Thanksgiving - The Pilgrim's Foundation of Faith
To whom are we thankful?
To Trust in God
Despair on the Mayflower
How They Got to Plymouth
Church persecution is real
the Church of England, presided over by the House of Bishops. The Church hierarchy had grown alarmed at the rapid growth of two movements of “fanatics.” The first and much larger group claimed to be dedicated to “purifying the Church from within.” That made them suspect from the start to the bishops, who saw nothing which needed purifying. These “Puritans,” as they were sarcastically dubbed (and which epithet they eventually took for their own) did, however, continue to acknowledge canonical authority. Thus they could be easily kept from positions of responsibility and safely ignored.
In the bishops’ eyes the much smaller but more dangerous element were the radicals who thought that the Church of England was already corrupted beyond any possibility of purification. They further believed that no person, not even the Queen, could take the title “Head of the Church.” That belonged exclusively to the Lord Jesus Christ. Having separated themselves from the state Church, they now conducted their own worship as they saw fit. If allowed to continue, these “Separatists” would soon reduce worship to primitive preaching, teaching, singing, and free praying, thus doing away with sixteen centuries of established liturgical tradition
The Separatists were hounded, bullied, forced to pay assessments to the Church of England, clapped into prison on trumped-up charges, and driven underground. They met in private homes, to which they came at staggered intervals by different routes, because they were constantly being spied upon. In the Midlands village of Scrooby the persecution became so intense that the congregation elected to follow other Separatists who had already sought religious asylum in Holland.
The decision to go to america.
Thus they came to Leyden, where they were forged together by shared adversity. As near-penniless foreign immigrants, they qualified for only the most menial labor and had to work terribly hard just to subsist. Bradford wrote that before coming, they had, “as the Lord’s free people, joined themselves by a covenant of the Lord into a church estate, in the fellowship of the Gospel, to walk in all His ways made known . . . unto them, according to their best endeavors, whatsoever it should cost them, the Lord assisting them.”
It cost them dearly. By 1619, after nearly a dozen years of penurious toil, they finally decided that they had to “remove.”
Bradford offered four reasons for moving. First, their life (though they never complained of it) was so hard that almost no others were coming from England to join them—even after the king’s edict of 1618, which decreed that all Christians unwilling to conform to ecclesiastical authority had to leave the country. Second, their life was aging them prematurely (everyone old enough to hold a job worked twelve to fifteen hours a day) and was so debilitating that, if the time came when they would have to move again, they might not physically be able to do so. Third, their children were also being worn down, and many were being drawn away by the lures of the world around them. Fourth, they had cherished a “great hope and inward zeal” of at least playing a part, if only as a stepping-stone for others, in the carrying forth of the Light of Christ to remote parts of the world
They left late
Having finally set sail for the New World on August 5, 1620, they were barely three days out on the Atlantic before it became obvious that the Speedwell was in trouble. The new masts with which they had fitted her in Holland were apparently causing her seams to work open under full sail. They had no choice but to turn back to the nearest port, Dartmouth, and recaulk her.
Another week passed, and they again set forth, only to encounter the same problem. This time, it was abetted by a full gale* that initiated the Pilgrims to the rigors of seasickness. Once more they were forced to turn back, this time making for Plymouth, the home of some of the best shipwrights in England. There they searched the ship for a loose seam.
Some historians have found hints that the Master of the Speedwell, anxious to get out of his contract to spend a year at the plantation, had deliberately crowded on sail to make the seams work loose. Indeed, the Speedwell, later rerigged, would see coastal service for many years.
God that their three-month ordeal was over.
Cramped Quarters
It added up to seven weeks of ill-lighted, rolling, pitching, stinking misery—the kind that brings up sins that had lain buried for years. Anger, self-pity, bitterness, vindictiveness, jealousy, despair—all these surfaced sins had to be faced, confessed, and given up to the Lord for His cleansing. No matter how ill they felt or how grim the daily situation, they continued to seek God together, praying through despair and into peace and thanksgiving.
Big storm
There was only one other death during the voyage: William Butten, a servant, ignored Master Jones’s and Dr. Fuller’s stern admonition about drinking a daily portion of lemon juice as a preventative for scurvy. He refused to swallow the sour stuff, and his willful disobedience cost him his life.
Another passenger nearly paid with his life for a “minor” infraction. A dozen or so days into the storm, John Howland, the servant of their governor, John Carver, could no longer stand the stench of the crowded ’tween-decks. The Master, Elder Brewster, and his own master had forbidden any of them to go topside, but if he didn’t get a breath of fresh air soon, he thought he would die. Finally, he decided that he was going to get what he wanted. Up he climbed and out onto the sea-swept main deck. It was like a nightmare out there! The seas around him were mountainous; he’d never seen anything like it—huge, boiling, gray-green waves lifting and tossing the small ship in their midst, dark clouds roiling the horizon, and the wind shrieking through the rigging. Howland shuddered, and it was not from the icy blast of “fresh air” that hit him.
Just then, the ship seemed to literally drop out from beneath him—it was there, and then it wasn’t—and the next thing he knew, he was falling. He hit the water, which was so cold that it was like being smashed between two huge blocks of ice. His last conscious act was to blindly reach out. By God’s grace the ship at that moment was heeled so far over that the lines from her spars were trailing in the water. One of these happened to snake across his wrist, and instinctively he closed on it and hung on.
According to the U.S. Navy, if a person goes overboard into the North Atlantic in November, he or she has at most thirty minutes to live. There is no telling how long Howland was in the sea, how soon someone spotted him and raised the alarm. When they hauled him aboard, he was blue. But even though he was sick for several days, he recovered. And never again would he stick his head above deck until he was invited to do so.
The most frightening episode of the voyage occurred not long after the Mayflower passed the halfway mark. In a particularly violent storm, she was rolling so far over on her sides that the sole lantern seemed almost parallel with the crossbeams. Children were screaming, and more than a few Pilgrims feared she might shift her cargo and go all the way over.
Suddenly a tremendous boom resounded through the ship. The main crossbeam supporting the mainmast had cracked and was sagging alarmingly. Now the sailors’ concern matched the Pilgrims’. They swarmed about it, trying to lever it back into place, but they could not budge it. Master Jones himself came to see. From the look on his face, it was obvious to the Pilgrims that the situation was as ominous as they had feared.
The Pilgrims helped in the only way they knew how. They prayed, “Yet Lord, Thou canst save!” Then Brewster remembered the great iron screw of his printing press. It was on board somewhere. A desperate search was begun. Finally it was located, dug out, hauled into place under the sagging beam, and cranked up. It met the beam and, to the accompaniment of a hideous creaking and groaning of wood, began to raise it—all the way back into its original position. For once the sailors joined the Pilgrims in their praises of God.
Disunity
Without waiting for the Master’s permission, they rushed up on the main deck, where they caught their first glimpse of a long, sandy stretch of coastline, covered with dune grass and scrub pine. One of the pilots identified it as a place the fishermen called Cape Cod. Despite the seemingly endless storm, they had actually been blown less than a hundred miles off their course—north, as it turned out. It should take them only a day to round the elbow of the Cape and perhaps three more days to reach the mouth of the Hudson.
They turned south.
But at the Cape’s elbow, Monomoy Point, there are fierce shoals and riptides. And with the heavy headwinds they now faced, the going became progressively more treacherous. Finally, after battling the wall of wind for two days, Master Jones said that before attempting to proceed further south, he would have to head back out to sea and wait another day.
Now Brewster, Carver, Winslow, Bradford, and several others, began to wonder if God really did want them to go to the Hudson. Perhaps He had blown them here because He intended them to remain in this place. At length, after much prayer and further discussion, they instructed Master Jones to turn about and make for the northern tip of the Cape (Provincetown). This he did, and on November 11, they dropped anchor in the natural harbor just inside the Cape.
At this point, a new question arose: if they were to settle here, they would no longer be under the jurisdiction of the Virginia Company. And since they obviously had no patent from the New England Company, they would be under—no one. This thought stirred rebellion in the hearts of some of the strangers, and the Pilgrim leaders realized that they had to act quickly and decisively to forestall the very real possibility of mutiny.
Their solution was pragmatic and expedient. It took into consideration the basic sinfulness of human nature, with which they had become all too familiar during the past seven weeks. They drafted a Compact, much along the lines of their first covenant back in Scrooby, which embodied the principles of equality and government by the consent of the governed. (Actually, this concept of equality could be traced directly back to the ancient Hebrew tradition of all men being equal in the sight of God.)
The Mayflower Compact would become cornerstone of American representative government. Although the Pilgrims had no idea of the significance for America of what they had done, it marked the first time in history since the children of Israel in the Sinai wilderness (with the exception of John Calvin’s Geneva) that free and equal men had voluntarily covenanted together to create their own new civil government based on Biblical principles.