THE PERILS OF THE PILGRIM PRINTER !!

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William Brewster eyed his new printing press with indisputable excitement.

“Now,” he told his wife, Mary, , “I will be able to print some tracts and booklets to help those good folk back in England who are still suffering under the reign of King James.”

The printing of religious literature in Britain had been strictly forbidden without the permission of King James I. Dire punishment awaited any caught transgressing the Royal command !! Brewster had already run foul of the authorities and been imprisoned at the age of 18, simply because his religious beliefs did not coincide with that of the State Church. Had he been arrested a second time the penalty would have been that he would be whipped, have an ear sliced off and his nose slit. Such things were the lot of printers in Merrie (?) England who dared to criticize the Established Church. .

A SAFE REFUGE.

In Holland, however, he felt safe. He grasped the lever that turned the great iron screw of his printing press. This lowered the platen, that heavy flat plate that impressed the inked type on to the paper already laid upon the bed of the press. Then the printed page would be removed by hand and another sheet of paper inserted. As he reclines in his chair to proof-read the copy, his small daughter enters and clambers upon his knee. Her name is ‘Fear’...for the Puritans of the Sixteenth Century often gave their children unusual names. Later the Brewster family would have two more children, ‘Love’ and ‘Wrestling’. And in the not too distant future the Brewster children would find playmates who would bear such names as Humility Cooper, Remember Allerton and Resolved White. ( 1)

“When are we going back to England, Father? ” asked Fear, “Why do we have to stay here in Holland ?”

William Brewster hardly knew where to begin. He had been born in the village

of Scrooby, Nottinghamshire in 1560....or thereabouts. That was half a century ago.

So much had happened since then. As a loyal member of the Church of England he had been educated at the University of Cambridge and then employed as assistant

to Her Majesty’s Secretary of State.

“You should have seen me in those days,” he told his daughter, “All dressed up in

satins and silks with a big white ruff around my neck. I even used to carry a rapier at my side. And William Davison was such a good friend ...he was the Secretary of State.”

Brewster paused. Perhaps Fear was too young to be told of how his friend had issued the death warrant for Mary, Queen of Scots, and then fallen out of favour with Queen Elizabeth I for acting in “undue haste”. Davison had been imprisoned in the Tower of London. Brewster had returned to Scooby.

PURITANISM.

“I had a lovely house,” he continued, “Scooby Manor it was called. And I was known as Master of Posts ... meeting the mail-coach drivers and giving them a bed for the night.. and feeding their horses... and every Sabbath your mother and I would go to Scooby Church to hear the Reverend Clifton preach the Word of God...”

And it was that Reverend Richard Clifton whose radical preaching triggered off events that had brought the Brewster family to Holland. For whilst the views of the preacher may have been radical, they were not necessarily wrong. Clifton was a Puritan, one of a growing movement so called because they wanted to ‘purify’ the Church of England of practices contrary to what the Bible taught. And to also 'purify' it of so many clergymen in those days who failed to take their calling seriously.

Then there was the advent of James I to the throne of England. Having a homosexual as Head of the Church was not to everybody’s liking! Certainly not the Puritans ! Besides which, King James had issued a rather infamous Act in 1593.....

“If any person over sixteen years of age shall refuse to go to

the authorised church, he shall suffer three months

imprisonment; and if he be obstinate he shall suffer banishment...”

Moreover, such punishment began being meted out with increasing severity. Those

who desired to worship God...but not in the way the King commanded .... found themselves meeting secretly in private houses .. or in the woods.

THE MARTYR

“We had 300 folk meeting at Scooby Manor!” William Brewster told his daughter. And then went on to relate the story of a certain Henry Barrowe... “A fine, godly man, he was. But in 1576 he was arrested and thrown into prison. While he was there his friends bribed a gaoler to give him a quill and ink and some paper and Henry Barrowe used to write books. And when they were finished he would smuggle the paper out and Master Boyle would take it to Dort ...over in Germany... and it would be printed. I have a copy here....” Brewster reached for the volume on the nearby table.

It was “A Brief Discovery of the False Church” by Henry Barrowe.

“He wrote it in 1590, just a short time before he was put to death,” William Brewster went on to explain, “ Four hundred pages ! And 3000 copies were printed and distributed back in England. Many people are still suffering persecution and are even being put to death like Henry Barrowe. So some of us decided to come to Holland.”

He did not tell her of the ship’s captain who had betrayed him and of the twelve months he had spent in a filthy cell.

“And whilst King James is on the throne” he continued, “ it is probably best if we stay in Holland.”

PROBABLY ??

It was the English Ambassador to Holland in 1619 who instructed the authorities to storm Brewster’s house and wreck his printing press. Brewster found himself back in prison.

This time he escaped .... ( none of the dozen books scattered around me tell how this was accomplished )..... and he called the ‘Separatists’ together. Such was one of the names they were given having ‘separated’ from the State Church. They were also called ‘Non-conformists’ because of their refusal to conform to the King’s decreed way of worship. “There is a land across the Atlantic,” he reminded them, “ a New World where we can find freedom to worship God without civil interference. There will be no harassment there by the King and his minions.... Already a colony has been established across the Atlantic just thirteen years ago... at Jamestown....”.

POCAHONTAS !!

That was true. Led by Captain John Smith a doughty band of pioneers had sailed to the New World and named the place of their arrival after their King. Their journey had no religious motivation. For them it was a world of gold and silver and a place to make a quick fortune ...or so they thought. Instead they found cold and starvation and hostile Indians.

From this era comes the story of Captain John Smith’s capture by the Algonquin Indians and his last minute rescue from death due to the intercession of Pocahontas, daughter of the Chief. Subsequently Pocahontas became a Christian and married one of the settlers, John Rolfe. Together they visited England where King James I refused them an audience. He was angered that Rolfe “should marry a person of Royal position without his permission !”

“ALL ABOARD !!”

Thus it was, with William Brewster as their leader, a group of Separatists returned to Southhampton, England, on the sailing ship Speedwell. Here they met with other emigrants bound for the New World on the Mayflower. Negotiations with rascally merchants left the pilgrims short of supplies. Brewster had to sell sixty pounds’ worth of provisions to pay for the passage. And then, after the two vessels had been at sea eight days and had covered about three hundred miles, the Speedwell sprung a leak. Both ships turned back.

It was an Autumn morning, September 1620, that the Mayflower eventually began her epic voyage with one hundred and two passengers. Only forty-one of them were Pilgrims, (17 men, 10 women and 14 children. )

Captain Miles Standish was among them. It is he who would teach the other passengers to fire their muskets in case of Indian attacks. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his well-known poem, The Courtship of Miles Standish, has immortalised a segment in the remarkable life of this soldier of fortune. John Carver was there, too…a fatherly figure who would be appointed first Governor of the new colony…if, and when, they reached it ! John Billington was the ‘black sheep’ of this Pilgrim family. In the New World he would challenge authority and eventually commit murder, a crime for which he would be executed in 1630. Mary Chilton would catch the imagination of future Americans with the story of her “famous leap on to Plymouth Rock, leading the way from the boat to the shore for those Pilgrims behind her who hesitated.”

Brewster stood on deck and watched the cliffs of Dover fade from view. As that historic voyage began many a stout heart ...and many a faint one, too, ..... wondered what lay in store.

This was to be no pleasure cruise. True, during the first month the winds were relatively favourable and the hopes of the passengers were high. By this time they were more than halfway to their destination. Plymouth, England, was far behind them now .

But then the sky darkened and danger was in the air. Captain Jones ordered them to stay below, hatches were to be kept closed . A storm was brewing. Children cried and men argued, cooked meals were forbidden. There was no privacy. The passengers found themselves, to quote one historian, “huddled in lantern-lit darkness of the low-ceilinged ‘tween decks.” Before long it became “a rolling, pitching, stinking inferno.”

DEATH & LIFE !!

One of the Pilgrims rebelled against the orders of Captain Christopher Jones . But the stench in the hold was unbearable…some folk had not the stomach to cope with such a storm (!)…and John Howland opened the hatch and climbed onto the sea-swept deck. The inevitable happened. A giant wave tossed him into the foaming deep. Miraculously…and one does not use the word lightly…his hand providentially “laid hold of the topsail halyard ( a rope) which hung over the side” and he was pulled back on board by the crew using “a boat hooke”.

Adding to the discomfort of the Pilgrims even more than the ferocity of the elements was the crew whose “ coarse tongues and heathenish habits caused them no end of distress.” These God-fearing Pilgrims were “mocked unmercifully” by the rough seamen. And by many of their fellow emigrants. Governor of the passengers was Master Christopher Martin, who treated them with "great scorne and contempte, as if they were not good enough to wipe his shoes.”

“You are the puniest assortment of psalm-singing puke-stockings,” the leader of the tormentors would say, “I’ll sew you in a shroud and feed you to the fish before we reach land!”

William Bradford, official scribe of the Puritans, jotted in his recently discovered journal…”It plased God before they came halfe seas over, to smite this yong man with a greevous disease, of which he dyed in a desperate maner, and so was him selfe the first that was thrown overboard….It was an astonishmente to all his fellows, for they noted it to be the just hand of God upon him.” There was no more mocking from the crew .

The only other death during the two month voyage was that of a young man, William Butten, who had refused to drink the daily portion of lemon juice as a preventitive against scurvy.

PERIL MID-ATLANTIC !

Then came the storm. . The 180 ton vessel bobbed like a helpless cork at the mercy of the weather……….. after all, modern day liners, like Queen Elizabeth 2 tip the scales at 65,000 tons! Or more !

The fury increased. There were those who cursed the day they had ever set their faces toward such a voyage. The Pilgrims prayed. And the Mayflower creaked and shuddered as it pitched ominously to and fro. It seemed to plunge to the depths of a watery grave only to rise again on the crest of some titanic wave. Water poured in between decks where mothers sought to comfort terrified children. In the midst of all this a baby was born! They named the little fellow Oceanus…. the son of Stephen and Elizabeth Hopkins.

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Then, with a mighty ‘Crack”, the main beam splintered. Even Captain Jones was sure the end was nigh. This beam – stretching from one side of the Mayflower to the other - along the roof of the lower deck, began to give way. Strong men braced their shoulders beneath it to keep it in place. They full well knew that without it the sides of the ship would surely cave in. But it was a losing battle. The sound of splintering timber and the roaring of the storm’s increasing fury mingled with the prayers of the Christians.

William Brewster suddenly remembered the printing press they had brought with them that hopefully they might be able to issue Christian pamphlets in the colony. It was a wooden structure, but solidly built, with a “great iron scrue” that rose or fell as the lever was turned .

It was placed beneath the sagging beam …the lever was operated , the screw raised…and the splintered timber was pushed back into its rightful position ! Scribe Bradford adds “the which being done, the carpenter and the master affirmed that with a post put under it, set firm in the, he would make it sufficiente.”

The leaks were plugged.

The crisis was averted.

The Mayflower weathered the storm.

And the Pilgrim Fathers …and even many of the other passengers and crew…thanked God for the “printing press” deliverance.

SAFE AT LAST .

On November 9 the cry went up, “Land Ho!” Before long the passengers could see Cape Cod appearing through the mist. But Cape Cod was not a suitable place to settle…and they were about 500 miles from their expected destination. Sixteen men went ashore and then reported back that a new harbour must be found. So for another month the Mayflower sailed up and down the coast looking for a suitable place to anchor. They found it in Plymouth Bay (at least, that’s what they named it,) and there, on December 22, they set foot on American soil.

It is strange to read the history of printing in America…for never again does William Brewster’s printing press rate a mention. On the contrary, book after book tells us that the first printing press in America was operated by Stephen Daye just over a decade later in another colony 100 miles south of Plymouth . Was Brewster’s press so damaged in the storm that it was no longer operable? Or was it that no paper or type or ink existed in that barren wilderness in which they found themselves? Were these some of the provisions Brewster had been forced to sell at the outset of the voyage? History fails to record the answer.

THE PRINTER FROM SCOOBY

For the first nine years of the colony the man who had once walked in the Royal courts clothed in velvet and satin now guided these Pilgrims... “their teacher, their minister, their father.” He saw to it that an honest payment was given for land acquired from the Indians . He helped stop an Indian war. “He never shirked the hardest of manual work, only leaving his fork or axe to lead prayers.”

The printer from Scrooby died on April 10: 1644. But the inspiration of his life and the principles for which he suffered still abide.

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References.

The Mayflower Pilgrims….by Brenda Colloms. 96pp.

The Pilgrims and Plymouth Colony….. by F. Ziner. 154 pp.

Founding Fathers…by John Adair. 302 pp.

The Mayflower Miracle….by J. King 134 pp.

The History of Printing in America …by I. Thomas 650 pp.

Stephen Daye…University Press of Cambridge, USA. 49 pp

The Light and the Glory .....by P.Marshall & D. Manuel. 384pp.

Yarns on Servants of the Church. ... by L. Cox. 96pp.

Dictionary of Christianity in America. 1305pp.

1000 Heroes ......by Arthur Mee ( Editor) Vol.1 964pp.

The Mayflower Pilgrims & their Pastor. ... by D. Fountain. 80pp.

Founding the American Colonies ... by D. Reische. 64pp.

Dictionary of American Religious Biography ....H. Bowden . 572pp.

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