New England's Coastal Plague, 1616-1619
“[How]
strangely they have decreased by the Hand of God... and it hath
generally been observed that where the English come to settle, a
Divine Hand makes way for them.” – Daniel Denton, early
American colonist
The
popular Pilgrim myth involves a persecuted group of Christian
reformers who fled England in order to worship freely in the New
World. In a narrative that finds parallels with the Israelite exodus
from Egypt, these chosen people were guided by the hand of God in a perilous
journey across the Atlantic in search of what would later be
described by Puritan leader John Winthrop as “a beacon of religious
light, a model of spiritual promise, a
city upon a hill."1
Through heroic struggle and an unshakable commitment to their faith, they were able to conquer the vast New England wilderness, tame the hostile natives and expand
the glory and dominion of the Christian God in these new lands.2
In
reality, the promised land wasn't exactly a Canaan that needed to be
conquered. The area that would become Plymouth Colony was essentially
a ghost town by the time that the Pilgrims stepped foot off the
Mayflower. Deserted villages and untended fields dotted the
landscape, with caches of crops, tools and other supplies hastily
left behind... along with the skeletal remains of the former
inhabitants. A few years prior, the entire coastal region had been
ravaged by a mysterious disease that wiped out most of the native
Wampanoag and neighboring Massachusetts, Pennacook, Nauset, Permaquid
and Abenaki populations.
For the
English settlers, this was all part of a divine plan. Providence had
taken the form of a "miraculous pestilence" that had swept
the land clean so a new Christian society could be established.
Thomas Morton, an early colonial merchant, praised the epidemic that
had recently depopulated the land, leaving it “much
the more fit for the English Nation to inhabit in, and erect in it
Temples to the glory of God.”3
If the history of holy wars has taught
us anything, it is that the most direct path to God is through rivers
of blood. Despite the official line of pacifistic cheek-turning,
violent conquest has been a fairly consistent feature of Latin
Christendom since the time of Constantine. It’s a religious legacy
shaped far more by the sword than the cross, and more accurately
represented by barbarian warlords then the benevolent apostles of
Christ. But the First Crusade, as blood-soaked in violence as it was,
represented something different; something almost otherworldly in the
carnage it unleashed.
