‘A kind of ruffling course in the world’: Perceptions of ‘Captain Shrimp’
Continued from
A purported portrait of Myles Standish, allegedly painted in 1625, first published in 1885.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myles_Standish
From Plymouth to Gainsborough and from Southampton to Scrooby, towns all over England have been anticipating Mayflower 400, with plans to mark what has been seen as a historic moment four centuries ago when the Plymouth Pilgrims arrived in the New World and set up their Massachusetts colony.
After so much hard work to prepare pageants and exhibitions the disruption and postponement of events caused by Covid 19 is being keenly felt.
Myles Standish Way, Chorley
Image credit: Chorley Council
Most of the Pilgrims came from the East of England – none was from Devon. But Chorley in Lancashire was particularly proud of its link with the Mayflower through Captain Miles Standish, the Pilgrims’ military commander.
The Standish family were Lords of the Manor of Duxbury to the south of Chorley. Miles named his estate in New England Duxbury after what is thought to be his manorial birthplace. The town reciprocated by naming one of its roads after him.
In some ways it seems incongruous that the Pilgrims, seeking spiritual freedom, should have felt the need for military aid in their New World venture.
St Laurence Church, where the Standish family worshipped
Chorley people seem less concerned by this aspect than by Standish’s family connections to the area. ‘He is an enigma, a man of mystery and almost a virtual being,’ observe the Friends of St Laurence Church in Chorley’s town centre, where they have been researching Standish’s early life.
Plimoth Plantation, a replica reconstruction of the original Pilgrim village in Plymouth, Massachusetts, including the palisade surrounding the settlement Image credit: Nancy
What they describe as ‘a chronic lack of evidence’ makes it well nigh impossible to answer the obvious and interesting questions about him, such as the date and place of his birth, his family origins and his career prior to joining the Mayflower Pilgrims in 1620.
An 1873 lithograph depicting the expedition against Nemasket led by Standish and guided by his Indian friend Hobbamock
A major issue with regard to Miles Standish, especially in the period leading up to the confrontation on Fishermen’s Field is the brutality he displayed in hostile encounters with Native Americans.
Four years before, in August 1621, he led an abortive night raid on the village of Nemasket in an attempt to kill Corbitant, a chief from the Wampanoag Indian tribe suspected of plotting against the Plymouth Pilgrims.
Four years before, in August 1621, he led an abortive night raid on the village of Nemasket in an attempt to kill Corbitant, a chief from the Wampanoag Indian tribe suspected of plotting against the Plymouth Pilgrims.
Better known is the so-called Wessagusset Massacre of March 1623. Standish had invited Chiefs Pecksuot and Wittawamut and several other warriors of the Massachusett tribe to what had been described as a ‘peaceful summit’. On an arranged signal, the door was shut and Standish attacked Pecksuot, stabbing him repeatedly with the man's own knife. Wituwamat and three other warriors were put to death along with several native villagers.
Wituwamat’s head was cut off and displayed on a pole as a warning. As a consequence, Plymouth’s trade with the Indians was devastated for years.
The scene is the deck of the ship Speedwell before the departure of Protestant pilgrims for the New World from Delft Haven, Holland, on July 22, 1620. Pastor John Robinson leads Governor Carver, William Bradford, Miles Standish, and their families in prayer, as depicted by the American artist Robert W. Weir (1803-89) in his Embarkation of the Pilgrims (1857) Image credit: Architect of the Capitol
News of the massacre and Standish’s role in it alarmed the Rev John Robinson, the Plymouth Pilgrims’ former pastor in Holland. This is what he wrote to the Pilgrims from Leyden on 19 December 1623:
‘Concerning the killing of those poor Indians of which we heard at first by report, and since by more certain relation, oh! how happy a thing had it been if you had converted
some before you had killed any! Besides where blood is once begun to be shed, it is seldom stanched of a long time after. You will say they deserved it. I grant it : but upon
what provocations and invitements by those heathenish Christians! Besides, you being no magistrates over them, were to consider not what they deserved, but what you were by necessity constrained to inflict. Necessity of this, especially of killing so many (and many more it seems they would if they could) I see not. Methinks one or two principals should have been full enough, according to that approved rule ‘The punishment to the few, and the fear to the many.’ Upon this occasion let me be bold to exhort you seriously to consider the disposition of your Captain whom I love, and am persuaded the Lord in great mercy and for much good hath sent you him, if you use him aright. He is a man humble and meek among you and toward all, in ordinary course: but now, if this be merely from a human spirit there is cause to fear that, by occasion especially of provocation, there may be wanting that tenderness of the life of man, made after God's image, which is meet. It is also a thing more glorious in men’s eyes than pleasing in God's or convenient for Christians, to be a terror to poor barbarous people, and, indeed, I am afraid lest, by these occasions, others should be drawn to affect a kind of ruffling course in the world.’
The title page of the Rev William Hubbard's General History of New England
Standish’s reputation for such violence was well established by 1625 when the encounter on Fishermen’s Field took place. The Captain was a dangerous man to cross, as is clear from the words of the Rev William Hubbard (1621-1704), to whom Roger Conant gave an account of the incident.
‘Capt. Standish had been bred a soldier in the Low Countries, and never entered the school of our Saviour Christ, or of John Baptist, his harbinger,’ wrote Hubbard in his General History of New England, ‘or, if he was ever there, had forgot his first lessons, to offer violence to no man, and to part with the cloak rather than needlessly contend for the coat, though taken away without order. A little chimney is soon fired; so was the Plymouth captain, a man of very little stature, yet of a very hot and angry temper. The fire of his passion soon kindled, and blown up into a flame by hot words, might easily have consumed all, had it not been seasonably quenched.’
Illustration from the story by the 19th century American author Nathaniel Hawthorne ‘The Maypole of Merrymount’. Hawthorne’s striking observation – ‘Jollity and gloom were contending for an empire’ – leaves the reader in no doubt as to where his sympathies lay
Three years later, in June 1628, saw Standish in action at the Merrymount colony in modern-day Quincy MA. Its English founder Thomas Morton had infuriated the Plymouth Puritans with what were viewed as his heathenish beliefs. Merrymount’s 80ft maypole was a particular target of the Puritans’ anger and Miles Standish was sent to arrest Morton and destroy the maypole.
‘Captain Shrimp’ was Morton’s name for Standish when he recounted the episode in his three-volume New English Canaan (1637). Perhaps he was thinking of Standish when he later wrote that the local Indians were ‘more full of humanity than the Christians’.
American historian Jeremy Belknap and the title page of his work American Biographies
Very different was the view of Miles Standish as an American hero expressed by later writers in a proudly free United States, following the victorious outcome of the War of Independence against Britain.
‘Sedentary persons are not always the best judges of a soldier’s merit or feelings,’ wrote the clergyman and historian Jeremy Belknap (1744-98), aiming no doubt at William Hubbard’s criticism of the Captain. While acknowledging that Standish had his faults, Belknap was laying the foundations for the pedestal on which the Puritans’ military commander would achieve his iconic status in the eyes of the American public.
‘If the arm of flesh to establish the rights and defend the lives and property of Colonists, in a new country, surrounded with enemies and false friends, certainly such a man as Standish, with all his imperfections, will hold a high rank among the worthies of New-England,’ he wrote in his two-volume American Biographies, published in 1794 and 1798.
25,000 copies of Longfellow's poem were sold in the first two months of publication. The depiction of Standish on the cover of this edition is by the American artist N.C. Wyeth (1882-1945), known for his illustrations of The Last of the Mohicans (1826) and Treasure Island (1883)
By the 19th century, the Captain had become a folk hero, partly because of Longfellow’s 1858 poem The Courtship of Miles Standish.
American historian John Stevens Cabot Abbott and the title page of his book Miles Standish The Puritan Captain
The historian John Stevens Cabot Abbott (1805-77), author of Miles Standish The Puritan Captain (1872) writes in epic style of the 1623 Wessagusset Massacre in which the Massachusett chief Pecksuot was murdered. Standish is described as ‘a conquering hero’ congratulated by his Puritan friends on his return to Plymouth for ‘his success in his chivalric adventure’:
‘Captain Standish was a slender man, of small stature. Pecksuot was almost a giant. The savage approached him, whetting his knife, and boasting of his power to lay the “little man” low. The other Indians were equally insulting and threatening, with both word and gesture. The Captain, perfectly preserving his calmness and self-possession, ordered the door to be shut and fastened, that no other Indians could come in. Then, giving the signal to the others of his men, he sprang, with the wonderful strength and agility for which he was celebrated, upon the burly savage, wrenched the knife, which was sharp as a needle at the point, from his hand, and after a desperate conflict, in which he inflicted many wounds, succeeded in plunging it to the hilt in the bosom of his foe. In like manner Wituwamat and the other Indian, after the fiercest struggle, during which not a word was uttered, were killed. Wituwamat’s brother, a boastful, blood-thirsty villain of eighteen, was taken and hanged, for conspiring for the massacre of the English.’
Abbott’s account is that of the triumphalist historian: ‘As we have mentioned, the unintelligent Indians often behaved like children,’ he explains. ‘This energetic action seemed to overwhelm all those tribes with terror, who were contemplating a coalition with the Massachusetts Indians against the English. They acted as if bereft of reason, forsaking their houses, fleeing to the swamps, and running to and fro in the most distracted manner. Many consequently perished of hunger, and of the diseases which exposure brought on. The planting season had just come. In their fright they neglected to plant; and thus, in the autumn, from want of their customary harvest of corn, many more perished.’
For Abbott, the massacre was justified because of the alleged conspiracy against the Plymouth colony in which Pecksuot and Wituwamat were involved: it was evident that
‘Captain Standish was the military commander of the colony, and in a sense responsible for its safety; that the measures he adopted were purely in self-defense, and that in no other way could he possibly have saved the colonies from massacre.’
Standish with the head of Wittawamut
Artist unknown Source: www.clipart.com
To those critics of the manner in which the Indian chiefs had been killed, Abbott retorted that one cannot apply today’s moral standards to the past:
‘Captain Standish took back with him the head of Wituwamat, which was placed upon the fort as a warning to all hostile Indians. This measure has been severely censured. But it is replied that the savages, whose bloodthirsty desires were fully roused, could be influenced by deeds only, and not by words; that no people should be blamed for not being in advance of the age in which they lived, and that more than a century after this, in the year 1747, in refined and Christian England, the heads of the lords, who were implicated in the Scots rebellion, were exposed upon Temple Bar, the most frequented avenue between London and Westminster.’
Abbott’s book was inscribed to the many thousands of the descendants of Miles Standish. In the Preface he wrote: ‘It has been a constant pleasure to the author to endeavor to rear a worthy tribute to the heroic captain and the noble man, who was one of the most illustrious of those who laid the foundations of this great Republic.’
For centuries, Miles Standish has been seen by most Americans as the brave man who ensured the survival of the Plymouth Pilgrims by his bold actions. In the Massachusetts town of Weymouth, this tablet placed in 1923 to commemorate the 350th anniversary of the settlement commemorates the killing of the Indian chiefs Pecksuot and Wituwaumet as an act 'averting serious disaster to the colonies'. The tablet was rededicated by the Weymouth Historical Commission in 1998.
American historian Nathaniel Philbrick and his 2006 book Mayflower A story of courage, community and war
Modern writers have been more circumspect about Standish and his role in early America. For historian Nathaniel Philbrick, Standish’s raid, combined with the complexities of inter-tribal Indian politics ‘had irreparably damaged the human ecology of the region’, initiating ‘a new and terrifying era in New England’.
Questions still persist about the rights and wrongs of the Captain’s actions just as they remain about his birth origins. But in the year of Mayflower 400, Chorley still insists on Standish’s links to the Lancashire town.
At the splendid 16th century building Astley Hall, owned by Chorley Town Council and now known as Astley Hall Museum and Art Gallery, a special Miles Standish exhibition was set up. Sadly the Covid-19 outbreak at the moment of writing has prevented its public opening. But the key slides proposed for the exhibition can be seen online, along with those serious questions to be answered.
‘Was his character too warlike - especially in his treatment of the native Americans?’ is one of the questions.
And the exhibition’s answer?
‘History is about interpretation and judgement. Readers will have to make their own mind up about Myles’ record.’
You can view the online Miles Standish exhibition at https://astleypark.co.uk/mylesstandish/
The Miles Standish monument in Duxbury, Massachusetts. A dedication and cornerstone-laying ceremony attended by 10,000 persons took place on October 7, 1872. The monument was not completed until 1898. The monument was built on Captain's Hill, the highest point, 200 feet above sea level, on what was once Standish's farm
Image credit: Pete Forsyth
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