The Women Who Came in the Mayflower | Page 3

Ten years ago it would have been as
difficult for women of our day to understand adequately the
womanliness of the Pilgrim matrons and girls. The anxieties and
self-denials experienced by women of all lands during the last five
years may help us to "imagine" better the dauntless spirit of these
women of New-Plymouth. During those critical months of 1621-1623

they sustained their households and assisted the men in establishing an
orderly and religious colony. We may justly affirm that some of "the
wisdom, prudence and patience and just and equall carriage of things
by the better part" [Footnote: Bradford's History of Plymouth
Plantation; Bk. II.] was manifested among the women as well as the
men.
In spite of the spiritual zeal which comes from devotion to a good
cause, and the inspiration of steady work, the women must have
suffered from homesickness, as well as from anxiety and illness. They
had left in Holland not alone their loved pastor, John Robinson, and
their valiant friend, Robert Cushman, but many fathers, mothers,
brothers and sisters besides their "dear gossips." Mistress Brewster
yearned for her elder son and her daughters, Fear and Patience; Priscilla
Mullins and Mary Chilton, soon to be left orphans, had been separated
from older brothers and sisters. Disease stalked among them on land
and on shipboard like a demon. Before the completion of more than
two or three of the one-room, thatched houses, the deaths were
multiplying. Possibly this disease was typhus fever; more probably it
was a form of infectious pneumonia, due to enervated conditions of the
body and to exposures at Cape Cod. Winslow declared, in his account
of the expedition on shore, "It blowed and did snow all that day and
night and froze withal. Some of our people that are dead took the
original of their death there." Had the disease been "galloping
consumption," as has been suggested sometimes, it is not probable that
many of those "sick unto death" would have recovered and have lived
to be octogenarians.
The toll of deaths increased and the illness spread until, at one time,
there were only "six or seven sound persons" to minister to the sick and
to bury the dead. Fifteen of the twenty-nine women who sailed from
England and Holland were buried on Plymouth hillside during the
winter and spring. They were: Rose Standish; Elizabeth, wife of
Edward Winslow; Mary, wife of Isaac Allerton; Sarah, wife of Francis
Eaton; Katherine, wife of Governor John Carver; Alice, wife of John
Rigdale; Ann, wife of Edward Fuller; Bridget and Ann Tilley, wives of
John and Edward; Alice, wife of John Mullins or Molines; Mrs. James

Chilton; Mrs. Christopher Martin; Mrs. Thomas Tinker; possibly Mrs.
John Turner, and Ellen More, the orphan ward of Edward Winslow.
Nearly twice as many men as women died during those fateful months
of 1621. Can we "imagine" the courage required by the few women
who remained after this devastation, as the wolves were heard howling
in the night, the food supplies were fast disappearing, and the houses of
shelter were delayed in completion by "frost and much foul weather,"
and by the very few men in physical condition to rive timber or to
thatch roofs? The common house, twenty foot square, was crowded
with the sick, among them Carver and Bradford, who were obliged "to
rise in good speed" when the roof caught on fire, and their loaded
muskets in rows beside the beds threatened an explosion. [Footnote:
Mourt's Relation.]
Although the women's strength of body and soul must have been
sapped yet their fidelity stood well the test; when The Mayflower was
to return to England in April and the captain offered free passage to the
women as well as to any men who wished to go, if the women "would
cook and nurse such of the crew as were ill," not a man or a woman
accepted the offer. Intrepid in bravery and faith, the women did their
part in making this lonely, impoverished settlement into a home. This
required adjustments of many kinds. Few in number, the women
represented distinctive classes of society in birth and education. In
Leyden, for seven years, they had chosen their friends and there they
formed a happy community, in spite of some poverty and more anxiety
about the education and morals of their children, because of "the
manifold temptations" [Footnote: Bradford's History of Plymouth
Plantation, ch. 3.] of the Dutch city.
Many of the men, on leaving England, had renounced their more
leisurely occupations and professions to practise trades in
Leyden,--Brewster and Winslow as printers, Allerton as tailor, Dr.
Samuel Fuller as say-weaver and others as carpenters, wool-combers,
masons, cobblers, pewterers and in other crafts. A few owned
residences near the famous University of Leyden, where Robinson and
Brewster taught. Some educational