Alexandersmap

    Tag: Mayflower

    • A Visit with Myles Standish

      Duxbury, Massachusetts doesn’t have the same notoriety as its neighbor Plymouth, but the roots of history run nearly as deep here. To be fair, if people think of Duxbury at all, it’s usually as an upper class suburb of Boston. There’s plenty of wealth on display in this town. But step away from the massive homes with their perfectly manicured gardens and you’ll find a legacy that reaches back to the Mayflower. The most famous character on the Mayflower, Myles Standish, lived and died in Duxbury, and is buried in what is now known as the Myles Standish Burying Ground.

      The burying ground was once adjacent to a meeting house, long gone, but marked with granite stones to indicate where it once stood. It is the oldest continuously maintained graveyard in the United States. The lay of the land is largely the same within the enclosure. The thing about graveyards is you’re walking on ground largely unchanged since the days when the people buried there were laid to rest. The entire area around a graveyard becomes housing developments and strip malls and paved roads, but these small graveyards are a time machine back to another time.

      Captain Jonathan Alden, son of Mayflower passengers John and Priscilla Alden, is also buried in this graveyard, and his is the oldest gravestone in the burying ground. Standish, who died well before Alden, likely had small pyramid-shaped stones marking his interment initially, and the monument built around the spot in 1893 (you can see one of these stones behind the boulder engraved with Myles Standish’s name in the picture below). That engraved boulder, like Plymouth Rock, is something for the tourists. The monument itself, with a fieldstone wall surrounding it and four cannon mounted on each corner, projects the violent boldness of the man interred beneath.

      Myles Standish was a military advisor to the Pilgrims. By all accounts he was brutal and decisive in his actions. He would preemptively attack when he heard trouble was brewing, and famously stuck the head of one rival, Wituwamat, on a pike as a deterrent to others. There seems to be no doubt that Wituwamat was lured into a room and murdered. Was this act of brutality something to be celebrated or scorned? Was there a legitimate threat to the Pilgrims, and could it have been resolved in a more diplomatic way? What’s clear is Standish believed he was fighting for the lives of the colonists, and used any method he could to intimidate those who he believed were threats to their safety. As with all history, we judge it from the comfort of distance.

      At another spot in town, on a point of land jutting out into Kingston Harbor, there are four more granite stones laid out in a park amongst multi-million dollar homes overlooking the harbor. It was here that Myles Standish actually lived. I found this interesting, as a military man like Standish would normally seek the high ground. A review of a Google map later revealed a small pond nearby that would have been his source of fresh water. Perhaps Myles dined regularly on Duxbury oysters, which have become almost as famous as the town’s most notable resident.

    • Whispers from a Dead Poet

      There is no dusk to be,
      There is no dawn that was,
      Only there’s now, and now,
      And the wind in the grass.

      Days I remember of
      Now in my heart, are now;
      Days that I dream will bloom
      White the peach bough.

      Dying shall never be
      Now in the windy grass;
      Now under shooken leaves
      Death never was.
      – Archibald MacLeish, An Eternity

      I confess to not really knowing much about Archibald MacLeish, who died in Boston exactly 39 years ago yesterday, the day I started thinking about Archibald MacLeish at all. It started the night before, watching Ken Burns’ Hemingway and latching on to his name as someone Hemingway hung out with in Spain, as someone I ought to look into. Much of his poetry is available online, and I waded through a strong dose of it. And then I read his biography:

      “His mother was a Hillard, a family that, as Dialogues of Archibald MacLeish and Mark Van Doren reveals, MacLeish was fond of tracing back through its New England generations to Elder Brewster, the minister aboard the Mayflower.” – Poetry Foundation Biography of Archibald MacLeish

      It seems I’m a distant relative of Mr. MacLeish, both of us pointing to Elder Brewster as a connection to the Mayflower. I don’t dwell on the Mayflower connection – who cares if you were the first European to settle here or the millionth? What matters is how you behaved when you got here. I think on the whole Brewster settled his accounts well. And MacLeish lived a life of consequence himself. So how does one keep up with the relatives?

      What do you make of meeting a long dead relative through his work on the very day he passed 39 years before? Serendipity? Whispers? Or just history and happenstance capturing my imagination and carrying it away once again, as it’s done so many times before?

      It doesn’t matter so much, does it? We have the advantage of now, and now. Until we lose it. Until we are whispers ourselves, hardly heard in the swirling wind in the grass. Days we remember and dreams of the future matter little compared to the urgent matter of now. And what we might do with it.

    • The Pilgrims and Pokanoket

      As you walk into the Mayflower Pub in London there’s a poster mounted high on the wall that shows the silhouettes of all the pilgrims and servants who sailed on the Mayflower to settle in America. The poster is divided in two, with the upper half showing the Pilgrims as they sailed from Europe. The lower half has the same image, but depicts those who perished before that first winter was over in gray. There’s a lot of gray… but by all rights it should have been all of them.

      The Pilgrims sailed for America too late in the season, without enough food, and sailed for the wrong place. Their charter had them settling at the mouth of the Hudson River, and instead they found themselves at the fist of Cape Cod. Turning south they almost wrecked on the treacherous shoals that have claimed thousands of ships since then. Turning back northward, the Captain of the Mayflower considered present-day Provincetown but eventually worked their way to the area that would become Plymouth., Massachusetts. Pilgrims were starting to die as freezing temperatures, tough living conditions aboard and malnutrition conspired against them. The Native American tribes were well aware of their presence and had already skirmished with them on Cape Cod at First Encounter Beach. A more sustained attack could easily have wiped them out.

      But the Pilgrims also had some lucky breaks that kept enough of them alive to establish a foothold in the region. They arrived at a place where just a few years earlier thousands of Native Americans lived. Contact with Europeans, most likely fishermen fishing the Gulf of Maine, triggered a plaque that killed thousands of people in the few years right before the Pilgrims arrived. So the native population was decimated and in no position to shove the Pilgrims back into the ocean they’d arrived on. They settled in an area with cleared fields and few adversaries. Truly fortunate to be there instead of landing in a place with a thriving and hostile Native American population.

      The other lucky break the Pilgrims caught was landing at a place where the local Sachem, Massasoit, saw strategic advantage in an alliance with the Pilgrims. The Pokanoket tribe Massasoit was Sachem of had been hit hard by the plaque that hit the tribes along the Gulf of Maine, and he was feeling pressure from the Narraganset tribe. An alliance with the Pilgrims gave him some strength in numbers that proved mutually beneficial for the short term. Ultimately this alliance would give the Pilgrims the momentum to survive and grow, but would destroy the Pokanoket in the next generation. An accident of geography brought the Pilgrims and Pokanoket together, time would drive them apart. But in the winter of 1620-1621, it would prove the difference in keeping more Pilgrims from turning into gray silhouettes on a poster 400 years later.

    • The Rose Standish

      A little piece of historical trivia is the name of the very first ship to travel through the Cape Cod Canal when it opened on July 29, 1914.  Following the Jeopardy answering with a question format, What is the S.S. Rose Standish?  And the ship was the perfect choice to be first.

      Rose Standish was the first wife of Captain Myles Standish.  She was one of many who died in 1620 during the first winter after the Pilgrims arrived in Plymouth, Massachusetts.  Myles Standish would explore the Manomet and Scusset Rivers three years later considering a canal.  That canal would finally be completed almost three hundred years later with great fanfare, with a future President of the United States, then Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt, in attendance.

      That first ship, the S.S. Rose Standish, was a coastal passenger vessel built just two years earlier in 1912 and operated by the Nantasket Beach Steamboat Company of Boston.  On that July day in 1914, she led a parade of ships through the canal.  The celebratory mood was likely tempered by news breaking about events the previous day, when Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, marking the beginning of World War One.  Almost exactly four years after the canal opened that war would impact the canal itself when a German U-Boat surfaced off of Orleans and fired on a tug towing barges.  That prompted the United States Army Corps of Engineers to take over the struggling private Cape Cod Canal so ships wouldn’t have to take the more dangerous route around the cape.

      The S.S. Rose Standish would be in service into the 1930’s.  There’s a great picture from 1930 of her docked in Boston Harbor, right about when the Cape Cod Canal was being widened to its current 480 feet.  She likely outlived many of the people who witnessed that first trip up the canal 16 years before.  History is full of related twists and turns, and this story offers a good example with Rose Standish, one of the first pilgrims, a young Franklin D Roosevelt and a German U-Boat all playing a part in the same story.