Cape Cod Read Free Page B

heed. In the beginning, I bore them no sympathy. They were like as any cargo, and no better, for all their prayer, than those they call Strangers. But the Saints have gained my respect, the Strangers as well.
    Christopher Jones did not bestow respect blithely, especially in his sea journal. He had been a mariner too long, had known too many men to wither in their first heavy gale. He had expected his passengers to wither before the wind ever blew, but they had faced the sea with more bravery than his sailors.
    And now they were praying. Perhaps that was the reason for their bravery. The prayer, this bleak November dawn, was the Twenty-third Psalm. Jones considered it a good prayer, though he was not a godly man. He professed belief in the holy Church of England, the prudent course in a world where a man’s faith determined his future on earth as well as in heaven. But first and foremost, Jones was a seaman. He put his faith in the compass and the chart, in the stars and the sun, in his own strong hand on the whipstaff and England’s strong oak in the keel.
    The Saints put theirs in God and their own understanding of his word. They believed that the corruption of the Roman Catholic Church still festered in its English bastard and would not be cut away until the bastard purified itself of ceremony, of statues, of priests, of all save the Scripture. The English church showed no interest in taking such cure, so the Saints became Separatists, and Separatists quickly became outcasts.
    They were simple people, these Saints, simple in their lives and simple in their faith, and their simplicity, thought Jones, had kept them strong.
    They did not wither during years of persecution by English bishops and sheriffs, nor after years of exile in Holland, where they found freedom while their children lost their English identity, nor after months of struggling to organize a voyage to the New World. And when their financial backers forced them to accept outsiders because there were not enough of them to build a colony, they did not wither then, either. They dubbed the outsiders Strangers, declared their sovereignty over the venture, and looked west at last.
    It should not have surprised Jones, then, that the Saints had not withered during ten weeks at sea.
    The Mayflower had left Southampton in August, in the time of good sailing. From her years in the wine trade, she had come to be known as a sweet ship in that the ullage from the casks made her bilge smell like a French fermentation cave. But no amount of sweetness could soothe the misery of seaborne motion in Separatist bellies, nor stop a stream of half-stomached salt meat, pickled beets, hardtack, and beer from frothing into the wake, nor overcome the stink of full slop buckets and the stench of seasick vomit that raised more vomit in even the strongest of stomachs.
    It was in the nature of men to endure such things for commerce, adventure, or faith, thought Jones, but what pain to modesty it must have been for the women to use the slop buckets without privacy, or to see the sailors hang their arses and balls in the bow ropes and let fly with whatever was in them. After all, these were not tavern wenches or London whores, but goodwives. And what worry the future must have held for any woman who came with children. Indeed, what worry for any woman who had left the safety of a warm hearth, whether for prayer or profit. But they seldom complained and they would not wither.
    When the autumn westerlies began to blow, the Mayflower went on the tack. For weeks she pounded like a mill hammer against the wind. Those who had recovered from seasickness grew sick again, then sicker still as the westerlies gave way to storms that swirled from the southwest, driving the Mayflower off course and leaving her to hull through days and nights of miserable waterlogged beating.
    Half-seas over, they were struck by a storm that dwarfed all the rest. Mountains of green water rose with the wind, over the decks,