Pilgrim Daughter
by Dr. Ralph F. Wilson
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New discipleship / spiritual
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curriculum for new believers
We searched for the ghost of fifteen-year-old Constance Hopkins
in the bowels of the reconstructed ship "Mayflower II,"
rolling gently aside a pier in Plymouth harbor. Where volunteers
dressed in period costume answered tourists' questions, Constance
had once huddled, miserably cold and damp, as fierce storms buffeted
the ship.
"According to the usuall manner," the old records relate,
"many were afflicted with seasicknes." As the ship
had only the crudest of conveniences and no sanitary facilities
of any kind except the traditional bucket, the air in the narrow,
crowded quarters below deck must have been nauseating at worst
and at best simply staggering.
Constance and her younger brother were responsible to keep track
of their three-year-old sister who was always scampering among
the various families camped side by side in the hold's cargo compartments.
It was all their mother could do, great with child, to brace
herself as the "Mayflower" heaved in the heavy Atlantic
storms. As Constance watched a tiny brother was born on the high
seas, christened "Oceanus."
Since the "Mayflower" had left England nine weeks behind
schedule, the New World's harsh weather threatened their very
survival. The men went ashore in December to construct rude shelters;
women and children spent the winter aboard ship anchored in the
bay.
Winter took its toll. Journal entries feature the same melancholy
theme week after week, for months on end:
"... Aboute noone, it began to raine ... at night, it did
freeze & snow ... still the cold weather continued ... very
wet and rainy, with the greatest gusts of wind ever we saw ...
frost and foule weather hindered us much; this time of the yeare
seldom could we worke half the week."
That winter more than half the heads of households perished. Aboard
ship only five of eighteen wives lived through the ravages of
scurvy, pneumonia, and tuberculosis. An entry for March 24th
reads:
"Dies Elizabeth, the wife of Mr. Edward Winslow. N.B. This
month thirteen of our number die. And in three months past dies
halfe our company ... Of a hundred persons, scarce fifty remain,
the living scarce able to bury the dead."
My daughter Annie, a descendent of Constance, tried to imagine
the terrors of that winter for a young teenage girl. When not
lying sick herself, she would doubtless be tending whimpering
children, preparing food for their stricken mothers, and comforting
the increasing number of orphans aboard the "Mayflower."
But spring finally came, and by the third week in March the weakened
survivors rowed ashore in the longboat to take up residence in
New Plimoth.
How could the Pilgrims talk about thanksgiving in the midst of
life's most difficult trials? we wonder. Why not just curse God
and die? They gave thanks for God's presence in their adversities
because they knew that struggles did not have to make them bitter;
struggles could make them better. These remaining Pilgrim daughters
and sons, mothers and fathers, placed their trust in their God
and laid the enduring foundations of a nation. Thanksgiving Day,
1621, did not just celebrate wild turkey and Indian corn; it celebrated
the human spirit reaching out to God in gratitude for the blessings
the Pilgrims still did possess.
"Yea, though they should lose their lives in this action,"
ancient documents say, "yet they might have comforte in the
same ... All great & honourable actions are accompanied with
great difficulties, and must be both enterprised and overcome
with answerable courages."
No, the Pilgrims did not lack for courage.
Our family poked around in a windswept burying yard until we found
the tombstone of Constance Hopkins Snow, age 72 years. And as
my wife and daughter laid a bunch of hedge row wildflowers on
her grave, we stood for a moment of silence, meditating on our
brave and very personal link with that first Thanksgiving.
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