The Bones of Plymouth

My dearest dissenters:

Happy Summer!

Are you enjoying your allotment of one week of va/stay-cation? Did you pay $800 for a tank of gas to drive into the wilderness and roast hot dogs over a fire, or did you pay $8000 for a Southwest flight to the theme park of your choice and eat a different meat on a stick?

I took my vacation at the birthplace of American colonialism and religious identity – Massachusetts. I spent time on the Cape and in Boston and I racked up quite a few excellent ghost and graveyard stories. For this newsletter I want to tell you about the absolutely fucking wildest one – the story of the Pilgrims and their dead.

We all know that the Pilgrims came on the Mayflower in 1620, right? The people we call the Pilgrims were actually radical fundamentalists called separatists by the English (they called themselves dissenters). They were early Protestants who thought the Church of England was corrupt and too closely aligned with the Catholic Church. They believed in a direct relationship with God, and a literal interpretation of the Bible. If this sounds familiar, it is – these folks are the original Evangelicals, and we’re still dealing with their bullshit in the US today.

Part of the separatist belief system was designed in opposition to Catholic practice: they considered the pageantry and symbolism of Rome to be superstitious. Pilgrims and Puritans eschewed religious ornamentation, even in death. The dead were to be buried without ceremony, even without a minister. They were buried with no marker, and praying at the graveside was discouraged. The separatists believed that their dead were on to their heavenly reward, and thus need not be mourned. I mean – that’s not possible but to show faith they had to be publicly stoic.

The Pilgrims also believed in divine providence, that God would clear the way for them if they were sufficiently obedient. They believed in predestination – that God had already chosen who was getting into Heaven, and acting like it was a sign that you were among the chosen few. So when they arrived at Plymouth to a chaotic and horrifying shitshow, they thanked God instead of running the other way.

At what we now call Plymouth, the Pilgrims found the abandoned Wampanoag village of Patuxet, still full of skeletons from a plague that wiped it out several years prior. According to scholars, the site was littered with the bleached bones of the prior inhabitants – that’s because the plague took them so quickly and thoroughly that there was no one left to bury them when they died. This happened during the Black Death in Europe, too. Approximately 2000 Wampanoag lived in Patuxet before it was abandoned. Of the area nations, the Wampanoag were hit the hardest by the epidemic. They considered the site untouchable, and must have been thoroughly shocked to see white people trying to live there.

And guess what? Those bones are probably not the dead of the winter of 1620-21. Scholars tell us that instead of burying the dead in the usual way, the Pilgrims used them to scare away the Wampanoag. They didn’t PUT THEM IN A GRAVEYARD, they propped them up like MANNEQUINS IN A HAUNTED HOUSE to MAKE IT LOOK like they had a FUCKING MILITIA. That’s right! They posed dead men, women, and children with muskets pointed out at the forest like the world’s worst three percenter themed fun house. And then they. . . went about their lives, with semi-frozen corpse guards posted up in a state of arrested decay. These, the people who WON’T EVEN GIVE THE DEAD A TOMBSTONE.

I mean, I guess in some ways it’s consistent with the dogma, right? The soul has left the body and it’s superstitious to treat it otherwise, so why not just put them to work???? They don’t call it the Puritan work ethic for nothin, babes. Before I get into why this is such an enormously gothic, extremely American story, I need to tell you that it actually gets worse. Kathleen Donegan, who studies the colony and its history, says that they actually dragged sick and dying folks out to the woods. They weren’t dead yet, my dudes. They died alone in the forest, sitting sentry. Kathleen doesn’t think they were actually ever buried, but simply left to die and rot in the woods. THIS IS VERY DARK. EVEN FOR ME.

The official narrative, as crafted by later politicians and colonial propagandists, is that the Pilgrims buried their dead under cover of night, and grew corn on top of the graves, to hide their losses from the Wampanoag. “Night burials” became the version of the lore that explains part of the story of mass death and loss, in a much less transgressive manner. Interestingly, this version is told along with the one about the militia mannequins at the Plymouth historical sites.

There is so much to unpack in this story. It’s hard not to see this scene side by side with the deserted Wampanoag village. In the case of those dead, God took them out so that His chosen could have the site. But then the chosen used their own dead in a profane and potentially murderous way to assert their claim on the land. They covered it up with a story about night burials and the planting of corn. Is that the behavior of folks predestined to Heaven? No, dude, it’s what desperate, starving people do. But there’s no way they could let History see that.