Friday, November 29, 2019

13. Past and Present: Seeking a Promised Land of sunlit uplands and meadows


 

'Sunlit meadows and uplands' – perhaps there's even a pot of gold?  Rainbow on the South Downs, Sussex, England  
Image credit: Antiquary

As we draw close to the last month of the year we can look beyond the gloom of Winter and anticipate more cheerful times.  Finally the people of this country will glimpse the ‘sunlit uplands and meadows’ that so many individuals have promised.





Individuals who include, as I’ve discovered, politicians as varied and as revered as statesmen Winston Churchill and Ronald Reagan, along with lesser politicians whose names have been so familiar in recent times. You can google this rather hackneyed phrase to see who they are!






Embarkation of the Pilgrims 1857, by Robert W. Weir 
Protestant pilgrims are shown on the deck of the ship Speedwell before their departure for the New World from Delft Haven, Holland, on July 22, 1620.
(Photograph courtesy Architect of the Capitol)  

Helping in a museum as I do, I tend to notice various anniversaries of events from the past. Like the approach of Mayflower 400 next year. 

My thoughts have been turning towards other pilgrims from East Devon who sought freedom in the Promised Land of the New World.  


Three years after the Pilgrim Fathers, East Budleigh-born Roger Conant left his homeland to make the perilous journey across the Atlantic with his family. 



Seal of the City of Salem. With a merchant dressed in colourful robes standing next to palm trees on an island, and a ship in the background under full sail, the seal represents Salem’s spice trade history  

Roger Conant is celebrated for founding the American city of Salem, Massachusetts, which is already planning to mark its 400th anniversary in 2026.  However hardly anyone in his birthplace knows about him. 

There is, by the way, no connection between the city of Salem and East Budleigh's 18th century Salem Chapel.  'Salem' simply means 'Peace'.



Many of us can recognise Sir Walter Raleigh, East Budleigh’s other local hero. This painting, on display in the village's All Saints Church, is a copy of one of the numerous portraits painted in his lifetime. But of Roger Conant there is only this statue, right, dating from 1913, standing outside the Witch Museum in Salem; it's based on how the sculptor Henry Kitson imagined he would have looked.  

Like Sir Walter Raleigh, Roger was brought up as a Protestant in a country still racked by conflict between people with different and fiercely held religious views. 

Research into his life inevitably led me to re-read the story of the English Reformation, and I was struck by parallels between his time and ours.

It all began, so they say, in 1534 with King Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy. "Break free from the Tyranny of Rome!"  "Leave its corrupt and greedy Church!"  "Deliver true Independence and guarantee Sovereignty for our Great Nation!" are some of the clarion calls that the Government might have used to sway the populace. 

Such seductive language.  So many wonderful promises to the People of this Great Country. 

 



























Top: King Henry VIII and his Lord Chancellor Thomas More, executed on the King's orders in 1535. Both paintings by Hans Holbein the Younger; below, the image shows King Henry II who similarly fell out with Thomas à Becket 

Not everyone believed the Government of course. Thomas More, a ‘Remainer’ loyal to the Catholic Church, refused to obey his King and paid the ultimate price.  Just as his namesake, as Archbishop of Canterbury, had opposed King Henry II.




The bridge at Clyst St Mary, south of Exeter, scene of a bloody encounter between opposing religious forces

 And other ‘Remainers’ would follow his example. Thousands of them were slaughtered in the Prayer Book Rebellion of 1549, many of them only a few miles from us at Clyst St Mary. 




During the reign of Queen ‘Bloody Mary’ it was the turn of the ‘Leavers’  to sacrifice their lives for their Protestant faith. Poor Agnes Prest was burned at the stake in 1557 at Southernhay, Exeter, as shown in this bronze panel sculpted by Harry Hems in 1909. The memorial is located on the corner of the city's Denmark Road and Barnfield Road.  


And so it went on, for many many years. "We're faithful to the One True Holy and Apostolic Church!"  screamed the 'Remainers', even as they were being tortured to death. "Traitors!" shrieked the others. "Leave means Leave! Get over it."  






The St Bartholomew's Day Massacre, August 1572, by the Huguenot painter Francois Dubois: Catholic 'Remainers' in France take revenge on Protestant 'Leavers', also known as Huguenots  

Of course compared with France's Wars of Religion between Catholics and Protestants during the 16th century England was relatively stable. That was surely thanks to the wise and clever Queen Elizabeth I who steered a middle path in religion between the fanatics of both sides.  

She shared the attitude of our own equally sensible Sir Walter Raleigh; as a boy he had seen the horrors of the conflict in France for himself. "The greatest and most grievous calamity that can come to any state is civil war", he would write in his 'History of the World', published in 1614.

When Stuarts succeeded Tudors and when a calamitous English Civil War did finally break out later that century it was for a variety of reasons, but religion certainly played a part. The Restoration of 1660 under King Charles II brought peace but did not heal matters.

It didn't help when the extraordinarily manipulative conman Titus Oates - later known as 'Titus the Liar' - threw the country into hysteria with his wild assertions of a 'Popish plot'. He accused Catholic 'Remainers' of conspiring to kill the King: by 1681 at least 15 innocent men had been found guilty and executed before Oates was exposed as a complete fraud. 






And then, finally, on 5 November 1688 — a day already special in the national calendar — the staunchly Protestant William of Orange landed in Devon with an army of 14,000 and the Catholic Stuart King James II was expelled in the ‘Glorious Revolution’.  

But fear of 'Remainers', seen as 'enemies of the People', persisted. Nearly a century later more anti-Catholic hysteria swept the Nation in the Gordon Riots. On 2 June 1780, a mob estimated at between 40,000 and 60,000 took to the streets in London and marched on the Houses of Parliament. The army was called out and over 280 rioters were shot dead, with 200 or so wounded.   







Chaucer's Friar from his Canterbury Tales

Of course it’s too simple to quote dates in these matters. Discontent had been simmering for centuries before Henry VIII’s break with Rome. Think of the Lollards, John Wycliffe and Chaucer’s satire of the Catholic Church in his Canterbury Tales. And I won't mention Northern Ireland.

It just shows that there is nothing new under the sun. And that researching the past and understanding the mistakes that people have made may help us enjoy happier lives in the future.

You can access other posts on this blog by going to the Blog Archive (under the ‘About Me’ section), and clicking on the appropriate heading.



Sunday, November 24, 2019

12. Coming Home to Budleigh: Jeff Conant's 2016 visit to his old village home (3)

Continued from 






Coming home to Budleigh: 
A visit to my old village home 
          

The village of East Budleigh in Devonshire County is remote by British standards – a four-hour train ride from London to the medieval city of Exeter and then due south to the edge of the sea. Exeter is home to one of England’s great cathedrals, a soaring gothic glacier of local sandstone and chalk, the pride of Devon. The afternoon I passed through, the city was in a minor state of grief: a fire the night before had torn through a row of buildings across from the cathedral and burned England’s oldest hotel to rubble and ash. And so time devoured another morsel of history.

I traveled there from the U.S., via London, to visit an ancestor. At Exeter station I rented a car and drove south along the wide, slow river Exe glowing white in the late afternoon winterlight. Devon is a land of rolling hills and grey-green mist-strewn heaths; gnarled ancient oaks presiding over stone Saxon churches beneath a sky the hue of bruised tin. Famously, it is a landscape of ghosts.

I was brought there for a very brief few days seeking one particular ghost: a pilgrim father and salter of fish who had left Devonshire in 1623 aboard a ship that two months later made land at what is now Salem, Massachusetts – a man who happened to be my ancestor.

I’ve traveled to dozens of countries, usually on some mission or other, but this journey was different – a literal pilgrimage to the farthest reaches of my bloodline, at least as far as recorded history goes.

From Exeter I drove anxiously, unaccustomed to driving on the left side of the road and the right side of the car. I entered the first traffic circle as I would in the U.S. and faced a barrage of angry horns before I emerged, rattled, onto the straightaway. A short drive south from Exeter the highway shrank to winding lanes sunken between ancient hedgerows that make you feel as if you are literally driving down into the stony British soil.

The deeper in the country I drove, the smaller the lanes became until I was sliding down a one lane rabbit run just wide enough for a small car to navigate between earthen embankments that framed a narrow strip of sky. I emerged at the very humble-looking resort town of Budleigh Salterton, where the English Channel swells up against long beaches of rounded stones in the pastel shades of Easter eggs. When I parked the car and stepped out, I nearly fell to the ground, overcome with emotion – whether from setting my feet on this storied earth after a long approach or from surviving the short left-handed drive, I’m not sure.

Budleigh Salterton is a small town of shops and beachy houses that lets onto a pair of smaller villages, Otterton and East Budleigh, tucked a few miles further inland. (The fact that West Budleigh is dozens of miles away in the North of Devon is a local joke.) It was from these little coastal villages that my ancestor Roger Conant had flung himself in a cramped vessel four hundred years ago to become one of the first English settlers of the quote unquote New World.

I found my way to the King’s Arms Inn in Otterton, a well-touristed remnant of sturdy whitewashed cob houses plastered and thatched in the Devonshire style, just as they were centuries ago. The lanky fellow who registered guests at the Inn appeared surprised to have an American tourist come through the door in the off-season dark of November.

“Come to see the beaver?” he asked me.

I shook my head. “The beaver?” I asked.

“Sorry,” he said. “I assumed you were a naturalist, come to see the beaver.”

He explained that thanks to the work of local ecologists, beavers had returned to the Otter River estuary after a 500-year absence. In fact they’d been absent not just from the marshes of Devon, but from the British Isles altogether. So the beaver’s return to this bosky haunt in the quaint English countryside was national news. And I’d arrived not long after.

In the morning I left the Inn and walked through the village streets shivering in the milkteeth of winter. The sun-struck sparks on the lime whitewash of the cob houses flashed as if each house were constructed of freshly packed snow. I found my way to an old mill built over a narrow stretch of the river, and from there to an old Saxon-built stone bridge from where the landscape widened out in a panorama. Below the bridge a path meandered through sheep pastures and hillocks along the river that over the course of a mile or two widens into a tidal marsh and then yawns out flat and muddy and spills into the roiling Atlantic.

Devon is famous for walkers – mystics, poets and old men who journey there to walk the fabled ley lines; trekkers who hike the ochre cliffs of the Jurassic coast seeking fossils; history buffs seeking out the ancient iron age hillforts sculpted into the landscape by tribal people long ago. I was there to walk, too, with the idea that just walking through this landscape where my ancestor had trod would perhaps jostle free something centuries old that would somehow illuminate everything around me.

Soaked in a chill fog, the path traveled over little hills topped with lean, whispy scotch pines and ancient sycamores and greened with wild nettles and blackberry, bracken fern and spiked holly bushes. From the salt marshes of southern New England where I grew up I recognized the winter plants and the diffuse light and the skittering water birds, the purple-green mud that reflects the sky and the thick, nose-clogging salt smell of low-tide. The estuary felt hauntingly familiar. It was a Saturday morning and I was joined on the trail by dog walkers, bird watchers, and the occasional muttering eccentric looking out among the reeds that poked from the muddy shallows. More than once I was asked if I were looking for the beaver. The familiarity of the damp British earth and all the excitement about the beaver gave me the feeling that somehow the beaver’s return and my own were part of the same prophetic event.

This is a place people have inhabited for a long time – before the British there were the Saxons, the Angles, the Romans, the Celts, and for millennia before that, the Dumnonii, a tribe of iron age, stone age, old age people. All of these people inscribed their stories in the land, and the land inscribed its stories in them. “There is hardly a copse, stretch of lane or fecund outcrop that lacks a name and a story,” writes the wily storyteller Martin Shaw, who lives just over the River Exe at the edge of the wild heath called Dartmoor. “Most of the tors,” Shaw writes of the outcrops and standing stones that dot the moor, “were originally people.”

But the tales embedded in a landscape don’t give themselves up in a weekend, and I had set foot in the Otter River estuary and the winding lanes of East Budleigh for just long enough to get a noseful of earth, to have a few conversations, and to jot down some notes on the stories that did appear. Vikings had settled here and culled salt from ancient salt pans they’d carved into the rocks; spices and Turkish jewels were smuggled in by boat from France and hidden in the false rooves of local homes. And then there were the religious wars: an uprising of Catholics in the 16th century had been massacred along the River Exe by the troops of Henry VIII for refusing to pray in the common tongue. A century later an uprising of radical Dissenters demanded that each local church should govern itself and that a man’s relation with God was not an affair for Kings and Bishops to oversee. A young Roger Conant was driven by piety to join the reformers.

The Dissenters gathered in congregations to resist the crown and the Church of England. When their congregations came under attack, they teamed up with a new breed of merchant adventurers and set out for uncharted lands to plant their faith and reap their fortune. The new religion that threw England into chaos in the seventeenth century conjoined with an emergent seafaring mercantilism would send my ancestor across the ocean, one of a million sparks that, through no intention of their own, would set the New World aflame for centuries.

What did it take for a young man, his wife and their young child to launch out across the dark swollen sea to a land empty of all comforts and inhabited by a people they saw as monstrous, heathen savages? I like to think it was something deeper even than religion and politics – some old Celtic blood that drove Conant to seek out mysteries across the western waters. But that may be sheer fantasy. Was Conant a marauding ideologue driven by religious dogma like the famous Puritan Myles Standish, with whom he fought on the bluffs at Rockport Massachusetts? Or was he a gentle soul with a fascination for the ‘noble savage,’ like the iconoclast Thomas Morton, who’d founded Merrymount, the ill-fated egalitarian commune north of Boston whose destruction was carried out by the Puritans of Plymouth and Salem. It seems he must have been some of both, or something else entirely; whatever the case, he was a man of vision and boldness thoroughly in service to a higher power.

But trying to divine the intentions of a man centuries gone is likely to have as much success as turning the granite tors of Dartmoor back into living flesh. What is undeniable is that the adventure of the English Dissenters was a seed of what became, far beyond their own reckoning, one of the most awful episodes the world has known: a stone thrown in the pond of time, whose ripples are genocide.

**

It would make for a great comedy sketch: William Bradford and the men of Plymouth company make land in 1620, hungry and afraid. At first they encounter no people on these wild shores, just “isles planted with corn, groves, mulberries, savage gardens and good harbors.” After some days of striking out around the land, they find fields and “new stubble, of which [the Indians] had gotten corn this year, and many walnut trees full of nuts, and a great store of strawberries, and some vines,” and then sandy pits in the earth filled with earthen pots, “a bow and, as we thought, arrows, but they were rotten…”

They recognized these pits to be both graves and food stores. And what did they do?

“They found two of the Indians’ houses covered with mats, and some of their implements in them; but the people had run away. They also found corn, and beans of various colors. Those they brought away, intending to give them full satisfaction when they should meet with any of them.”

The Wampanoags and Massachusetts and Naragansetts had been devastated by disease just before the pilgrims landed; when the pilgrims arrived, the Indians, so-called, were vastly diminished, hungry and afraid. And the very first thing the pilgrim fathers did was to dig out and make off with the natives’ food stores.

Bradford justifies the action when he notes that six months later the natives “came and made their peace and full satisfaction was given by the settlers to those whose corn they had taken.”

By “satisfaction,” Bradford suggests that the pilgrims repaid the Indians’ corn. But the pilgrims, who’d never seen, let alone grown, corn, could hardly have produced a crop in six months to pay back what they’d taken. And even if Bradford’s tale is true, what kind of peace was established by the paying of the corn-debt to a hungry people? From that ignoble beginning, the settlers went on to incur more debt – blood debt – through centuries of brutal plunder and conquest.

The pilgrim fathers, we’re told, were steadfast, possessed of courage, humility, vision, piety, and a fortitude that is at once human and superhuman. Belief in their sturdy character underpins the notion that God Himself opened the New World to them, to sow and harvest and to bring under their dominion, because of their fortitude, their courage, their devotion.

To the natives they must’ve seemed like hostile, frightened, desperate savages.

Conant wouldn’t arrive until two years after Bradford’s initial corn-thieving incident, and his band, which formed the Massachusetts Bay Colony, had, it seems, a somewhat different ethics from the Plymouth Colony. So I don’t know if my ancestor shared William Bradford’s sense that “these savage barbarians when they met us were readier to fill our sides with arrows than otherwise!”

All of the accounts I find of Conant tell of a fair-minded, kind and gentle man, but relations of the early American colonies are notoriously untrustworthy. Even a cursory reading of Bradford’s history of Plymouth Plantation makes it clear that Bradford, whose writings serve as the foundational story of the English settlement, presciently took as his task the establishment of a narrative that would serve to justify the violence that would come later.

Just like the Spanish conquest of the “Indies” a century before, the English settlement of New England was driven both by religious ideology and by economic adventurism. Conant’s trade as a fisherman made him a hand in the economic engine of the North Atlantic – the limitless cod fisheries of the Grand Banks that stretched from Newfoundland south almost to Boston. The expansionist economics of the nascent British empire, as much as anything else, brought him to what became Massachusetts three years after William Bradford’s band of pilgrims had made their storied landing at Plymouth Rock. Hired by a wealthy businessman to lead an expedition to New England, Conant made the sea journey with his wife, brother, and young daughter. They’d sailed from Devon – from Exmouth or Plymouth or Dartmouth – on a ship that carried both pious dissenters fleeing the English Church and merchant adventurers seeking fortune, as well as the indentured servants who worked for them both.

There was nothing peaceful about the pilgrims’ arrival. In the years just prior to their landing the Wampanoags and Narragansetts had been decimated by disease carried by other Europeans who’d come to fish the cod and trap the beaver. By the time the Mayflower arrived, the natives’ villages lay empty, their fields abandoned. The Mayflower party themselves arrived ridden with pestilence, starvation, dissension and disease. Conant’s party a few years later most likely arrived in a similar state.

The relative peace of 1620 was short-lived. The natives had good reason to believe that everything the English touched was marked by death and disease. By 1637, the Pequots to the south began to rebel (Bradford called them “unruly”) and the settlers made war upon them and slaughtered hundreds – a massacre that the Plymouth colonists came to celebrate with a great feast day that may be the origin of our Thanksgiving. Roger Conant was 45 years old that year. He could not have known that the Pequot War, which began as an effort by the Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth Colonies to establish a trading post on the Connecticut River Valley and ended with the complete extermination of the Pequots as a people, would become the archetype for every brazen assault on native peoples across North America for three centuries to come.

By the 1670’s – a generation later, after thousands more settlers had arrived – the Narragansetts, Massachusetts and Wampanoags had ample evidence that the English planned to exterminate them too, and they launched an open rebellion. The settlers responded with an ever-escalating war that bloodied the salt marshes and clotted the estuaries with corpses. Known to the settlers as King Phillip’s War and as Metacom’s War to the natives, the killing almost erased both the settlers and the Wampanoags from this continent.

By other names, the same war continues to this day.

**
I was welcomed at East Budleigh by a small group of local history enthusiasts. They’d met other Conants over the years, and had stories and documents and a warmth for sharing them that in my heightened mindset I found wonderful, almost miraculous. Unsurprisingly, they were all on the older side, retirees who met for lunch from time to time at the Sir Walter Raleigh Pub at the heart of the village. (Sir Walter Raleigh, the benighted pirate who established the Virginia colony and famously taught Queen Elizabeth the habit of smoking tobacco, had been East Budleigh’s other, more famous resident.)

One of my hosts was a Dutch woman who had come to inhabit the village with her British husband, now deceased. Her name was Hanneke Coates. As it happened, she lived quite close to Sir Walter Raleigh’s house, and was a docent and keeper of artifacts at the local church, as well as an illustrator and a proud amateur historian. She must have been close to seventy years old, and was kind, and spry, with an easy smile, and short. In her stature she represented an older generation of Dutch, unlike the Dutch people of today who are on average the tallest people in the world.

East Budleigh is a very small village: two pubs, a shop, a school, and in the center of town, just up the small inclined high street from the Sir Walter Raleigh Pub, the All Saints Church stands over it all. Hanneke and her friends bought me lunch at the pub and walked me to the church, where she led me and the others on a private tour. She was fascinated by the church, and rightly so. Sir Walter Raleigh’s step-mother was buried beneath the flagstones and his portrait hung in the nave. There were angels in the architecture and a lone green man, the vegetable-faced wild god of old, carved in a cornice.

Hanneke was most delighted by the pew-ends: each wooden pew, a half millennium old, belonged to a family dating to the sixteenth century, and they had at their ends oaken slabs carved with stories and symbols. Some of the pew ends were the coats of arms of the gentry; some were folk images of the trades: a man wielding sheep shears, a woman roasting a chicken. Some were carvings of mythical creatures and foliage: dragon-like fish that may have been visited upon by a sailor fishing the Grand Banks; a Turk with a long mustache and his hair wrapped in a turban; a man with thick lips holding a plant that might have been Indian corn or, less likely, a banana.

The Conant family pew was there, ancient polished red oak, with a water serpent entwined beneath a shield and a stag standing, passant. I recalled my father tracing the same stag at our kitchen table some time long ago; seeing the image again in its ancient setting tied the present to the past in a way that feels deeply mysterious.

The pew-end that most fascinated Hanneke was the one she called “the red Indian.” It was a man’s head in striking profile with sharp eyes and a pronounced nose and cheeks, a long braid and a crown of leaves, or feathers. It wouldn’t have been out of place set outside an American cigar store. “It’s the absolute likeness of a red Indian, wouldn’t you agree?” she enthused. I did agree, though was compelled to tell her that I knew people with similar features who, this far into the 21st century, would not appreciate being called “red Indians.”

Another of my hosts, Michael Downes, a retired French teacher and lay historian, recounted the local debate around this pew-end: was the image a red Indian, or was it a unique aspect of England’s pagan Green Man? A pamphlet he wrote links the face to the “‘wodewose’ or ‘wildman of the woods,’ a figure often known as a Green Man with ancient links to natural vegetative deities in cultures from earliest times in places around the world.” East Budleigh may not be unique among British villages in its plethora of pamphleteers, and another pamphlet suggests that the carvers were “influenced by the threatening mythical creatures of the Dark Ages, including such examples as the wodewose and boggarts or malevolent spirits of the fields.”

In an essay on the sacred groves of Devon, British naturalist Roger Deakin visits with the Green Man, echoing older thinkers like John Ruskin in calling him “both playful and terrible”: “if the Green Man often looks deathly at the same time as overflowing with life, that is because paradox is his very nature.”

And so in this half-millenia old church pew you have a double paradox – a figure that may be a spirit native to the local fields and woodlands or may be an exotic from the Newe Worlde introduced at the time of Walter Raleigh; and he may be “malevolent” as the British pamphleteer says, or “savage” as William Bradford would say – or he may be “playful,” as Ruskin and Roger Deakin have it. Whatever the case, he is a spirit that in his mystical and chthonic nature is antithetical to church doctrine, but which remains fully present carved in granite and oak in churches across England.

                                                                        ***

Such paradox is helpful in thinking about my own ancestral boggart, the Puritan Roger Conant. Figures like the Green Man and the red Indian are never one dimensional – and thinking them so diminishes us even as it pushes them farther into oblivion where they are more likely to become malevolent ghosts who haunt us than to become the instructors or guides we need them to be.

They are, after all, our ancestors, and we should learn from them, not be haunted by them.

Over two afternoons, Hanneke showed me the historic sights of East Budleigh. She walked me past Vicar’s Mead, a group of sturdy whitewashed buildings where Conant would have received his education in Latin, and down a country lane flanked by pollard sycamores and fields in corn stubble to Hayes Barton, the plantation where Sir Walter Raleigh was born in a rustic cob farmhouse whose original glass windows remain intact. Hanneke more than indulged me, enjoying the game of imagining what these lanes would have looked like in the days when Walter Raleigh was a young man of great ambition and Roger Conant a young boy who would have admired him, and eventually sailed in his wake to America.

As we walked into the early darkness of the descending winter evenings, Hanneke’s own story began to reveal itself. As a young child, I learned, she’d survived a Japanese concentration camp in what was then the Dutch East Indies during World War II. I was struck by this, because my father served with the U.S. Marines in the Pacific in 1945, and so had some connection to Hanneke’s story, remote as it was from this Devonshire village. When allied forces liberated the East Indies, they sent the young Dutch girl back to Europe where she would eventually meet her British husband and, later in life, move here. Somehow it was as if the Mobius strip of time had entwined my fate with that of Hanneke Coates, as we strolled the cobbled lanes of little Budleigh.

“I was very little, 4, 5 years old, and we were moved from one camp to another,” she told me. “The camps were barbed wire prisons set up to intern European civilians, mainly Dutch, as ‘Guests of the Emperor’.  Those of us who ended up there experienced what can only be called hell on earth.”
“The most lasting effect,” she said as we walked the quiet lanes, “was the relentless humiliation the Japanese inflicted on us. We were day and night screamed at and publicly disgraced. We had our hair hacked off with blunt knives and we were lashed with long whips. Most died. I was one of the lucky ones.”
Hanneke, I discovered, had recently returned from a peacemaking visit to Japan, and had become something of a celebrity, touring England to speak about her experience. “For my whole life, when I heard Japanese voices, the hairs would stand up on the nape of my neck. I hated them. And then, with all the wars I saw over the course of my lifetime, I realized it wasn’t the Japanese. It was any young men in any nation on earth, whipped up into hatred by war. It’s taken a long time, but I’ve finally forgiven them.”
***
The Wampanoag, the people of the dawn lands, have been mostly extinguished, though some remain and are reviving their language and culture on Massachusetts’ north shore. Most U.S. Americans know the word Wampanoag, if at all, from the recklessly untrue story of the first Thanksgiving. They themselves, I learned from Haartman Deetz, a Wampanoag man active in their cultural revival, would have celebrated thirteen thanksgivings – one at each full moon as the earth offered up a different gift. There was the herring thanksgiving, when the estuaries ran thick with herring to fill their nets and their stores for a full year. What was left they returned to the earth to feed the summer corn. There was the strawberry thanksgiving, when they feasted on strawberries in every way you can imagine; there was the cranberry thanksgiving, and the pumpkin thanksgiving, and the green corn thanksgiving, and the thanksgiving for the return of the geese.

When the goose migrates she brings the seasons in her wake. When the sky is festooned with great miles’ long ribbons of geese flying south, their raucous shouting and fluid symmetry in flight, they bring the winter winds at their tail. When they return north the warm balm of summer pushes them along. In the thanksgiving moon of spring, the Wampanoag would shower the geese with offerings of beads ground and polished from the shells of white and purple quahog clams. The geese might have gobbled up the beads as food to supply their gizzards with grit. These same shell beads, called Wampum, were strung on thick belts that told the peoples’ stories in ceremony, and were brought as messages to the neighboring Narragansetts, Pequods, Wabanaki and Quinipiac. Later the Dutch and English merchants turned the Wampum into money, and it was no longer given in offering to the geese. Sometime after that, the great ribbons of geese no longer filled the sky, as the cod no longer roil the sea.

It is the nature of empire to erase all memory of the conquered until they are safely stowed away beneath the earth. Another imperial practice is to erect monuments to the conquerors to keep the ghosts of resistance – and the resistance of ghosts? – at bay. In Salem Massachusetts, a lofty greened copper statue of the windswept pilgrim father Roger Conant stands on the town Common, keeping the ghosts at bay. My father would have told me about the statue, and may even have taken me to see it sometime in my early childhood: the childhood memory is fuzzy, if a memory at all.

So the first time I know for a fact that I laid eyes on my ancestor, was during college, when I took the train from Boston up to Salem to visit the Roger Conant statue. It must have been a Saturday or Sunday in autumn, in the mid-nineteen eighties.

I arrived early in the day on the train from North Station, Boston. I was in the bloom of my late teenage liberation, having left home maybe a year or two before, and in order to sanctify my adolescent pilgrimage to meet my ancestor I’d brought with me a small plastic bag of psilocybin mushrooms. (My first experience with psylocibin had imbued me with the profound impression that all human history and all human knowledge were available to me in my own mind, an epiphany of James Joycean majesty that has never fully worn off, though it has dulled around the edges a bit. Maybe you know the feeling?)

Arriving in Salem, I bought a cup of Lipton tea at a corner market and drank it as I chewed down the mushrooms, their twisted blue stems tough and bitter as boiled leather as I walked toward the center of town. The statue stands in a broad traffic circle between Salem Common, the town’s central park, and the Salem Witch Museum, the town’s principal tourist attraction. Larger than life-size and mounted on an uncarved granite boulder, the figure of a weathered patriarch with blowing cape and high pilgrim hat is easily mistaken for a witch himself – a coincidence that seems almost intentional.

While I must have spent hours tripping around Salem that day – perhaps absently touring the Witch Museum and Hawthorne’s House of Seven Gables and sitting on the Common smoking cigarettes and writing in my journal – the memory that is etched into me is of a moment when, having climbed over the low iron fence enclosing the statue from the street, I mounted the boulder on which the statue stood. I must have been fully in the mushrooms’ power because at a certain moment I was pressed full body against the cold form looking up into Conant’s copper face with its pronounced Gallic nose, its strong chin, its weathered cheeks and deep brow, enraptured by the sense that this man from four centuries ago bore the precise image of my father, who was then beginning the decade-long descent into the illness that would eventually kill him. Just at the height of my psychedelic communion with my Puritan ancestor, a police cruiser slipped into the traffic roundabout and into my awareness, causing me to climb around the statue in a clownish effort to hide in plain sight.

Suddenly in the broad daylight of a Saturday afternoon in the busiest intersection in town, I was high on mushrooms acting like a character in a Pink Panther cartoon. Thanks to a small dose of luck and a large dose of white boy’s privilege the police didn’t notice me and I climbed down and slunk out from the intersection, the vision of Conant’s stern wind-burned face etched into me.

When I revisit that day, I imagine my hijinks as an attempt to both get close to my ancestor and to mock him. With the mushrooms, of which no Puritan would approve (with the possible exception of the apostate Thomas Morton of Merrymount), I was reaching for an effect something like that caused by the ergot of rye that drove the young women of Salem mad in the winter of 1692, leading to the charges of witchcraft. (It is another curious trait of the imperial mindset that it will erect a museum to the victims of its excesses, centuries after the fact.) In this sense my first visit to the Roger Conant statue in Salem was an early attempt to foray into the Otherworld and see what was there.

I’ve since had numerous glimpses of the Otherworld, many guided by native shamans using native plants: I’ve drunk ayahuasca and tobacco juice with Kichwa shamans in the Amazon; chewed Holy peyote in the vast, spiny desert of northern Mexico; trekked across thundering Andean waterfalls on the juice of the San Pedro cactus. In these journeys I met tiny green men with the bulging eyes of frogs whose sting set my spinal cord aflame; I rode astride a flying serpent that devoured Manhattan; I sang all night to the Pastaza River and crawled through a teeming jungle swamp at dawn. But I believe I’ve never had a vision as enduring as the close-up of my English forebear’s rough, pointed face beaten out of green copper, weathered by a century of Nor’easters, and looking for all the world like my dying father.

“All the wounded of Europe sail west,” writes Martin Shaw, describing the old belief that when you sailed west you sailed into the Otherworld. “It’s where they go to dream and to die.” In some sense, I’ve come to believe, Conant’s journey west across the sea to a fateful encounter with the Wampanoag, the People of the Dawn Lands, was also a reaching down into the depths of his peoples’ old beliefs, the mythic journey across the waters to the land the Irish call Tir Na Nogh, to Atlantis, to the Islands of the Sun. This is not the usual way the Pilgrim fathers’ story is told, but weren’t they, after all, religious seekers, enraptured by a myth of a new land given unto them by God, across the ocean to the west?

Maybe it’s the hallucinogens talking… but if I’m any indication, Conant’s people have continued journeying west ever since.

***

In every churchyard in England there is a yew tree. They say the yew that looks over the Sir Walter Raleigh Pub from the yard of All Saints Church in East Budleigh is as old as the church itself – over a millenia. There’s nothing about its size that tells you this. It’s the shagged gray bark drawn over its boney trunk and the needles like the iron chin hairs of dwarves that give the tree the appearance of an old winter god. The yew withstands centuries of bitter wind, nourished and made mighty by the cold and the damp. They say the yew – an Otherworld tree if ever there was one – lives for millennia because it simply doesn’t know about dying.

Sometime in the ninth century human hands had planted the yew at All Saints Church. Seven hundred years later, Roger Conant, a boy in breeches, would have passed under its branches every Sabbath until he left to apprentice with a fish salter in London. One evening in Budleigh I sat on the churchyard wall under a cold misty rain, swinging my feet out into the air and watching the sky grow dark over the Scotch pines on the hills around, trying in some way to inhabit the body of this boy before he brought me to America. In a sense this visit to Budleigh was a continuation of my Otherworld journeys. But this time the journey, without the assistance of entheogenic plants, was to go back across the ocean and down into time, to delve toward my origins.

“Connection to where we come from is starting to matter,” Martin Shaw writes. From popular products like Ancestry.com and mail-in DNA tests to the arguably self-indulgent impulses like my own to journey to Budleigh, you could say genealogy is in fashion. Our perennial alienation from our history, from the land, from the bedrock of stories that form our bones, is clearly breeding a hunger for our origins.

But genealogy is a fraught and hazardous undertaking. Depending on how you use it, such delving back can serve to shore up or tear down family mythologies, ethnic histories, racial categories and the privilege or pride or dignity or shame that come with. It can indulge an irrelevant and inflated personal narcissism, or guide us in interpreting history in ways that are fundamentally political, and purposeful; it can breed revenge fantasies as much as reckoning, can drive an insular monomania or deliver personal communion and collective liberation. A tracing of genealogy can serve to aggrandize a bloodline by tracing it to some imagined source where it runs “pure,” or contrarily, when the route traced goes back further than any notion of purity can survive, it can undo the intergenerational wounds wrought by that presumptive notion of purity.

I don’t believe I’m burdened by any such notions of purity. Nevertheless, I’ve spent fascinated hours tracing the origins of my family name – an activity that feels both vitally important and absurdly self-indulgent – a form of navel-gazing that verges on the sort of pride my ancestor might have reckoned a sin. From what I gather the Conant name is either the Breton form of the old Celtic word Conn, meaning “mighty,” related to the Germanic tribal word that comes down to us as Koenig, king; or it’s of Scottish origin going back the Picts – the indigenous peoples of ancient Britain – and means “little hound.” Both are good, but the Breton seems more likely, as many Breton Huguenots – French Protestants – fled France for Devon in the century preceding Roger’s birth, and settled precisely in the area between Exeter in the north and Plymouth in the south.

If taken with a reasonable lightness, scanning our genealogy can be a not-so-complicated effort to recover memory of how we became what we are, and to pick back up some of what was lost along the way. We should know that most of what we might take for personal landmarks on the trail are the remnants of larger movements of earth, landslides that provide cover for deeper veins of truth.

In my case, my immediate family, a suburban middle class white family, had failed massively in giving me any sense of where I – where we – came from. Like most white US Americans, my primary inheritance has been the ease and privilege of forgetting: forgetting who I was, and where I came from, and why, and of the consequences of my peoples’ sea journey here centuries ago and of what came after. It comes also with the privilege of never having to inquire where other people have come from, or why, be it through the Middle Passage or the Treaty of Guadelupe Hidalgo or the Vietnam War or the Contra War or the Gulf Wars, through slavery or starvation or mere self-preservation. The willful amnesia of institutionalized whiteness is a privilege that sooner or later turns to grief, and loss, and even to hopelessness and rage. I have no doubt that this forgetting is the driver of so much suicide, so much depression, so much shame and anger and isolation – and also, in the drive to consume and forget, the driver of so much economic activity that has drawn the world into a maelstrom of apocalyptic destruction.

So the discovery in the churchyard at East Budleigh of a yew tree old enough to have sheltered my ancestor from a drizzling rain in the seventeenth century was, for me, a small gesture of homecoming.

****

Sometime in the late 1990’s during a summer teaching job in Boston, I returned to Salem, without the benefit of hallucinogenic mushrooms. This time I visited Old Salem Village which I’d either not seen on my first visit, or if I had, the memory vanished in the fog of time. Old Salem Village is no village, but a reconstructed historical site built to attract tourists, right on the place that the Wampanoags called Naumkeag. The spot is right where Conant arrived in 1623 and built first a wigwam style house and then a proper English timber frame home. Though he was a salter of fish by trade, he was also a planter, and was among the first Englishmen to plant gardens of Indian corn, winter squashes, and tobacco. After establishing the colony, Conant was very quickly shuffled out of Salem by the merchant men who took it over – that’s another story for another time – but for centuries after his descendants lived mostly within a few leagues of that place.

I too grew up nearby, and within a few hundred miles of where both my mother and my father’s people landed when they hit America – both places with Indian names: Manhattan and Massachusetts. But so little of their ancestral cultures remain, I might’ve been raised on the moon.

And it was a full decade after dropping in as a tourist to Old Salem Village that I visited East Budleigh. These occasional visits, once a decade, it seems to me, are gestures in an exploration of a fundamental question: how to braid oneself to history in a way that communes us with our ancestral responsibilities – a way that makes us accountable for the acts of our relations without driving us to revenge, or to self-hate, or to suicide. Somehow, I believe, if we can braid ourselves to our ancestry we can braid ourselves back into the living world from which we’ve been so violently torn.

Like so many of us, I am at large on the face of the earth, a generational vagrant, set adrift for good when Conant sailed away from Devon in 1623, or a few generations earlier perhaps, when his forebears sailed from Bretagne or wherever it was they had last set roots. And so I know that whatever was to be found in the Devonshire earth, would be buried too deep for me to sniff out on a weekend junket.

Martin Shaw tells the story of a visitor to Devon’s Dartmoor who gets himself killed for trying to excavate a mystic treasure. The visitor learns in passing a bit of local lore: legend has it that any man who proves able to burgle an ancient set of sheep shears from a grave high in the crags above the moors, to bathe the shears in a deepwater creek at midnight until the waters run bloody, and then, in the darkest hours of the night, to approach a circle of stones that turns back into a bleating, grazing flock of sheep on the warm night of midsummer, and shear the sheep, will find the fleecings turned to gold by morning. The visitor is entranced by the tale and makes a go of it, but he makes a few slovenly mistakes – signposts to the spirits that he’s not up to the task – and he ends up dead, crushed beneath a dolmen. The locals shake their heads and things go on as before.

I too am a visitor, attempting to sheer fleece of gold from dead stones by stepping into the twilight of the ancestors – but I’ve lived long enough to know the limits of what can be accomplished in a brief visit, and I’m careful not to take what doesn’t belong to me. Unlike the treasure seeker in Shaw’s Devon tale, I’m not willing to go all the way without a guide. And fifty years into my time on earth, no guide has yet appeared.

In my Amazonian vision quests I was guided by shamans – men who had made the journey many times and were anointed with the task of taking others along to the Otherworld. These journeys were also father-journeys – lone descents into remote jungles guided by men who took me as a son, fed me medicine, sang to me, stroked my back as I vomited on the floors of their huts – and so they partook of the same flavor as my ancestral searchings.

My own father did try to impart to me something of my blood history – an early childhood visit to Salem, a discussion of the medieval family crest, any number of fatherly attempts to talk that I rejected at the time and have long since forgotten – but for the most part he was a white American man of his time: remote to the point of absence. No doubt he was gravely wounded by his war experiences and by returning to a culture unable to engage in the healing that such wounds demand.  And I was a typical American youth of my own time: rebellious and dismissive and short of attention and ready to move on. My relationship with him left me little but a sense of loss, and a grief that I have come to recognize as the grief of being a man.

Strange, then that I was guided around East Budleigh by a tiny old woman who was a victim of the same war as my father, but who had managed to live long enough to see her wounds mostly healed.

***

England in Conant’s time was in upheaval, and nowhere more so than in the far-off corner of Devon and Cornwall. In 1549, a generation before Roger Conant’s birth at East Budleigh, 600 Devonshire and Cornish rebels were cut down at a river crossing when they refused to adopt the prayerbook of the reformed Church of England. Why?

Perhaps they wanted to retain the down country ways that flowed of old in their Saxon and Celtic blood, that were perhaps even coded into the Catholic liturgies, just as pagan green men were sculpted into the church architecture. It was after all the Catholic monks who’d best preserved the lore and languages of the Devonians and Cornish, as they’d done with the druidic religion in Ireland. Or perhaps they couldn’t stomach the monarchy with its new claim on God and its claim on the forests and the harvest of the fields; or perhaps for all of these reasons. The country had been riven over this for a hundred years, and would be riven for a hundred years more. If you dissented from the Monarchy and the Anglican Church, it was a good time to get out. And anywhere you went would be a New World.

From there a long history unwinds, that we know as the history of the United States of America – a history of violence and invention, a colonial expansion that began with a few pilgrims and ended in world domination. Roger Conant had died by the 1670’s as Metacom’s War threatened to push the colonists off the continent altogether. It’s not known what role Conant and his children played in that war, or in the Pequot War. Nor is it known by this writer what role Conant’s children might have played in the Salem Witch Trials of the 1690’s, a century after Conant’s birth, when the great European femicide infected Massachusetts. The witch trials that have cast a shadow over Salem for centuries were also a killing off of the pagan, womyn-centered earth religions of the past. As historian Sylvia Federici wrote, the destruction of female knowledge, female values, and female power that the Calvinists found so threatening was a pre-requisite for the establishment of North Atlantic imperial capitalism. (Curiously, the last execution of witches in England took place in Exeter just a few years before the infamous events in Salem; and a century earlier, a suspected witch had been burned not a mile from the King’s Arms Inn in Otterton, at the crossroads with sleepy little East Budleigh.)

A small anecdote: the morning I left London for Budleigh everything was running behind. I tried to get a subway to Paddington Station, but the trains were suddenly shut down. Breathless from running through the Baker Street tube station, I flagged down one of those black London cabs they call a Hackney carriage and asked the driver to get me to Paddington Station as fast as he could.

“Where you off to?” the cabbie asked me with a friendly cockney lilt.
“Uh, Exeter, in Devon.”
“What you doin’ ‘air?” he inquired.
Still catching my breath, I said, “I’m from America, and I’m tracking down my ancestry in Devon.”
“Oh yeah? Very good,” he said. “What year’d they go to America?”
“1623.”
“1623? Must’a been slaves. Indentured slaves.”
Fascinating. “Why do you say that?”
“Loads a slaves shipped off to America at ‘at time.”
I told him, as it happened, that I knew a few details, and my ancestors were not shipped as slaves.
“Well, den dey were de masters an’ dey ‘ad slaves wid’ ‘em,” he said.

And so they did, though it’s near impossible to find anything on it in the history books. Bradford’s On Plymouth Plantation does mention that the Mayflower pilgrims brought “servants,” and it’s well known that the first centuries of English colonization were undertaken by Scots-Irish enslaved and press-ganged by the British. Historian Peter Linebaugh in The Many Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic tells stories of slave uprisings, mutinies, and rebellions that posed the alternative to the westward expansion of capital during those years, and elaborates how the enslavement of poor Brits, Scots, and Irish was slowly replaced by Africans, as the British government found reason to prevent any unholy alliances between the indentured Irish and the Africans being hauled in chains across the Atlantic in ever greater numbers. It’s this history that has trained us, by and large, to think of the African chattel as “slaves” while the whites who came in forced labor were dignified as “servants.” So there was something about getting the unbridled truth from a London cabbie – the ease with which he informed the American tourist who stepped into his Hackney that he was the descendant either of slaves or of slave owners – that, like the return of the mythical Otter River beaver, gave an edge of historical drama to my humble three day junket into deepest Devon, England.


***
I no longer disdain the memory of Roger Conant, as I did in my twenties, in my thirties, into my forties. I revisit my psychedelic adventure with his statue in Salem and see a private act of rebellion tinged with a hint of contempt for Conant’s religion, for his status as a patriarch, for the fact that he very much did look like my own remote and often bloodless father, and for the centuries of holocaust that followed his arrival. That’s all perfectly reasonable: each of these aspects is a powerful fact for a young man to confront – combined, they are all but unforgivable. But an older man, having confronted each of these aspects, comes to see a statue of beaten copper, hollow and old, stuck with false grandeur in a suburban traffic circle. And it is, after all, good to keep memory alive.

A memory of my father comes to me: each summer for a few years of my childhood he would host a New England clam bake in our backyard. Neighbors and friends would gather in the swampy yard behind our Connecticut clapboard house or on the back deck (years later that deck would collapse under the weight of neglect as the family itself collapsed), and would enjoy the harvests of high summer: quahog clams, lobster, steamers and mussels steamed in a seaweed-lined pit in the ground, steamed corn on the cob, hot dogs off the grill. My memories of these parties are almost magical: my father the beneficent patriarch, my mother laughing with a drink and a cigarette perched in her hands, my friends and I chasing each other laughing through the tall grass. But the feelings there were obliterated by what came next: my father’s years of smoking and quiet anguish that ultimately took him, my mother’s alcoholism that bloomed into early dementia, the house fallen into disrepair and rot as if reclaimed by the swamp. I grew up and headed west, chasing a taste for the Otherworld.

The younger man, facing such anguish, decides he needs to reject it. The older man, returning through the life events driven by this rejection, decides he needs to examine it. Such an examination, taken fully on, leads through the father to the ancestors. If we can braid ourselves to our ancestry we can braid ourselves back into the living world from which we’ve been so violently turned out.

Martin Shaw draws extreme importance to the place-ness of a story, as stories, he insists, are not exclusively of human creation, but emerge often from the wild forces of a local ecology, like bog-iron from a fen or the itchy color of lichen on a rock face. “It’s unlikely that a sixty-year old electrician from Budleigh Salterton will ever quite draw the resonance out of a Miwok story that a California native will.”

When I would scratch around my childhood yard with a shovel digging for artifacts, I often came upon old seashells and bits of burnt charcoal, which I attributed to the Indians that had lived here (and about whom I knew less than nothing, not even a tribal name). This is the most wonderful quality of childhood – the child sees shells from the cook-out tossed into the midden heap in summer, and when he uncovers them in winter he is able to conclude without a shadow of doubt that they are centuries old remains of tribal villages.

***
With only 48 hours to pass in South Devon, after a second morning hoping in vain to spot the famous Otter River beaver, I decided to go a bit further afield and down into history. I squeezed back into my right-side, left-hand vehicle and scanned a paper map for the nearest tumulus, or Neolithic hill-fort. The map was sprinkled with little topo circles that signify these ancient dwellings with names like Castle Dyke, Woodbury Castle, Farway Castle, and Blackbury Castle. I set off up the deep-dug warren of lanes where winter crows and jackdaws attacked the roadside field stubble and clustered in the ancient oaks above, picturing a rough-hewn rock fortress decorated in mist. What I found instead when I arrived at Woodbury Castle was a wooded park where high sloping earthen ramparts enclosed levelled ground, not a structure in sight. Archeologists have found the remains of “wood-henges” – circles of timber stakes driven deep into the ground to mark ritual space – and have envisioned the thatched wattle-and-daub buildings that would have composed dwellings. But to the casual visitor, the site is a lovely earthwork-in-the-woods where one can halt and listen for ghosts among the built-up ground, hear the wind whipping through the Scotch pines, and ponder.

How did a young man in the seventeenth century perceive these landscapes shaped by human hands five thousand years before? Or even, worshipping in 1610 in a church built by Saxon hands three centuries before the Normans conquered Britain, what perspective might Conant have had on the waves of invasions that had formed his own place? Or, assuming his people had just crossed over from Brittany within a generation or two, how did his French Celtic imagination couple with that of his adopted Devonian Celtic cousins?

The poet Robert Bly in his book Iron John gives a nod to “the memory culture that our ancestors lived in up till the time of writing.” Roger Conant, growing up in East Budleigh walking along the Otter River estuary to the Roman salt pans where he might have begun to learn his trade as a salter, would have lived in such a memory culture – a society where most learning and most communicating were done orally. There are preserves of some of what might’ve been spoken – Martin Shaw has captured some in writing, as have others – but most of it is gone, and unknowable.

It’s curious to consider the memory culture that may have existed in Conant’s time, and its relationship to the culture of books and writing that was evolving rapidly at the time. It was the moment of the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer – royal, imperial projects that put into English script stories and psalms that had previously been only spoken, from a Latin that was mastered only by the priestly caste and the elites. Not everyone agreed with these projects, and the conflict between orality and script was central to the religious wars that led the dissenters to flee. This was also the time of Shakespeare and Marlowe and Sir Walter Raleigh, whose sonnets Conant would have known. I like to imagine a young Roger Conant bucking Puritan mores to attend the Tempest, Shakespeare’s last play, staged at the Globe in London in 1621, in the years between Raleigh’s beheading at the Tower of London and Conant’s journey to Naumkeag.

I wonder, too, if in Conant’s blood ran some Celtic tribal memory, some primordial impulse to move and keep moving. For millennia the Celts, along with so many tribal peoples of old Europe, had been driven west, each group knocking into the next like billiard balls, or atoms, scattering tribes from the Danube to the Rhine to the Rhone to the Thames, each collision driving seeds into the local soil, and each collision driving other tribes onward, to the west. Amidst empires and religions, enslavement and war and conquest, but in the absence of electric neon digital information how much might a people’s memory have retained across these centuries?

On arrival in the land of the Massachusett and the Wampanoag Conant’s dissenters find a memory culture still intact and they hasten to destroy it. The only written accounts of the Wampanoags of Conant’s time and before are the records of William Bradford, Thomas Morton, Roger Williams (who even compiled a dictionary, A Key Into the Language of America, in 1643) and a few others, and they consist of these settlers’ observations. To my knowledge, we have nothing of the Wampanoags in their own voice and so another morsel of history is consigned to oblivion.

Neither is it possible to know what drove Conant, or any of them, to make their sea journey to the Otherworld of the West. Religious intolerance, political conflict, economic opportunity, divine will – it’s all in the mix. That the Pilgrims’ arrival catalyzed the catastrophe of genocide and colonization that would roil on for four centuries and more is all part of it. Certainly they are not blameless: their attitude and their religion dehumanized the native people, made them into “savages,” and their mission to wrest the wilderness from these savages made the settlers into murderers and mercenaries. Both their ideas and their actions were poison, and the poison has not yet ceased to do harm. And so I curse the pilgrim father in me – my inner Roger Conant with his stern, windblown cheeks and great Gallic nose and his alien ideas. And with the same breath I bless and forgive him so that he may rest once and for all, if such a thing is possible, in his traffic roundabout on Salem Common or his family pew in All Saints’ Church, there overlooking the Walter Raleigh Pub in East Budleigh, a few miles from where the last witches were burned and the River Otter quietly spreads across fields of pastel-colored pebbles out into the sea.

 © Jeff Conant 2019


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