History of Plymouth, Massachusetts

The Pilgrims were not explorers, they were settlers.

Massachusetts Bay was not terra incognita. By 1600, its shores were a regular stopping-point for European fishing boats. Descriptions of the fertility of the land, equability of the climate, and friendliness of the natives brought back by explorers and fishermen were widespread in Europe.

Neither were its shores uninhabited when the Pilgrims arrived. In 1600, there were thriving Algonquin ("Indian") villages all over eastern Massachusetts, with particular concentrations near the shore where seafood was abundant and the climate more moderate.

Much of the land had been cleared for family gardens, cornfields, berry fields, wild fruit and nut orchards, and hunting grounds.

But the fisherman who stopped and got to know the natives left behind deadly souvenirs: bacteria and viruses unknown in the New World, against which the local people had no natural immunity.

Smallpox, syphilis and other "European" diseases spread like wildfire through the villages of Massachusetts Bay, and within a generation this well-populated land was nearly empty. It's estimated that up to 75% of the people died, leaving their cleared, prepared lands open for the Pilgrim settlers.

Even though the land was prepared for them, the Pilgrims were not well prepared for the land. The agricultural lands and hunting grounds that had provided an abundant living to the Algonquins would not do so right away for the Pilgrims.

The Europeans, used to growing wheat and herding cattle, found themselves in a land best suited to maize (corn) farming, turkey and deer hunting, and fishing for cod, oysters, clams and lobsters.

During the first hard winter at Plymouth, about half of the Pilgrims died. The rest survived largely through the beneficence of their Indian neighbors, who taught them how to hunt and fish, to plant maize, fertilizing the cornhills with fish waste, to collect berries and nuts, and to store produce underground.

On many occasions, the generosity and providence of the Algonquins, and barter, provided the Pilgrims with food to get through hard times.

Within two decades of the Pilgrims' arrival at Plymouth, European settlers' villages were flourishing on the shores of Massachusetts Bay and beginning to appear along the banks of rivers reached from the sea.