Mayflower Bastard: A Stranger Among the Pilgrims

by Dave Lindsay

David Lindsay, researching old records to learn details of the life of his ancestor, Richard More, soon found himself in the position of the Sorcerer's Apprentice-wherever he looked for one item, ten more appeared. What he found illuminated not only More's own life but painted a clear and satisfying picture of the way the First Comers, Saints and Strangers alike, set off for the new land, suffered the voyage on the Mayflower, and put down their roots to thrive on our continent's northeastern shore. From the story, Richard emerges as a man of questionable morals, much enterprise, and a good deal of old-fashioned pluck, a combination that could get him into trouble-and often did. He lived to father several children, to see, near the end of his life, a friend executed as a witch in Salem, and to be read out of the church for unseemly behavior. Mayflower Bastard lets readers see history in a new light by turning an important episode into a personal experience.

Genres: History, American History, Nonfiction, Biography

272 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 2002

Reviews

[Nancy]

I admit. I only picked it up because of the title. I was intrigued when I saw that it was non-fiction. It was an amazing tale of one poor lad who was shipped off to the New World just to get rid of him and his siblings by their peerage father. Amongst the very youngest that were sent over to the new colony. Sadly Richard More's siblings all died pretty early on. He was a rare thing though. As a child, he was to get land when he came of age. And he did. He also became a sea captain. Richard More was the only Mayflower colonist to have his own headstone when he died. His name pops up in the history of the settling of the New World because he, by virtue of being one of the youngest early settlers, was the longest lived. He had a checkered life that made for even more fun. The writing style is clear and fun. There is a certain wryness on the authors part that makes you realize some of what Richard did were with a wink and a nod. Openly thwarting the tax laws of England. Richard died soon after the Salem Witch trials had ended. His own neighbor was weighted with stones until the man died. If you like biography then this is a good read. If you would like to know some of our earliest history as a colony then this is a must to read.

[Barbm1020]

This book is nothing if not thorough, detailing the life and fortunes of Richard More, from cruel English relatives who didn't want to be responsible for him in childhood to his truly self-made status as a First Comer and wild card among the settlers on the Massachusetts coast. His life was colorful and often lawless, but what he did for good or for profit is carefully listed here. My only problem with the book is that the narrative often lapses into speculation and poetic language, which is fine if you're writing songs, but makes the story a little shaky. There are several characters named Richard More, and several characters named Samuel More, and at times I wasn't sure who was who. Still an interesting read.

[Betsy]

It could have been written in a better style. Sometimes Lindsay explains the colonial words he uses and sometimes he does not. I had to jump to the footnotes to understand what he was trying to say. I found it confusing.
Coming from Massachusetts, this was an interesting topic for me. It differed from the Massachusetts history we were taught. I enjoyed reading about the origins of the many towns mentioned, but it felt like work.

[Kathie]

Poorly written on so many levels, and I'm not convinced the research behind it was done well, either. Entertaining, though!

[Mike Little]

One of the worst written books I’ve come across. There were many sentences and entire paragraphs that left me scratching my head. Was there an editor? This was a DNF for me. Too bad, as the subject matter was of interest.

[K]

This is a very entertaining book, but it's hard to follow in some ways, and that's why I give it a mediocre rating. It's short and snappy, but actually too short and too snappy -- I would have benefited from more background information on a few of the events that transpired during the time period that was covered, as well as of the bizarre social/cultural practices of the era.

The story is thus (in highly simplified form). In the early 1610's, a woman of means in England had an affair with a local yeoman farmer and had four children. Her husband sued her for divorce, and he took the four kids. A couple weeks later, he stuck them on the Mayflower when it it went to America. Three of those children died in that first miserable winter of 1620. One of them, Richard More, survived and lived on as the oldest survivor of the Mayflower. This book tells his story.

Richard was only 6 when he was thrown onto the Mayflower, and he never saw his mother again. He was adopted by a Puritan family that was making the passage and lived as an indentured servant to them for 7 years. Then the record is sketchy, but he probably indentured himself to a shipbuilder or sea captain for another 7 years. Over the next several decades, he traveled back and forth to England, up to Newfoundland, and down to colonies along the U.S. East Coast and the Caribbean. He was a trader, captain, smuggler and pretty damn near a pirate.

Oh, and he married a woman in Massachusetts and another one in England. At the same time.

Telling More's story illuminates a world of the Puritans that is not the one told to us in elementary school. Yes, there were righteous people, and they tried to uphold ideals. But even on that Mayflower voyage there also were regular people who filled out the list of emigrants -- people looking to make a buck or just to escape England. And they didn't get along with each other. Richard More straddled the middle, having grown up in the house of someone with Puritan credentials, but clearly not buying into all of the rigors of it.

The book does a wonderful job of presenting the complications and contradictions of that life. It shows how Puritans tried to present a honest face to the world, as a challenge to what they felt was the hypocrisy of the Christian leaders of England (who were very hypocritical). But the Puritans had to make compromises of their own, such as looking the other way at smuggling that was essential to their existence, as the levies and trade restrictions imposed by England were too steep. And the Puritans also acted cruelly to Indians, in ways that don't need to be repeated here, and which are referenced only in regards to specific incidents in the book in which Richard More might have taken a part.

And finally, near the end of More's life, the Salem witch trials happened, which marked the evil side of religious zeal. More knew several of the people who were hung as witches, in one case owned land that abutted the victim. But More was living under his own cloud of having recently been found out as an adulterer and banished from the church, only to be allowed back in after a change in government.

The author of this book has almost nothing to go on about More, so he speculates over and over. But he tells you what he knows from documents, and then he explains why his guess about what happened is logical, and so it's entertaining in a novelistic way. Yet, it really happened (probably, maybe, sort of). You get inside the head of a man who had to scramble from a young age under the hardest of circumstances -- without parents, siblings, or even his native country, into a land of hardship and unforgiving religious fervor. And yet he persevered and even prospered at times.

[Matt Nyman]

Mayflower Bastard is a really good book to read if you are interested in the 17th century in Massachusetts. It is the personal history of one of the youngest people who were on the Mayflower, and runs from 1615 to 1695 or so, covering in good detail a great amount of the history of the early Plymouth and Salem colonies.

It does so in a very haphazard way, with a flowery language that is hard to bear at times, and also a great deal of poetic or narrative license, as the author admits. It makes for a good story, but of course so much is lost to time, and so many many gaps have to be filled to construct the narrative. I was willing to look past this, as one does have to make a best effort to tell the story when reconstructing a man's life and I think Lindsay was reasonable in the conclusions he drew.

Despite these problems, I really appreciated the detail here on how one man's personal history intersected with these new americans more generally, and the political history of the time. I learned a great deal from this book about how the leaders of Massachusetts struggled through the first 70 years of their time. I now feel I understand the evolution from the Pilgrim Puritans to the Salem Witchtrials and a great deal about how Massaschusetts was dealing with England and how the economy was building.

You have to be patient with the author, but really an excellent job done communicating a ton of information about what it was like in 17th century Massachusetts. The book is easily worth it for anyone interested in that time period.

[KHLOARIS]

Before 1959 it was not yet publically known that the orginal Mayflower ship had been used for trafficing minors out of England. At the age of 5, Richard More [1614-1696] was one of several orphan passengers who survived the voyage that eventualy landed at Plymouth Rock. Richard More went on to became a sea captain, tavern keeper & sex criminal. This book is his biography.

This is a remarkable trip into New England’s early coloninial history. The author opens the first chapter as a personalized travelogue starting in Shipton, England before diving into the subject of Richard More’s life in North America.

On our continuing tour, Don Harris took me next to the church in Shipton, where Richard More was baptized. I stood at the baptismal font, resting my hands on its edge, and tried to imagine a baby's skin against its coarse texture. Before leaving, […] I leafed through the church register and stopped at the page where the writing ended. Picking up a pen, I signed my name. Then, below it, I wrote, "Descendant of Jacob Blakeway [accused by Samuel More to be adulterous father of Richard More]." - - I heard Don try to suppress gasp. "They'll probably tear that page from the book!" he said as we got back to the car. - - The idea of tearing a few pages from the church records may well have crossed Samuel's mind as well, once his suspicions were aroused. Yet, oddly, he did nothing to vent his rage. He did not lay a rough hand on his wife, even though his law— unlike mine, or yours for that matter-would have permitted it.

The casual prose of the first chapter, relaxes once the story starts rolling, but this book seldom turns into dry history lessons. There are so many facts & details to this curious tale that I really appreciated every time author inserted his quirky voice.


There were many social expectations surrounding taverns. Moderate drinking was universal, but excessive drunkenness was not permitted, as it was seen as a deformer of character: one Salem man was fined by the court for being "disguised with drink." - - Who drank what was also carefully prescribed. Beyond the sale of alcohol to Indians, a grave breach of the law, the tavernkeeper had to know the hometown of any English customer before he set his drink down. In September 1674, when Richard succeeded in getting his original tavern license renewed, it had been on the condition that he sell wine to "strangers only." This was an old word around New England, and one Richard knew intimately: in its capitalized form, it had originally referred to non-Saints at Plimouth, including himself. - - Gradually, however, the meaning of the word had changed. According to laws drawn up in Massachusetts in the 1640s, a traveler coming within the bounds of a town was considered a "stranger" until he made his religious views known. This sense of the term had persisted with the passage of the years, although its bite had grown progressively weaker until theoretically it referred to transients of any kind, and, in the case of tavern customers, mainly to mariners. - - These sailors,
who constituted the bulk of
Richard's clientele, could be expected to fall easily to blows. Thomas Chubb was hardly atypical when he stood up in Richard's tavern and vehemently denied having borrowed someone's boat without permission. Nor was it unusual that his accuser responded by beating him to within an inch of his life.

And…


Aside from what they foreshadowed, these incidents offer glimpses into the day-to-day rhythms at Richard's tavern. […] One gets the sense, too, from ephemeral appearances of various people described each in his turn as "Captain More's man," of comings and goings, of the milling quality so common in large, loose-knit communities. Certainly, in this regard, we will want to take note of a black woman about the house, visible only at the odd moments when she cleared the tables or emerged from the kitchen in the back to freshen the stock of tobacco. - - Whether Judeth was
slave or servant is impossible to say definitively, not only because the record describes her simply as Richard's "neager" but also because the distinction in New England at the time was slight. Neither condition was racially defined, and neither was necessarily permanent. Some slaves were bound to a term of seven years, just as servants were. By the same token, a servant could be forced to serve an extra term if his master decided to starve him just when freedom lay in sight. Nevertheless, we are relatively safe in asserting that Judeth was a slave and that she had probably been procured by Richard More Jr. on one of his recent voyages to Barbados. - - As a black in Massachusetts, Judeth was able to attend church, though she would have been required to sit in the back of the meetinghouse and receive Communion last. She was entitled to marry, though she would remain property and could not assume her husband’s surname. Some of her culture was imported—her dress tended toward the colorful, and her folklore toward African tales—but she and her fellow slaves also celebrated an event called Election Day: after electing their own “governor,” they rode in their masters’ carts to an evening of dancing, singing, and toasting. - - How much Judeth took part in any of this is untraceable, but she has not been completely lost to time. In 1678, while the whites of New England bickered, Judeth made her stake in history by falling in love with David Geffard, described in the record as Mr. Pilgrim’s “neager man.” Not owning any property themselves, these lovers had to conduct their romance as best they could, which generally meant that David would come over to Richard’s front yard and try to find Judeth. Even then, of course, there were few places where they could carry their feelings to their natural conclusion, and ultimately they were discovered in the act. Brought to court in November 1678 for “fornicating,” they were sentenced to be whipped (the penalty for Judeth was “five stripes,” for David ten) or pay a fine.” - - […] [Richard More] merely paid the fine, remarking that he had asked David several times not to come into his yard. Still, it is worth pointing out that at least one Mayflower passenger-quite apart from the glorious myth of the Ancient Beginning-held complete power over a black human being, to do with her as he wished.

[Bonnie]

The writing style of this book is off-putting, but once you get past the first chapter, it gets better. It is a revealing look at life for the pilgrims and other early residents of North America. As a descendant of Mayflower passengers, I hoped to get a better idea of what their life was like.
This true story follows one of four siblings who were involved in a custody battle and were sent to North American as indentured servants to Pilgrims. Three of the young children did not survive the first brutal winter. Richard More was only about five years old, but he helped bury many of the Mayflower settlers.
From there, he went on to become a fisherman, a boat builder, a sailor, a ship owner and businessman facilitating trade between England and various colonies. The author, David Lindsay, believes Richard had two families, one on each side of the Atlantic, and speculates about how this impacted his life as he strove to keep his secret. His life was not an easy one, but he was the only Mayflower passenger who lived to witness the Salem witch trials.
The author did a remarkable job of researching records in England and the New World. He stitches the facts together with supposition to create a fascinating picture of the hard reality of survival, politics, and the first stirrings of American independence from England.

[Debra]

This is a well- written account of a man who, as being born out of wedlock, is shipped off to the New World aboard the Mayflower by his mother’s husband (not his father) with his siblings to serve as indentured servants ( Richard at the tender age of five!) before they are to receive land after seven years. Richard is the only survivor of his siblings and has a most colorful life. He lives amongst the Pilgrims and Strangers alike, witnessing the interactions between Pilgrims and Native Americans to the Salem Witch trials. He commits, among many sins, adultery and bigamy, lying, cheating, and what amounts to piracy all while becoming a sea captain, and a tavern keeper.
“ Before me sits a stone from Richard More’s childhood soil at Larden Hall. From time to time I gaze upon it and wonder at the mystery of a seashell imprinted on a stone nicked from a landlocked country. With that image before me, I think back on what I have written, and though the story keeps shifting in my mind’s eye, in the end there is nothing I can do: the pious and the permissive, the minister and the makebate, the scholar and the sailor alike, can only despise me for what I have done. Richard More was neither pilgrim nor beast; he was simply a man who wanted to redeem his mother, to make it “all one before God”, and I have tried- without success—to deny him that privilege. “

[Sharon]

Interesting tale of of Richard Moore, a Mayflower Passenger (though not one of the 'Pilgrims') sent to Plymouth Colony as a child along with his siblings because they were the products of a years long affair between his mother and a neighbor. Richard, the only one to survive the harshness of the early days of the settlement, grew up to be a merchant sailor. He traveled back and forth to England so many times that he committed bigamy, having a wife in Plymouth and another in England. He was one of the longest lived Mayflower passengers, (the last to die was Mary Cushman in 1699). In his later years, he lived in Salem and was a witness to the famous trials.

The author inserts himself into the writing, but we can overlook it as he is a descendant of Moore's, and he speculates a lot over what this or that person was thinking or what their motivations might have been. It reads almost like a memoir.

Interesting read, if you can get past the 'ruffles and flourishes' of the writing style.

[Joshua Horn]

This book is written in a pretty unique style, which I will not attempt to describe in this short review. I appreciate the effort to be innovative, and to keep the focus on story of the book's subject, as this can be difficult in a situation like this, where the story is interesting, but the records are scanty. On the other hand, I found it quite hard to follow at times, perhaps more careful editing could have improved this. In a major failing, he blurs the line between fact and speculation, asserting as facts things that I know there are not records to definitively prove.

[Gregory Knapp]

This was a wonderful read. It took a chapter or two to get used to the author's style, but he's done an excellent job of journalistic and genealogical research to pull together the life story of the main character. As a Mayflower descendant myself, it was refreshing to see the historical background before, during and after the Mayflower voyage in the context of the their lives. And as a bonus, I learned something about my own ancestors in the process.

[Irene]

Focused mostly on his research of a Mayflower relative, it is not the most exciting reading. However, Lindsay did uncover some very interesting information about the first settlements in the New World and gives quite an interesting glimpse into the lives of the first colonists. It is quite amazing that his relative arrived with the Pilgrims and lived through the Salem witch trials.

[David Flanagan]

A nicely presented story of an often forgotten character in the early days of Plymouth Colony. The research might seem sketchy, but considering the ages of the records, it is actually very impressive. Richard is one of many who "followed the sea" and this is an interesting portrayal of that element of New England colonial history.

[Shannon Luppens]

I actually enjoyed the book immensely. I have relatives that came over in the Mayflower so it was interesting to hear what it was really like for them at this time and to hear about them
In the story!

[Donna Peake]

Great book if you like reading how the Pilgrims lived. It sure wasn't an easy life.

[Gail Gauthier]

This is a fascinating, even heart-breaking, situation. But a lot of detailed speculation holding the story together.

[Rebecca Simpson]

What can I say? I love a work of historical research that reads almost like a novel. The details of this man's life are to bizarre not to generate interest. Mother had a number of children, all apparently fathered by men other than her husband. Hubby sent all the kids off with the Pilgrims to settle America as indentured servants. Only one survived. He went on to become a sea captain and apparently had a wife and family in both Massachusetts and in England. I suppose he was pretty secure in the knowledge that one wife would never find out about the other. This man had a life straight out of a soap opera plot, and was involved in much of what was going on during the settlement of Massachusetts. Fascinating stuff and a good recommendation for people who usually find books about history to be a little dry.

[Janet Blake]

The author clearly enjoyed writing this book! He's inclined to prose. This makes the first chapter a bit of a hard read, but once you're past that, it's a pleasure. He did extensive research on the customs of the time, in order to spot irregularities which might indicate something relevant to the story.

My only complaint is the dropoff at the end. I know that in life there are no neat bows and ribbons, but it sure would have been nice to have a little bit of closure! When was he last heard of?

A great read that will have you pondering peoples' roles in society for a long time.

[AskHistorians]

An interesting book, about a young boy on the Mayflower, and his life afterwards up to and including the Salem Witch Trials. The style of the book is offputting to some, and the author has been criticised for including too much supposition, but it is worth a read.

[Susanne Gulde]

Strange writing style, as I think has been mentioned in other reviews.