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| Of Plymouth Plantation: ed. Francis Murphy |
First,
let’s start with some background. Of
Plymouth Plantation is essentially a journal of the Puritans’ colony in
Plymouth, Massachussetts, written by one of its initial governors, William
Bradford. The journal covers the initial journey of the pilgrims to the
colonies from Europe on the famous, celebrated Mayflower and relates the various difficulties and struggles the
pilgrims encountered as they set up their colony. The Puritans made the
hazardous sea voyage from Europe to America because they disliked many rituals
and practices of the Church of England, but were persecuted for their attempt
to establish a church of their own that conformed with their own sense of true
Christian faith. The points of religious disagreement, from what I’ve read, are
extremely complex and I’m not going to go into them here. The important part,
for the purpose of how the text unfolds and what it means for American history
and literature, is that the Puritans made this voyage (after an eleven-year
self-imposed exile in Holland, which allowed them religious freedom but wasn’t
so great to live in for reasons only vaguely explained by the text) with the
cemented belief that God was on their side and that whatever happened as a
result of this risky mission was God’s will.
And
it was seriously risky. Their voyage from Europe to Plymouth took a little over
two months, and they arrived in an unsettled (and what I mean by that is "largely unsettled by white people," but full of indigenous people that already had their own way of life) space, in the dead of
November. Due to numerous delays, leaky ships that needed to be repaired, and
storms, many of their provisions and supplies were used up by the time they arrived, and they weren't showing up to a community that was already thriving and ready to move into. Bradford emphasizes the difficulty of their landing by,
intriguingly, comparing to them to the Apostles of the New Testament Book of
Acts (and ultimately, he suggests that the Apostles had it easier than the
Puritans): “...they now had no friends to welcome them nor inns to entertain or
refresh their weatherbeaten bodies; no houses or much less town to repair to”
(69-70).
However, what I want to explore from
the first ten chapters of this text is not how rough the pilgrims had it when
they landed in America, but the ways in which the Puritans’ expectation of God’s favour and providence contains seeds of what would
later be dubbed manifest destiny. This belief in the inevitable settlement and
control of the continent by Americans pervades American literature and popular
culture in various modern updates and iterations of the frontier myth, to this
day (consider something as innocuous as the rhetoric of Star Trek: “space: the final frontier”).
Can seeds of manifest destiny be
detected in the rhetoric Bradford employs in his journal of Puritan landing? I
think it can. The Puritan worldview was one that attributed every event and
occurrence to the providence of God, and wherever possible, events that
positively affected the Puritans were seized as evidence of God’s particular
favour towards them. Consider the following event that occurs aboard the Mayflower on the voyage to Plymouth,
which is prefaced by Bradford’s assurance that “I may not omit here a special
of God’s providence” (66). Bradford
describes a sailor who, during the voyage, continually mocks the pilgrims,
curses them, and tells them that “he hoped to help cast half of them overboard
before they came to their journey’s end.” (whoa, right? Guy doesn’t hold back).
Gleefully, Bradford relates that “it pleased God...to smite this young man with
a grievous disease, of which he died in a desperate manner, and so was himself
the first that was thrown overboard.” Bradford is just tripping over himself to
relate this little tidbit of dramatic irony, and concludes the incident with
the observation that it was “the just hand of God upon him.”
On a more grave and upsetting note,
Bradford relates the Puritans’ first conflict with indigenous people living
around Plymouth (who, it should be noted, have run away every single time the
Puritans try to approach them, thus far). The indigenous people attack them (it
should also be noted that the Puritans went traipsing around the forest and
stole all the cultivated corn they found, and this was interpreted, not as the
hard work of the indigenous people living there, but as a gift God just left
there for them) and the Puritans fight them off, killing a few of their
attackers with musket. Bradford’s reflection on this conflict is that “it
pleased God to vanquish their enemies and give them deliverance” (77). Yeesh.
I
know, with my head, that I can’t read
a colonial text from 1647 and expect a sensitive, nuanced treatment of American
First Nations people. When Bradford relates two or three instances of “we saw
some Indians and when they saw us, they ran away! WTF! So we followed them!”
followed by “I sure hope they don’t attack us! God will vanquish our enemies!
Also we stole their corn” I just want to throw the book across the room in disgust at such
a blatantly entitled attitude that fails to stop and think “hmm, maybe they’re
SCARED because we just showed up in their home and we keep following them.” At the same time, I know that I can’t
expect Bradford, in that time and context that truly and earnestly believed that land was just there for them to
take and anyone else that lived there was incidental, to understand the glaring
injustice of their beginning relations with First Nations people. I know all
this. But passages like this still make
my skin crawl every time.
Next
time – I’m hoping to get through Book II of Of
Plymouth Plantation, and I’ll post my thoughts soon after.
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