Mayflower by Nathaniel Philbrick Read Free Book Online Page B

happened for a reason. Whether it was the salvation of John Howland or the sudden death of the young sailor, it occurred because God had made it so. If something good happened to the Saints, it was inevitably interpreted as a sign of divine sanction. But if something bad happened, it didn’t necessarily mean that God disapproved; it might mean that he was testing them for a higher purpose. And as they all knew, the true test was yet to come.
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    Unknown to Jones and any other mariner of the day was the presence of the Gulf Stream—a virtual river of warm water flowing up from the Caribbean along the North American coast, across the Atlantic, and past the British Isles. Bucking the Gulf Stream and westerly gales, the Mayflower had managed an average speed of just two miles an hour since leaving England back in September.
    Jones had a cross-staff, a calibrated three-foot-long stick equipped with a sliding vane, that enabled him to calculate his latitude, or north–south position, within a few miles, but he had no reliable way of determining his longitude, or east–west position. This meant that after all the bad weather they’d encountered, he had only the vaguest idea of how far he was from land.
    He knew the Mayflower was well north of her ultimate destination, the mouth of the Hudson River. But at this late stage in the voyage, with disease beginning to appear among the passengers and crew, he needed to find his way to the coast as quickly as possible. So he made a run for it, sailing west along a latitude that would lead him to the sandy peninsula known to most mariners of the time as Cape Cod. It was named Cape James in Captain John Smith’s map of New England, but Jones didn’t care what it was called. Reaching out to them like an upturned arm, the Cape was as good a target as any.
    The Mayflower pushed on until they were within smelling distance of the continent. Seagulls began to appear in the sky, and the color of the water changed from deep blue to pale green. And then, at daybreak on Thursday, November 9, 1620, after sixty-five days at sea, they saw land.

CHAPTER TWO
Dangerous Shoals and Roaring Breakers
    I T WAS A BEAUTIFUL late-fall morning—clear skies and light winds out of the northwest. There was a thin slice of moon overhead, gradually fading to nothingness as the sun rose behind them in the east. Up ahead to the west was what Jones believed to be the forearm of Cape Cod. Known to subsequent generations of mariners as the “back side” of the Cape, this almost thirty-mile stretch of barrier beach runs from north to south and is edged by dramatic hundred-foot-high cliffs of sand that must have been instantly recognizable to Jones’s pilots if they had been in this region before. Stretching behind the cliffs were rolling, tree-covered hills.
    The Mayflower ’s passengers were, according to Bradford, “not a little joyful.” The clarity of the atmosphere on a crisp autumn day in New England shrinks the distances and accentuates the colors, and the Pilgrims were “much comforted…[by] seeing so goodly a land, and wooded to the brink of the sea.” Just to make certain, Jones tacked the Mayflower and stood in for shore. After an hour or so, all agreed that this was indeed Cape Cod.
    Now they had a decision to make. Where should they go? They were well to the north of their intended destination near the mouth of the Hudson River. And yet there were reasons to consider the region around Cape Cod as a possible settlement site. In the final chaotic months before their departure from England, Weston and others had begun to insist that a more northern site in New England—which was the new name for what are now the states of Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont—was a better place to settle. As Cape Cod’s name indicated, this region was renowned for the large schools of cod that frequented these