"Plymouth Adventure" and Other Bad Mayflower Takes

 

All claims (by others) to the contrary, I am at best an amateur historian, though I have been at it since childhood, when I was a 13 year old  Junior Member of the Pettaquamscutt Historical Society of South County, Rhode Island, where my brother, for reasons no one could ever quite figure out, was made President. He set me to work transcribing dusty old diaries and ledgers, and identifying the content of old glass photographic plates. and I have been bored to distraction by such tasks ever since. I’m glad other people do it, but it’s not what gets me out of bed in the morning. I prefer to write and tell stories, and history is a gold field for stories.

My love of books and history was inspired by my favorite grandparent, my mother’s mother Ruth Cady Herindeen (the one who stirred up all that trouble with the Trouble Man). Through her I am descended from Governor William Bradford, as well as Henry Howland, who was the brother of the boy who fell off the Mayflower, John Howland whom we might call the Jerry Lewis of the Pilgrims.

I hold in my hands right now a book of grandmother’s that came into my possession after she passed away, a 1925 school textbook called The Land of the Pilgrims, by one Jay Earle Thomson, A.M., Principal of School Number Three, Jersey City. New Jersey. This was the sort of outdated, misguided tome I spent my childhood engrossed in, full of charm and jingoism, obsolete vocabulary and vague, spotty information. It gave me a reputation for book-learning among those who never graduated beyond TV Guide, but also turned me into a square peg in the round, spinning hole of the 1970s. Since today I write nostalgically about things like Starsky and Hutch and KC and the Sunshine Band, it appears I will always be exactly one half century out of date.

At any rate The Land of the Pilgrims remains a useful gauge of the attitudes a certain portion of the American public has about the topic to this day, I think, insomuch as they reflect upon the subject at all. It is an attitude, one need hardly say, of unquestioning veneration. It’s the sort of book the teachers on the Little Rascals or Leave it to Beaver, ya know Miss Crabtree or Miss Canfield, might teach out of, full of “noble and edifying sentiments.” It dates from the one room school house time, when one teacher would teach you everything. It is a book so multiform and variegated that one would be hardpressed to say what it is. It is simultaneously a history of the Pilgrims, a travel guide to Plymouth Massachusetts, a biography of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and a critical appreciation of “The Courtship of Miles Standish”, which is presented in its entirety for the purposes of memorization.

Here is its description of Scrooby, the northern English village where the Pilgrim’s Separatist congregation first formed: (picture it read in a Margaret Dumont falsetto): “Like most English villages, Scrooby is quaint, charming and picturesque. Flowers, flagrant and colorful, and nicely kept lawns and terraces attract the traveler. It is not unusual to see tastily cultivated gardens in front of the dwellings. In the rear of the homes are well-kept fields separated by hedges that appear olive green in the sunlight. Everywhere one finds the people frugal, hospitable, and happy. In such an environment lived the Pilgrims over 300 years ago. Thus it is no wonder that they developed such excellent traits of dignity, character, and refinement.”

Wait, are they talking about Pilgrims or Munchkins? Sounds like the Scrooby Realtors Association slipped the author of this book a ten spot. “Each house possesses a lovely fireplace, equipped with its own chimney, allowing all the inhabitants of Scrooby an adequate supply of oxygen, which periodically aerates their healthy and well-nourished bodies”.

Apparently, things weren’t that good in Scrooby because the Pilgrims had to either flee or risk imprisonment and torture! The truth is that, no one is ONLY descended from nice people, so some of your ancestors were nice people and some of them were nasty people. You have not just hundreds but thousands of ancestors, and a sizeable fraction of them, whatever your color, whatever their origin, committed what you would consider unspeakable acts unless you yourself  are a psychopath. If you think no ancestor of yours ever did something so vile it would make you throw up to witness it, think again. That is the text of history. Now, you don’t have to put it quite that way to a group of elementary school children, but on the other hand, the pretty flowers in the front yards in Scrooby seems decidedly off topic, and something of a bait and switch. Unless you refer to Les Fleurs du Mal.

But there is an impulse which many among us have to speak no ill – at least to speak no ill of your own tribe. I am here to tell you that the world is too small for tribes, has been since long before I was born, so you’d better see the good in other folks families and acknowledge the ills of your own. White people, like people of all colors from every corner of the earth, have done unspeakable things. And never more so than at the very moment when they claim they never do unspeakable things. To claim otherwise is to LIE, which is L.I.E., the Long Island Expressway to perdition.

So The Land of the Pilgrims is a mighty white book. It came out in 1925, when membership in the Ku Klux Klan was exploding and the Nationalistic Society of Teutonia, precursor to the German American Bund was being established across several American cities. There’s ya patriotic education for ya.

At any rate, I find it significant that after all its promotion of pureness and goodness and commendableness, in the end The Land of the Pilgrims lands on the Longfellow poem The Courtship of Miles Standish which in the first, last and final analysis is a soap opera about a love triangle between Priscilla Mullin and her two suitors, John Alden, who was the ship’s carpenter, and Miles Standish, who was basically the Pilgrims' chief of police and commander of their militia. There was plenty in that poem to make a high school student’s heart go pit-a-pat, back when high school students knew how to read. Which guy is the girl gonna go with, huh, huh, huh? And don’t say Jesus.

My mother was born one year after The Land of the Pilgrims came out. Books, even books as cockamamie as The Land of the Pilgrims, were not her cup of vodka. Growing up in the ‘30s and ‘40s, her main cultural influences outside of school assignments would have been old time radio and Hollywood movies. She loved her jazz bands and movie stars.

Times have changed

And we’ve often rewound the clock

Since the Puritans got a shock

When they landed on Plymouth Rock

If today

Any shock they should try to stem

‘stead of landing on Plymouth Rock

Plymouth Rock would land on them!

Those are of course lyrics from Cole Porters’“Anything Goes”. The tune first became a hit when my mother was eight years old. For some perspective. Somewhat irreverent! Hollywood!

Compared with Christmas or Halloween there aren’t many classic Thanksgiving themed movies. Practically none, in fact. In desperation, a few years ago Turner Movie Classics began showing a 1952 turkey known as Plymouth Adventure every November.

Contrary to what the title promises, the film offers virtually no Plymouth and precious little "adventure". The entire movie takes place aboard the Mayflower during its VOYAGE to North America. Half way through the picture they are still tied to the dock. The movie literally has a 20 minute scene where they haggle over the lease! There are limits to realism. On the other hand, there are aspects when we are definitely reminded we are in a Hollywood movie. The Mayflower as depicted is a bit more spacious than the reality. I’ve been on a replica of that tub. The ceilings were very low. To practicably shoot a movie there you’d have to use the all-midget cast of The Terror of Tiny Town. Hey, maybe the Pilgrims WERE Munchkins!

And since it would be a drag to fill two hours with what the Mayflower passengers were really doing during those uncomfortable 7 months ( throwing up, eating rotten food, and holding their noses), Plymouth Adventure spices things up with no less than TWO love triangles. The first has one of Hollywood’s sexiest female stars Gene Tierney as Dorothy Bradford. (wolf noises). Hoo boy! That is one hot Pilgrim! That’s a real hornicopia! Unfortunately Dorothy finds herself neglected by her husband William Bradford, played by the cuckhold from central casting Leo Genn, who’d been nominated for an Oscar the previous year for his performance in Quo Vadis? and remains a forgotten star of yesteryear in spite of that accolade. So Gene Tierney is all too grateful for the attentions of Captain Christopher Jones, played by the much more dynamic Spencer Tracy. Spoiler alert, Dorothy Bradford never made it alive to Plymouth, which is why I wasn’t making wolf noises about my own 10th grandmother just now even if she was Gene Tierney, and also why the filmmakers could depict a lurid tale of implied adultery in the age of the Production Code. It never gets consummated. In fact the trailer advertises it! Probably why the movie wasn’t a hit! Bradford later married a woman named Alice Carpenter and it is her from whom I am descended.

The other triangle in the film we already know from the Longfellow poem thoughtfully included in The Land of the Pilgrims. In this one Dawn Addams, who some of you may know from Charlie Chaplin’s A King in New York (1957) is Priscilla Mullin. [wolf noises galore]. She is lusted after by both John Alden, played by Van Johnson, and Miles Standish, portrayed by Noel Drayton, who’s even more forgotten than Leon Genn. The biggest of those three stars was of course Van Johnson, who was from my home state of Rhode Island and inexplicably a major heart throb with the ladies in the World War Two era. “Ah jeez, look at that. Say, if I knew you girls were havin’ a clambake, I’d have brought some of my famous quohaug stuffin’!”

WELL. I can see my Van Johnson imitation is wasted on you.

Plymouth Adventure also has a young Lloyd Bridges as a totally made up pirate guy walking around deck with his shirt off. With all this action you’d think a body’s pulse might quicken, but no dice. In fact in the end, Gene Tierney can’t take the tedium and jumps into the drink. The end. Oh and also, religious freedom.

Pilgrim dramatization had not appreciably improved by the time of my own childhood. When not reading 50 year old books, for my Plymouth fix in my own childhood I might tune in the 1979 CBS made-for-television movie Mayflower: The Pilgrim’s Adventure, with a young Anthony Hopkins as Captain Jones, and Richard Crenna, as Pilgrim leader William Brewster.

William Brewster was on the run from the authorities at the time so, I kid you not, Crenna spends the entire movie hiding in a small box like some kind of Pilgrim Senor Wences. And given that Hopkins had starred in Magic the previous year, I count that as a lost ventriloquial opportunity. “Are you alright down there, Brother Brewster?” (echoey Senor Wences): “S’alright!”

And did I mention the Pilgrim goils in this one? Whoa-sa! Trish Van De Vere as Rose Standish and Jenny Agutter as Priscilla Mullin. Clearly John Landis liked Agutter so much in this movie that he just had to have her for An American Werewolf in London and you know what that makes me say? (An absurd amount of wolf sounds and dogs barking).

But wait! Now we come to my sons' generation! And they have their own TV movie, Saints and Strangers, which premiered on the National Geographic channel in 2015.

This one has several male actors, but more importantly Anna Camp and Natsacha McElhone  as a couple of Pilgrim beauties [Crazy amount of wolf noises, climaxing with dogs barking "Jingle Bells"].

Hey now, these movies make it sound like Plymouth was a hotbed of…hot beds!

Tobacco Road, Crack Alley, and the Path to the Celestial City

 

My father worked for decades in a shipyard, just a short drive away from a fabulous, world-famous casino started by the Pequot tribe. I like to call that King Philip’s revenge. He was to have two grandchildren who were part Pequot, whom he didn’t get to know, because he was killed by Madison Avenue driven consumption of a Native American product called tobacco. I call that one Chief Powhatan’s Revenge...

***

I was lucky on two counts when the call came: 1) my bags were already packed and under my desk; and 2) the call came before I left work. I was separated from my wife then, and every Friday night, I’d bolt to the Port Authority bus station and hop on a coach which would take me upstate to visit my kids. By upstate I don’t mean Sing-Sing. Plenty of time for that later. At the moment, their mom was in grad school at Cornell so I would get on this bus that would take me through the beautiful Catskill mountains, Rip Van Winkle territory, Thomas Cole territory, James Fenimore Cooper territory (which really means Mahican territory), and then Northwest to the college town of Ithaca, at the base of the Finger Lakes where I would spend the weekend. Every weekend.

And you know, in those days, we were supposed to always be packed, anyway. It was two years after September 11, and those were the days of Go Bags. You were supposed to be ready to flee at a moment’s notice with all the underwear and road maps and duct tape you might require as you fled New York City. Nowadays I think the authorities would take one look at all that stuff in a bag and think you had a Murder Kit there, but back then they were telling you to pack this stuff. But like I say, my valise, my grip, my portmanteau was not for outrunning Armageddon, or kidnapping women at truckstops, it was just for visitation. Visiting children upstate thankfully not in prison.

And so when the call came that my father was shortly to be drawing his last breath, I was prepared. Not for that, but I was prepared in a more general way, for any type of emergency. All I needed to do this time was grab my bags -- and go in a different direction.

My father had been drawing his last breaths for about six months by that time, so I didn’t know how seriously to take this news. He was a bit of a drama queen. Minor things were always exaggerated to a heroic scale. I got in the habit of taking everything he said cum granis salis. But this time he was right. His lung cancer was advanced. The end was imminent. I remained skeptical right up until I got to his deathbed, which was surrounded by relatives, and saw him.

It wasn’t pretty. Every breath took Herculean effort. He couldn’t talk or even open his eyes. He had to summon every ounce of strength every few seconds to accomplish a shuddering, whistly whiny wheeze. It was agony to witness his agony. The cause was lung cancer: as advertised. He wasn’t the first in my family to die of the demon weed. My dad’s mother, an old hillbilly woman from the Smokey Mountain country had actually CHEWED tobacco, or chaw, as it was called, and spit it into coffee cans. She died of mouth cancer, an equally horrible way to go because the towards the end you can’t even eat. Can’t breathe, can’t eat. What a product of perfect selfishness tobacco is.

In a way, the English and the Native Americans had collaborated to kill my father. The natives had discovered the mildly intoxicating effects of tobacco and first cultivated the plant, but it had been the English of Virginia and North Carolina who had mass produced it and created a market for it and invented insidiously efficient new delivery systems. The names of the brands tell the story: Raleigh, Viceroy, Kent, Marlborough, Winston, Pall Mall. These name are the most prominently British products in all of American culture, then cancer-like, the products they're associated with eclipsed their origins. When you hear those names now, do you picture the London skyline, Big Ben? 

To the Native Americans tobacco had been a sacrament; the Europeans managed to convert it into an obscenity. The indigenous people would pass a pipe around during a tribal meeting. Each person would take ONE hit and pass it around, and that one hit was considered and had significance. The smoke was believed to contain their prayers or aspirations or thoughts or decisions, which would drift off to be heard by the spirits. Not dissimilar from the ancient Latin conception, where breath and spirit were the same word, so that inspiration and respiration come from the same root. Tobacco was also used as medicine, believed to cure everything from stomach woes to toothache. When John Rolfe and others were trying to create a European market, they too made medicinal claims for tobacco, and such claims on behalf of tobacco were made well into the 20th century. Calm, relaxation, a sense of well-being. For a while in the 1920s there were even Listerine cigarettes for curing bad breath. Gee, I wonder why that’s no longer on the market?

But ultimately, I think it’s less the principle of falsehood, than the industrialized scale of it that has done the widespread damage. If consumed in the quantities and with the frequency that the Native Americans brought to it, smoking tobacco was on balance pretty harmless and even benign. Then the Europeans got a hold of it and turned it into a menace to the human race. Why share a pipe? Here: take the whole thing! Look, we’ll roll it in paper. Why refill a pipe? That could take four seconds of valuable smoking time! The way you people are doing it is very inefficient! Soon each individual is smoking enough for 100 regional tribal meetings a day. It’s not just profane and irreligious but obscene in its selfishness. The industrial revolution didn’t stop at lengthening our lives. It has turned us all into Neros and Henry VIIIs. And what should be medicine becomes poison.  We do that with everything in this country. Anyone who’s ever witnessed SantaCon can tell you that. One Santa Claus: magical. 10,000 Santa Clauses running amok through the streets of New York: cancerous. Or consider all of the foodstuffs we subsidize. Like Corn. Corn comes from the Americas. Everyone knows that story about the Natives teaching the Pilgrims to grow corn so they wouldn’t starve. That’s kind of at the core of the Thanksgiving myth. Now, there’s corn syrup in EVERYTHING and America is the most obese nation on the earth. If corn syrup had come to the surface of the earth as glops from outer space like the goo in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and then suddenly everyone doubled in weight, you’d consider it a real life horror movie. The alien menace must be thwarted. When the menace is US, we’re like “Okay, whatevs!”

 

Tobacco may well be the most widespread, most pernicious swindle in history (next to the various forms of totalitarianism; let’s be real). Let’s say it’s the biggest CAPITALIST swindle. The Virginia company founded Jamestown, discovered no gold, struggled for a while, and then simply created a market for a product that had NO value (other than “satisfaction”, which is a euphemism for “the absence of withdrawal symptoms”.)  At their founding, Virginia and North Carolina were actually LITERALLY narco states. We’re filled with revulsion at drug cartels in Central America. I’m at a loss to know how the earliest Southern States of the U.S. were any different, other than the fact that their drug was legal. Tobacco growers created millions of addicts, and to grow their insidious product, they relied on slavery and indentured labor. People were actually forced upon pain of death to labor their entire lives so that rich men could get richer by killing other people. That is literally what happened. Later, cotton became the main cash crop, and slavery grew worse and worse (a topic for another project and another day). But you must admit that there is a stark difference here. Massachusetts was founded as a City on a Hill. Virginia was founded as a Swamp of Despond. Those two strains have been doing battle for the soul of this nation ever since. By the 20th century the North was fully complicit as Madison Avenue hawked this pernicious product to the world.

 

At any rate, many of my father’s earliest American ancestors were complicit in this evil cultivation across the generations. Growers, plantation owners, overseers, merchants. But Chief Powhatan got his licks in. My father started smoking when he was eight years old; he stopped breathing when he was 68. I was there at the end, when his entire form froze, and his soul left his body, leaving him in a nightmarish pose, with his eyes rolled back into his head and his mouth agape in a yawn of terror, like the victim of a vengeful spirit. I’ll never unsee it. 

***

One night, not long before his death, we were sitting at the kitchen table and my father said, “do you think your sister could be on this cocaine? And I thought that was just hysterical. You know how parents are. They see on the news that something bad happened in Brooklyn and then they phone you in an entiurely different Brooklyn neighborhood and say “Are you alright? I see where a pizza parlor blew up in a place called East Flat-Haven!” Because endless Law and Order marathons gave them this erroneous idea that New York was a combat zone, a place where you go to the bodega, the laundromat, or the takeout joint and you find a body behind the dumpster. So I laughed and I said “No way!“ My sister was the conservative one. Of late she was the one who organized the family gatherings. In fact, my last family Thanksgiving, spent with my own family, was cooked and organized by her. My parents' vague reports that she was acting strange, keyed up, and hanging around with sketchy people sounded like alarmism. They knew little of the world. But so did I. and it turned out that I was naïve. 

She left her husband and kids, was seeing this other guy, and they were into all kinds of shit. One day they met me in the city, a journey she rarely made. So I met them or the front stairs of the American Museum of Natural History, which is across the street from the New York Historical Society, where I worked. And my sister said “You look good” which is the same thing my mother said at my fathers deathbed and for the same reason. I’d just come from work and was standing there in a suit and a topcoat, instead of dressed like a bum which was what they were accustomed to. We met near the statue of Teddy Roosevelt and his trusty red and black assistants (since removed) which in retrospect seems significant, for my sister's paramour was part Pequot and part black or so he claimed. I'm not the one who was skeptical about his identity. The Pequots were, it turns out, because he was energetically trying to be recognized as a member of the tribe at the time. There was a legacy and a fortune there and ownership of a casino and some of his cousins belonged and so he was just positive that he was going to get this money. And when he got that money he was gonna do this and he was gonna do that and he’s saying this (I guess) to impress me and I wanted to say "No! Stop that, its not necessary, its embarrassing and I'm just some cracker, I'm an imposter who doesn't belong here myself, and I hate materialism, if you want to impress me stop talking about this payday, this bonanza". But I held my tongue and was icily polite and distant but friendly in the way of my people. As we looked at the dinosaur bones and the Hall of Evolution until they had to make their train and then off they went.

The pair proved to be like bleach and ammonia -- together they were like poison. They both developed rap sheets as long as my arm, and did time in jail. Years went by when I never spoke to my sister, never knew where she was, if she was alive, dead, in jail or how to get a hold of her and wouldn’t have anyway because she was beyond help and I had no help to give . I was barely hanging by a thread myself sometimes, the proverbial spider web, to use Jonathan Edwards' metaphor. But I missed knowing the two beautiful babies she and her boyfriend had made and lost during those years of tumult. They are among the closest blood relatives to me on the earth, born, like me, out of wedlock. They've grown up, and I haven't seen them, I don't know them and they don't know me. But I want to.And I sense a bond with them, though it's only a theory. I imagine that like me, they have big chips on their shoulders and much to prove. There might be ways I could relate to them like no one else can. Maybe, maybe not, But I dedicate this work to them, just in case. 

What is a Pilgrim?

Our family had a framed copy of a print of this kitschy 1914 genre painting by Jennie A. Brownscombe painting entitled "The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth". In my dad's handwriting at the bottom it says, "Plymouth, Mass" and the date, a few months before I was born. I can only conclude that he'd made a pilgrimage there with my mom when she was pregnant with me. 

What even is a Pilgrim? Think of them as children of divorce.

Without the divorce of the adulterous and lascivious King Henry VIII in 1534 there would likely be no official English Reformation. Henry’s desire to marry Anne Boleyn and thus shake off the authority of the Catholic Church made him the Church of England’s own Constantine, an official state sponsor of a previously illegal new religion. There had been a secret Protestant movement, a much more serious one, outside of that schism, but without royal favor it may well have been extinguished, just as the French had extinguished their Huguenot minority. For comparison, at this writing France is 83% Catholic, 2% Protestant, 15% other.  Prior to Henry’s reformation all of England’s early Protestant leaders were executed for heresy, usually by burning.

 

Still, many of their ideas survived underground for a number of years. Around 1605 a group called the Separatists or the Brownists began to come together, and them’s yer Pilgrims. There grew to be around 400 of them prior to the transplantation. Between 1607 til the end of the 16 teens they lived in Holland to escape English persecution. But they grew concerned when their children started wearing wooden shoes and putting their fingers in dykes and posing for cleanser cans so they decided to try their luck in America, where a colony known as Virginia had been founded a few years earlier. After many ups and downs, some of them set sail in mid-September, landing in Massachusetts a couple of months later.

We obsess on the Mayflower as though there was only one boatload of Pilgrims, and their descendants sprang from just them like Adam and Eve. But there were many subsequent shiploads, of course.  In addition to the Mayflower passengers, I also have many ancestors among those who came on the unsung second boat The Fortune in 1621 and the obscure but adorable sounding next two the Anne and the Little James in 1623 and so forth.

And then in 1630 came the Winthrop Fleet to found Boston, bringing it with my mother’s paternal line, her father’s 7th great grandfather. These were Puritans, reformists but not out and out Separatists like the Pilgrims, and hence much more numerous. My mom’s paternal ancestry line is the longest unbroken chain in the American leg of my family background, starting in 1630 and ending in my case with my mother’s death in 2014, 385 years, 11 generations. The Founding of Boston was a much bigger deal than Plymouth, at least in terms of scale. 700 people came over with the Winthrop Fleet in 11 ships. About 20,000 followed over the next decade—this is when most of my mother’s ancestors came to this country.

Naturally, these later arrivals married Mayflower passengers and their descendants, and their descendants married Mayflower descendants, and they married other recent arrivals but they all stayed in the same place and intermarried and that is how I can get to be related to so many of them, though I am separated from my nearest Mayflower surname by over 200 years. My 6th great grandmother Abigail Fuller (d. 1804) is the last from a direct Pilgrim line. 

 

Children of a Saucy Godson

 

My mom’s family is the longest unbroken American family line in my background, starting in 1630 and ending in my case with my mother’s death in 2014: 385 years, 11 generations. Her immigrant ancestor James Harrington was the brother-in-law of Arabella Clinton, for whom the flagship of the Winthrop Fleet, the Arabella was named.  Her father, Thomas Clinton, 3^rd Earl of Lincoln, was one of the backers of the venture. There is a street named after him in Boston, right next to Faneuil Hall. I discovered there one time when I was eating a $14 pretzel.

As is well known, we inherit most of our nature from our longest and strongest family lines. And the Harringtons, as it happens, were not model Puritans.  James was the son of Sir John Harington, Queen Elizabeth’s Godson, who was mostly known for writing naughty satircal  poems and making flip and disrespectful jokes at court, earning him the nickname “The Saucy Godson”.I feel a STRONG connection to this ancestor.  Posterity remembers Harrington best for also inventing the flush toilet, which is said by some to be called “John” in his honor.

 Whereas John had merely been critical of the monarchy in a provocative way; his son James up and joined the Puritans and sailed to America. But he died almost immediately upon arriving, leaving his tween son Benjamin in the care of a cruel Puritan uncle Charles Clinton-Fiennes. Ben ran away from him and proceeded to grow up to be a fairly wayward, churlish borderline criminal specimen. And HIM I take to be the true founder of the American branch of my mother’s family.