumscussoc, now North Kingstown, with his business partner, Roger Williams. In 1651, he built a house there, 20 miles from the nearest settlement. Smith also had trading posts in Taunton, Mass., and in New Amsterdam, where he lived part time. He sent fish, beaver and salt to Europe in exchange for manufactured goods. Slaves and sugar came from the Dutch in the West Indies.

After Richard Smith died in 1666, his son Richard took over the business. Today the Smith Castle docents will tell you his family incorporated Dutch holiday traditions – such as Sinterklaas and koekjes — into their daily life.

Anglo-Dutch Wars

In the mid-17^th century the English began to block Dutch shipping in the English Channel and along other trade routes. That caused three Anglo-Dutch Wars, fought primarily at sea. The first broke out in 1652 and ended in 1654. The second lasted from 1664-67, and the third from 1672-74.

The New England colonies kept up commerce and correspondence with the Dutch during the wars. Rhode Islanders especially honored bans on Dutch trade more in the breach than in the observance.

Huys de Hoop, Connecticut

Connecticut probably had the testiest relations with the Dutch in New England, perhaps because familiarity bred contempt. Connecticut, after all, was cheek-by-jowl with New Amsterdam, and the Dutch early on claimed both the Connecticut and New Haven colonies.

Dutch settlements

The Dutch called the Connecticut River the Versche, or Fresh, River, and the Dutch made good use of it in the early 17^th century. They traded beaver for trade goods with the Indians. In 1633, they built a fort called Huys de Hoop, or House of Hope, on a tributary of the Versche in what is now Hartford. Today Huyshope Avenue connects the Connecticut Probation Department at one end with Aetna Ambulance Services at the other.

The Dutch intended the House of Hope to serve as the capital of Dutch Connecticut, which had amounted to a few tiny, scattered settlements – in Branford, Old Saybrook and New Haven. But they couldn’t keep up with the influx of English immigrants fleeing the Puritans in Massachusetts.

Groenwits

One exception was Greenwich, in the far southwestern corner of Connecticut. Today it’s called the Entryway to New England. In 1640, the Dutch considered it the westernmost settlement of New Amsterdam.

That year, two Massachusetts families, the Feakes and the Patricks, bought land from the Indians and called it Elizabeth’s Neck. Massachusetts had banished them for their support of the heretical Anne Hutchinson. The Feakes later built a house, the Feake-Ferris House, in what is now Old Greenwich.

Three months after their arrival, armed Dutch soldiers from New Amsterdam showed up in Elizabeth’s Neck. They gave the Feakes and the Patricks a choice: submit to Dutch rule or leave. They submitted. The Dutch then changed the settlement’s name to Groenwits and held it for the next 16 years.

Coincidentally, Greenwich was one of the first Connecticut towns to suffer Dutch Elm Disease in 1934.

Squabbling

The Dutch and the ever-increasing English squabbled constantly over their borders in Connecticut. It didn’t take long for English settlers from Massachusetts to surround the House of Hope in Windsor, Wethersfield and Hartford. Finally in 1650 the English and Dutch settled their boundary 50 miles west of the Connecticut River. Greenwich stayed with the Dutch.

The Dutch relinquished those claims at the end of the Second Anglo-Dutch War in 1667. In exchange, they got concessions on the Indonesian spice trade including, ironically, nutmeg.

The Dutch eventually realized they couldn’t compete with the exploding English population in Connecticut. So they decided to consolidate their North American colony at the tip of Manhattan in New Amsterdam.

New Amsterdam

But even the retreat to New Amsterdam was fraught. The leadership in England, kings and Cromwell alike, dearly wanted to oust the Dutch from the North American colonies.

During the first Anglo-Dutch War, Oliver Cromwell outfitted an invasion force under Robert Sedgwick to take over New Amsterdam. New Amsterdam stayed in Dutch hands only because the two nations declared peace. Sedgwick turned north and captured Acadia instead.

Then after Charles II got his throne back he decided he wanted New Amsterdam for his brother, the Duke of York. On Aug. 27, 1664, four English frigates under the command of Richard Nicholl sailed into the harbor. The Dutch, with few supplies, quickly surrendered.

New Amsterdam in 1884

As a Dutch minister, Samuel Drisius, wrote, “No relief or assistance could be expected while daily great numbers of Englishmen arrived from New England both on foot and on horseback hotly bent upon plundering this place.”

The city, now New York, stayed in English hands until July 1673, when it reverted to the Dutch. The Dutch held it until the end of the Third Anglo-Dutch War, when they gave it up in exchange for Surinam.

The Dutch influence in the region can still be seen in the region, from architecture to place names to New York Mets uniforms. The blue, white and orange colors go back to the 17^th-century Prinsenvlag, or Prince’s Flag, the naval flag of the States-General of the Dutch Republic.

Maine

In 1857, a military historian named Maj. Gen. J. Watts De Peyster read a paper before the New York Historical Society about Dutch settlement and exploration 250 years earlier.

“There never was a good piece of land that the Devil did not open his bag and shake out some Dutchman upon it,” he said. That land included ‘the rich lumber districts of Maine.’ The Dutch, he said, made several attempts to settle Maine to ‘share the prolific fisheries; the unsurpassed masting and lumbering facilities; and, at that time, the rich fur trade.’

Though Maine was, in the early 17^th century, the Province of Acadie, the Dutch planted the flag at least on the shores of Muscongus Bay at what is now Bremen. De Peyster said the Dutch language was perpetrated in the town by a steady stream of Germans who followed in the footsteps of those early settlers.

He also claimed a Dutch settlement had existed at one time on the Sheepscot River a mile above Wiscasset, and at Pemaquid.

For a century, de Peysters argument was neither proven nor disproven. But by the end of the 20^th century, archaeologists found extensive Dutch artifacts along the coast from Maine to Maryland.

The Flying Horse

Historians have not disputed the Dutch conquest of Castine. In August of 1674, the Flying Horse, a Dutch frigate, sailed into Penobscot Bay. The fighting force of 110 men easily overtook the 30 French soldiers at the fort of Pentagoet.

Marker showing the Dutch in New England

The Dutch commander, Capt. Jurriaen Aernoutsz, viewed Pentagoet as fair game. The French had allied with the English during the third Anglo-Dutch War. Though the English had settled with the Dutch, the French had not.

Aernoutsz then captured another French fort at Jemseg, and in both places he buried a bottle with a message in it. The message said Acadia belonged to the Dutch and was to be known as ‘New Holland.’ But he sailed away, the Dutch couldn’t hang on to Acadia and soon the French recovered the territory. They gave Pentagoet a new name, Bagaduce, but today it is known as Castine.

Dutch-American Heritage Day

Fast forward a century. On Nov. 16, 1776, an American warship, the Andrew Doria, sailed into the harbor of the Dutch Caribbean island Sint Eustatius. The Dutch governor ordered a friendly cannon salute. That angered the British, and they took control of the island a few years later. The Dutch got it back in 1784. In 1990, that day was proclaimed “Dutch-American Heritage Day.”

The Andrew Doria in Sint Eustatius

With thanks to Dutch Trade and Ceramics in America in the Seventeenth Century by Charlotte Wilcoxen and The New Netherlands Institute.

Images: Castine sign By No machine-readable author provided. Masonbarge assumed (based on copyright claims). – No machine-readable source provided. Own work assumed (based on copyright claims)., CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=696875. Smith’s Castle By Mlanni98 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=77139260. This story was updated in 2022.

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The Puritans Burn the Book of Sports

Merrie Old England used to spend Sunday afternoons the way we do now: enjoying sports. King James actually encouraged his subjects to play games and have fun after church. He even sent out a list of approved activities in a small volume called the Book of Sports.

The Puritans hated the Book of Sports. But many of them did what the book suggested they do if they didn’t go along with the king’s commands. They left the country.

The Puritan Sunday

In the late 16th century, the growing Puritan movement in England tried to ban sports on Sunday. The Parliament of 1584-85 passed a bill that forbade markets and fairs, bear-baiting, hunting, hawking and rowing barges during church services on Sunday.

‘Keeping Sunday’ according to King James’s Book of Sports

Queen Elizabeth, who advocated religious tolerance, vetoed the bill.

Then in In 1595, a Puritan scholar wrote a book called the True Doctrine of the Sabbath that advocated the Sabbath be treated as a solemn day to meditate and attend meeting. Queen Elizabeth ordered it burned.

Elizabeth’s cousin James I ascended to the throne, and he knew the Puritans threatened his authority. In 1617-18, he went on a listening tour of England, and he heard complaints about Sunday. People worked all day from Monday through Saturday, and then had to spend their entire Sunday at the Puritan services.

That was a bit much for King James. So he issued the Book of Sports, formally known as the Declaration of Sports. It directed his subjects to attend Sunday services, but to spend Sunday afternoons enjoying life.

“No lawful recreation shall be barred to our good people,” he wrote.

Book of Sports

Then James ordered the Book of Sports read in every church in England – every Church of England church, that is. Catholics who attended Mass and dissenters like the Puritans weren’t to have fun on Sunday even if they wanted to.

The Book of Sports allowed both men and women who attended church on Sunday to enjoy dancing. However, men only could engage in archery, leaping and vaulting.

James also allowed ‘May-games, Whitsun-ales, and Morris-dances.’ He encouraged ‘the setting up of May-poles and other sports therewith used: so as the same be had in due and convenient time, without impediment or neglect of divine service.’

Additionally, James allowed women to carry rushes to church to decorate them in the traditional manner. But he banned some of the ‘meaner’ sports – the ones that encouraged gambling – including bear-baiting, bull-baiting and bowling.

Charles I

James died in 1625, and his son, Charles I, ordered the Book of Sports reissued and read in every church. If Puritan ministers didn’t go along with Charles’ religious decrees, his bishop would remove them from the pulpit and take away their licenses to preach.

The Book of Sports did give the Puritans an out: They could either ‘conform themselves’ or ‘leave the country.’

And so thousands of Puritans left for North America between 1620 and 1640.

Eventually, of course, the Puritans took power in England and Charles lost his head. Many of the Puritans who left his repressive rule ended up returning to England.

And in 1643, Puritans ordered the hangman to burn the Book of Sports on the common in London.

Burning the Book of Sports

America

The Puritans who remained in America, of course, kept a somber Sabbath filled with services at the meeting house. They treated Christmas as an ordinary work day. In 1621, Plymouth Colony’s governor William Bradford famously stopped some non-Pilgrim newcomers from playing sports — ‘stoole ball and pitching the barr’ — on Christmas day.

The Puritan sensibility over time loosened gradually, though not completely in New England. In 1756, the priggish John Adams wrote, “Let others waste their bloom of life at the card or billiard table among rakes and fools.”

With thanks to the William and Mary Dyer blog. This story was updated in 2022.

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