"When in the reigne of Charles I an endevour was made to supresse the Puritans, a ship call'd the Mary Anne was fitted out at Yarmouth, by a merchand named Payne, for the conveyance of the persecuted to New England..."
-- Perlustrations in Yarmouth, England Vol. III
Setting forth from Great Yarmouth, England in the Spring of 1637, a group of Puritans boarded the ship Mary Anne mastered by one William Goose. The vessel was bound for Massachusetts Colony, with some few passengers for Boston, the majority for Salem. Among the Salem-bound pilgrims was a certain Philemon Dickerson. He was a tanner by trade and his passage to New England was partially paid by fellow passenger Benjamin Cooper, to whom Dickerson was thereby indentured. English records indicate that Cooper was probably Philemon Dickerson's uncle. Cooper died on board the vessel. Dickerson must have worked off his debt within a few months of arriving in Salem, as records show he was awarded four pole of land "near Richard Hutchinsons house" to be used "to mak tan pits & to dresse goat skines & hydes". This tannery is believed to have occupied several lots near what is now the intersection of Maple and Vineyard streets in Danvers, Massachusetts. Court records show that Dickerson became a freeman of the Village of Salem on June 2, 1641. Shortly thereafter, Dickerson married Mary Paine (the daughter of Thomas Paine jr., another passenger on the Mary Anne and the merchant mentioned in the Perlustrations) and soon had children born in the New World, all baptized in the First Church of Salem.
The father of my great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather Philemon Dickerson was, according to English records, a tanner of the town of Great Yarmouth, England named Henry Dickerson. My eight-greats grandmother was Barbara Dickerson, née Cooper, of Norfolk County. Great Yarmouth and Norfolk County are in East Anglia, the chief stronghold of the Puritans and from whence Oliver Cromwell raised his army in the civil war which broke out in England five years after the Mary Anne set sail.
It is not exactly known how old Philemon was when he arrived in New England. He is known to have died in 1672 at a reputed age of seventy-four which would indicate that he had been born in 1598. This date of Philemon Dickerson's death is derived from a Dickerson family monument which was erected in Southhold, Long Island, New York in 1851. However, a birthdate of March 17, 1613 is given for him in Burke's Landed Gentry: American Families with British Ancestry. It is known that his wife, Mary Paine, was born on October 12, 1611 in Wrentham, Suffolk County, England, the daughter of Thomas Paine and Katheryne Paine, née Harsant. Mary died in 1698. If Philemon Dickerson was born in 1598, he was nearly forty when he left Great Yarmouth for Salem and would have been forty-three when he married and began a family. This might make the 1613 date seem more likely, but most records say otherwise.
Pious and sober, Philemon was typical of the Puritans who came to America in the first half of the seventeenth century in that he was educated in a trade, but not in letters (his illiteracy is evidenced by his will, which survives, marked with an "X" instead of endorsed by signature) and was a townsman rather than a farmer.
Seventeen years prior to Philemon Dickerson's arrival in the New World, the Pilgrims of the Mayflower -- a group which shared the Puritans ethics and religion -- reached Cape Cod. Driving through this portion of New England today, with its pleasant villages full of restaurants, shops, and inns, it is difficult to imagine what the Pilgrims found when they dropped anchor in Provincetown Harbor on November 12, 1620. What they found was nothing. P'town, now full of art galleries, gift boutiques, Portuguese bakeries, and assorted tourist traps, was utterly unpopulated then. A sandy stretch of land along shore gave way to thickets of twisted pine and then to hardwood forests, all interspersed with sinkholes, salt water ponds and salt marshes. They did find a source of fresh water and later a cache of indian corn stored in reed baskets buried in sand. This last was as close to a civilized infrastructure as they initially would encounter. It indicated the presence of men schooled in agriculture and basket weaving and indeed there were Indians nearby. The Pamet tribe of the Wampanoag nation lived upcape somewhat in what is today the village of Truro, but they kept their distance from the newcomers. The Pilgrims first encountered the Indians at a place now called -- logically enough -- First Encounter Beach in present-day Eastham, Massachusetts. These Indians, of the Nauset tribe, possibly had had bad experience with white men previously, as the Puritans were not the first Europeans to sail the waters of Massachusetts Bay. The Monomoyicks, neighbors to the Nausets, had been roughed up in a set-to with some French explorers a few years earlier and the Nausets, as caution would dictate, did not distinguish between the French and these Englishmen and promptly attacked them. They fled back to their shallop and made way back to the Mayflower in Provincetown harbor with all haste.
The first effort to colonize New England had occurred in 1602 when Bartholomew Gosnold sailed round about Cape Cod Bay, the Gulf of Maine and Nantucket and Vineyard Sounds and left off some people to build a fort on one of Elizabeth Islands, a chain which stretches southwest from the southwesternmost point on the Cape and forms the southeastern marker of Buzzards Bay. He could not convince any of his sailors to stay, however, and the settlement was abandoned. Gosnold gave Cape Cod its name as well as the Elizabeth Islands their collective name, and his descriptions of the Cape and of the Provincetown region were so good that the Pilgrims knew exactly where they were when they arrived eighteen years later.
The great difficulty which confronted the Puritans upon their arrival in Massachusetts was their relatively poor knowledge of farming, fishing and hunting -- the skills needed to procure food. The infrastructure which supplied food to tradesmen and merchants in England was lacking among the colonizers. Stories of real hunger -- even starvation -- among the poor souls in America began to find their way back across the Atlantic to England. Quite naturally, the early settlers turned to trade with the Indians, goods for food. The Indians of the New England coast grew maize, squash, pumpkins, harvested shellfish and trapped and hunted game animals, all that in good abundance, but the colonizers were short of material goods with which to barter. Eventually, most Puritan men were pressed out of necessity into the rural skills of tilling soil, sowing, reaping and husbandry. Still others had to turn to the sea and learn boat-building and net making in order to harvest the rich resources of Cape Cod and Massachusetts Bays. Hunting also added to the Puritan's larder. Wild turkeys, of Thanksgiving fame, indeed roamed widely in New England, as they do today. Turkeys are incredibly skittish, and thereby difficult to hunt, but hunger breeds the twin virtues of patience and perseverance which are needed to triumph over the natural defenses of the quarry. Ducks and geese abounded in and about the watercourses, fresh and salt. The Puritans had some guns when they arrived and more were soon imported from England. Punt-gunning soon was common and remained so until the end of the 19th century. So plentiful were the gamebirds of that era in our history that a gunner, having worked his way up stealthily to a roost of fowl, could blast down as many as a hundred birds with one report of the cannonlike gun fixed to the bow of his boat.
At Thanksgiving time, my ancestors are depicted in displays of cartoonlike characters who often bear little resemblance to the real people they are meant to represent. Typically, the Puritans are shown dressed in plain black clothing with white blouses or aprons. The menfolk wear black hats with silver buckles. This is the style of clothing favored by wealthy Dutchmen of the seventeenth century as are depicted in Rembrandt paintings. The Puritans had a strong Dutch influence in their society as many of them had fled Crown persecutions by betaking themselves to the more liberal Netherlands, yet few of the Puritan emigrants would have the means to dress in black silk and silver. That the Puritans wore plain dress is true, but it is also true for all Europe at the time. Alkaloid dyes were not developed until the German chemical industry hit full stride in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Until then, it was indeed a drab world, sartorially speaking. As evidenced by Philemon Dickerson's trade, people wore a lot of leather. Leather was tough and therefor lasted a long time -- a good thing, that, in an economy where money was always scarce. Silver and other lustrous metals were far too valuable as means of exchange to waste on belt buckles. Iron, copper and its alloy brass (which is copper mixed with tin) were sometimes used as buckles, as well as for buttonhooks. However, leather garments and pullover blouses lent themselves to ties or laces and many garments had not a touch of metal, bone or wood for fastening purposes.
The Thanksgiving panorama usually shows the Puritans living in log cabins. Log cabins were unknown in the New World until the first were built by Swedish immigrants in New York and Pennsylvania rather late in Puritan times. The Puritans did not know how to build log cabins. They came from a land of houses built of wattle work and white daub with thatched roofs. These picturesque structures are still seen in the English countryside today, but the daub could not stand up to the harsher winters of the New World and Philemon Dickerson would have needed to reinforce this construction with either clapboarding or wood shingles. The thatch roof also tends to fail in New England winter nor'easters, but is an even greater hazard in summer when the "Bermuda High" -- a high pressure weather system -- settles in over the Atlantic and imposes a desertlike climate on the coastal states and Canadian maritime provinces. This weather pattern led to spontaneous combustion and fires claimed almost all the thatch roof houses rather soon after construction, and the practice was eventually abandoned. The roofs had to be made of wood planks and shingled. Perhaps reflecting the thriftiness of the Puritans, the half-house construction was often employed where the rear roof extended almost to the ground, confining the second story to the front of the house only. These "salt boxes" are found all over New England. The full-house construction is now known as the Cape Cod style and is built today all over the country.
Each house had at least one fireplace which was used for cooking and heating. It averaged eight feet wide and about five to six feet in height -- a walk-in fireplace, as it were. It was backed by fired bricks. The better ones had baking cubbies built into the walls and all had cast iron trammel bars for suspending cooking pots. Tableware in the Puritan home was mostly pewter and some glass. There was no porcelain "china" -- imports from that far-off country would commence in the next century. A cupboard, a table and some ladderback chairs made up the furniture in the Puritan home. Most homes had one bed for the parents and cradles for the children -- all of them. Cradles were easy to construct of wood and served as good enough bedding. The children of a modest-means household would sleep in a cradle until they married and moved out. At the Shelburne Museum in Vermont, I have seen examples of cradles that could accommodate a person of five and a half feet in stature -- the average height of a seventeenth century adult Englishman.
The household would be equipped with a few candles for lighting but no oil-lamps. Whaling would come much later and the nearest oil fields were in Pennsylvania, which was then in the possession of wild Indians and would later fall into the clutches of the Quakers -- a much-distrusted group. In the early years, glass was not used for windows. The windows sometimes were covered with greased paper, sometimes just shuttered. Within twenty years of the Pilgrims' arrival, some more successful settlers began to build more elaborate houses and it is of these that examples survive. The oldest surviving house on Nantucket Island was built in 1686. In the town of Barnstable on Cape Cod is the fine Nathaniel Bacon House which dates to 1642. So closely do the modern Cape Cod or colonial houses resemble their forebears erected by the Puritans and other early settlers that it is difficult to discern the age of any such house in the region. A quaint cottage in the village of Sandwich on the Cape with steep pitched roof and clad in armor of wood shingles weathered battle-gray may be twenty or may be three hundred twenty years old.
To heat these homes and for cooking there was, of course, no shortage of firewood. New England was covered by a dense forest full of lofty trees ready for the ax. Even today, the thickness of the eastern woodlands is impressive, especially to the American born and bred in the dry territories west of the Mississippi. In the old days, the plush green carpet of leaf and pine needle rolling athwart the shoreline, stretching itself over uplands and through river valleys and even up mountainsides was staggering, awe-inspiring. Huge old-growth stands of trees towered to heights rarely seen today. Within this green sanctum, lived bears, bobcats, wolves and lions, great lumbering moose and scampering, graceful whitetail deer, a host of birds familiar and strange, and bizarre new animals which still today carry their Indian names such as the New England skunk and the black-banded raccoon.
The frame houses of the Puritans required sawn wood planks from the logs provided by the great forest. Among the earliest commercial buildings erected by the Puritans were sawmills. These worked by water power and used a mechanism which transformed the circular movement of the water wheel into an up-and-down movement of the saw. This was achieved by a gear known as an eccentric, which is a flat wheel with an arm attached near one rim. When the water-propelled wheel rotated it would lend a back-and-forth motion to the arm. Attach the arm to the blade, and you have an up-and-down moving saw. Excessive vibration of the blade was prevented by an idler, which was also attached to the eccentric and held the blade tightly at its opposite end. The cliché sawmill with the circular blade whirling away as the damsel-in-distress is strapped to the cutting jig was an improved version of the sawmill which appeared somewhat later in our history, just in time for the matinee. The sawmill often doubled as the village smithy, foundry, and colliery [place where charcoal was made]. The kinetic energy of the waterwheel could be harnessed to operate a large bellows to stoke a fire to a frenzy for working metals or for blackening wood. The mills were busy places that burned down a lot -- judging from the fact that few originals remain in New England. Millwrights were in great demand in the Puritan's world. Indian corn was the principal crop and most of it had to milled to flour. Watermills were also used for this purpose, at least on the mainland. On Cape Cod and on the islands of Martha's Vineyard, Nantucket, and Block Island running water was scarce and here windmills were put to use as wind is a cheap commodity on these Atlantic landfalls. In Philemon Dickerson's time windmills were manned by a single individual -- the miller -- whose pay was a percent of each bushel he milled. This was known as the miller's "pottle". The Puritans fixed this amount in law. They fixed almost everything in law.
The Puritans had a strong belief in civil law and the English court system and it is the belief that each man is equal before the law (and equally accountable to the Deity) that constitutes their major contribution to what today we call American freedoms. In coming to America, the Pilgrims and the Puritans had not sought personal liberty in any sense similar to that to which their descendants aspired one hundred and fifty years later. Rather, they believed in a strictly ordered society bound together by common religion and Common Law. Indeed, gaining admittance to one of their towns was difficult and each town had a bailiff or sheriff, and several selectmen whose duty it was, among others, to give the bum's rush to undesirables and "aliens".
The Puritans kept meticulous records of births, deaths, titles and deeds, property metes and bounds, bills of exchange, census tabulations and transcripts of court proceedings. From these last we know that Philemon Dickerson once testified in court against a man named Arthur Smith, a Quaker, who had been accused of "blasphemious remarks & opynions". Smith was found guilty and received a punishment of four strokes of the whip, after which he was banished to Brookhaven.
Among the Puritans, Quakers were widely held to be bad people, though many people confuse the Puritans with them. Quakers held to a few notions which struck the leadership of the Massachusetts Bay Colony as subversive, e.g. Quakers believed in equality and were strong opponents of slavery, they also held to the old Puritan distrust of ecclesiastical hierarchies and extended this to the ministry. This last notion had been the wellspring of Puritanism ( indeed the name "Puritan" comes from their stated desire to "purify" the Church of England of bishops, priests and other 'Papist' styles ). The Puritans, on the other hand, now held a strong belief in the ministry as a font of social leadership. They also would keep slaves ( but unlike the chattel system which would grow up in the South, each slave had rights which were carefully spelled out in law ). Further removed from the Puritans in both time and temper, though often confused with them, were the Shakers. Arising from the Quakers in England in the middle of the eighteenth century, the Shakers were officially called the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing. The name "Shakers" derives from their frenzied dancing rituals in which men and women formed separate concentric circles and danced madly, the men's circles going in one direction, the women's in the other. They believed sex to be the source of all sin and therefor established communities ( mostly in upstate New York ) in which the sexes were strictly segregated and celibacy was practiced. Not suprisingly, the Shakers died out quickly.
So did the Puritans. The decline of the Puritan spirit came quickly in America after the new century (1700) dawned. The first blow may have come in Salem with the Witch Hysteria in 1692. The horrible events of that dark time led to wider acceptance of unpuritanlike notions of religious tolerance and political liberty. The arrival of newcomers from England, the Netherlands and Germany brought dilution with Old World religions: Episcopalian, Lutheran and even the dreaded Romanists. As a practical matter, the people of New England could no longer be ruled by clerical elders of a particular point of view.
Yet, Philemon Dickerson and his fellow passengers on the Mary Anne left me, particularly, more than a set of genes and left the nation, generally, more than a November holiday. They are responsible more than any group of early settlers for our mercantile heritage as Yankee traders. Further, through their determination to survive, the Puritans gave us Yankee independence and Yankee ingenuity.
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31 October 1996