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PLYMOUTH PLANTATION’S PLACE IN THE ATLANTIC WORLD carla gardina pestana

LYMOUTH Plantation, on the shore of Cape Cod Bay, began P as a small outpost, its precise location initially unknown to other Europeans.1 An isolated settlement set in an out-of-the-way place, Plymouth persisted almost seventy years without achieving the sta- tus of an official colony in the emerging English empire. Belying its small size and unsettled status, Plymouth’s fame arose because it later became a national symbol: of “firstness” and of settler sacrifice. Its significance has been captured in a series of vignettes garnered from the events of the first year, including the landing of the passengers from the , their later meeting with Native man Tisquan- tum (or ), and their enjoyment of a harvest feast on a day of thanksgiving. These mythic elements all drew upon the two published accounts of Plymouth’s first years, which provide sufficient detail to support selective remembering of the plantation’s beginnings. Beyond these popular images, Plymouth later gained scholarly attention for its interactions with the resident Wampanoags and for the possible in- fluence of its separatist heritage on the emergence of New England’s variant of the Protestant faith. Plymouth continues to be viewed in the context of a national narrative of beginnings—the Mayflower is ar- guably the single most famous ship throughout the entirety of United States’ history—and Plymouth is further recalled as an aspect of a re- gional story. It has been left out of the history and historiography of the Atlantic world.

The author would like to thank Sharon Salinger and Adrian Weimer as well as Ken Minkema for advice on this essay. 1The term “plantation” would come to refer to a large landholding that produced a single crop for export using enslaved laborers, but in the early seventeenth century, it carried a different meaning: that of a transplanted group of people. In that sense, it became the quasi-official name of first the village occupied in the winter of 1620–21 and later the jurisdiction that included the town of Plymouth as well as a handful of others under the same government. Plymouth landowners did not initially buy slaves, either African or Native, but Plymouth itself came into being out of transplanted En- glish people who occupied Indigenous lands. For a discussion of the term, see Carla Gardina Pestana, The World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni- versity Press, 2020), 28–36.

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Yet Plymouth, for all its appearance of lonely isolation, was a well- connected place in at least two respects: it took part in larger trends that were shaping other locations and it was linked to—indeed deeply dependent on—many distant places. In the terms used by David Ar- mitage in his influential discussion of the variety of approaches that allow us to assess the history of the early modern Atlantic, it can be seen as both a transatlantic case, a place that can be compared with others in the Atlantic basin, and a cis-Atlantic case, which is to say a particular place shaped by “the interaction between [its] local particularity and a wider web of connections.”2 Plymouth had much in common with other Atlantic outposts, and its history—indeed its very survival—was affected by how its own features—its location and attributes—interacted through these connections to other places. Both Plymouth itself and the Atlantic of which it was a part appear different once it is acknowledged as participating in the wider world, not just sitting on the edge of the continent, withdrawn and timeless.

I

Plymouth holds a prominent place in the national imaginary of the origins of the United States. Its role as the first permanent En- glish settlement in New England—however inadvertently that came about—gave it an advantage in the regional mythmaking that began in the late colonial period but gained traction after the American Revo- lution.3 That Plymouth was the first English settlement in what would become New England bolstered claims to its significance. The set- tlement’s promoters chose a boulder to symbolize the landing itself, a moment depicted in nineteenth-century art in a manner that em- phasized December weather on a wind-swept and lonely shore. The men who traveled on the Mayflower were credited with introducing democratic principles as well because they signed a “civil combina- tion,” a document intended to guide their governance of the outpost in the short term. The legacy of that “” took on such great importance that the first political parties in US history con- tested its meaning as they vied to claim and to shape the lessons of

2David Armitage, “Three Concepts of Atlantic History,” in The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800, ed. Armitage and Michael J. Braddick (New York: Palgrave Macmil- lan, 2002), 18, 21. 3Jean M. O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), xiv, 5, 7, 10.

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Plymouth.4 Once the significance of Plymouth had been established, those who could trace their ancestry to the Mayflower earned cachet. With the Mayflower descendants, the new United States created its own aristocracy, one incongruously elevated not for its exalted birth but for its suffering and sacrifice. Plymouth also served as a backdrop for imagining peaceful relations with the region’s original residents. The story of Squanto teaching the settlers to plant corn suggested that the Natives welcomed the new arrivals and depicted grateful planta- tion residents eager to rely on their neighbors while ignoring the fact that they quickly set aside his guidance to revert to their usual ap- proach to planting. The allure of such harmony was so strong that the Squanto story—alone among those associated with Plymouth— also had a counterpart in Pocahontas’s misunderstood rescue of John Smith.5 The tale of the Thanksgiving meal involved rewriting ’s mention of a harvest celebration—complete with a martial display that brought a large contingent of native warriors to the settlement—into a meal celebrating piety and harmonious re- lations.6 These stories related events that occurred—if not remem- bered exactly—in the first year of Plymouth’s history: landing ata rock, signing a shipboard compact, meeting Natives, and celebrating a harvest. The implication was clear: important patterns were set at the start and would be carried to fruition in the United States. Alongside the images of Plymouth Plantation that allowed later res- idents of the United States to connect the colonial era to the nation’s identity, Plymouth also has a place in the region’s historiography. The religiosity of Plymouth planters is key to the nationalist version of the plantation, as the piety of the first arrivals runs as an undercurrent

4William Bradford, Of Plimoth Plantation, The 400th Anniversary Edition, ed. Ken- neth P. Minkema et al. (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, New England His- toric Genealogical Society, 2020), 189 (hereafter Bradford, Of Plimoth Plantation), refers to it as a “combination,” and “the first foundation of their government.” On nine- teenth century political uses, see Mark L. Sergeant, “The Conservative Covenant: The Rise of the Mayflower Compact in the American Myth,” The New England Quarterly 61 (1988): 246–49. 5Ann U. Abrams, The Pilgrims and Pocahontas: Rival Myths of American Origin (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999). 6Winslow’s mention is contained in his “A Letter Sent From New England to a friend . . . setting forth a briefe and true Declaration of the worth of that Plantation ...,”printedinA Relation or Journall of the proceedings of the English Plantation setled at Plimoth in New England, . . . (London, 1622), 61; for a discussion of the martial display possibly prompting the arrival of native warriors, see Paula Peters, “Of Patuxet,” in Bradford, Of Plimoth Plantation, 37.

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through all the varied images. Most consumers of Plymouth’s popu- lar image do not think too deeply about the precise nature of that piety although some evangelical Christians identify with Plymouth separatism in a specific and even proprietary7 way. Scholars scruti- nize the faith of the residents, debating the influence of Plymouth’s ostensible separatism on the broader religious culture of colonial New England. Many accounts assume that the Plymouth church adhered closely to a strictly separatist stance and that it therefore attracted radicals like Roger Williams, who served the church briefly in the early 1630s. Others attempt to determine the extent to which the church’s separatism influenced the congregations gathered in Mas- sachusetts on such issues as admission requirements. Citing the fact that Plymouth church deacon visited Salem very early in its history and consulted on church matters, some assert the later radicalism of Salem’s church or the general nature of the New En- gland way bore signs of Plymouth’s contribution.8 In most accounts, Plymouth’s distinctive nature did not last as the churches in that juris- diction eventually took part in the region’s broader religious culture. Some have noted occasional signs of difference such as a great ten- dency to offer succor to Quakers. Attributing this relative acceptance to any attribute unique to Plymouth appears problematic, however, since greater tolerance was on display in other jurisdictions such as Barbados and Rhode Island, which had no link to Plymouth or sep- aratism. The national image of Plymouth vaguely assumes piety as a motive to migrate for “religious freedom” while scholars are far more interested in parsing what difference Plymouth’s brand of reformed Protestantism meant for regional religious culture. This scholarly consideration of Plymouth’s religious politics places it within the transatlantic context of a European religious reforma- tion that spilled over into New England. In this, scholars and authors of popular accounts follow William Bradford, who wanted Plymouth remembered precisely in terms of reformation transplanted to the

7Numerous publications demonstrate the evangelical attachment to Plymouth; see for example J. R. Broome, In Search of Freedom: The Pilgrim Fathers and New En- gland (Harpenden, Herts. UK: Gospel Standard Trust Publications, 2001). 8Numerous works discuss Plymouth’s influence on the region’s religious practices; for a recent treatment see Michael Winship, Godly Republicanism: Puritans, Pilgrims, and a City on a Hill (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). David D. Hall recently considered all the most energetically reformed Protestants subject to the Stu- arts as part of the same intertwined movement, whether in Scotland, England, , or New England, in The Puritans: A Transatlantic History (Princeton: Princeton Uni- versity Press, 2019).

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American strand. He began his great work, “Of Plimoth Plantation,” explaining the reformation roots of the plantation. Motivated by the sense that it was about to be numerically overwhelmed by the arrival of migrants, Bradford sought to convey a sense of Plymouth’s unique origins. He succeeded in that his narrative arc has long dictated the outlines of the standard account. His story opened with the creation of a separatist congregation in the Notting- hamshire town of Scrooby, the migration of members to the Nether- lands, the establishment of a church under pastor in Leiden, and the departure of some church members for America.9 Bradford wrote because he feared this history would be forgotten, or perhaps that others would understand the origins of Plymouth in a different light: as part of a more general movement of peoples or as inspired by other causes such as desire to expand English dominions. Very few people in Plymouth could trace their roots to Scrooby, which meant that Bradford was creating a past that most never experienced. He knew that if he did not establish the terms of remembrance, the past he favored was unlikely to be recalled. Indeed, many Plymouth residents had not even participated in the more recent sojourn in the Netherlands and had never enjoyed membership in John Robinson’s congregation. Bradford ascribed a separatist and heroic past to his lit- tle community, well aware that personal ties to the purported origin point were limited. Although Bradford well knew this truth, we tend to overlook it, and we do so with his full encouragement. The validity of specific claims to a separatist past reaching back to Scrooby notwithstanding, Plymouth’s church did fit into a larger history of reformation and migration. The vast majority of English migrants into new Atlantic settlements in the seventeenth century shared their commitment to reformed Protestantism. Although many were lackadaisical adherents, others who came in the 1620s and 1630s were drawn from the more reform-minded sector within the Church of England. Although New England overall was closely associated with this puritan movement, people adhering to the same religious sensibility went to Virginia and Bermuda as well as to every colony that would be established in the decades after Plymouth was founded. Yet, beyond the awareness that Plymouth participated in the move- ment of reform-minded Protestants across the ocean, no one has lo- cated Plymouth within its broader context.

9Bradford, Of Plimoth Plantation, 97–127.

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An Atlantic perspective on Plymouth seems long overdue since considerations of this wider context has reshaped the history of early America over the last three decades and more. Although the origins of Atlantic history have been debated, as a general historiographical movement profoundly affecting the study of early American history, the trend dates to the 1980s, with scholarly publication accelerating in the 1990s. From the perspective of colonial American history, an At- lantic perspective helped scholars to appreciate that the British North American colonies did not in fact form a discreet unit for much of the colonial era. They were neither united together nor separated from other outposts, and the historiographical convention of treat- ing the region that would become the United States as a distinctive entity of long standing made no sense. This insight has pushed schol- ars to see connections and parallels beyond British North America as well as to make more of the linkages among those places.10 Historians have reconceived what was once referred to unreflexively as “colonial America” without reference to most of the colonies in the Americas, as part of a larger world shaped by the circulation of people, goods, ideas, and more. General histories of the English Atlantic abound, and many individual colonies have been reconsidered in a broader geographical framework. Plymouth, in its splendid isolation, has not been so considered.

II

Plymouth was of course isolated, especially at first. It was remote from other Europeans in the region, who clustered farther north around the fisheries which they visited seasonally or to the south in the . Navigation around Cape Cod, while pos- sible, was an undertaking so that a settlement tucked into the bay had no easy access to the south. The time and effort necessary to navigate around the Cape explained why a long-planned canal was finally cut at its base in the twentieth century. Other locations were most distant still: Bermuda sat far out to sea, and beyond that, En- gland itself was months away. Natives of long residence peopled the stretch of coast on which the settlers established Plymouth Plantation

10Atlantic historiography is now vast, especially that related to the British. The British Atlantic World (ed. Armitage and Braddick) offers a useful introduction to the conceptual framework as it was coming into its own. See also essays collected in Nicholas Canny and Philip D. Morgan, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

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although their numbers had been depleted because of recent ravages by epidemic disease. This massive death toll—which many commen- tators attributed to God’s wish to make a place for the new arrivals— allowed the settlers to move into the abandoned Pawtuxet village site and made them slightly less likely to encounter residents in their day-to-day activities than would have been the case had they arrived a decade earlier.11 The image of Plymouth as a remote outpost, al- though exaggerated, is not entirely without merit. Yet Plymouth was also intensively connected, especially by the Atlantic itself. While overland travel was possible and Plymouth resi- dents did traipse across land to visit various nearby Native communi- ties, water travel was the preferred mode for both speed and distance. Contact with any other Europeans of necessity involved travel by sea until traders established a few small outposts up the coast from Ply- mouth in the years after the plantation was founded. Ships, or in the case of the nearby fisheries boats, brought Europeans, whether vis- itors or new residents. The planters acquired boats to use in their fishing efforts and, eventually, to visit the fur trading stations theyes- tablished on the and Kennebec rivers and on . Water-borne transportation carried more than people, however, also connecting Plymouth to sources of supply that were essential for the survival of the plantation. Clothing, shoes, and other necessities came from England by sea, as did animals used to create a local farming economy. Ships also conveyed news—usually delivered orally at first, before the sharp rise of printed news in the 1640s—as well as letters and books. The ruling elder of the Plymouth church, William Brew- ster, bought many books after he took up residence in Plymouth, fur- ther expanding his already substantial library. Yet he never returned to England in the twenty-four years before his death, ordering books through travelers or receiving them as gifts from friends who sent or brought them.12 Ships of course trafficked in both directions, carry- ing away those who departed Plymouth as well as transporting animal skins and other items for sale in England. Without the connections to distant ports, Plymouth would not have survived. In addition to bringing books for the edification and education of Plymouth residents, seaborne travel carried the words of planters

11John Smith, New Englands Trials, 2nd ed. (London, 1622), 12. 12Jeremy Dupertius Bangs, ed. ’s Private Libraries: As recorded in Wills and Inventories, 1633-1692, rev. ed. (Leiden, Neth.: American Leiden Pilgrim Museum, 2018), 38–178.

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back to England where they were published. Indeed, we would know far less about Plymouth in its first years without those handwritten texts that were carried to London and there translated to print. Both A Relation or Journall (1622) and Good Newes from New-England (1624) only survive in their print form.13 Had they not been con- veyed to a London printer, the information they contain about the first years of Plymouth—including the only reference to what would become Thanksgiving—would have been lost. While Bradford’s “Of Plimoth Plantation” conveys much information—although not about rocks or thanksgivings—it was a source that remained in manuscript for two centuries and that was in any event lost for decades. Much that is known about the plantation from that source would have been encountered only secondhand through the writings of those like Nathaniel Morton who borrowed heavily from Bradford’s manuscript. Without the books carried to London aboard ship, the Plymouth story would not have been readily available for residents descended from those first planters when they became interested in valorizing their ancestors. The Atlantic made Plymouth possible in the first place by conveying settlers; travel across the ocean also allowed Plymouth to be known subsequently by preserving information upon which all ac- counts and myths rely. While the connection to England was foundational, Plymouth inter- acted frequently with Virginia as well. The only other English North American outpost at the time of Plymouth’s founding, Virginia housed settlers some six hundred miles to the south. With land claims that stretched north to modern-day New Jersey, the Virginia Company had offered the Mayflower travelers the opportunity to settle in northern Virginia under that colony’s nominal control. Having landed too far north to take up that offer, the Plymouth residents never came un- der Virginia’s jurisdiction. They did receive visitors from Virginia— such as John Pory who stayed in Plymouth briefly on his way to England after living in the southern colony—and they witnessed their own residents depart to live there—including the exiled troublemak- ers and . Despite the inconvenience of nav- igating around Cape Cod, ships leaving frequently sailed down the coast. Occasional Plymouth visitor and ship’s captain William Peirce departed with passengers as well as pelts intended as payment on the

13A Relation or Journall, and E[dward] W[inslow], Good Newes from New England: Or A True Relation of Things very remarkable at the Plantation of Plimoth in New- England (London: 1624).

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settlement’s debt to London investors; the furs never arrived, lost in a shipwreck as Peirce sailed south to stop in Virginia on his way to England. His route is known because of the catastrophic losses the wreck brought, but such an itinerary was in itself unremarkable by that time. Despite the best efforts of the merchant factor who organized the Dutch West India Company’s business venture, the relatively nearby Dutch outpost of founded in 1624 seems to have been less important than Virginia to Plymouth in the early days. Isaack de Rasieres came to offer a trade relationship with Plymouth in 1627. Bradford expressed uncertainty about whether the planters ought to pursue it, given that they might appear to be supporting a rival claimant to this stretch of the American coastline, although he did note that de Rasieres tempted them with offers to supply desper- ately needed cloth. It is possible that such a relationship, understood to be potentially controversial, was carried on without leaving much of a documentary trace. More likely, Plymouth continued to expend its trading efforts in accordance with the need to repay its debt and ignored the offer to barter with New Netherland. Eventually some residents—most notably , in the 1640s—moved to that colony but only after it had grown enough to support residents be- yond the company employees pursuing the fur trade. Those Plymouth residents, who like Allerton had previously lived in Leiden, had the language skills to move comfortably into a Dutch-controlled settle- ment. Travel between the two occurred by boat, the overland route through the lands of various native communities being both time- consuming and potentially dangerous. The economic activities Plymouth residents undertook often re- quired coastal transport to complete local transactions. Fishing for Atlantic species required a boat. Plymouth men did not initially have those skills—although the two Mayflower crewmen who contracted to stay a full year to aid the new settlement surely did. London investors sent small ships to fish for the plantation’s benefit, one of which was wrecked in a timely fashion on the eve of a purportedly planned mutiny. Plymouth never became an important site for processing fish for export, as that work was commonly undertaken by fishing crews plying the waters north of Cape Ann. The fur trade involved boats for regional transport as well as visiting ships to send home the an- nual harvest of animal pelts. The plantation erected outposts as dis- tant as the coast where designated traders met Native hunters who brought furs for trade; traders and their Native partners accessed

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these sites via boat or canoe, and then the former carried the acquired items to be loaded on the ships that transported furs to England for sale. The Atlantic and its adjacent waterways were essential to these practices. Visitors largely arrived in Plymouth via the sea. In the main ex- ception to this observation, Native visitors often walked to the pal- isaded village. Once a few trading outposts were established north of Plymouth, Europeans also showed up that way, but they were few compared to Native travelers on foot. In other cases, water served as the main mode of transport. If a European fisherman came down the coast, it was generally by boat. Anyone arriving from New Nether- land, such as Isaak de Rasieres, or from Virginia, as John Pory, came over water. Ships from England came almost annually after 1620, in 1621 (the Fortune), 1623 (Anne and Little James), and 1624 (Char- ity). That traffic became more regular with time and far more fre- quent after the advent of the Massachusetts Bay Colony to the north. Ships brought new settlers as well as visitors. , al- though long associated with the undertaking, only stayed for a short time in the plantation during its first year; John Hampden, who had no known long-term relationship to Plymouth, also visited from En- gland. A surprising array of individuals came ashore over the first decades. To take but one example, Roger Conant arrived in Plymouth in 1625 but headed north subsequently to help found Salem.14 In the 1640s, as civil wars rocked England, even a company of privateers lin- gered in Plymouth for a time, earning a detailed description of their sojourn in Bradford’s history. With regular transatlantic traffic, some travelers traversed the Atlantic repeatedly: this was the case with Ed- ward Winslow, Isaac Allerton, and others. Seafaring made this circu- lation into and out of the plantation possible. Ships literally connected Plymouth to the wider world.

III

Besides concrete linkages of these sorts—what David Armitage referred to as cis-Atlantic examples—Plymouth had comparable ex- periences to other places in the emerging English Atlantic. Its sim- ilarities to other places give the lie to its image as a unique origin

14Scholars debate whether Hampden was the parliamentary leader who played a central role in the events leading to the first English civil war; definitive evidence on this score is not available. On Conant, see Charles M. Andrews, The Colonial Period of American History: The Settlements (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1926), 2:147n.1.

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moment within US national mythology or New England history. When Plymouth was only a scheme in the minds of some people in England and the Netherlands, it already had begun its engagement with Atlantic trends when planners had considered a variety of lo- cations that might house their plantation, their community of trans- planted Europeans. Like many early efforts to establish an English settlement in the Americas, the planners for what would become Ply- mouth Plantation examined options in various locations. Their dis- cussions included the possibility of locating in a planned but not yet launched outpost of the Dutch West India company, what would be- come New Netherland; the Staats-General of the United Provinces offered to send the group there. They also thought about heading south to Guiana, on the north coast of South America, site of a num- ber of planned enterprises.15 They accepted an option to locate in the northern reaches of the Virginia Company land grant in the area of modern-day Delaware. That process of studying options paralleled the experiences of many other prospective planters. As interest in At- lantic opportunities grew, those who contemplated migration thought about the Somers Islands as well as Virginia, about South America but also the smaller Caribbean islands, and about New England ver- sus a colony planned off the coast of central America, on Providence Island. Choosing among possible locations was a common experience shared by those who ultimately went to Plymouth. Once the Plymouth people arrived in New England, many aspects of their experiences demonstrated parallels to other places, but one of the most examined in recent years is the history of Native relations. First writings treated the inhabitants as potentially malevolent, with initial sightings cause for alarm among the planters. Once the two groups made direct contact, interactions became more varied, and the English found many engagements more intriguing than alarming ac- cording to their written accounts. Early writings described the meet- ings with and Squanto, the latter’s lesson on how to plant corn, the treaty negotiations with local leader Ousamequin, and the presence of Native warriors at the multi-day fall gathering that became the basis for the national holiday of Thanksgiving. Later commentary aimed at extolling good relations focused on such mo- ments, interpreting them in a particular light. For instance, the at- tendees at the “first Thanksgiving” may have come in response toa

15For Guiana, see Bradford, Of Plimoth Plantation, 123.

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show of force on the part of the planters, as Paula Peters has re- cently argued, not to celebrate a successful harvest. Those who cre- ated Plymouth’s image as imbued with positive relations ignored other moments, including the unprovoked attack on one Native commu- nity fed up with Thomas Weston’s ill-behaved trading outpost. The assault led by Miles Standish did not go ignored at the time but earned the Plymouth residents a scolding from Leiden pastor John Robinson. With an uneven record that included gifts but also theft, diplo- macy but also miscommunication, cooperation but also violence, Ply- mouth was much like any small outpost of Europeans who took up residence on Native land. Its small size and slow initial growth ren- dered the plantation less threatening to the area’s Indigenous in- habitants, who generally attempted to work with or around the new settlement. Similarly, like Virginia, the first people in Jamestown— sickly and inept as they were—initially appeared relatively inconse- quential. Over time the introduction of more Europeans, especially with the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1629, intensi- fied pressures on land and resources, leading to violence and warfare. Although Plymouth did not eagerly participate in the 1636–37 war against the Pequots—and seems to have missed out on the distribu- tion of enslaved Natives that came to the colonies which did—the first assault on an English town in King Philip’s War (1675) occurred in the Plymouth town of Swansea. The colony fully engaged in that war and did receive captives as slaves in its aftermath. The same trajec- tory occurred in Jamestown as well: the advent of tobacco cultivation brought more English people to the colony, expanded the territory the intruders occupied, and sparked war with the Powhatan Confed- eracy. The time frame to hostilities proved shorter in Virginia, because a tobacco boom created intensive demand for land while in Plymouth the small size of the settlement and its slow expansion slowed the process of intrusion into the lives of the first inhabitants. Indeed, Ply- mouth might have enjoyed a longer period of coexistence save for the influx of settlers into Massachusetts to the north. If the demand for land under the tobacco regime in the south accelerated the shift, the eventual result was the same everywhere. A similar history of early coexistence destroyed after European demands for land soured re- lations occurred in the leeward Caribbean islands as well. Plymouth was far from immune from the deteriorating relations that resulted when European demands for land and control over Native affairs met Native resistance.

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Every Atlantic outpost, Plymouth included, was shaped by the larger history of European rivalry. Even the location of Plymouth was determined to an extent by such rivalries since fear of Spanish re- taliation encouraged settlement in the otherwise uninviting northern climes. Every English intrusion into the Americas occurred at a place Spain had claimed—since they claimed all of the Americas outside of Brazil—and the Spanish had wiped out rival settlements, most no- tably a French attempt to colonize Florida in the previous century. To reassure New Englanders that their area was unlikely to be visited by a force under the king of Spain, William Wood observed: “it doth not follow that because he tooke such places as lay just in his way to the West Indies, that hee should come thousands of miles with a great Navie to plantations, as yet not worth the pillage.”16 The earlier, ill- fated, colony of Roanoke as well as Virginia also worried about Span- ish attacks which never materialized. Those who chose Caribbean locations were much more liable to harassment, and a number of small outposts in the eastern Caribbean as well as the more centrally located Providence Island sustained such assaults. Plymouth’s location rendered it safer, and the distance of New England from highly con- tested areas helps explain why that region came to host much English activity in the years after Plymouth’s founding. Plymouth faced European rivalries in its own region. Upon their ar- rival the planters were aware of an energetic French presence, with a settlement in Acadia to the north but also—they soon learned—a great deal of activity in Narragansett Bay to the west.17 The Plymouth planters sought to displace the French fur trade, establishing trading centers far from Plymouth in the hopes of capturing the trade in the Connecticut River to the west and the Kennebec River in Maine. The treaty alliance between Plymouth and Massasoit aimed, among other things, to draw the Wampanoag leader toward the new settlement and away from the French traders.18 Once the Dutch moved into the Hudson River watershed, they complicated the diplomatic situation facing the plantation. In their interactions with the subjects and citi- zens of rival European polities, Plymouth was entirely typical of other English making inroads in the Atlantic. Sir Thomas Warner, who set- tled St. Christopher (today St. Kitts) in the Caribbean, agreed to share

16William Wood, New Englands Prospect. A true, lively, and experimentall descrip- tion of that part of America, commonly called New England (London: 1634), 54. 17A Relation or Journall, 43. 18A Relation or Journall, 45.

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the island with prospective French settlers who arrived a few years af- ter his party, and the peace between the two lasted for decades before the island got caught up into the imperial warfare of the 1660s.19 Wars fought among European powers never came directly to Plymouth, as it would to other colonies over the years, but it was still shaped by its experience as a small English outpost in an Atlantic setting that witnessed contests over resources and land. Although the scholarship on the Plymouth church has not enter- tained this possibility, the planters there, like migrants into the En- glish Atlantic everywhere, had to work out the specifics of their new church once they arrived. In general, religion has been treated as highly portable, picked up in one place to be deposited unchanged in another. Plymouth, thanks to Bradford’s myth-making, has been especially susceptible to the idea that it imported an intact religious system inherited from the Scrooby separatists. Yet Plymouth too had to struggle with such questions as who would lead the church in the absence of a qualified pastor. Its answer was to go without a pastor for years, relying instead on its ruling elder William Brewster who mem- bers believed unqualified to take on all the duties of a pastor. The church also had to decide on its extent. As an offshoot of the Leiden separatist church, the church arrived with Leiden members already attached to it. Yet many others, not members of the original church, arrived in Plymouth, so those in the church had to choose whether to welcome those who would have been unlikely participants in the church in Leiden. Was the Plymouth church going to function as a parish would in England, encompassing all residents, or was it going to continue as a more exclusive congregation that admitted some and not others? If the latter, what become of the unchurched? Were they expected to go without any organized church, or were they free to erect a different church? Such were the quintessential questions mi- gration to an Atlantic settlement raised, and these issues had to be sorted out in every outpost. In some the answers were obvious: ev- eryone in Virginia or Barbados was a member of their local parish church. Elsewhere the answers had to be negotiated, just as they did in Plymouth.20

19On St. Christopher, see Arnoldus Montanus, America: Being the Latest, and Most Accurate Description of the New World (London: 1670), 386–87. 20An essay exploring this issue is “Reworking Reformation in the early English At- lantic,” in Protestant Empires: Globalizing the Reformations, ed. Ulinka Rublack (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 30–55.

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Another similarity to other places arose from Plymouth’s difficulties in securing its legal place in the English Atlantic. Every settlement wanted the government in England to acknowledge its right to be located on a stretch of the American coast (or on an island in the Atlantic or Caribbean), an acknowledgement that they saw as granting legal jurisdiction over the territory and making the place part of the nascent English empire in the Americas. Plymouth never enjoyed full status as a colony, a situation that began with landing in the wrong location and that carried on through unsuccessful attempts to secure a charter. In the 1680s, when Plymouth—by then a collection of towns to the southeast of Massachusetts Bay Colony—was absorbed into the new administrative unit, the Dominion of New England, it had no charter to revoke, unlike its neighbors Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut.21 From its founding until that date, it had managed with a patched together authorization as well as the goodwill of its more powerful neighbors. The Mayflower passengers had agreed with Virginia that they would reside in the northern reaches of its land grant, but their ship came to anchor in southern New England where it had no prior ar- rangement. It landed within the jurisdiction of the second Virginia Company, but the company was all but defunct by that time, with its elite men dividing up the territory—on paper at least—among them- selves, having done nothing to plant the region before the landing in late 1620. The prospect of coming ashore outside of a functional gov- ernment jurisdiction prompted the men of the Mayflower to compose and sign “a civil combination” that would establish the rudiments of government among them. Much later referred to as “the Mayflower Compact,” this agreement was initially intended as a stop gap mea- sure until the new arrivals or their contacts in London could arrange for the king to grant a colonial charter.22 The compact became more important to Plymouth’s leaders when the goal of a charter proved elusive. The plantation only received a patent from the remnants of the New England Company (which had superseded the Virginia Company of Plymouth), but this permission was a far cry from an actual charter.

21John Demos, A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 17–18. 22Bradford opens the 2nd book by jumping back in time to cover the newly essen- tial “combination,” explaining “I shall a little return back,” see Bradford, Of Plimoth Plantation, 189.

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This lack of full authorization made Plymouth Plantation insecure in its dealings and also rendered it much like the other places which lacked, at least temporarily, the backing of the English government. St. Christopher came under English control in 1623, the unautho- rized work of Sir Thomas Warner, who was on the way back to England after a failed attempt at settling on the South American continent. He deposited people on the island to hold it until he could return to England to get backers for the settlement. When the island and others nearby were subsequently made part of a royal proprietary grant to the Earl of Carlisle, Warner’s informal claim was superseded. St. Christopher thus gained legal standing, and Warner was made gov- ernor general to compensate him for his displacement as the founder and leader of the outpost.23 Examples of such squatter colonies occurred in New England as well; Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Haven all began without authorization. In two of the three, the settlers eventually acquired a charter while New Haven remained unofficial. With this status, New Haven became a target, and John Winthrop Jr. was able to absorb it under the new charter for the Connecticut colony in the 1660s. Some of these squatters negotiated agreements with resident Natives or with English elites who had some claim dating back to the Virginia Company of Plymouth or to the Council of New England.24 Such measures gave some assurance of their continued existence, but the illusive royal charter remained the gold standard for securing a claim. That security appeared a chimera for a short time when the Domin- ion of New England cancelled all charters in the region; yet with its fall every fully chartered colony regained its independent existence. Plymouth, the only one without a charter prior to the advent of the Dominion, never regained its independent status, becoming instead part of Massachusetts Bay. Managing without full authorization had been possible for a time but ceased to be so by the late seventeenth century. Plymouth, like New Haven, learned to its peril that official status gave a degree of security even in the uncertain environment of the late seventeenth-century empire.

23This early history is narrated in James A. Williamson, The Caribbee Islands under the Proprietary Patents (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1926), 22–32, 39–41, 64–65, 70–71. 24For the idea of squatter colonies, see Carla Gardina Pestana, The English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 1640–1661 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 17.

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Plymouth found it had to represent its interests in England by sending agents back across the Atlantic to see to its business. Ed- ward Winslow, only twenty-five years old at the time he boarded the Mayflower, quickly emerged as an important early advocate for Ply- mouth. On three occasions in Plymouth’s first fifteen years of exis- tence, he returned to England to work for its interests, and on one of those occasions, he was imprisoned on charges that he performed civil marriages. He would finally leave New England permanently— although his family stayed behind—when he sailed in the 1640s on behalf of both Plymouth and Massachusetts.25 Other agents went to England to promote the plantation: Isaac Allerton and Miles Stan- dish traveled to advocate for the settlement. Plymouth was not alone in dispatching leading men to England to approach the government for favors or meet with investors. Virginia sent an agent in 1624 to complain of the governor Sir Thomas Smith; the next year it sent Sir George Yeardley to plead with Charles I and the Privy Coun- cil “that their liberty of General Assemblies may be continued and confirmed, and that they may have a voice in the election ofoffi- cers.”26 It would in fact be difficult to identify a colony that never sent an agent; the practice became a common way to avoid the diffi- culties of transatlantic governance. Before it turned to Winslow in the mid-1640s, Massachusetts sent others, including Hugh Peter. Neither Winslow nor Peter ever returned to New England after the 1640s, becoming caught up in the political changes underway. Winslow per- ished on board a naval ship in the Caribbean while participating in Oliver Cromwell’s Western Design in the 1650s while Peter died, somewhat unjustly, as a regicide in the 1660s. Despite losing one of its important early leaders through the practice, Plymouth agreed that an American jurisdiction needed an occasional man in England to rep- resent the needs of and situation in their outposts. Its embrace of the practice represented a conventional response to their new Atlantic circumstances.

25For a detailed treatment of Winslow’s career up to his final return to England, see Jeremy Dupertius Bangs, Pilgrim Edward Winslow: New England’s First Interna- tional Diplomat, A Documentary History (Boston: New England Historic Genealogical Society, 2004). 26Lillian Margery Penson, The Colonial Agents of the British West Indies: A Study in Colonial Administration (London: University of London Press, 1924), 1; and Thomas J. Wertenbaker, Virginia Under the Stuarts, 1607–1688 (orig. pub. 1914, repr. New York: Russell and Russell, 1958), 62. My thanks to James Horn for sharing the latter citation with me.

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In many other ways, Plymouth was a typical rather than an un- usual place. It required laborers and used the various usual Atlantic strategies for getting them: long-term indentures to bind workers to landowners in Plymouth and, eventually, slavery. Like other places with less robust economies, Plymouth had trouble attracting or pay- ing for laborers. It experienced shortages similar to those that oth- ers elsewhere in New England also bemoaned. As with other places not engaged in highly profitable cash crops, Plymouth attracted few slave traders, and its first enslaved workers were local Native peoples rather than Africans brought via the transatlantic or intercolonial slave trade.27 Quakers “invaded” Plymouth in the 1650s, just as they did all the other jurisdictions in New England, and the local authorities had to construct a response to their presence and their disruptive pros- elytizing.28 Whether we examine labor, religion, economics, warfare, or any of a host of other topics, Plymouth participated, and it did so in ways that reflected its location—as an out of way place with- out notable resources or the prospect of a tropical cash crop—and its prospects.

IV

Its Atlantic context clearly fashioned Plymouth’s history. The events of the first year which are so well known to residents of the United States—especially to school children—cannot be understood out- side of the Atlantic connections that were then developing. Some- thing so basic as the transatlantic voyage that brought English men, women, and children to the shores of Cape Cod Bay required the rising volume of traffic that intended to take advantage of the open- ing of Atlantic sea lanes to European mariners and the increasing skills that made such voyages possible—even though they still some- times missed their navigational mark and landed in the wrong loca- tion. Interactions with an English-speaking Squanto would not have been possible without the 1616 kidnapping by English ship’s cap- tain Thomas Hunt that had carried him to Europe and given him his exposure to European languages. The need for a civil combina- tion to organize government temporarily in this unexpectedly isolated

27Pestana, The World of Plymouth Plantation, 135–46. 27The first Quaker convert in Massachusetts Bay, Nicholas Upshall, fled to Plymouth to avoid persecution; see Humphrey Norton, New-England’s Ensigne: It being The Ac- count of Cruelty, the Professors Pride, and Articles of their Faith (London, 1659), 12– 14.

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outpost was necessitated by the rise of rival claimants to American lands and the need to manage their affairs when they landed at a dis- tance from an acknowledged authority. After arrival, initial encoun- ters, and setting up the settlement, Plymouth remained intimately connected to distant places. Ships and the linkages they allowed re- main essential to Plymouth throughout its history. Whether examining its first year or longer history, Plymouth survived and thrived because of its ties to other places. If, from Plymouth’s perspective, its Atlantic location and interac- tions proved essential, did Plymouth matter to the larger history of the Atlantic? Plymouth’s existence affected—if modestly—other At- lantic outposts. London investors received beaver pelts from Ply- mouth, beginning English involvement in a trade that would soon burgeon with the introduction of other traders to the region and be- yond. Plymouth offered a North American destination that was not Virginia to prospective migrants and traders, expanding options and increasing transatlantic traffic. It called English attention to New En- gland as a region, supporting John Smith’s earlier claims of the area’s potential, especially through the published accounts of its first few years.29 Even as some reformed-minded English planners looked to the Caribbean as a possible site for a “puritan” colony, Plymouth’s existence drew the gaze of others to the location further north.30 If the massive migration into New England that began in 1630 threatened to overwhelm Plymouth, it also owed much to that small settlement for the example of English colonization in the region. Plymouth, small and isolated though it was, affected later migration trends and regional commercial endeavors. It moved English atten- tion away from the Chesapeake, drew it to a longer swath of the shoreline, and helped to make the North American coast between Acadia and Florida into a region dominated by English and later British efforts. Unless one has a genealogical interest in Plymouth, the planta- tion garners little attention after its first years. Known as the juris- diction in which English blood was first shed in what would come to be called King Philip’s War, Plymouth otherwise took only a modest

29John Smith, A Description of New England (London: 1616), advocated for English settlement in the region. Early Plymouth publications, beside A Relation or Journall and Winslow’s Good-Newes, included [Robert Cushman], A Sermon Preached at Plim- moth in New-England December 9, 1621 (London: 1622). 30Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Providence Island, 1630–1641: The Other Puritan Colony (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

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role in later historical events. It refrained from hanging witches or, for that matter, Quakers.31 It did not lead the way in protests leading to the American Revolution, as Boston did, although it did divide in a typical fashion between supporters and opponents of that revolution. Plymouth faded from view, as a minor coastal county in the larger province of Massachusetts, standing out not at all within the region. That was true, at least, until residents began their campaign to em- phasize Plymouth’s firstness and launched the claim that it originated various key traits important to the emerging United States. Only then did Plymouth become a place that might be worthy of a tourist’s visit, whether to view a caged rock, wander the old town site, or look at art fancifully depicting the early history. History seemed to have left Plymouth behind until its residents began promoting it as a central moment, indeed as the origin of New England, and, eventually, of the new nation. Lost in that campaign was its relationship to its own place and time, its connections and its shared experiences.

31For a discussion of the political nature of this understanding of the start of the war, see Lisa Brooks, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 138–39. James and Patricia E. S. Deetz collected the minimal mentions of witches in the early records, The Times of Their Lives: Life, Love, and Death in Plymouth Colony (New York: W.H. Freeman, 2000), 92–96.

Carla Gardina Pestana is department chair, professor, and Joyce Ap- pleby Endowed Chair of America in the World at UCLA. Her very first publication, based on a graduate seminar paper treating theex- ecution of four Quakers in Massachusetts, appeared in the NEQ in 1983. Since that time she has written books and articles on Quakers, religion more generally, and empire in the English Atlantic world. Her latest book, The World of Plymouth Plantation, just appeared with Harvard Belknap.

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