This young girl recounts her voyage across the Atlantic to Plimouth Plantation in what would become Massachusetts.

I'm crouched in the forecastle of the Mayflower II, huddling to keep out of the brisk breeze rolling in out of the southeast. Beside me is a young girl, wearing at least four layers of rough-woven clothes. She grasps a pottery jug in which she carries a little water. She is recounting for me the horror of the voyage across the ocean in 1620 – for that is her reality. She tells me her brother and her sister died on the voyage. Her father, mother and another sister survived. There are no histrionics coming from her; just the honest simplicity of her narrative.
I am fully engaged in her make-believe world. I ask what her father did in England and she tells me he was a shop-keeper. But that reality trips me up. For this place to which she has come, Plimouth Plantation, the first settlement of white people in the northern part of the new world, is an inhospitable place. There is no possibility that a shop-keeper can thrive here for this is place where a man must turn his hand to pure survival.
Winter is coming, there are no crops possible for the growing season is over. The ship's master aboard the Mayflower wants to load the hold with furs and other goods to take home to England so his owners will gain something from this voyage. But there is no possibility of this and so he loads the hold of the ship with stones to provide the necessary ballast.
“Why did your father come here?” I asked her. “This is no place for a shop-keeper, surely.” A little smile played on her thin lips, she looked off into the middle distance and said quietly, “We came for the land.” Then she explained how each adult aboard the Mayflower was guaranteed a share. And a share translated to 50 acres of land. She, as a young girl, was entitled to a half share. Her baby brother would be allocated a quarter share – 12.5 acres.
“It is my dowry, you see, sir,” she said to me. This land could never have been her's in England. Now she tells me her father is struggling to get the shares of the dead children put in his name so that he can enlarge his holdings and make up, in a small way, for their deaths.
Jo and I had spent the morning in Plimouth Plantation, mingling with the Wampanaok Indians who worked the land, eking out a living while straddling time. They spoke with us in contemporary English and were able to provide us through their oral history the saga of death that followed the arrival of the white people. They spoke of how their village had been essentially destroyed before the arrival of the men, women and children aboard the Mayflower. French traders had come through and spread their diseases, including yellow fever, which wiped out more than 90 per cent of the village. These were not warlike people. I asked who they considered their enemies before the arrival of the white man and a middle-aged women, marked with zig-zag tattoos on her face and arms, drew her deerskin top around her shoulders and told me the tribe struggled with the Narragansett Indians to the southwest. But mostly they got along, she said.
We left her village and made our way along a primitive path to the Plantation where the new settlers worked at basic survival while fearing God and struggling to maintain order and solidarity in the face of the potential of attacks by the “heathen savages”.
We wandered into the thatched home (just one room inside) of Mr. Brewster who preached to the settlers. He told us he was not an ordained minister and could not serve the sacraments to the people. But all members of the community were required to come to the public meeting house at the top of the hill in the village each sabbath. There, he read from a bible that pre-dated the King James Version because, he told me, he could not accept that the king had the right to to remove all of the explanations in the margins which appeared in the earlier version of the bible. “The king believes – mistakenly, I believe, sir – that the common people need not know the explanations. He believes – mistakenly, I believe, again – that the priest can explain what they need to know.” He worked up quite a lather as he explained to us that the Puritans did not need a church building – for the church is within each person, he said. And then, as I drew him out, he explained there are still Church of England believers in the community and there are Separatists who have a much more austere view of the role of the church and the clergy than even the Puritans. They are a problem for Mr. Brewster for they can upset the potential stability of the tiny community.
We crossed the dirt street and came into the home of a middle-aged woman who worked at her wooden table, cutting eggs which she then placed in a clay bowl with butter and some mustard seeds. She placed that bowl among the embers of the fireplace as she explained to us how hard her life is. More than half of the settlers already were dead, she said. She did praise her rooster which she and her husband had brought across. “Ah, sir, I tell you it was something to see. When a fox came upon my 15 chickens, the fox managed to kill one of the chickens before the cock jumped on his back and rode him out of the yard. I think he will not be back,” she chuckled at the memory.
She told me about a learned man whose house was filled with books that he had brought aboard the Mayflower. I asked her is she was able to read and she half smiled at such a silly notion. “What need do I have for Greek and Latin texts, sir, in this wilderness? I do not read. But my husband does read some.” She then explained that there was no need for a woman to have the reading ability. Her husband would explain to her all she needed to know.
She asked me, if I found her husband up the hill working on making coal – by which she meant charcoal – to tell him she has made buttered eggs for his dinner and he should come home. I promised to do this if I found him.
We found three men, with rich Lincolnshire accents, working on the charcoal. I asked if they sold the charcoal and they laughed and said this was not a commercial enterprise. “We make the coal for the forger, sir, so that he can make nails and spikes for us.” He explained there is no commercial venture possible because there is no money and no need. I asked if he would not trade the charcoal with the Indians and, again, he looked at me as though I had just dropped in from another planet.
“No, no, sir. The Indians have no need of coal for they have no metal except for what we have given them. They have no need for this precious coal and they would know not what to do with it.” I told him his wife awaited him with her buttered eggs and that clearly brightened his day.
Back aboard the Mayflower, we chatted with John Alden, a young fellow, with greasy hair and dirty clothes. He said his job aboard was to be a cooper, making barrels. He suggested I meet the ship's master who would fill me in on the trading with the natives.
We found the master below decks. He played with his stocking, pulling them up and stuffing them under his pantaloons. He had a sharp, aquiline face, not unkind, but you could sense he'd suffer no nonsense aboard his ship.
“I am God aboard my ship, sir. I care not whether you are Puritan, Separatist or Church of England. You can worship any God you choose. But on board this ship my word is the law.”
He told of meeting another captain, John Smith, who had played a major role in setting up the Jamestown Plantation in Virginia.
“Ah, sir, John Smith was a master at negotiating with the savages,” he told me as he pulled his dagger from his belt. He handed me the dagger outside its sheath and then turned away from me. “That is how Capt. Smith negotiated, sir. He handed the Indian such a dagger then turned his back on the savage to show that he trusted the savage not to drive the dagger into his back. In this way, he showed he trusted the savage and, the Indian thus became his friend. I have learned much from Smith,” he said.
And so it went, we were transported back three centuries to that special time when the first settlers left their imprint on the land.
We met many others who helped us understand how the Mayflower worked out by dead reckoning where the ship lay in the great unknown of the vast ocean. We came away with a great sympathy for those who made that initial step. The next time this will transpire most likely will be when we build a settlement on the moon or Mars. The only difference will be that while we might botch the settlement and contaminate a new planet, we probably won't mess up the natives. But do we really know that?