Betty Alden: The First-born Daughter of the Pilgrims

Two men stood upon Cole’s Hill, half sheltering themselves behind the ragged growth of scrub oaks and poplars sprung from those graves of the first winter, sown by the survivors to wheat lest the savages should perceive that half the company were dead. That pathetic crop of grain had perished on the ground and never been renewed; but Nature, tender mother, soon replaced it with a robe of her own symbolism, green as her favorite clothing ever is, and embroidered with the starry flowers of the succory, blue as heaven.

From the grave of John Carver and Katharine his wife had sprung a graceful clump of birches, and it was behind these that the two men finally took up their post of observation. One of them was John Lyford, a smooth and white faced man, whose semi-clerical garb only accented his cunning eyes and sensual mouth. A double renegade this, for, flying to the New World to escape the punishment of his sins in England, he proffered himself to the Pilgrims as a convert to their creed, renouncing with oaths and tears his Episcopal ordination, although assured by those liberal-minded men that such recantation was not required or desired; then, having joined the Church of the Separation entirely of his own free will, he turned viperwise upon the hand that fed him, and began plotting against the peace, nay the very life, of his generous hosts, and leading away those weak and disaffected souls to be found in every community.

John Oldhame, his companion, was a very different sort of person. Big, loud-voiced, and dogmatic, he was the sailor who would see the ship driven to destruction on the rocks unless he could be captain and give orders to every one else.

The motives of these two conspirators were as diverse as their antecedents, although both came out under the auspices of the London Adventurers, of whom a word must be said. These gentlemen, knowing a good deal less of New England than we do of the sources of the Nile, had adventured certain moneys in fitting out the Pilgrims, and in sustaining them until they should be able to repay the sums thus advanced “with interest thereto.” When the Mayflower made her first return, leaving fifty of the Pilgrims in their graves and the other fifty just struggling back to life and feebly beginning their plantation and house building, the Adventurers were exceedingly wroth that she did not come freighted with lumber, furs, and especially salted fish enough to nearly pay for her voyage. Their bitter reproaches written to Carver were answered with manly dignity by Bradford, but a really cordial feeling was never reëstablished, and when the Pilgrims requested that either Robinson or some other minister should be sent out to them, the Adventurers imposed Lyford upon them, some of them giving him secret instructions to act as a spy in their behalf.

John Oldhame, a man of means and position, came out upon a different footing, paying his own expenses, and being, as the Pilgrims phrased it, “on his own particular” instead of “on the general” or joint stock account. But events soon made it plain that a very good understanding existed between Oldhame and the Adventurers, and that if he should be enabled to detect his hosts in defrauding the Adventurers, whose greedy maws never were fully satisfied, they would transfer their protection and countenance to him, sustaining him as a rival or even supplanter of the interests of the men they had undertaken to befriend.

The Pilgrims had the faults of their virtues in very marked degree, and carried patience, meekness, long-suffering, and credulity to a point most irritating to their historians and very subversive of their worldly interests. Doubtless, however, they found their account in the final reckoning, and one must try to be patient with their goodness. All which means that if this growing treason in their midst was at all suspected it was not noticed, and both Oldhame and Lyford were admitted to the full privileges of townsmen, including a seat at the Council and full knowledge of the colony’s concerns. Lyford, in virtue of the ordination, so scornfully abjured by himself, was requested to act as minister in association with Elder Brewster, although some quiet doubts still prevented his admission to the position of pastor.