Thursday, January 30, 2020

22. Another 400th - Gloucester, MA




The seals of the Massachusetts cities of Salem and Beverly

Salem in Massachusetts is not the only American city which is looking forward to celebrating the 400th anniversary of its founding in 1626. 

A short distance further north was the Bass River settlement, later to be named Beverly. Roger Conant and his family moved there a few years later, having been succeeded as Governor of Salem by John Endecott, a fellow Devonian. 

Beverly would be his last resting-place when he died at the grand age of 87, and it is the year 1626 which confirms on the city’s seal that it too will be celebrating its quatercentenary in 2026.   




North-east of Salem and Beverly is another community associated with the name of Roger Conant. This is the city of Gloucester, where they are already planning their 400th anniversary in 2023. In fact a public meeting took place at Gloucester City Hall on 27 April 2019 when local residents were invited to participate and contribute ideas.




Another meeting took place on 24 November later that year at the Gloucester Unitarian Universalist Church to focus on the community's first century – 1623-1722. The search is on for descendants of the early settlers to assist with the program. Contact Glou400outreach@gmail.com





We are delighted to welcome Gloucester resident Linn Doyle Parisi to the Conant 400 Facebook group 
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2603367279712361/, and impressed to learn that it was she who designed the Gloucester 400 logo that you see here. 
I found the story of the logo online:
‘The theme of the quadricentennial is Gloucester: Our People, Our Stories™. And, like the city itself, the Gloucester400 logo has a story of its own. The story begins back in 2013 when Ms. Parisi first began thinking about the city’s big anniversary and discussing it with friends and associates in the community. Like so much of Gloucester’s progress through the centuries, the final logo was the result of the collaboration between Gloucester newcomers and long-time residents alike.
“Before the planning for Gloucester400 began, I had read Gloucester Historical Timeline 1000-1999, by Mary Ray and Sarah Dunlap,” said Ms. Parisi. “Thinking about the waves of immigrants who settled in Gloucester over the centuries intrigued and inspired me. The image stuck with me as the town began to organize for our 400th-anniversary celebration. In my imagination, symbolic waves would be a prominent feature in the logo. I'm not an artist or a graphic designer but my dear friend, Linda Stockman, is. So I asked for her help to make my design come about."

Image credit:  Bobak Ha'Eri
In addition to Ms. Stockman’s help, Ms. Parisi received input from other members of the community who suggested adding an element that would evoke Gloucester’s renowned Fisherman’s Memorial, seen above. 
The resulting picture became her anonymous submission to the logo contest that integrates iconic imagery with a symbolic homage to Gloucester’s diversity and tradition of inclusion.
“My vision for our logo was to honor the generations of immigrants who built our city. The teachers, fishermen, artists, innovators -- all the citizens since 1623 have added their culture to make us who we are,” Ms. Parisi explained. "Each citizen and their family, past and present, owns their spot on Gloucester's 400-year timeline; and each has a story to tell and celebrate. I could not be more pleased that my entry was selected to represent our 400th anniversary.”’




In the late summer of 1623, as you can read in detail in Mary Ellen Lepionka’s account herea small group of fishermen arrived from England in a 50-ton fishing vessel called The Fellowship and proceeded to set up camp on Cape Ann. 

It was here that Roger Conant was asked by the Dorchester Company’s Rev John White to go and supervise the enterprise. And it was here at Cape Ann that his reputation for “wise diplomacy” and, in the words of Beverly historian Alice Lapham, an “attitude of tolerance and conciliation”, was established.

On the gigantic bronze plaque on ‘Table Rock’ you can read how “On this site in 1623 the Dorchester Adventurers founded the nucleus of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and the fishing industry. Here Roger Conant averted bloodshed between two factions contending for a fishing stage, a notable example of arbitration in the beginning of New England.” 




Seal of the city of Gloucester 

Modern Gloucester is quite a bit bigger than the village of East Budleigh – over 28,000 population as opposed to around 700. I’ll be reading a lot more about the city, starting with, as usual, the wonderful Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gloucester,_Massachusetts    

Our Conant 400 project is based on the theory that Roger Conant landed in the New World in 1623, a date which is widely accepted. 

Hard evidence for that is lacking: however it is known that his brother Christopher sailed to America as a passenger on the Ann. So, in the Conants’ birthplace of East Budleigh we’re sticking with 2023. It sounds like a good year!


 


























Sunday, January 19, 2020

21. Roger Conant on Cape Ann Part I: The Dorchester Company

Continued from https://conant400.blogspot.com/2019/12/a-tale-of-two-museums-how-conant-400-is.html


Roger Conant on Cape Ann
Part I: The Dorchester Company
Mary Ellen Lepionka 12/3/2019


In 1622 some merchants in England’s West Country, whose ships sailed from Weymouth to fish on Newfoundland’s Grand Banks, decided to attempt a settlement on the coast of New England. They thought if they sent a double crew, they could leave some fishermen ashore with provisions for the winter to build a fishing station and start a plantation to support the next season’s fishing expedition. The merchants optimistically believed that while waiting for the fishing fleet to return in spring, the fishermen on shore could build stages and dwellings, cure fish, make salt, construct fish boxes and salt barrels, trap and trade with the Indians for furs, hunt for venison, and plant crops.[1]

The Reverend John White (1575-1648), a Puritan minister and rector of Holy Trinity Church, which still stands in  Dorchester, was captivated by this idea.[2] He believed such a colony would be an economic boon to England. Europe’s local fisheries had become depleted from overfishing while meeting demand for fish on Fridays when Roman Catholics abstained from eating meat.[3] More than that, a Puritan colony in New England would be a refuge for church reformers as well as for colonists who wanted to escape the rigid separatism of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Colony, established in 1620. Pilgrims tended to be anti-royalist and wanted to break away from the Church of England. They were intolerant of Puritans, who tended to defend the monarchy and merely sought to reform the way the state religion was being conducted.[4] Such  differences contributed ultimately to the English Civil War (1641-1651), which had significant impacts on England’s American colonies.

White promoted the idea for a colony in New England among his family, friends, parishioners, colleagues, local merchants, and Sir Walter Earle [Erle], a knight and sheriff of Dorset and also a parishioner and friend. The merchants were represented by Richard Bushrod—a Dorchester haberdasher and mercer interested in furs for his hats and outerwear, and a parishioner in White’s Holy Trinity Church.[5] In February 1622 Bushrod obtained a fishing license for the merchants from the Council of New England and requested permission to search for a site for a colony in New England, and in February 1623, the Council granted a patent, or indenture, to Sir Walter Earle to that end.[6] Unbeknownst to them, in its haste to establish a Puritan foothold in the New World, the Council at the same time granted a duplicate patent to merchants represented by Lord Sheffield. Sheffield promptly and without permission sold his claim to Plymouth, however, rendering it invalid. (Governor Bradford later complained that White’s “adventurers” had robbed him of Cape Ann because of Sheffield’s “useless patent”.) [7]

White’s merchant associates purchased a 50-ton fishing vessel, the Fellowship, which sailed for New England in the summer of 1623. It arrived too late in the season for productive fishing but left fourteen men and provisions on Cape Ann, on the northern coast of what would later become Massachusetts Bay Colony. They landed on a point of land at the western end of a natural harbor, today’s Stage Fort Park on Gloucester Harbor, and set up camp there on Fishermen’s Field, where resident Pawtucket came to fish. The 14 Englishmen sheltered in the Indians’ wigwams. There is no record of who they were, but the event is immortalized in a bronze plaque on “Tablet Rock”, a plutonic outcrop at the site. Meanwhile, the other crew eventually found fish on Stellwagen Bank in Massachusetts Bay but returned too late to their market in Seville, Spain, to get a good price for their catch. According to White [8], the first season ended in the red:

The first imployment then of this new raised Stocke, was in buying a small Ship of fiftie tunnes, which was with as much speed as might be dispatched towards New-England vpon a Fishing Voyage: the charge of which Ship with a new sute of sayles and other provisions to furnish her, amounted to more then three hundred pound. Now by reason the Voyage was undertaken too late; shee came at least a moneth or six weekes later then the rest of the Fishing-Shippes, that went for that Coast; and by that meanes wanting Fish to make up her lading, the Master thought good to passe into Mattachusets bay, to try whether that would yeeld him any, which he performed, and speeding there, better then he had reason to expect: having left his spare men behind him in the Country at Cape Ann, he returned to a late and consequently a bad market in Spaine, and so home. The charge of this Voyage, with provision for foureteene spare men left in the Countrey, amounted to above eight hundred pound, with the three hundred pound expended vpon the Shippe, mentioned before. And the whole provenue (besides the Ship which remained to us still) amounted not to above two hundred pound; So the expence above the returne of that voyage came to 600 li and vpwards.

With men on Cape Ann to resupply, Earle and White then met in March 1624 in Dorchester to set up a joint-stock company to organize and fund the venture. The “Dorchester Company Adventurers” consisted originally of 119 investors, including five women of means, who each paid £25 per share. Stockholders’ names and stories are on record.[9] The Company’s fund from the sale of stock came to around £3,000. They purchased two more vessels, the Amytie [Amity] as a supply boat and coaster, and a 140-ton Flemish fly-boat called Zouch Phoenix to carry colonists and cattle. Additional decks had to be added to the fly-boat’s stern to carry them, but the Zouch Phoenix proved unseaworthy and had to be returned to port for repairs. Ultimately it carried 16 to 18 people to Cape Ann in 1624, including both settlers from England’s West Country and refugees from the failed Wessagusset plantation in Weymouth (MA), picked up at Plymouth on route to Cape Ann. Wessagusset had been founded in 1622 and abandoned in 1623 after an attack by Wampanoags.[10] Those arriving on the Zouch Phenix would later found Salem Village with Roger Conant, and they were:[11]

From England:
      Thomas Gardner (Rev. White’s nephew, a farmer), wife Margaret, and sons Thomas, George, Richard, and Joseph
      Peter Palfrey, trader
      John Woodbury, trader (later joined by son Humphrey)
      John Tilley (Tylly), mariner
      William Allen, carpenter

From Wessagusset via Plymouth:
      John Balch, wife Agnes, and sons Benjamin and John
      Capt. William Trask
      William Jeffreys

Rev. John White never saw Cape Ann, but his envisioned colony officially began upon the landing of the Zouch Phoenix passengers in the summer of 1624 at Half Moon Beach in Gloucester Harbor. Thomas Gardner was assigned to manage the plantation and led the group until Roger Conant arrived in 1625. Gardner’s mother was White’s sister and one of the investors in the Dorchester Company. John Tylly (Tilly), later killed by Indians in the Pequot War, was assigned to manage the fishery. These settlers joined the 14 fishermen who had overwintered, which made for 30 to 32 people—at least 22 men, 2 women, and 6 children. White reported 32 “men”.



The people at Fishermen’s Field managed to build a meetinghouse with oak framing timber and roof beams brought from England in their ships’ holds.[12] The structure would later serve as Roger Conant’s residence. Otherwise, the colonists’ efforts were fraught with mishaps, disagreements, bad judgments, difficult terrain, and poor soil—and the proceeds of the second fishing season disappointed the merchant investors. The Dorchester Company barely broke even after making up for the first season’s loss and covering unexpected expenses—more repairs to the unseaworthy Zouch Phoenix and the hiring of extra transport to get the second season catch to its market. Fishing in unfamiliar New England waters, the men did not readily find the fish and came late to the wrong port. The master mistakenly brought the fish home to Weymouth rather than to their assigned market in Bordeaux, France. As White reports in Planter’s Plea:

The next yeare was brought to the former Ship a Flemish Fly-boat of about 140. tunnes, which being unfit for a Fishing Voyage, as being built meerly for burthen, and wanting lodging for the men which shee needed for such an employment, they added unto her another deck (which seldome proves well with Flemish buildings) by which meanes shee was carved so high, that shee proved walt, and unable to beare any sayle: so that before shee could passe on upon her Voyage, they were faine to shift her first, and put her upon a better trimme, and afterwardes that proving to little purpose to vnlade her, and take her vp and furre her. Which notwithstanding it were performed with as much speede as might be, yet the yeare was aboue a moneth too far spent before she could dispatch to set to Sea againe. And when she arived in the Country, being directed by the Master of the smaller Ship (vpon the successe of his former yeares Voyage) to fish at Cape Anne not far from Mattachusets Bay, sped very ill, as did also the smaller Ship that led her thither, and found little Fish, so that the greater Ship returned with little more then a third part of her lading: and came backe (contrary to her order by which she was consigned to Bordeaux ) directly for England: so that the Company of Adventurers was put to a new charge to hire a small Shippe to carrie that little quantitie of Fish shee brought Home to Market. The charge of this Voyage with both the ships, amounted to about two thousand two hundred pounds: whereof eight hundred pounds and upward must be accounted for the building, and other charges about the greater Ship. By these two Ships were left behinde in the Country about thirtie-two men, the charges of whose wages and provision, amounted to at the least five hundred pounds of the summe formerly mentioned. The provenue of both the Voyages that yeare exceeded not the summe of fiue hundred pounds at the most.

The Dorchester Company borrowed heavily to keep going, but the third fishing season also proved a failure and threw them into debt. In 1625 they sent more people and added a third vessel for cattle and provisions for the people at Fishermen’s Field. The Flemish flyboat again proved unseaworthy and had to return for repairs. Because of their lateness, the three vessels fished at Newfoundland, took too many fish, and had to discard much of their catch. The supply ship, meanwhile, dropped provisions at Cape Ann and subsequently had good fishing there but found the plantation in great disarray and unprepared to help process the fish, a portion of which rotted before it could be delivered. Upon return, the ships could not find secure markets or get good prices for their catch. The ports and markets were in confusion or closed because of the war with Spain. England had declared war on Spain in 1624 in alliance with the Dutch, and in 1625 Charles I succeeded James I as King of England, bringing that country closer to civil war. According to White:

The third yeare 1625. both Ships with a small Vessell of fortie tuns which carried Kine with other prouisions, were againe set to Sea upon the same Voyage with the charge of two thousand pounds, of which summe the Company borrowed, & became indebted for one thousand pounds and upwards. The great Ship being commanded by a uery able Master, hauing passed on about two hundred leagues in her Voyage, found her selfe so leake by the Carpenters fault, (that looked not well to her Calking) that she bare up the Helme and returned for Waymouth, & having unladen her provisions and mended her leake, set her selfe to Sea againe; resolving to take aduice of the Windes whether to passe on her former Voyage or to turne into New-found-land, which she did, by reason that the time was so far spent, that the Master and Company dispaired of doing any good in New-England: where the Fish falls in two or three mounths sooner then at New-found-land. There she tooke Fish good store and much more then she could lade home: the overplus should have beene sold and deliuered to some sacke or other sent to take it in there, if the Voyage had beene well managed. But that could not be done by reason that the Ship before she went was not certaine where to make her Fish; by this accident it fell out that a good quantitie of the Fish she tooke was cast away, and some other part was brought home in another Ship. At the returne of the Ships that yeare, Fish by reason of our warres with Spaine falling to a very low rate; the Company endevoured to send the greater Ship for France: but she being taken short with a contrary Winde in the West-Country, and intelligence given in the meane time that those Markets were over-laid, they were enforced to bring her backe againe, and to sell her Fish at home as they might. Which they did, and with it the Fish of the smaller Ship, the New-England Fish about ten shillings the hundred by tale or there about; the New-found-land Fish at six shillings foure pence the hundred, of which was well nigh eight pence the hundred charge raised vpon it after the Ships returne: by this reason the Fish which at a Market in all likely-hood might have yeelded well nigh two thousand pounds, amounted not with all the Provenue of the Voyage to above eleaven hundred pounds. Vnto these losses by Fishing were added two other no small disaduantages, the one in the Country by our Land-Men, who being ill chosen and ill commanded, fell into many disorders and did the Company little seruice: The other by the fall of the price of Shipping, which was now abated to more then the one halfe, by which meanes it came to passe, that our Ships which stood vs in little lesse then twelue hundred pounds, were sold for foure hundred and eighty pounds.

The Dorchester Company declared bankruptcy. Amytie and Fellowship, in two voyages, brought most of the Dorchester Company fishermen and some settlers, who had started to die from exposure and disease, home to England.[13] According to their bills of lading they landed dry fish, codfish, train oil (whale oil), quarters of oak (quarter-cut oak boards for wainscotting), and skins of fox, raccoon, pine marten, otter, muskrat, and beaver from their trade with the resident Pawtucket of Cape Ann:

…[T]he ‘Amytie’ and the ‘Fellowship’ two ships employed by the Dorchester company return from New England on 1st August and the 15th September 1625. They bring with them ‘dry fish, corfish [codfish], train oil [whale oil], quarters of oak [quarter cut oak boards for wainscoting], and skins of Fox, racons [racoons] , martyn’s [pine marten], otter, muskuatche [muskrat], and beaver’ and are unloaded by Richard Bushrod and William Derby.

Even after the sale if its three ships and their cargoes, however, the Dorchester Company remained deeply in debt and in a quandary over how to protect its assets at Fishermen’s Field as well as the colonists who had elected to remain on Cape Ann. This is the context in which Roger Conant became involved in events leading to the establishment of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.





[1] Gray, Todd. 2012. Cape Ann Fishermen, the Pilgrims and England in 1623 (Talk given at the Cape Ann Museum, November 17, 2012).

[2] Ackerman, Arthur W., June 1, 2007, Reverend John White of Dorchester, England, Dorchester Atheneum: http://www.dorchesteratheneum.org/page.php?id=917; Rose-Troup, Frances, 1930, John White: The Patriarch of Dorchester (Dorset) and the Founder of Massachusetts, 1575–1648 (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons), and 1930, The Massachusetts Bay Company and Its Predecessors (New York: Grafton).

[3] Gray, Todd. 2012. Cape Ann Fishermen, the Pilgrims and England in 1623 (Talk given at the Cape Ann Museum, November 17, 2012). See also Fisheries in New England and in the Merrimack River, Early. Essex Institute Historical Collections 1: 73, 32: 196, and Fisheries of Gloucester, The, from the first catch by the English, in 1623, to the centennial year 1876. 1876. Gloucester, Mass: Proctor Brothers.

[4] Doyle, John Andrew, 1889, The English Colonies in America: Vol. 2 The Puritan Colonies (New York: H. Holt & Company); Records of the Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England. From 1628 to 1641, in Volume I of the archives of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (1850): http://archive.org/details/recordsofcompany00mass. Francis Bremer, The Puritan Experiment: New England Society from Bradford to Edwards (1996); and Bremer and Webster, eds., Puritans and Puritanism in Europe and America: A Comprehensive Encyclopedia (2006).

[5] Russell, Michael, February 2012, Richard Bushrod (1576-1628), Haberdasher and Merchant Adventurer, http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~fordingtondorset/Files/RichardBushrod1576.html; Russell, Michael, March 2009, Sir Walter Earle (Erle) 1586-1665, Knight of Charborough (Fordington): http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~fordingtondorset/Files/SirWalterErle.html. Also:
Haven, Samuel F. 1869, History of grants under the Great Council of New England. Massachusetts Historical Society, Lowell Institute (Boston: Press of John Wilson and Son): https://archive.org/details/historygrantsun00instgoog.

[6] Council for New England Records 1622-1623, American Antiquarian Society folio Vol. C. http://www.americanantiquarian.org/Findingaids/council_for_new_england.pdf.

[7] Haven, Samuel F. 1869, History of grants under the Great Council of New England. Massachusetts Historical Society, Lowell Institute (Boston: Press of John Wilson and Son): https://archive.org/details/historygrantsun00instgoog. See the Sheffield Patent of 1623 at https://www.loc.gov/resource/rbpe.03300100/. Thornton’s discussion of its provisions is on pages 31-37 of his 1854 history, The Landing at Cape Ann: or, The charter of the first permanent colony on the territory of the Massachusetts Company. John Babson’s retelling of Bradford’s “useless patent” begins on p. 34 of his History of the Town of Gloucester, Cape Ann, Including the Town of Rockport, 1860 (350th Anniversary Edition, 1972). Primary sources include Bradford’s History of Plymouth Plantation, Collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Volume 11, Series 4: 1-89 (1856, the unabridged Fulham manuscript with letters). See also Governor William Bradford’s Letter Book. Massachusetts Society of Mayflower Descendants, Boston  (1906).

[8] White, Rev. John, 1630, The Planter’s Plea (London: William Jones); also: John White’s Planter’s Plea, 1630, printed in facsimile with an introduction by Marshall H. Saville, The Sandy Bay Historical Society Publications Volume I (Rockport, MA, 1930).

[9] Russell, Michael. 2007, Members of the Dorchester Company 1624-1626. In Pilgrims of Fordington & Dorchester Dorset England: http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~fordingtondorset/Files/FordingtonDorchesterCo2.html.

[10] Adams, Jr., Charles Francis. 1905, Wessagusset and Weymouth, Vol. 3, Weymouth Historical Society. Stewart, Marcia, ed. 1662. Phineas Pratt’s Account of Wessagusset Plantation. Boston, MA: The Winthrop Society: http://www.winthropsociety.com/doc_pratt.php.
Pratt, Phineas. 1662. A declaration of the affairs of the English people that first inhabited New England (about Wessagusset), in The Narrative of Phineas Pratt, The Pilgrim Hall Museum:

[11] Emigrant Ships Departing Weymouth: http://www.weymouth-dorset.co.uk/ships.html. See also: Hubbard, William. 1815. A General history of New England: from the discovery to 1680. Volume 5 of Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society. Boston, MA: Hilliard & Metcalf. See also Volume 1 of Alexander Young’s 1846 Chronicles of the First Planters of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay, 1623-1636, and Thornton, John Wingate. 1854. The Landing at Cape Ann: or, The charter of the first permanent colony on the territory of the Massachusetts Company. New York: Gould and Lincoln.

[12] Adams, Herbert B. The Fisher Plantation of Cape Anne, 1882. Part I of The Village Communities of Cape Ann and Salem, Historical Collections of the Essex Institute: 19. (Salem, MA).
Webber, Carl and Winfield S. Nevins. 1877. Also Gardner, Frank A. 1907. Thomas Gardner, planter (Cape Ann, 1623-1626; Salem, 1626-1674) Essex Institute, Salem, MA.


Friday, January 10, 2020

20. Mayflower 400: celebration or 'call-out'?





The banner that I designed for Henry Carter FRS

A few weeks ago I happened to mention online an exhibition that I had staged at our local museum back in 2013. It was a bicentennial tribute to East Devon’s only native-born Fellow of the Royal Society: the physician, geologist and naturalist Henry John Carter.

Carter has given his name to a species of gecko, a variety of frankincense tree, a parasitic fungus and many species of sponge. Charles Darwin, a contemporary, praised his research.















A view of Carter's home town of Budleigh Salterton from the sea, and the blue plaque on the wall of his home Umbrella Cottage, on Fore Street Hill

Born in 1813, he spent much of his working life abroad before retiring to his birthplace of Budleigh Salterton where, in 1872, he explained in a letter to one of his former teachers that he was devoting his leisure to scientific studies “in order to follow your precept of making fellow-creatures better and happy.” 

A good and gifted man, therefore. A humanist, as is clear from the anger that he expressed in a diary entry at the inhumanity of the caste system in India. But a Victorian.

































The Extent of the British Empire in 1886
Published as a supplement to the 'Graphic' magazine 24 July 1886 with statistical information furnished by Captain J.C.R. Colomb MP, with British territories coloured red 
Artist: Walter Crane (1845-1915)

And that mention of India disturbed one of my readers.  “Not sure I would describe anyone associated with the East India Company in any positive way. A bit baffled as to why that appears on here as if to be celebrated!?” she wrote in a comment on social media. “Colonialist horrors exist in all kinds of places. It is important to call them out for what they are though.”



























Left: This painting in All Saints' church, East Budleigh, is a copy of one of the best known portraits of Sir Walter formerly attributed to Zuccaro but now to the monogrammist 'H' (? Hubbard) and dated 1588. It shows Raleigh in court dress at the height of his favour with Queen Elizabeth I. The illustration by an uncredited artist, right, circa 1860, is an impression of the execution of Sir Walter Raleigh (who refused a blindfold).  Included in 'The Popular History of England: An Illustrated History of Society and Government from the Earliest Period to Our Own Times,' by Charles Knight.  

What she had written reminded me of a similarly outraged response – though a bit garbled - by an Exmouth resident when I suggested that our museum should honour local hero Sir Walter Raleigh in 2018 by marking the 400th anniversary of his death. 

“Celebrate Walter Raleigh no chance he made his money from the slave trade along with Elizabeth a disgrace nothing to celebrate there along with the mayflower ship leaving from Plymouth a boat load of poor innocent men, woman and children set voyage for a disgusting life chained up whipped and beaten and rape defo no and to work day and night poor slaves. America made great through the slaves along with Britain.”


I got the sense of what she was saying of course. I didn't tell her that Raleigh had been dead for two years when the 'Mayflower' sailed from Plymouth in 1620.  






























Frontispiece illustration from 'Upper Canada Sketches'  by Thomas Conant  Toronto: William Briggs 1898. It shows the former mill house in East Budleigh, demolished in the early 20th century

I’m wondering now what kind of response there will be to the suggestion that East Budleigh honours its other hero: Roger Conant, born in 1592 at the village’s mill house, who went on become a member of the Salters’ Company in London, took ship for America three years after the Plymouth Pilgrims and in 1626 founded the coastal city of Salem in the state of Massachusetts.

One local resident whom I invited to take part in a commemorative project to honour Conant responded:  “Whilst the historic connection between East Budleigh and Salem, and the importance of the salting industry is a vital part of our heritage, the colonial nature of the subject sits uncomfortably with me howsoever significant. The cost of colonialism to indigenous communities has been so great.”

2020 has a problem which was not there a century ago when the 300th anniversaries of Raleigh’s death and the sailing of the Mayflower were remembered.

In October 1918, in the midst of the bombardments and the slaughter of the Great War, Britain took time off to celebrate the life of Sir Walter for his tercentenary. Its politicians clearly wanted to show their gratitude to America for its support of the Allies, even if it had come in at a late stage. Germany of course had been desperately hoping to keep the US out of the conflict. 

Celebrating Mayflower 300 would have been an extension of that celebration to stress the UK-US ‘special relationship’.  You can read more about the Raleigh tercentenary at http://raleigh400.blogspot.com/2018/01/raleigh-300-how-did-they-mark.html































Sir Francis Drake whilst playing bowls on Plymouth Hoe is informed of the approaching Spanish Armada. One of four bronze relief plaques on the base of the Drake statue in Tavistock, Devon. By Joseph Boehm (d.1890), donated by Hastings Russell, 9th Duke of Bedford   Image credit: Lobsterthermidor 

And in 2020 the city made famous by the departure of the 'Mayflower' – even though none of the Plymouth Pilgrims came from Devon – has a difficulty.  The glorious reputation that it enjoyed a century ago – where heroic Sir Francis Drake played bowls on Plymouth Hoe before sailing out to defeat the Spanish Armada and keep England free from the tyranny of the Inquisition – is under attack. Today, Drake is commonly known not just as an English sea captain and explorer but as a slave trader.



























Portrait of Admiral Sir John Hawkins, National Maritime Museum, London. Artist unknown.  Right are the arms granted to John Hawkins in 1565, for the massive profits he made in the slave trade. Included is a "demi Moor in his proper colour, bound and captive, with annulets in his arms and ears". Image credit: William Harvey - College of Arms, United Kingdom


Thanks to Drake’s cousin Sir John Hawkins, the city is even more tainted. “Interestingly the English chapter in the history of slavery begins in Plymouth,” reads a BBC report of 2014. “John Hawkins was England’s first slave trader. In 1562 he sailed from the Barbican in Plymouth with three ships and violently kidnapped about 400 Africans in Guinea, later trading them in the West Indies.”

Back in 1994, Plymouth City Council called off plans to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Hawkins’ death because of his links with the African slave trade.  But the organisers of Plymouth’s Mayflower 400 are well aware that the stain of the supposed Elizabethan origins of slavery has spread wider. To that crime has been added what the website calls the ‘horrific genocide’ of America’s  indigenous peoples, committed over the centuries by those who followed the 1620 Pilgrims.  

For that reason, for four weeks in July and August  2020 in Plymouth’s Central Park,  a group of 20 Native American indigenous and mixed heritage artists will “both present and live in a radical large-scale installation of public art”  in what is described as “a groundbreaking project linking communities across the globe”.  The event, entitled ‘Settlement’ will  “investigate and interpret their lives as the survivors of settler colonialism".









































Village of the Secotan Indians in North Carolina, by John White in 1585. British Museum, London. 

It is indeed shocking to learn, from the Mayflower 400 website that the population of Native Americans before contact with Europeans was between 9 and 18 million and that by the latter part of the 19th century it had been reduced to approximately 250,000. “Boarding schools, involuntary sterilisation and mass murder” were among the methods used in what has been called – incidentally by a Conant descendant  elsewhere on this blog – “a holocaust”. 



































Adolf Hitler poses for the camera in 1930
Image credit: Bundesarchiv Bild and Wikimedia

The terminology matches all too well what we know of genocide in Europe. An article in 'The New Yorker' magazine of 30 April 2018 noted how Hitler, in his book 'Mein Kampf' had praised America as the one state that has made progress toward a primarily racial conception of citizenship, by “excluding certain races from naturalization.” Three years later, in 1928, he remarked, approvingly, that white settlers in America had “gunned down the millions of redskins to a few hundred thousand.”

Comparing the official American and British Mayflower 400 websites, Prof Donna Seger, Head of History at State Salem University, commented in a post for 1 January 2020 in her ‘Streets of Salem’ blog on the "sophistication, earnestness, and creativity of the British commemoration of the Mayflower voyage"; the American version in her view was no more than a Chamber of Commerce production.















The Mayflower 400 logo

And yet, for critics, there is no end to the ‘call-out’ for colonialism. With Plymouth’s programme of events well under way in November 2019, writer and local resident Angela Sherlock, in a letter to the 'Guardian' newspaper, was complaining that “Mayflower 400 is commemorating the Mayflower voyage of 1620 without reference to the context and aftermath of that colonising venture”.  The voyage, she wrote, “was an invasion, seeking profit, and part of that process was the construction of a racial categorization”.

I suspect that so far the attention of the British public has been focused on Brexit rather than on Mayflower 400, but surely in the coming year that will change. I am looking forward to experiencing and learning from some of the events in Plymouth that should make us both share in the American dream and reflect on the nightmare.

Some useful links:
https://www.mayflower400uk.org/
https://www.plymouth400inc.org/   
https://streetsofsalem.com/2020/01/01/2020-the-commemorative-year/

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.