What was the 17th century like in New England for the pilgrims off the Mayflower?

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What was the 17th century like in New England for the pilgrims off the Mayflower?
Not good. they had come ill-prepared for life in New England, and most of the pilgrims did not have the skills to cope with life in a hostile environment, or the equipment. In 'made In America' Bill Bryson writes:





'It would be difficult to imagine a group of people more ill-suited to a life in the wilderness. They packed as if they had misunderstood the purpose of the trip. They found room for sundials and candle snuffers, a drum, a trumpet, and a complete history of Turkey. One William Mullins packed 126 pairs of shoes and 13 pairs of boots. Yet between them they failed to bring a single cow or horse or plough or fishing line. among the professions represented on the Mayflower were two tailors, a printer, seven merchants, a silk worker, a shopkeeper and a hatter - occupations whose importance is not immediately evident when one thinks of surviving in a hostile environment. Even those who labelelled themselves farmers generally had scant practical knowledge of husbandry, since farmer in the 1600s meant an owner of land rather than one who worked it.





They were, in short, dangerously unprepared for the rigours ahead, and they demonstrated their manifest incompetence in the most dramatic possible way, by dying in droves. Six expired in the first two weeks, eight the next month, seventeen more in February, a further thirteen in March. By April, when the Maflower set sail back to England, just fifty-four people, nearly half of them children, were left to begin the long work of turning this tenuous toehold into a self-sustaining colony.





At this remove, it is difficult to conceive just how alone this small, hapless band of adventurers was. Their nearest kindred neighbours - at jamestown in virginia and at a small colony at Cupers (now Cupids) in Newfoundland - were five hundred miles off in opposite directions.At their back stood a hostile ocean, and before them lay an inconceivably vast and unknown continent of 'wild and savage hue' in William Bradford's uneasy words. They were about as far from comforts of civilisation as anyone had ever been (certainly as far as anyone had ever been without a fishing line).





For two months they tried to make contact with the natives, but every time they spotted any, the Indians ran off. Then one day in February a young brave approached a party of Pilgrims on a beach. His name wa sSamoset and he was a stranger in the region himself, but he had a friend called Tisquantum from the Wampanoag tribe to whome he introduced them. Samoset and Tisquantum became the Pilgrims' fast friends. They showed them how to plant corn and catch wildfowl, and helped them to establish relations with the local chief'





While the men were establishing themselves as farmers, the women's contribution to colonial life was important as well. in 'America's women' Gail Collins writes:





'The house was the one place where a Colonial housewife could be in charge, the chief executive and artisan of a little factory producing the items the family needed to survive. The most time-consuming chore was the making of cloth, and it was also one of the most critical. Early on, fabric was in such short supply in America that there are records of court suits fought over a missing handkerchief of a hole burned in a blanket. the colonists regarded the production of cloth as crucuial to their survival.





Colonial cloth was made from wool or flax. Turning the flax into linen thread was an excruciating process in which the stalks were dried, combed, softened, cleaned, dried again, then "broken" to separate the fibres, pounded, cleaned and pounded again. The little mass of fiber that emerged fromall this was spun into thread on a small wheel with a hand pedal. The thread then had to be treated with repeated washing, rinsing, bleaching, and beating before it was ready for the loom. With wool, the women used a much larger wheel and stood to do the work. They performed a sort of graceful dance, gliding backward to draw out the newly spun yarn, then coming forward to let it wind onto the spindle. In a full day of spinning, a woman could walk over twenty miles.





Spinning was one of the jobs housewives most eagerly foised off on their daughters or servants. Cooking was naother duty they found particularly burdensome - it was both repetetive and diffcult to do well because the temperature of the fire could not be controlled. Women might have found their seasonal duties more interesting. In the autumn, they made apple butter and cider. When the pigs were butchered, they cleaned the intestines for sausage casting and stuffed them with meat scraps and herbs. they collected the fat to mix with lye for soap making - a long and arduous process that probablynever ranked high on anyone's list of favourite chores. the grease and lye were mixed together, outdoors, in a huge pot over an open fire. it took about six bushels of ashes and 24 pounds of grease to make one barrel of soap, which was soft, like clear jelly.





In the cold weather, the women made candles and brewed beer. In the spring, they planted theri kitchen gardens. they grew beans, cabbage, lettuce, parsnips, carrots, turnips, beets, cucumbers, radishes, onions, garlic, peppers, squash, peas, muskemelon, watermelon, pumpkins and a variety of herbs both for cooking and medicinal purposes. cheesmaking started in early summer. The dairy woman slowly heated several gallons of milk with rennet. In an hour or two, the curd formed and she worked in some butter, packed the mixture into a mold, and put it in a wooden press for an hour or so, changing and washing the cheesecloths as the whye dripped out. A housewife who could make good clean butter and cheese was a real boon to her family, creating a product that was not only valuable at home but in the marketplace. To be a good dairywoman was a fine art and hard work. Turning milk into butter required an hour or so at the churn followed by kneading and pressing with the hands or wooden paddles.





obviously most women weren't able to do all the housewifely tasks well. Someone who was good at cheese making might trade her wheels of cheese for cloth or meat or candles. A midwife or dressmaker might be paid for her services with a brace of geese or tub of sweet butter. Daughters were regularly "lent out" by their mothers to to help a neighbour with the spinning or harvest or nursing.





A competent housewife also earned the respect of her husband, who could see firsthand the value of her labors. The farmer who slaughtered a pig needed his wife to make the sausages, process the bacon, and preserve the pork. As he sat by the fireside at night, mending his fishing net or fixing his tools, he couold watch her turning the flax he had harvested and the wool he had sheared intot he family's clothes. The candles that lit their way to bed came from her hand, as did the vegetables, eggs, cheese and chickens they ate and the beer or cider they drank. they were very much parnters in the family business, and if the man was at all sensible he understood how critical his wife was to their mutual success.'
Reply:a whole lotta no fun
Reply:They arrived in the month of December and it was a very cold winter. They had to build houses and shelter so for themselves and decided that the place we now call Plymouth was the best spot.





It turns out to be very good but for a very sad reason. The tribe of Indians who had lived in that area had all died from the disease we call small pox.





They still need help farming and so forth. The soil in New England tends to be what they call hardscrabble which means there is a lot of granite rock and it is many times under only a inch or two of good farm land.





This was remedied by a friendly Indian named Squanto who taught them to use fish for fertilizer so that the capos would grow.

gert