The year of Covid-19 also marks the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower. Its famous voyage brought to New England a band of Protestant “separatists,” many of whom had migrated from England to Holland in 1608 for religious reasons. In 1620, a portion left Leiden with plans to settle in America. In September, at Plymouth, England, they crowded aboard a 160-ton vessel bound for Virginia. After a stormy two-month crossing, they landed near Cape Cod instead.
The Pilgrims’ faced a stark isolation. They “had now no friends to welcome them,” Governor William Bradford recalled. “Besides, what could they see but a hideous and desolate wilderness.” The striking scarcity of local inhabitants was as surprising as the harsh winter. Indian towns had been literally decimated when European ships introduced unfamiliar diseases. Between 1617 and 1619, one onslaught had killed nearly nine tenths of the coastal population. As Bradford put it, “skulls and bones were found in many places lying still above ground.”
Short on shelter and supplies, the new Plymouth Colony faced sickness of its own, losing half its members in the first winter. Still, by 1624 new arrivals had expanded their numbers to 180, housed in several dozen dwellings. With the Virginia Company seeking reimbursement for its investment, the colonists amassed stacks of beaver pelts and barrels of salt cod. That way, ships bringing expensive supplies would not be returning to England with empty cargo holds.
But in 1625, New England’s “hideous and desolate” isolation suddenly began to seem a God-given blessing in disguise. Captain Miles Standish had been sent back to England, aboard a ship laden with furs and fish, to negotiate with overbearing creditors for their “favour and help.” He went at “a very bad time,” Bradford related, for their home country was “full of trouble.” To his dismay, Standish found “the plague very hote in London, so no business could be done.”
Hot indeed. England’s plague had arrived, apparently from Holland, early in 1625, but it went undetected through most of March. George Wither, a poet who survived the epidemic, recalled how the stealthy sickness first approached London through the city’s “well-fill’d Suburbs” and spread there undetected for weeks:
Infection unperceiv’d, in many a place
Before the bleare-ey’d Searchers, knew her face.…
On March 25 the Privy Council, aware that the contagion had entered the city, rebuked London officials for squandering an opportunity to act quickly and failing to take preventive measures weeks earlier. With the benefit of hindsight, members argued that swift action might have “stayed” the outbreak. “You may be assured,” they threatened the Lord Mayor and his aldermen, that a full accounting for this critical failure “will be demanded at your hands.”