Man Overboard : John Howland

No one could have imagined 400 years ago,  in the fall of 1620, as autumn winds blew the 102 passengers of the Mayflower, west across the Atlantic how harrowing, dark and deeply unsettling their pilgrimage to the New World would be.

Or how what was considered a small group of religious radicals set out to establish a separatist religious community in the New World would transform the place they were sailing towards or the searchers themselves and eventually the nation that would rise up long after they were gone.

They weren’t the people that you would expect to be founding a new colony as a new outpost of the British Empire.

They weren’t soldiers or emissaries of a foreign government – at least half of them were Separatists -that is to say, radical Protestant exiles who had been living the Dutch Republic.

To a remarkable degree, their struggle would be a mystery, were it not for the unusual man named William Bradford  who lead the Pilgrims in the New World by serving as Governor of the Plymouth Colony, intermittently, for about 30 years between 1621 and 1657.

The unusual book he left behind is a luminous text unlike any other account of early American settlement, extraordinary both in what it says and in what it passes over in silence during very dark and turbulent times.

 He labored over the manuscript ,Of Plymouth Plantation for more than 20 years — “scribbled writings,” he said, “pieced up in times of leisure,” stolen from his duties as governor, and written in the 3rd person, as if to a far distant future -seemingly understanding  Plymouth, will have that future in its history, and he’s the one who’s documenting it, leaving the manuscript to his sons and heirs the day he died in 1657.

England was a Roman Catholic nation until 1534, when King Henry VIII (reigned 1509-1547) declared himself head of a new national church called the Church of England.

This set off generations of civil wars and assassination plots in England.

Although he and his daughter, Queen Elizabeth I (reigned 1558-1603), changed some things which made the Church of England different from the Roman Catholic Church however, a few people felt the new Church retained too many practices of the Roman Church.

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They called for a return to a simpler faith and less structured forms of worship, the way the early Christians had.

Because these people wanted to purify the church, they came to be known as “Puritans.”

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For example, they denounced popular pastimes like bear-baiting (letting dogs attack a chained bear) often conducted on Sundays.

In the culture where William Shakespeare produced his masterpieces, Puritans called for an end to the theater, censuring playhouses as places of decadence.

But even the Bible itself became part of the struggle between Puritans and James I, who as King of England was also head of the Church of England.

Soon after ascending the throne, James commissioned a new King James Version of the Bible in an effort to stifle Puritan reliance on the Geneva Bible, which followed the teachings of John Calvin and placed God’s authority above the monarch’s.

However, the King James Version published in 1611, emphasized the majesty of kings.

In the Church of England’s view, Puritans represented a national security threat because their demands for cultural, social, and religious reforms undermined the king’s authority.

During the 1620s and 1630s, the conflict escalated to the point where the state church prohibited Puritan ministers from preaching.

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Religious Conflict in England was more than just protestants against each other,  the Gunpowder Treason Plot of 1605, was a failed assassination attempt against King James I by a group of provincial English Catholics led by Robert Catesby.

The plan was to blow up the House of Lords during the State Opening of Parliament on 5 November 1605,e as the prelude to a popular revolt in the Midlands during which James’s nine-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, was to be installed as the Catholic head of state

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Another group, considered very radical, went even further.

They thought the new Church of England was beyond reform and were called “Separatists,” they demanded the formation of new, separate church congregations.

This opinion was very dangerous; in England in the 1600s, it was illegal to be part of any church other than the Church of England.

The  core of the group called “the Pilgrims” were brought together around 1605 when they quit the church of England to form Separatist congregations in the north of England, led by John Robinson, Richard Clyfton, and John Smyth.

The Separatist church congregation that established Plymouth Colony in New England was originally centered around the town of Scrooby in Nottinghamshire, England, about 150 miles north of London.

 An area where religious divisions were particularly conspicuous, there was still quite a large number of lingering Roman Catholics, but which had recently been evangelized by radical Protestantism.

Members included the young William Bradford, William Brewster, and Richard Clifton, all spiritually strong and young.

They supported each other, which is probably why it took off there, and not in other places.

Their sense of faithfulness to Scripture at the heart of it, it’s no accident the larger movement from Separatists came from were called Puritans by their opponents because that’s what they were campaigning for – greater purity and greater faithfulness to what they believed they read in Scripture.

Nothing Bradford read made a deeper impression on him than a passage from the book of St. Matthew, in which Christ explains to his disciples where the true church lies.

 For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them. ‎Matthew 18:20 KJV 

That’s obviously the key Separatist text — that Christ will be with you without a bishop; without a church; even without any clear ecclesiastical organization.

For them, prayer, conversion, and commitment is enough for the presence of Christ.

That’s an extraordinarily radical text when you think about it -that you can, in an unmediated way, see God, the Bible is your window in, but to have a bishop or a pope telling you what to can get in the way, like fallen static.

Particularly powerful for someone like Bradford, who finds himself alone at age 12, to think that God is that accessible — if he can find just a few others, and have a congregation of people on the same wavelength,  they can find their way with God.

That’s all you need and he’s willing to go to the ends of the Earth literally, to follow that path.

By 1603, he was fully committed to the radical idea that the true love of God might mean separating from the Church of England altogether.

It’s when the real trouble begins, because the head of the only Church in England,from Henry VIII’s time is the monarch.

It’s not just the Church – it’s the monarch that you’re discrediting, which makes it so dangerous and worrying for the authorities.

But for the Puritans the issue at stake is literally more important than life and death — it’s their eternal life or eternal death.

As they see it, the monarch is jeopardizing their eternal life.

It’s seen by the royalists as very dangerous and controversial, so prominent Separatists began to be confronted, fined, and imprisoned, because anyone who separates from the Church, is not just separating from the Church, they’re separating from royal authority.

Under the Act of Uniformity 1559, it was illegal not to attend official Church of England services.

For not attending a church, you can be fined. And it was £ 20  in those days – about £9,000  in today’s money.

That’s a lot of money, just for not going to church.

If you persisted, you could be imprisoned.

 Elizabeth I, after the Act Against Puritans in 1593,  made the next step banishment, but with King James , the next step is possible death.

Newly to the throne and not popular – he couldn’t afford any dissenters – the separatists were risking everything.

Formerly,  in areas like this,  people had been able to get away with things, but there was a new drive to make sure everyone conformed to the Church of England.

Still – bottom line, what was at stake? – their lives.

The Seditious Sectaries Act of 1593, explicit rules that subjects couldn’t have private religious meetings in houses, specifically aimed at outlawing the London Underground Church, whose followers faced larger fines for conducting unofficial services.

They were harassed, repeatedly imprisoned, or even killed.

Ministers should not convene private groups of people which were judged illegal and subversive to order in the realm.

For that reason, a network of people began to feel that they were under pressure.

Pressure mounts as congregants Henry Barrow, John Greenwood, and John Penry were executed for sedition in 1593.

It’s Penry who urged the London Separatists to leave England in order to escape persecution.

 In the fall of 1607,  William Brewster himself was fined, and threatened with imprisonment – it was clear that only one option remained.

To worship God as they saw fit, they must separate not only from the English church, but from England altogether.

They felt they could no longer suffer these difficulties in England, and chose to flee to the Dutch Netherlands which emerged as the Protestant part of the Netherlands, opposed Catholic rule in the South and a place of refuge for evangelicals, in a time of threat and challenge.

Dissenters couldn’t just leave the country, because they needed permission to pass port, obviously they weren’t going to get it, so they had to escape from their own country.

A 1st desperate attempt to flee ended in disaster when the English sea captain they  hired betrayed them to the authorities.

8 months later, on a cloud-darkened evening in the spring of 1608, they tried again- this time 16 of the men — including 18-year-old William Bradford — managed to board a Dutch ship and get away to sea – 1 step ahead of the searchers in pursuit — the terrified women and children left behind were arrested and carted them off to jail.

They were soon released; and over the next year, in groups of 2 or 3, quietly made their way across the North Sea to Amsterdam, to join friends and family members in exile and join the radical Protestants of their time, the Dutch.

With no family of his own, William Bradford found lodgings in a poor neighborhood called Stink Alley.

At age 21, he was able to set up shop in a small house of his own, working 6 – 7 days a week as weaver.

For King  James, it was like

“Let them go there, if that’s where they’re happy, no reason why they shouldn’t go there. The Dutch are our allies, we’ve been fighting on the side of the Dutch.

If you want to live there, fair enough. Good riddance.”

In fact, the Separatists, or “Saints,” as they called themselves, did find religious freedom in Holland, but they also found a secular life that was more difficult to navigate than they’d anticipated.

 It was a completely different environment from what they were used to used to in England.

As far as anyone knows, only William Brewster spoke the language.  Still,  there was no going back

Through all the trials and hardship, they would look back these on years with a  longing and nostalgia —   they created a world around them there, free for the 1st time to worship as they wished, in accordance with God’s will.

William Bradford : Such was the true piety, the humble zeal, and fervent love, of this people (whilst they thus lived together) towards God and his ways, and the single heartedness and sincere affection one towards another, that they came as near the primitive pattern of the first churches, as any other church of these latter times have done.

In 1609 — fearing the congregation would come apart in the sprawling Dutch metropolis – William Brewster and John Robinson led their people 22 miles south to the city of Leiden — a university town, and the bustling heart of the Dutch textile industry.

 John Robinson built around his house, cottages, a meeting hall –very much based on what they read in Paul’s letters of the early Churches in the New Testament — about what it means to be a community in the body of Christ.

Eventually, they would take that vision from Leiden across the Atlantic to the New World.

In 1613, William Bradford married a young English woman named Dorothy May — not in a religious service performed in a church, but in a civil ceremony at Leiden’s grand city hall — in accordance with Dutch custom, and because the Separatists found no precedent in the Bible for church ordained weddings.

It was the beginning of the separation of church and state — another custom they would take with them across the Atlantic.

Sooner than anyone could have imagined, by 1617 it was clear Leiden was not the promised land after all-  the climate was far harsher than they’d expected and the difficulties they encountered were much greater.

 Dutch craft guilds excluded the migrants, so as foreigners, they were relegated to menial, low-paying jobs.

Instead of farms they grew up on they ended up basically in little factories, creating clothing literally working from dawn till dusk.

A bell would go off in the morning, and they’d work to the very end of the day — often with their children.

As the savings which had been brought to Holland by their parents were starting to dry up after 12 years in the Netherlands, younger members had to start integrating more into local society, in order to get jobs in local factories and support their families.

 In late November 1618, a brilliant blue-green comet appeared in the night skies.

“We shall have wars,” the English ambassador to the Netherlands wrote – he was right.

Europe was on the verge of an enormous conflict, the beginning of  the Thirty Years’ War – a great religious conflict, involving all the great powers of Europe — which Protestants such as the Pilgrims saw as a great confrontation between good, in the shape of Protestant Christianity, and evil, in the shape of Roman Catholicism.

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This, in the eyes of many, was a cataclysmic global confrontation, which might very well lead to the end of the world. It might herald, if you like, the Second Coming of Christ and the Day of Judgment. Things were that urgent. The stakes were that high to them.

 Everything seemed to be on the edge of complete meltdown.

In 1618,  when English authorities came to Leiden to arrest a congregation elder  named William Brewster for distributing flyers critical of King James and the Anglican Church.

William Bradford Plymouth Colony governor, kept a journal of the congregation’s events

RELIGIOUS DIFFERENCES

The settlers at Jamestown were members of the Anglican faith, the official Church of England.

The Pilgrims were dissenters from the Church of England and established the Puritan or Congregational Church.

They really had to figure out how they were going to do this. They  were not wealthy people and had huge list of problems.

  How they were going to get there will require an awful lot of them.

They despaired about finding anyone willing to finance the hugely costly, high risk undertaking,  in early 1620, they were approached in Leiden by a 35-year-old broker from London named Thomas Weston — who offered to organize financing for the expedition through a group called the Fellowship of the Merchant Adventurers.

Which was the beginning of all sorts of trouble.

The right time to make that westward crossing of the Atlantic is to set out in the spring, the Pilgrims get themselves ready in Leiden, but it’s June when they discover that Weston hasn’t organized any transport.

To their deep dismay, Weston also now informed them that the investors were getting cold feet and insisting that non-Separatist outsiders go along with them.

The prospect was appalling — but there was nothing they could do.

In June — with no word about financing or the ship Weston swore would be waiting for them in Southampton — they arranged their own passage across the channel on an aging vessel called the Speedwell.

On July 22nd, they bid a heart-wrenching farewell to those staying behind, including Pastor Robinson, who, it was decided, would remain in Leiden with the main congregation until a secure beachhead had been established.

In anguish, William and Dorothy Bradford left their 3 year old son, John, in the care of relatives.

 There was deep sorrow at the bottom of this decision for many.

As they got on the boat, they knew, at least most of them,they had no chance to come back.

They were never again going to see the people who had meant most to them, up to that point.

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William Bradford: And so they left that goodly and pleasant city which had been their resting place for near twelve years; but they knew they were pilgrims, and looked not much on those things, but lift up their eyes to the heavens, their dearest country, and quieted their spirits.

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When they arrived in Southhampton, to their relief they found waiting for them at the dock a 2nd ship, which Thomas Weston secured at the last possible moment: , battered from use, but 3 times longer than the Speedwell — The Mayflower seasoned  from years of shuttling bales of wool to France, and wine back to England in the 12 years before its famous voyage.

Suddenly these Leideners, who had spent over a decade cultivating their own spiritual and very inward bond, found themselves on a ship — sharing their space with  “Strangers,” who came from a completely different place with the understanding that:

they’re not sharing the ship with them, they’re going to live with these people for the foreseeable and very long  future.”

August 1620, a group of  41 Saints joined a much larger group of (comparatively) secular colonists–“Strangers,” –and set sail from Southampton, England on 2 merchant ships: the Mayflower and  Speedwell.

The Mayflower, was a merchant ship whose ship’s master was also a part owner and shared in its profits.

It was a long process before they could finally get away to sea.

The Speedwell began to leak almost immediately, however, and the ships headed back to port.

The travelers squeezed themselves and their belongings onto the Mayflower, a cargo ship about 80 feet long and 24 feet wide.

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Historically, ships headed for what was called the New World left England in February or March, and arrived  in time to give a full spring and summer to become accustomed to the new land and reap a harvest  before  winter set in.

Summer was fading fast, and the window for attempting the long and dangerous ocean crossing had already started to close, when the  aging 180 ­ton Mayflower set out on her own across the North Atlantic—and would prove to be one of the most historic voyages of the millennium.

When they finally set sail, they’re going against the prevailing westerly winds, they’re struggling against the Gulf Stream, and they made incredibly slow progress — two miles an hour across the Atlantic.

Edward Winslow, a 24-year-old printer traveling with his wife, Elizabeth, never forgot the moment they set sail. :

Wednesday, the 6th of September, the winds coming east north east, a fine small gale, we loosed from Plymouth, having been kindly entertained and courteously used by divers friends there dwelling.

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Under­supplied and overcrowded, and with the “Strangers” (the investors had insisted go with them)  the Mayflower set sail once again under Captain Christopher Jones and Robert Clarke, the second-in-command.

There were two dogs — a spaniel and a giant slobbery mastiff.

Because of the delay caused by the leaky Speedwell, along with a combination of religious and contract disputes, the Mayflower left port late,  practically guaranteeing its Pilgrim cargo would sail into storm and hurricane season—which was about as bad as it could be.

As a result, the journey was horribly unpleasant.

The Mayflower was designed for cargo, not passengers.  The hold and main deck were like a warehouse and, on this trip, the passengers and their belongings were the ballast.

1. Forecastle: Where meals were cooked and crew’s food supplies kept.

2. Upper deck: Where seamen worked and attended to the ship.

3. Masts: During a storm on the journey, the main beam cracked. The Pilgrims fixed it with a large screw they had brought for housebuilding.

4. Steerage room: Where the pilot steered the Mayflower with a stick called a whip-staff, which moved the tiller, which moved the rudder.

5. Gun deck: Where cannons were located and where the passengers lived. It was only 5 feet high.

6. Cargo hold: Where food, tools and supplies were stored.

7. Poop house: Where meals were cooked and crew’s food supplies kept.

8. Cabin: General sleeping quarters for the crew members.

9. Gun room: Where gun powder, shot and other supplies were stored for the ship’s cannons.

10. Artillery: The ship carried 12 cannons to defend itself against pirates. 8 were Minion cannons that weighed 1,200 pounds and could shoot a cannonball over a mile.

The nights were cold and dark.

Some of the passengers  tried to create little cabins within the ship, but it just made suffocating cells.

All lights on board the ship were doused to preserve the night vision of the navigator, who used the stars to guide them west towards America.

 The passengers attempted to keep warm and dry by huddling under oilcloths.

Chamber pots everywhere.

There was a boat that had been cut up into pieces which some people were trying to use for a bed.

A baby was born in the dark hold of the ship, but   somehow kept alive.

Tempers shortened as food became scarce and fresh drinking water was rationed.

Bradford spells it out — he describes it as awful, saying these terrible sailors, were a blight on humanity, and the Strangers, some of whom were worse, loaded up with all this gear — animals, people.

 Sometime towards the end of the first week of September, the Mayflower lost sight of Land’s End and even the sailors almost turned back.

They’d be happy to earn their wages, but they were not going to risk their lives, it was such a treacherous time, it’s a miracle they came out alive.

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John Howland was a Cambridgeshire man who had joined the Mayflower as an indentured servant of passenger John Carver, which means he was under 25 years old at the time (i.e. he was born after 1595).

During one particularly violent storm it was impossible to steer the ship.

  All the crew could do was ‘heave to’ (face into the wind, with the helm and sail positions fixed) and ride out the storm.  One of the passengers – a strapping young man in his early twenties – had had enough.

Carver was sent as a representative along with Robert Cushman to England to negotiate with the Virginia Company and organize the business sponsorship of the Plymouth Colony.

Still anything but servile, Howland was heading to the New World for adventure and to make his mark.

Fed up with the miserable conditions down in the cramped hold, he struggled his way to the upper deck.

Even though the storm raged around him, it was a brief escape from the oppressive atmosphere down below.

As he staggered forward, clinging to the railings to stay upright.

Somewhere far out on the North Atlantic – as the Mayflower lay ahull in a furious storm ,Howland was hurled violently overboard, when the ship rolled suddenly in the shifting gale, Howland was lifted off his feet and swept overboard.

As he flew over the side, he grabbed blindly at a dangling halyard – and though he was carried far beneath the waves , as

the cold sea engulfed him, he instinctively kicked his legs and flailed his arms to prevent himself from being sucked under .

When he surfaced, gasping for breath, he found he was in reach of one of the ship’s sail ropes which hung overboard and ran out at length.

He clung on to it like grim death, even as the crashing waves totally submerged him – somehow held on long enough for the crew to haul him back to safety.

The crew, who had seen Howland go over the side, rushed to the rails and hauled on the rope to bring him back to the surface.

Eventually he was brought alongside the ship by means of a boathook and dragged back on board.

He was cold, exhausted and had swallowed huge amounts of seawater, but his life had been saved.

John Howland’s survival was as fortuitous and random as his near fatal plunge.

Many of the other passengers were so seasick they could scarcely get up, and the waves were so rough that another one called a  “Stranger” was swept overboard.

(It was “the just hand of God upon him,” Bradford wrote later, for the young sailor had been “a proud and very profane yonge man.”)

The drama of Howland’s life did not peak with his rescue.

You’ve no doubt heard of the butterfly effect.

One of the reasons why the Mayflower story continues to fascinate is how all modern American history, and world history, was confined to that creaky tub and its occupants in 1620.

If John Howland had drowned, he wouldn’t have gone on to help found Plymouth Colony.

Not only did he survive near-drowning and the freezing temperature of the water, but “he survived that first winter in America, when more than half of the pilgrims died.

In the new world, John Howland would thrive, work off his indenture and become a cornerstone of the colony – marrying a young woman named Elizabeth Tilley .

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 2 people had died, and more were failing fast when early on the morning of Thursday, November 9th, 1620 — after more than 2 months at sea — a crew member spotted a line of high bluffs shouted out excitedly to Captain Jones.

It was the first land they had seen after 2 miserable months at sea, but their jubilation quickly dimmed as word raced through the ship that they made landfall far north of their intended destination.

 They’ve arrived off the coast of Cape Cod, but they’re 200 miles off-course.

By the end of the sea journey,  people are getting sick, so there was a real sense of urgency aboard, particularly for Captain Jones, who knew at some point he had to get people off his ship.

Jones heads them south, and the crew tries to sail around the Cape for the mouth of the Hudson River — modern-day New York City — which was their intended destination.

And unfortunately, there are no reliable charts, so they unsuspectingly find themselves in one of the most hazardous pieces of shoal water on the Atlantic coast.

 Dangerous sand bars and heavy seas forced them to abandon the effort, turn back, and drop anchor  at the tip of Cape Cod, though it was 42 degrees north latitude, well north of the Virginia Company’s territory.

They’re in the midst of what Bradford would call “roaring breakers,” and it looks like this is going to be the end of them. Still, almost immediately, an argument broke out on board the Mayflower,  leading to the brink of mutiny.

According to William Bradford (who later wrote an account of the Pilgrims’ experiences) several “strangers” made “discontented and mutinous speeches.”

They apparently argued that, since the Cape Cod area was outside the jurisdiction of the Virginia Company, its rules and regulations no longer applied

The troublemakers threatened to do as they pleased “for none had power to command them,” wrote William Bradford. 3,000 miles from home, a real crisis faced the colonists even before they stepped ashore.

The Mayflower Compact

Imagine the situation: over 100 people, cut off from any government, with a rebellion brewing. Only staunch determination would help the Pilgrims land and establish their colony. If they didn’t work as a group, they could all die in the wilderness.

The Pilgrim leaders realized that they needed a temporary government authority. Back home, such authority came from the king.

Isolated as they were in America, it could only come from the people themselves. Aboard the Mayflower, by necessity, the Pilgrims and “Strangers” made a written agreement or compact among themselves.

The point of the Compact was to ward off the danger of division and dissolution after they got to the other side. The thing that’s key about it is it’s a contract. It’s not exactly an elaborate plan for democracy. It’s a contract: “We’re going to agree on this particular goal, and get everybody’s name on this document, and make a commitment to this.”

On the morning of November 11th, 1620, the Mayflower compact was offered up for signature. The first to sign was John Carver, one of the wealthiest men on board;, John Howland, was the thirteenth member of that little band of Pilgrims to affix his signature to the compact ,the last, a servant named Edward Leister.

In the end, the vast majority of the men on aboard put their names to the paper — 41 adult men in all — 90 percent of the adult male population of the Mayflower including two of the indentured servants.

Years later — when William Bradford and others codified the rules of Plymouth Colony in a new Book of Laws, on the very first page they described the Compact as “a solemne & binding combination” whose authority came from the fact that it was based upon the vote of the governed.

Although the Compact began with an affirmation of loyalty to King James, the Book of Laws made clear that at times of political crisis, the authority of the monarch could sometimes be suspended, while the consent of the governed could never be.

Once the signing was complete, the colonists acted collectively for the first time and elected John Carver to be their governor. He remained in that capacity until his untimely death from an apparent sunstroke in April 1621. His wife, Katherine died a few weeks later, of a “broken heart.”

At least for the moment — from the relative safety of the ship at anchor in Cape Cod Bay — the threat to the corporate integrity of the colony had been averted.

The format of the Mayflower Compact is very similar to the written agreements used by the Pilgrims to establish their Separatist churches in England and Holland.

Under these agreements the male adult members of each church decided how to worship God. They also elected their own ministers and other church officers.

This pattern of church self-government served as a model for political self-government in the Mayflower Compact.

The colonists had no intention of declaring their independence from England when they signed the Mayflower Compact.

In the opening line of the Compact, both Pilgrims and “Strangers” refer to themselves as “loyal subjects” of King James.

The rest of the Mayflower Compact is very short.

It simply bound the signers into a “Civil Body Politic” for the purpose of passing “just and equal Laws . . . for the general good of the Colony.”

But those few words expressed the idea of self-government for the first time in the New World.

When Governor Carver died in less than a year, William Bradford, age 31, replaced him.

Each year thereafter the “Civil Body Politic,” consisting of all adult males except indentured servants, assembled to elect the governor and a small number of assistants.

Bradford was re-elected 30 times between 1621 and 1656.

Self-Government Takes Root

After a few days the vessel anchored at what’s now Provincetown harbor on Dec. 16, 1620.

They called it Plymouth Plantation.

On November 11th, with their ship safely anchored off the tip of Cape Cod — a landing party of 16 armed men — including William Bradford, Edward Winslow and the veteran English soldier they had hired, Miles Standish — ventured ashore in a small boat and stepped on dry land for the first time in two months.

Though they walked for hours among the windswept dunes, before returning to the Mayflower with a boatload of freshly cut fire wood — on their first excursion ashore they found no wild beasts — and stranger still, no sign of any human presence at all, wild or otherwise.

In southeastern Massachusetts,there was Wampanoag territory. To the north, the Massachussett; to the west the Nipmuc; to the south were the Narragansett – the Pequot – Mohegan – Niantic.

It is estimated that within that area there were  69 villages. A village could be anywhere from 100 people to 2,000. So, rounded off at 1,000 average it would be close to 70,000 people.

In 1616, before the coming of the Pilgrims, there was a huge plague. It started in Maine, brought over by European fishermen and swept a 15-mile-wide path right down the coast, in the middle of Wampanoag country and stopped at Narragansett Bay.

The Wampanoags, suffered anywhere from a 50 to a 90% loss in   population.

However, without this knowledge Captain Jones made a very historic decision -rather than chancing more days at sea, the Pilgrims decided to land where passengers found an abandoned Wampanoag Native American community, a good harbor, cleared land and not much else.

The means of death were so sudden, and, yet, relentless. And English fishermen, explorers, come to the coast and say it’s absolutely abandoned.

It’s devastated. Where did the people go? And from that time to 1619, that’s what they found — emptiness, abandoned villages, bones scattered around the ground.

In some of the accounts only found bleached bones, not because we didn’t have rituals and observances, but because there wasn’t anybody left to take care of the ones who had passed away.

Nowhere was the devastation more complete than in a village the Wampanoags called Patuxet.

One villager named Tisquantum — kidnaped 2 years before the plague began and carried off in chains to Europe only to return in 1619 to find his village completely abandoned. Patuxet was gone.

 It was a village of about 2,000 people. And when Tisquantum came back, not one had survived – No one!

He was the only survivor of his entire village. It’s unimaginable — the grief, the loss of that. And this is the world into which the Pilgrims enter.

Technically, the Mayflower colonists had no right to be there at all.

But, when they arrived in this territory, they believed that their journey was ordained by God — that they had a mission that they were to fulfill. And the desolation that they found was God’s providence. It was meant to be that way for them.

Back on the ship, as the sun went down, the enormity of their situation began to sink in upon them.

There on the edge of the dark whispering continent — time seemed to stand still for the immigrants — then widen into an ominous void.

  3 successive scouting parties probed their way down the long arm of the cape towards the mainland — looking for fresh water, and a suitable place to settle for the winter.

On their first day out, they caught sight of six men and a dog walking far down the beach — the first native inhabitants they had seen.

The men stared back at them for a moment — then whistled for the dog and disappeared into the line of trees.

As they moved through the strange and inscrutable landscape — filled with signs of human presence they could see but not understand — their first halting forays had a primal, unsettling character to them.

In the first scouting mission, they found a sand mound and started to dig it up. And they realized this might be a grave, so they stopped digging.

Bradford doesn’t report that in his history. Edward Winslow does.

What Bradford reports is coming on another place.

Finding the same kind of mounds, digging it up, and finding baskets of corn.

They take away half the corn.

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Then what happens on the 2nd scouting trip Bradford doesn’t report at all, but Winslow gives us a long account of a smaller group going in through the woods, to an Indian village, and finding something that looks like a grave.

So they begin to dig and this time they continue — they start taking out the goods, they start taking out the planks, they start taking out the mats until they find two bundles — one larger and one smaller.

They open up the first bundle, and the first thing they notice is that it’s full of this fine red powder — that has a kind of smell — they say it’s not a bad smell, but the smell comes up to them.

They look further in and they see the bones and skull of a man.

The face still has skin clinging to it.

But what’s most startling is that the skull is covered with blond hair.

So they know that this is not an Indian, but the body of a European.

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They open up the second mat, and find the bones and the skull of a child.

And the child’s body is decorated with white Indian beads and bracelets, and there are little childish things around.

So there’s this mystery:

“What has happened here? Who are these bodies? What are they doing in the same grave? What was the relationship between these dead bodies and the living hands that put them there?” And they cannot construct a narrative about that which makes them think of their own situation:

“How will we die here? Whose hands will attend to us? What will happen to us here?”

 They moved on. A few nights later, at a place called First Encounter Beach, they were attacked in the dark by a party of warriors.

For hours the air was filled with war cries and whistling arrows, which they answered with deafening blasts of musket fire, until the attackers withdrew.

“Thus it pleased God,” William Bradford wrote, “to vanquish our enemies and give us deliverance.”

Finally, on December 8th, on the far western shore of the bay, they came upon a site they determined might suit them for a settlement.

 It was an Indian settlement that had been abandoned. It seemed, physically speaking, a proper place. And it had a nice slope down to the harbor and fields beyond, and that seemed to be a convenient place.

A sad tragic irony,  the place that the Plymouth colonists settle on for their location is the village that was perhaps the hardest hit of all the Wampanoag villages — Patuxet — to the point where there are bodies lying on the ground that can not be buried, because there are no relatives.

From a Native perspective, you would not reoccupy those places. So people must have thought the Pilgrims were insane to come and settle in a place where there’s been so much death and loss.

Physically weakened by the voyage, only 53 passengers and ½ the crew survived the first year.

Women were particularly hard hit; of the 19 women , only 5 survived the cold New England winter .

According to Bradford, the 3rd exploring party set out December 6th with 10 principal men and some of the sailors. They were: Miles Standish, John Howland, Master Carver, John Tilley, William Bradford, Edward Tilley, Edward Winslow, Richard Warren, Steven Hopkins and Edward Dotte.

 On December 12th, the 3rd and final scouting party sailed back across the bay to the waiting Mayflower — where William Bradford was greeted with staggering news.

5 days earlier, his 23-year-old wife, Dorothy, had somehow fallen overboard while the ship lay at anchor, and drowned in the icy waters of the bay.

The decks were icy. She could have slipped overboard. She could equally have been suffering from depression.

Maybe it was too much leaving her child behind. Maybe with the advanced scurvy, which can give you the feeling of not just depression but of being doomed, did she slip herself into the water?

To this day, people are wondering: “Well, was it just an accident?” It’s unknown, but the fact of the matter is, despair was a huge part of what all of them were feeling. A child had just died, the day before her death.

 William Bradford never spoke of Dorothy’s death in his history; and the circumstances were never explained.

On Friday, December 15th, 1620, with its cargo of sickened, and sea-weary passengers and crew, the Mayflower sailed west across the vast windswept bay — towards the dark wintry shore that awaited them.

They arrive just at the worst possible time, Winter and by the end of December they begin to start building houses.

The Mayflower had to anchor a mile offshore, because the harbor at Plymouth wasn’t deep enough to let the ship right up.

So that they had to ferry the supplies, the goods, so slowly in from the Mayflower.

And they managed to build only very few houses — far fewer than they had anticipated.

 Everything was wrong.

They had to reach the shore by wading through ice-cold water to the shoreline.

And, Bradford says, at one point with sleet beating at them, they were covered with this ice glaze.

Many caught cold and they died.

Edward Winslow : Friday, 22nd. The storm still continued, that we could not get a-land nor they come to us aboard. This morning good-wife Allerton was delivered of a son, but dead born. Sunday, the 24th, our people on shore heard a cry of some savages — which caused an alarm, and to stand on their guard, expecting an assault. But all was quiet.

They had just set to work building a 21-square foot common house for protection against Indian attack when the temperature dropped, and the weather closed in mercilessly. One by one, the weakened immigrants began to succumb to dysentery, pneumonia, tuberculosis, exposure.

At one time in that first winter, 2 or 3 people were dying every day.

The number of people who were sick and needed caring for — must have been overwhelming.

By February, people were dying in droves — some huddled in the makeshift settlement — many more back on the Mayflower, which had been converted to a hospital for the sick, and a hospice for the dying.

Onboard was absolutely awful. They can’t go ashore. They’re all suffering from scurvy. That sweet ship, the Mayflower — by the end it was like a death house on the water.

 By the spring, half of them are dead.

50-some people die that first year. And, by all rights, they all should have died given how ill-prepared they were.

What happened that first winter was more than most of the grieving survivors could bear.

The full horror of what they went through was fated to live on only in the margins of history.

In Bradford’s history, he really turns away from the corpses.

There’s no record of burials, which, with mass mortality — with the dead outnumbering the living — would account for a major activity of the group. So the question becomes, “What happened to the dead?”

What is known  is hidden in a piece of court testimony, by a man named Phineas Pratt.

He came in 1623, to find the Plymouth Colony completely devastated.

And he asks, “Where are the rest of our friends?”

And the answer, he reports, is, “God took them away by death. And we were so dejected, and so frightened that first winter, that those who could carried our sick men into the woods, and propped them up against trees with their muskets by their side, so that the Indians, looking in through the forest, would think that we had a guard — a forest sentinel.”

So, the well, Bradford tells us, are nursing the sick, but what Phineas Pratt tells us is those who have strength are carrying the sick and dying bodies into the woods and propping them up against trees.

Later, when Increase Mather is writing a history of Plymouth, he quotes Phineas Pratt, but right at that terrible moment, Mather changes the story and inserts, instead, that they buried their dead at night, so as to keep their losses from the Indians.

 Then, as the story of the Pilgrim dead gets told and retold, the story of night burials starts to get remembered and cherished and elaborated – they plant corn over the graves so that the Indians don’t notice how many losses that they have.

But what really happened gets completely dropped out of the history.

This place of death — both Native and English,have to have some kind of meaning. It couldn’t just be a waste yard of bones for everyone.

They have to mean differently. So they started to assign different meanings to Indian death and English death.

Indian death were just bones scattered on the ground — were forgotten people, were just material. Indian death to them, was about dispossession.

Whereas English death was about becoming the seed, buried, possession – it  was going to be remembered, was going to be honored.

The days were growing longer and the death rate had finally begun to subside when on Friday March 16th, cries of panic and alarm rang out as a lone warrior — naked except for a loin cloth, and carrying a bow — broke cover from the line of trees near their huts and walked boldly into the camp.

Edward Winslow : He saluted us in English, and bade us welcome, He was the first savage we had met withal. He said his name was Samoset. He told us the place we now live is called Patuxet, and that about four years ago all the inhabitants died of an extraordinary plague, so as there is none to hinder our possession, or to lay claim unto it.

The Wampanoags are looking for an ally, but they’re suspicious of the Pilgrims when they first come.

They stay away from them at first – they watch them.

But, eventually, they realize that an alliance is going to be best for them as well.

It was not just political convenience – it was survival.

If you do not have power backing you, and you are a weakened people, then enemies that naturally exist around you will take advantage.

Leadership knew very well, tough decisions  needed to be made at the time, in order to ensure that Wampanoag people continue to exist in Wampanoag territory.

6 days later, the emissary returned, bringing the principle leader of the Wampanoags, their Massasoit, and 60 of his men, including Tisquantum, the sole survivor of Patuxet who served as interpreter as the two sides concluded a remarkable treaty, agreeing, among other things, not to harm each other’s people, and to come to each the other’s aid in the event of attack.

It was also agreed that Tisquantum would remain with the struggling group on the site of his former home to help with the spring planting, hunt local animals, and gather shellfish.

Both peoples were in a survival situation.

The Wampanoag, devastated by disease in the 3 years before, and the neighboring Narragansetts were threatening to take them over.

The Pilgrims, obviously very close to losing everything after that first winter.

They began to form an alliance with Massasoit and the Wampanoags, defining so much of what happened in that 1st and 2nd years.

2 weeks after concluding the treaty, the immigrants  bid a somber farewell to the Mayflower,  Captain Jones sailed back to England in April 1621, with only half the original crew and an empty hold.

It was one of the last voyages she would ever take. In less than a year, Captain Jones himself would be dead, and 2 years later      , the Mayflower, rotting at anchor on the Thames, would be sold for scrap, and disappear to history.

The Pilgrims’ only anchor and lifeline was gone.

They were on their own. With the return of warm weather, they put in their first crops under Tisquantum’s careful supervision, planting herring in yard-wide mounds of earth sewn with corn seed, and adding once the corn came up seeds of squash and beans

. The coming of spring did not entirely halt the sad toll of death.

William Bradford: In this month of April, whilst they were busy about their seed, their Governor (Mr. John Carver), came out of the field very sick, it being a hot day; he complained greatly of his head, and lay downe, and within a few hours his senses failed — so as he never spake more till he died. Shortly after William Bradford was chosen Governor in his stead. And by renewed election every year, continued sundry years together — which I here note once for all.

The Carvers’ only children died while they lived in Leiden, and it is possible that Howland inherited their estate. In 1621, after Carver’s death, Howland became a freeman.

In 1624, he was considered the head of what was once the Carver household when he was granted an acre for each member of the household including himself, Elizabeth Tilley, Desire Minter, and a boy named William Latham.

All through the warm summer months, the grieving immigrants labored to make a world for themselves — building houses, tilling soil, fishing for cod and bass in the bay.

In June, they made their first tentative efforts to trade with the native groups around them.

In July, William Bradford sent Edward Winslow and Stephen Hopkins to visit the Wampanoags in their village, 40 miles to the west, to build on their alliance and to find out whom they had stolen corn seed from the previous December, and to make reparations.

Autumn came, and the days dipped down into darkness.

By October, they had finished erecting 11 crude structures in all — seven dwelling-houses — and four common buildings.

They had also managed to bring in a successful harvest of corn, thanks to Tisquantum, and as the leaves began to turn, they prepared.

Edward Winslow reported, to in a “special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors.”

No one at the time called it Thanksgiving.

William Bradford made no mention of it in his history.

There isn’t much of a record. There’s a paragraph,

Winslow, that describes what’s come to be known as the first Thanksgiving.

It says nothing about an invitation. It was just that the English celebrated their first successful harvest with a 3-day festival of thanksgiving, though it did not occur on the fourth Thursday in November like it does today, but sometime between late September and mid November 1621.

The colonists were outnumbered 2 to 1 by their guests.

Attendee Edward Winslow noted there were “many of the Indians coming amongst us, and amongst the rest their greatest king Massasoit, with some 90 men.” who went out and got 5 deer to add to what the English were cooking.

They played games together. There’s like four little facts of what happened, and then the rest of it is fluff that’s been added over the centuries.

2½ centuries later, at another American moment of great trial and suffering,  President Abraham Lincoln declared Thanksgiving a federal holiday in 1863, during the American Civil War.

He called it a national day of “Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens,” to be celebrated on the last Thursday in November.

The humble event, would be remembered as one of the most important and defining moments in American history, because it’s about alliance and abundance and envisioning a future where Native Americans and colonial Americans can come together and celebrate the providence of a single God.

But part of the reason that they were grateful was that they had been in such misery; that they had lost so many people on both sides. So, in some way, that day of thanksgiving is also coming out of mourning; it’s also coming out of grief. And this abundance, that is a relief from that loss. But we don’t think about the loss, we think about the abundance.

On November 9th, 1621, a shout went up from a lookout on Burial Hill, followed by the loud booming of a cannon — as far out in the bay the first sails they seen since the departure of the Mayflower loomed on the eastern horizon.

They had had no contact with the outside world for more than a year.

Though they feared at first it might be French pirates, it turned out to be an English relief ship, called the Fortune — sent by their mercurial broker — Thomas Weston.

A third the size of the Mayflower, the tiny vessel carried 35 new recruits, to Bradford’s dismay, only a handful of them Separatists, no supplies to speak of — more mouths to feed just as winter came on again — and a stinging letter from Thomas Weston himself rebuking the colonists for having failed to send back any cargo with the Mayflower.

When the Fortune weighed anchor 4 weeks later, they freighted it with as much beaver fur and timber as they could muster, but it was nowhere near enough to make a difference.

They desperately needed to find something they could ship back to England to pay their debts,  it that just wasn’t available in those early years in New England.

So there were all kinds of challenges, which they were not well-prepared for.

 Over the next 18 months, as the pilgrims struggled to stay alive and keep their group together, they would face staggering new challenges, on not one but three fronts simultaneously: economic and demographic, as they struggled desperately to make ends meet, and to contend with the influx of what William Bradford called profane and disorderly outsiders; but also military, as it soon became terrifying clear that their alliance with the Wampanoags would not be easily replicated with other groups in the region.

The struggle with those challenges would change them forever.

 Part of that has to do with living in a world where it suddenly seems that no holds are barred, where you’re being forced to do things that you never thought that you would be forced to do, and you’re willing to do things that you never thought that you would be willing to do.

 Ominous rumors had been swirling around the settlement for months — first that the Narragansetts, then that the Massachusetts — were planning to attack, when in early December, William Bradford ordered the construction of an 8 ft-high timber wall around the entire plantation for protection.

Work on the massive fortification had just been completed when three new ships, also sent by Thomas Weston, appeared in the harbor. Their arrival would trigger the darkest crisis in the Pilgrims’ history.

Thomas Weston sponsored another competing trading post, north of Plymouth. It was very different from the Pilgrim contingent. They were not there for religious reasons; they did not have a social cohesion; they did not have family structures. They were there for financial reasons, and it was a collection of young men.

 None of the 60 new colonists were Separatists.

They had come to set up what amounted to a rival trading post, and after four months of uneasy cohabitation with the colonists at Plymouth, moved 30 miles up the coast to a place called Wessagussett near a Massachusetts village still reeling from the recent epidemics.

 And things very, very quickly start deteriorating there.

They have terrible relationships with the Natives.

They run out of food.

The Natives start jeering at them, making fun of them.

The people at Wessagusset start trading their clothes for capfuls of corn, they start working for the Indians and the whole social structure of that trading post just absolutely falls apart.

As the new colony disintegrated, more bad news reached Plymouth — first that the Fortune had been plundered on her return voyage, leaving the colony for a 2nd straight year with nothing to show for itself, then that a massive Indian uprising, in Virginia, had killed 347 English colonists near Jamestown.

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The Pilgrims feared that something similar was about to happen to them – there were clear indications  they were under threat from some parts of the local Native American population.

In March 1623, news reached Plymouth that Massasoit himself, their only ally, lay dying, and William Bradford quickly dispatched Edward Winslow to his bedside.

Under the Englishmen’s skilled care the Wampanoag leader made a rapid recovery, and in return revealed that Plymouth was in the gravest danger was from a region wide conspiracy whose aim was to eradicate all English settlements in New England.

The Massachusetts have a plan that they want to wipe out the Wessagusset trading post. but they’re afraid of retaliation from Plymouth.

So the plan is to actually make a coalition, and wipe out both Wessagusset and Plymouth.

 Mr. Weston’s colony had  exasperated the natives among them, as they plotted their overthrow; because they secretly instigated other people to conspire against them , but their treachery was discovered, the colony then went to rescue the lives of their countrymen.

To take vengeance for their villainy, Miles Standish and Allerton and Bradford decide to make a preemptive strike.

Standish and others go to Wessagusset on the pretense of trade.

They gather many of the Indian men, including 2 leaders, into the trading post supposedly for trade.

Lock the doors, and on a signal, kill these 2 men with their own knives hanging around their neck.

Standish and other veterans of the Thirty Years’ War were brutes.

They hung a young Native American boy  and  the rest they stabbed to death and cut off Wituwamat ‘s head, and brought it back and put it on a pole in the middle of Plymouth and it stayed there for years.

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When word of the attack reached Leiden, John Robinson wrote an anguished letter back to William Bradford.

 Concerning the killing of those poor Indians…. oh! how happy a thing had it been, if you had converted some, before you had killed any; besides, where blood is once begun to be shed, it is seldom stanched of a long time after.

You will say they deserved it…. but upon what provocations by those heathenish Christians? It is a thing more glorious in men’s eyes, than pleasing in God’s to be a terror to poor barbarous people.

Yours truly loving, John Robinson

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The bloodshed at Wessagussett was a watershed — permanently altering the balance of power in the region — in favor of the Pilgrims and their allies, the Wampanoags.

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5 months later, William Bradford married a recently arrived 32-year-old widow named Alice Southworth — in a ceremony attended by the entire community.

 The Pilgrims usually shun decoration, ornamentation, but when Bradford gets married, people notice one piece of ornament — a piece of linen soaked in Wituwamat’s blood.

Visitors to Plymouth commented upon it in letters.

When Massasoit comes with his band to Bradford’s wedding, he sees Wituwamat’s head on the pike but , to Massasoit, it was a symbol of the strength of his alliance with Plymouth and Plymouth’s willingness to take action against his enemies.

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 By 1623, the most immediate existential threats to the colony’s survival had started to recede, but other challenges remained, and in the long run these would prove even more intractable.

 In 1626, a gloom fell over the settlement when news came from Leiden that John Robinson had died the previous winter.

It was a perpetual disappointment to Brewster and to Bradford.

They felt the pain very clearly that this person who was the most crucial mentor for the whole group — so instrumental in creating this community — was never there with them.

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In 1626, the investors in London — convinced the colony would never show a profit — filed for bankruptcy, and disbanded the Merchant Adventurers.

Most of the massive debt left behind was assumed by 8 of the colony’s most stalwart members, who, going forward, would have a monopoly on whatever trade the company might be able to establish — a prospect that by 1626 looked exceedingly bleak as most people, on both sides of the Atlantic, now assumed the blighted colony would soon fail completely.

But it didn’t.

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 Their business model leaned heavily on the idea that America was a place of things of incredible value.

Now beaver are not quite as valuable as gold, but it is still a valuable commodity, and the beaver ends up saving them.

Although beaver skins were valuable, the price was relatively low during the early 1620s.

It quadrupled, and the Pilgrims got the benefit of that. But in order to really get furs in sufficient quantities, they needed to get up to Maine.

Edward Winslow was the key character in this, because Winslow had been going up to Maine for several years, particularly the Kennebec Valley in Maine, or the Penobscot Valley in Maine — river valleys where there are enormous supplies of beaver fur readily available.

So everything came together in 1627 and 1628 and prices for pelts rocketed.

Price had gone up, Pilgrims had found the furs.

Once established in the Colony, Howland quickly rose to a position of responsibility and respectability.

  He was one of the 8 Plymouth “Undertakers” who assumed the colony’s debt.

He also served as an Assistant to the governor, as a member of many committees and was placed in charge of the Colony’s fur trading post at Kennebec, Maine.

While Howland was in charge of the colony’s northerly trading post, an incident occurred there that Bradford described as “one of the saddest things that befell them.”

A group of traders from Piscataqua (present day Portsmouth, New Hampshire) led by a man named John Hocking, encroached on the trading ground granted to Plymouth by a patent, by sailing their bark up the river beyond their post.

Howland warned Hocking to depart, but Hocking, brandishing a pistol and using foul language, refused.

Howland ordered his men to approach the bark in a canoe and cut its cables setting it adrift.

The Plymouth men managed to cut one cable when Hocking put his pistol to the head of Moses Talbot, one of Howland’s men, and shot and killed him.

Another of the Howland group shot Hocking to death in response.

Howland was also an important person in the Plymouth Church.

Once the Pilgrims were able to deliver beaver skins back to England in sufficient quantities to turn a profit, investors in London saw this business model the Pilgrims developed, and wanted to build a muchbigger colony — with not hundreds of colonists, but thousands of colonists with the founding of New Boston, in 1630.

In the spring of 1630, a ship called the Arabella — the first of a massive fleet of 17 ships, led by a wealthy Puritan lawyer named John Winthrop, left for the bay of Massachusetts, 60 miles north of Plymouth, bringing 1,000 well-supplied Puritan immigrants -3 times larger in 10 weeks — than the tiny community Plymouth had gathered to itself in 10 years.

All through the spring and summer the great ships arrived.

By the end of July, a church been established — the First Church of Boston.

 The size of the 2 groups is massively different.

The ethos is similar — they are all Reformed Protestants of a passionate conviction, but the striking difference is the people who go to Boston make an enormous fuss about the fact that they are not separating from the Church of England.

In July, Edward Winslow paid a visit to their new sister colony.

Whatever their theological differences, he reported, Bradford could take courage in knowing the elders of the new colony had been urged to “take advice of them at Plymouth,” and to “do nothing to offend them.”

After 10 harrowing years, the future of a Puritan New England — if not a Separatist one — seemed assured.

The Pilgrims’ experiment, in that respect at least, had worked, because, completely against the odds, they survived, put down roots, and established a colony.

So in that sense it was a success.

 In 1630, not long after the founding of the colony at Boston, William Bradford, 40 now and beginning his 10th year as governor, sat down to write a history Of Plymouth Plantation, sensing perhaps from the moment the new settlement began how dramatically his own community would be transformed, and determined to leave an account of who his people were, and what had happened to them, and why they mattered.

For Bradford, the experiment was not a success.

But as a historian writing for posterity, he can tell the story and preserve the meaning of their vision.

Even as that vision is being dissipated, and not being held by others, he can preserve it in his history.

He was aware of what was going on around him, he knew that when the Puritans started to arrive in 1630 — 15,000 of them — the market for agricultural goods was going to boom.

Which meant more farms, farther out, fresher ground — that would further dissipate the religious group.

And, even those most committed to its principles wandered out into farms of outlying districts.

The heart of the community was being lost because its integrity was personal — people living together as a group, praying together and sharing their beliefs.