Cape Cod

by William Martin

Genres: Historical Fiction; Sagas

Synopsis

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

“Engrossing...entertaining...the perfect book to take to the beach.” —Boston Herald

Two families, both carried by the Mayflower across stormy seas... both destined to generations of proud leadership, shameful intrigue, and passion for the sandy crest of land that became their heritage...

This is the story of the Bigelow and Hilyard clans, from their first years on America’s shores, through the fury of her wars and the glory of her triumphs, to our own time when young Geoff Hilyard must fight to save both his marriage to a Bigelow heir and the windswept coast he loves. It is a struggle that will take him deep into the past, to a centuries-old feud that never died...and on a dangerous quest for a priceless relic of American history that has lain hidden in the Cape for over two hundred years.

Release date: May 29, 2018

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 652

Sample

“THIS IS THE BOOK FOR YOU WHETHER YOU’RE HEADING FOR CAPE COD, THE MOUNTAINS, ARUBA OR JUST UNDER A BACKYARD TREE. SUPERB… SHEER READING DELIGHT… FIVE STARS—FIVE GREAT BIG STARS!”

—The Dorchester Argus-Citizen

“ENTERTAINING… [AN] INVENTIVE FICTIONAL FORAY AMID HISTORICAL FACT, a salty sense of time and place, and a spanking pace, sails bellying with adventure.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“ENGROSSING… gives some of the high points of American history a human touch.”

—Orlando Sentinel

“A POWERFUL NARRATIVE… an historical novel with a capital ‘H’…. The excitement never flags.”

—Marlboro Enterprise/Hudson Daily Sun

“THIS HAS BLOCKBUSTER WRITTEN ALL OVER IT… Martin embraces the entire sweep of American history with unflagging relish for authentic detail and private moments.”

—Booklist

“JOHN JAKES MOVE OVER, YOU HAVE COMPANY… exquisite detail… one of the best fiction novels in many a year.”

—Morse-Press News

“STRONG, WELL-DEVELOPED CHARACTERS…. The story takes off and moves with the momentum of a snowball rolling down a steep hill.”

—Cape Cod Times

“ONE OF THOSE BOOKS TO BE TREASURED.”

—Copley News Service

“MARTIN IS A NATURAL STORYTELLER, JOHN JAKES AND JAMES MICHENER CAN ONLY DREAM ABOUT BEING THIS GOOD…. This may be the best historical novel set in New England since the heyday of Kenneth Roberts.”

—Flint Journal

“A BLOCKBUSTER TALE… A MASTER STORYTELLER…. Its characterizations are vibrant and robust…. If you enjoyed Back Bay you will delight in Cape Cod.”

—Bangor Daily News

“MASTERFUL… INTENSE… THE HISTORY OF CAPE COD COMES ALIVE…. The Hilyards and the Bigelows are so believable, one is tempted to check the original list of Mayflowerpassengers to make sure they weren’t aboard.”

—Dayton Daily News

“ASSEMBLED WITH GREAT CLEVERNESS….[Martin’s] smooth blending of past and present works like a pendulum, swinging back to the Pilgrims and forward to their descendants. As the book progresses the arcs between eras become smaller.”

—Journal (Edmonton, Alberta)

My family for many years kept a summer home on the bluffs of Manomet—just south of Plymouth, where the historical Cape begins, and just north of the canal, where the geographical Cape flexes eastward. I could sit on the lawn and, in one sweep of the eye, take in all of Cape Cod Bay, from the beach that protects the Great Salt Marsh to the place where the summer fog hangs above Chatham to the dunes of Provincetown, some twenty-two miles to the east yet near enough to touch.

It was a good place for daydreaming. I loved to study the sailboats skimming along in the summer breezes, the lobster-men tending their pots, the freighters steaming toward Boston, and if I closed my eyes, I could even imagine the Mayflower crossing the bay.

Our ancestry was Irish and Lithuanian, but like many generations of Americans before us, we had embraced the story of the First Comers as our own, perhaps because all of us, in one way or another, come from Pilgrims. In fact, an uncle of mine, who was something of an artist, once painted the First Thanksgiving as a family portrait. It did not matter that he was a Catholic priest and so would have been, at the very least, distrusted by the strict Separatists who settled Plymouth and Cape Cod. The truth of what they did was more powerful to him than the details of what they believed.

In 1957, the year that the Mayflower II reached Plymouth, he made us all Pilgrims in oil and canvas. To my Black Irish father he gave armor, helmet, and blunderbuss. To my mother he gave the apron and bowl of the Pilgrim goodwife. To me he gave a hatchet and painted me cutting up the squash for the most famous meal ever eaten in America. I appreciated that. I still do. And though he has passed on, he deserves my thanks.

Of course, many others have helped more concretely with my tale of the First Comers and their descendants. They have helped me in the details and the broad contours and I thank them all, from the shoulder to the hand of Cape Cod.

At Plimoth Plantation: James Baker, Theodore Curtin, who so vividly portrays Master Christopher Jones on the Mayflower II; Nanepashemet; Richard Pickering; and all of the interpreters and guides in the village, at the Indian settlement, and aboard the Mayflower II, who bring history to life with accuracy, imagination, and passion.

In Plymouth: the staff of the Pilgrim Hall Museum.

In Sandwich: Brian Cullity of the Heritage Plantation.

In Woods Hole: William Sargent.

In Mashpee: Joan Tavares and Richard Scoville, of the Mashpee Indian Education Program; Rosemary Burns and Ann Tanneyhill of the Mashpee Archives.

In Hyannis: Marion Vuilleumier.

In Barnstable: Susan Klein and the staff of the Sturgis Library; the staff of the Nickerson Library.

In Dennis: Richard Zisson; Captain George Mabee.

In Brewster: Frederick Dunford, staff archaeologist of the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History, and the rest of the museum staff; Robert Finch; Marion Hobbs; Doris Mullen; David Palmer; Janine and Richard Perry; Robert Wilkinson; and the members of the Brewster Historical Society, who maintain museum and mills.

In Harwich: Joshua Atkins Nickerson II; the staff of the Brooks Free Library.

In Chatham: Tom Marshall.

In Orleans: Susan Nickerson of the Association for the Preservation of Cape Cod; Eldredge Sparrow.

In Eastham: Nathan Nickerson.

In Wellfleet: Helen Olsen of the Wellfleet Historical Society; Stephen Kakes; Franny Choate, who can read the water on Billingsgate Shoals the way most people read their mail.

In Truro: Rosemary Broton Boyle.

In Provincetown: Napi Van Dereck; Patti and Ciro Cozzi.

Also, thanks to the rangers and staff of the Cape Cod National Seashore; and to all of the volunteers at all of the Cape’s historical societies and in all of the Cape’s historical sites, from Aptucxet to Wood End, whose enthusiasm helps to keep the past alive.

And to a few off-Capers: George F. Amadon; the Reverend Mr. Peter Gomes; Gary Goshgarian; Robert Gould; Stephen Martell; the Reverend Mr. George Werner; Conrad Wright and the staff of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

And to my editor, Jamie Raab; my agent, Robert Gottlieb; and, of course, to my wife and children, who never complain.

William Martin

November 1990

The novel you are about to read begins, it is safe to say, where no novel has begun before or since: in the mind of a pilot whale, in Cape Cod Bay, on an autumn afternoon about a thousand years ago.

But we don’t stay there long.

Soon we’re aboard the Mayflower on a bleak November morning in 1620. The little ship has been pounding the Atlantic swell for six weeks. The passengers and crew are exhausted. And before them rises a great bluff, the sandy brow of the immense American wilderness.

And soon after that, we’re stuck in traffic in a minivan on the July Fourth weekend. The Sagamore Bridge glimmers in the heat haze ahead. The kids are bickering in the back seat. Mom and Dad are losing patience.

This book covers a long span of time. But so does the history of the Cape.

When I finished it back in 1990, I suggested to my editor that a good one-line description might be: The story of Cape Cod is the story of America. It was true then, and it’s true today.

That fragile spit of sand, dumped by the glaciers ten thousand years ago and sculpted by the sea every day since, has seen every movement of American history from the Pilgrim settlement to the real estate booms and busts of the last thirty years. But what makes the Cape unique is that nature has not simply affected human lives there. It has defined them.

In winter, the wind scours the sand and drives even the heartiest locals indoors. In summer, the sun brings joy to vacationers, while the rain clears the beaches and fills the shops and brings money for the merchants. But there are deeper rhythms, too. The tides flood the estuaries and marshes twice a day. The birds and fish keep to migratory patterns established thousands of years ago. And surrounding it all is the ocean, a tangible presence, a living god, sometimes benign, sometimes angry, giving all who gaze upon it a sense of limitless possibility and insignificance, too.

The Pilgrims and their descendants set out to tame the world they found on Cape Cod. They saw it as part of God’s plan. They harvested the whales on the beaches and hunted the whales in the bay. They stripped the trees for lumber and firewood and burned the forests to clear their fields. They struggled, sometimes violently, with the Wampanoag Indians, whose name means “children of the dawn” and whose gods were as real to them as the Christian God was to the Pilgrims.

Generations of shipwrights, seafarers, and fisherman followed. They built the neat villages and towns of Cape Cod. But they seldom built houses looking out to sea because, as one old Cape Codder told me, “The sea was a place of work and death.”

Then Henry David Thoreau came for a visit just before the Civil War. He looked out to sea and into the future. And he wrote, “The time must come when this coast will be a place of resort…” He was right. Before long, the wealthy were building mansions at the ocean’s edge. And then vacationers arrived for those two-week summer rentals that are as much a part of the Cape’s seasonal rhythm as the migration of the whales.

I’ve been in love with the Cape since boyhood, and once I began to write novels, I knew that someday I would tell the story of the place and its people and their unique relationship to nature.

I decided that I would tell it from the beginning… or from before the beginning. That’s why the book opens as it does, with a whale stranding observed by… well, read the book to find out. And I knew I could not tell it without the Pilgrims, the first of so many who came to the Cape to find freedom or fulfillment. And I would close the narrative circle by bringing the story all the way to the present, to a family of Pilgrim descendants struggling over their ancient birthright.

A hundred people sailed on the Mayflower. They called themselves Saints and Strangers. Some were religious separatists. Others had joined the voyage just for profit. Fifty survived the first winter, and while many of them were filled with piety, all of them were tough, resilient, and resourceful. The proof is that today, more than ten percent of the American population can trace their ancestry back to those fifty.

They were like us in some ways… but very different, too.

The senior historian at Plimoth Plantation, the Pilgrims’ living history museum, put it best. He said that the Pilgrims had all the big things figured out. They understood their relationship to God and eternity. It was only the little things that troubled them, the daily problems of shelter, fuel, and food. We, on the other hand, have most of the little things settled, but it’s our place in the cosmos that leaves us wondering.

If this novel has a theme, a big idea, it’s in that observation.

But don’t bother yourself too much about the big ideas. I’m a storyteller. My job is to keep you up past your bedtime. And it’s the story that has kept readers turning these pages for two decades. Let the thousand-year plot wash over you while the characters in the smaller plots—Saints and Strangers, praying Indians and Wampanoag warriors, rebels and royalists, slave runners, rumrunners, show runners, whaling men, fishermen, oystermen, real estate agents, developers, and conservationists—swirl around you and sweep you through time.

They’re all after a secret. The secret is in a lost book. The book is the log of the Mayflower. It reveals the truth about the first scandalous death in the New World, and perhaps something more. Yeah, it’s juicy. Enjoy it. But remember that while I aim for historical accuracy (this is one of the few novels ever offered for sale at the Plimoth Plantation museum bookstore) not everything that you’ll read here happened as it’s described… or even happened at all.

Looking back, I am happy to say that I have forgotten the fourteen-hour days, the seven-day weeks, and the last two months when I never left the house. A writer always forgets the hard part once the work is done.

Instead, I can recall dozens of experiences begun as research that became cherished memories. I see my wife and little children in the bright summer sun. We are wandering the paths and dunes of Wing Island in Brewster, the inspiration for the fictional Jack’s Island. Or I am standing with my father in the meetinghouse at Plimoth Plantation. We are marveling that they made their house of God a strong fortress as well.

The kids are grown now, and my father has passed, but I see all those scenes in the present tense because there is something perpetually present about the Cape. The cycles make it so.

Things have continued to change on Cape Cod since this book was published. More commuters ride the bus every day to Boston. More traffic lights flash. More condos and trophy houses rise in places where once there were small cottages. The struggle to accommodate the needs of a modern population in an ecologically fragile place goes on. The business cycle of boom, bust, and boom still turns.

But the earth still turns, too. The light falls exactly as it did when the Pilgrims walked the shore in spring or fall. The summer people come every Fourth of July. The tides rise and fall and sometimes confuse the pilot whales that stray too close to shore.

In the mild winter of 2011-2012, Cape Cod beaches saw several huge dolphin strandings. Why were the dolphins, close relatives of the creatures that appear in the first scene of this book, hurling themselves onto the beaches? Was it disease, global warming, or just another of nature’s relentless and sometimes heartless cycles? No one knows.

The generations may come and go, but on Cape Cod, the deepest mysteries remain, and so do the deepest memories.

William Martin

March 2012

A.D. 1000

Each year the whales went to the great bay. They followed the cold current south from seas where the ice never melted, south along coastlines of rock, past rivers and inlets, to the great bay that forever brimmed with life. Sometimes they stayed through a single tide, sometimes from one full moon to the next, and sometimes, for reasons that only the sea understood, the whales never left the great bay.

The season was changing on the day that the old bull led his herd round the sand hook that formed the eastern edge of the bay.

It had come time for them to fill their bellies and begin the journey to the breeding ground. The old bull did not need the weakening of the sunlight or the cooling of the waters to know this. He knew it because his ancestors had known it, because it was bred into him, in his backbone and his blood. And he knew that in the great bay, his herd had always fed well.

So he sent out sounds that spread through the water and came echoing back, allowing him to see without sight, to know the depth of the water and the slope of the beach, to sense the movement of a single fish at the bottom of the sea or the massing of a giant school a mile away.

And that was what the old bull sensed now.

He turned toward the school, and his herd turned with him. A hundred whales swam in his wake, linked by color and motion in a graceful seaborne dance, by the simple rule of survival to the fish before them, and by the deeper call of loyalty to the herd, their kin, and the old bull himself.

Then the sea was lit by a great flash. The fish felt the coming of the whales, and like a single frightened creature, they darted away. First east, then west, then south toward the shallows they went, and the sunlight flashed again and again on their silver sides.

The dance of the whales rose into a great black-backed wave and rolled, steady and certain, toward the shoal of fish. Soon the stronger fish were swimming over the weaker and splattering across the surface to escape. It did them no good. The wave struck, churned through them, and pounded on, leaving a bloody wake in which the gulls came to feast, while on the shore, other creatures watched and waited.

The old bull filled his belly, and as always in the great bay, the herd fed well. But their hunger was as endless as the sea, and their wave rolled on to the shallows where the last of the fish had fled. Black bodies lunged and whirled in the reddening water. Flashes of panic grew smaller and dimmer. Then came a flash that seemed no more than a moment of moonlight. The old bull turned to chase it, and the movement of his flukes brought the sand swirling from the bottom.

He had led the herd too close to shore and the tide was running out. In the rising turbulence, he could see almost nothing, so he made his sounds, listened for the echoes, and sought to lead the herd toward safety.

But something in the sea or the stars or his own head had betrayed the old bull. He followed his sounds, because that was what he had always done, and swam straight out of the water. The herd followed him, because that was what they had always done, and the black-backed wave broke on a beach between two creeks.

Still something told the old bull that he was going in the right direction. He pounded his flukes to drive himself into one of the creeks. But he did no more than send up great splashes and dig himself deeper into the eelgrass that rimmed the creek.

All around him, black bodies flopped uselessly in the shallows. The sun quickly began to dry their skin. And their own great weight began to crush them.

The old bull heard feeble warning cries, louder pain cries. He felt the feet of a gull prancing on his back. Then new cries, patterned and high-pitched, frightened the gull into the air.

From the line of trees above the beach came strange creatures, moving fast on long legs. They wore skins and furs. They grew hair on their faces. They carried axes that flashed like sunlight.

They were men. And they swarmed among the herd without fear, and drove their axes into the heads of the whales, and brought blood and death cries. And the biggest of them all raised his axe and came toward the old bull.

But before the axe struck, an arrow pierced the man’s neck and came out the other side. Blood and gurgling sounds flowed from his mouth. His eyes opened wide and the axe dropped from his hand.

Now men with painted faces came screaming from the woods. The old bull felt the clashing of the fight and heard sounds of fury unlike any he had known in the sea. Rage swirled around him, stone against iron, arrow against axe, bearded man against painted man. And with his last strength, he tried to escape.

He pounded his flukes but could do no more than roll onto his side, his great bulk burying the axe in the marsh mud beneath him.

Then a bearded man beheaded the painted chieftain and his painted followers fled. The victor lifted the head by the hair and flung it into the sea, but the other bearded men did not celebrate their victory. Instead, they ran off in fear.

For some time, the old bull lay dying on the beach between the creeks. Then the bearded men appeared once more, this time with a woman of their kind. Their axes flashed like the sides of panicked fish, and like the fish, they were fleeing. But the woman stopped and looked at the old bull. She made angry sounds. She picked up a boulder and raised it over his head….

June 30, 1990

One of them had seen every year of the century, the other a full three score and ten. One had trouble sleeping. The other wondered where the years had gone. Neither ever awoke without a new pain somewhere or an old pain somewhere else. And neither could drink much anymore, or he’d spend the night at the toilet, pissing out ineffectual little dribbles that wouldn’t even make a satisfying sound.

But in these things, they were like old men everywhere. Other things bound them like brothers.

Both were descended from the Mayflower Pilgrims. One was grandfather, the other great-uncle, to the same two children. They walked on the beach between the creeks because each owned half of it. And they had detested each other since the administration of John F. Kennedy.

Rake Hilyard walked at dawn. The world was changing quickly, but he found perspective on the beach. Seasons passed, birds migrated, and tides flowed according to laws laid down long before the foolishness began. In the dunes, Indian shell heaps gave evidence of the first men. In the marsh mud, the bones of ancient pilot whales told of the first standings. Even the sea-smoothed boulders on the tideflats recalled the glacier that left them. And all of it made a ninety-year-old man feel a little younger.

Dickerson Bigelow did not come out as regularly. But after the heart attack, his doctor had told him to walk more, and on the beach, he could work even as he walked. If the tide was low, Dickerson walked on the flats, studied the island from a distance, and imagined what the last development of his life would look like. When the tide was high, he simply walked, his eyes fixed on the sand between his toes, his soul coveting the land on the Hilyard side, his brain scheming to get it.

At high tide on this summer morning, the beach was no more than a twenty-foot strand from wrack line to dune grass, which meant the old men could not avoid each other. But neither would turn back. They had been trespassing on each other’s beaches for decades, like warships showing their flags in foreign straits. So they ran out their guns and steamed on.

Dickerson fired first. “Mornin’, you old bastard.”

“What’s good about it, you son of a bitch?”

“We’re alive and can walk the beach. How’s that?”

“If it was up to you, only one of us’d be alive. Then you’d fill the creeks and hot-top the beach.”

Dickerson Bigelow laughed and ran a hand through the beard that fringed his face. He shaved his upper lip, in the style of an old shipmaster, so that whenever he bought property or petitioned for a permit, he would seem to have sprung from the Cape Cod sand itself, a modern man with the shrewd yet upright soul of a Yankee seafarer.

Next to him, Rake looked like the original go-to-hell dory fisherman—leathery face, dirty cap, dirtier deck shoes, and flannel shirt stuffed into trousers so dirty you could chop them up and use them for chum.

Rake glanced at Dickerson’s bony bare feet, the same color as the sand, at the gray trousers rolled up to the calves, the windbreaker draped over the barrel chest, and the knot of the striped tie. “Men don’t wear ties to the beach ’less they come on business.”

“Our families have quite a resource here, Rake.”

“Answer’s no.”

“Magnificent spot.” Dickerson stepped to the top of the dune and looked around.

“Mind the dune grass. That’s Hilyard property. Don’t want it blowin’ away.”

“It is blowin’ away. The whole Cape’s blowin’ away, washin’ away, every day. Time to sell, ’fore any more of it goes.”

When the Pilgrims came, the land between the creeks had been surrounded by a wide marsh. Then someone dumped some sand in the marsh to make a cart path, then more sand to make a causeway, and later, macadam for a modern road, but the seventy acres of upland, dune, and beach was still called Jack’s Island. It nestled in the crook of the Cape’s elbow, safe from the rage of the Atlantic, sheltered from the northeast wind, but fully exposed to the two families who’d lived on it and fought over it for three and a half centuries.

“Won’t sell. Sister won’t sell.” Rake Hilyard started walking again. “And with any luck, town’ll take it all. My side and yours.”

“Don’t be so sure of that.” Bigelow went after Rake. He was taller and heavier, but from a distance, he looked like a balloon that the kid in the dirty pants tugged along behind him. “For all the centuries our families have suffered here, Rake, the Lord’s givin’ us the chance to get somethin’ back. Think of the future.”

“The future,” Rake stopped. “Most men think the land’s somethin’ they inherit from their fathers. The smart ones know they’re just borrowin’ it from their kids.”

“The future’s now, and there’s some in your family who agree.”

“Who?”

Dickerson scratched at his beard.

“You’re bluffin’,” said Rake.

“The town meeting won’t take this land. Too many strings. And if I have to buy you out a parcel at a time, it could take years. Then it might be too late for all of us.”

“Too late already, ’cause if the town won’t do it, I’m buyin’ you out.”

“With what? Old lobster pots? The only Hilyard with more than two grand cash money’s married to my own daughter.”

“Nobody’s perfect.”

“So what do you have to buy me out?”

“The truth.” Rake poked a finger at Dickerson. “Straight from history.”

“Now you’re bluffin’.”

“History don’t lie. ’Specially in a book written by a man who was there.”

“What man? What book?”

Rake pulled his cap down and turned toward Eastham.

“You’re gettin’ senile, Rake.” Dickerson watched until Rake disappeared into the glare of the rising sun. He had come to upset his old adversary, to leave him wondering about the loyalty of his family. Instead, he was left wondering himself. As he walked back to his son’s house, his eyes fixed on the sand between his toes, his soul frustrated once more in its coveting, his mind traveled back through the story of the Hilyards and Bigelows in search of “a book written by a man who was there.”

November 1620

November 9. Sixty-fourth day. Cold unto freezing yet another day. Position not fixed as clouds cover sky, but soundings show forty fathoms, shallowest since England. The Saints pray hard and regular after sight of land, and God may soon give them heed. In the beginning, I bore them no sympathy. They were like as any cargo, and no better, for all their prayer, than those they call Strangers. But the Saints have gained my respect, the Strangers as well.

Christopher Jones did not bestow respect blithely, especially in his sea journal. He had been a mariner too long, had known too many men to wither in their first heavy gale. He had expected his passengers to wither before the wind ever blew, but they had faced the sea with more bravery than his sailors.

And now they were praying. Perhaps that was the reason for their bravery. The prayer, this bleak November dawn, was the Twenty-third Psalm. Jones considered it a good prayer, though he was not a godly man. He professed belief in the holy Church of England, the prudent course in a world where a man’s faith determined his future on earth as well as in heaven. But first and foremost, Jones was a seaman. He put his faith in the compass and the chart, in the stars and the sun, in his own strong hand on the whipstaff and England’s strong oak in the keel.

The Saints put theirs in God and their own understanding of his word. They believed that the corruption of the Roman Catholic Church still festered in its English bastard and would not be cut away until the bastard purified itself of ceremony, of statues, of priests, of all save the Scripture. The English church showed no interest in taking such cure, so the Saints became Separatists, and Separatists quickly became outcasts.

They were simple people, these Saints, simple in their lives and simple in their faith, and their simplicity, thought Jones, had kept them strong.

They did not wither during years of persecution by English bishops and sheriffs, nor after years of exile in Holland, where they found freedom while their children lost their English identity, nor after months of struggling to organize a voyage to the New World. And when their financial backers forced them to accept outsiders because there were not enough of them to build a colony, they did not wither then, either. They dubbed the outsiders Strangers, declared their sovereignty over the venture, and looked west at last.

It should not have surprised Jones, then, that the Saints had not withered during ten weeks at sea.

The Mayflower had left Southampton in August, in the time of good sailing. From her years in the wine trade, she had come to be known as a sweet ship in that the ullage from the casks made her bilge smell like a French fermentation cave. But no amount of sweetness could soothe the misery of seaborne motion in Separatist bellies, nor stop a stream of half-stomached salt meat, pickled beets, hardtack, and beer from frothing into the wake, nor overcome the stink of full slop buckets and the stench of seasick vomit that raised more vomit in even the strongest of stomachs.

It was in the nature of men to endure such things for commerce, adventure, or faith, thought Jones, but what pain to modesty it must have been for the women to use the slop buckets without privacy, or to see the sailors hang their arses and balls in the bow ropes and let fly with whatever was in them. After all, these were not tavern wenches or London whores, but goodwives. And what worry the future must have held for any woman who came with children. Indeed, what worry for any woman who had left the safety of a warm hearth, whether for prayer or profit. But they seldom complained and they would not wither.

When the autumn westerlies began to blow, the Mayflower went on the tack. For weeks she pounded like a mill hammer against the wind. Those who had recovered from seasickness grew sick again, then sicker still as the westerlies gave way to storms that swirled from the southwest, driving the Mayflower off course and leaving her to hul