First in our minds
Other historic achievements get lost in the shuffle
What was it in the Puritan character that excised from memory anyone who landed in these parts, let alone this continent, before them? What made the Brahmins later cling to the notion that the New World started with them?
"There was a total lack of interest in others," Ted Widmer, director of the John Carter Brown library in Providence and an expert on this period, says about the early settlers. Adds Peter Drummey, librarian of the Massachusetts Historical Society, "Everyone who came before or at the same time didn't exist. They had an obsession for priority, for being first."
To be fair, the Pilgrims - you know, the ones who hit Plymouth in 1620 - were clueless that Ponce de Leon arrived in Florida in 1513 or that the city of St. Augustine was founded there in 1565. Some knew the French were in Canada but were probably unaware that French explorer Samuel de Champlain founded Quebec City in 1608.
(There's a boffo exhibit at the Boston Public Library displaying Champlain's influence in the settling of Canada and the Northeast.)
But they surely knew that one of their own, Sir Walter Raleigh, had sponsored an expedition that ended in North Carolina in 1584. That fellow Brit John Smith and his crowd had founded Jamestown, Va., in 1607. Certainly the Puritans, who arrived in 1630, knew better.
Over time, Bostonians knew better, too, yet they have maintained their own solipsistic story line right into the crush of digital cameras on the Freedom Trail today. It was this warped construct that led Oliver Wendell Holmes to write "Boston State-House is the hub of the solar system. You couldn't pry that out of a Boston man, if you had the tire of all creation straightened out for a crowbar."
We forget that the first Native American met by Pilgrims who landed in 1620 was Samoset, who greeted them in the English he had already picked up from fishermen along the New England coast. Squanto, the second Native American they faced, spoke better English learned in England, where he had been kidnapped by whites before making it back here again.
Tiny French and English fishing communities dotted the New England shoreline long before Plymouth Rock gained fame, and French trappers roamed the continent in the previous century.
English names were on maps that preexisted the settlement of New England. It was John Smith, who had sailed our coast, not the Pilgrims, who came up with "Plimouth," notes Drummey. It was British explorer Bartholomew Gosnold who came up with "Cape Cod" in 1602.
Smith's maps and records were widely published in England, so the Pilgrims had access to these documents before they set sail. It is hard to believe they wouldn't have perused them before they left, so it is equally hard to believe they set off into the unknown.
What's more, says Drummey, the Pilgrims were relative arrivistes to the scene: "They really marked the end of the first era of exploration."
Boston chauvinism, from Plymouth Rock to the endless John Adams and beyond, dominates our cityscape, as one would expect. But there's little else to site our history in a larger truth. Yes, there were scholars like the echt Brahmin Samuel Eliot Morison, who wrote an overlooked biography of Champlain, but such scholarship never penetrated popular knowledge.
Boston history should be framed, however lightly, by the earlier contributions of the French, Spanish, and the Dutch. We should know about the Spanish hegemony stretching from Florida west to Santa Fe to the mission system that ran along the California coast.
We should know, too, about a Genovese named Giovanni Caboto, who explored Canada in 1497 for the British crown. The family name was anglicized to "Cabot," and anchored the venerable Brahmin name.
I for one am deeply chagrined to have missed the sad story of Merrymount, a vivacious English settlement in what is now Quincy, squeezed between the Pilgrims and the Puritans. Merrymount was led by a man named Thomas Morton, who believed that New England should resemble Merry Olde England, that life is good and should be fun.
The Puritans, who abhorred joy, were livid about the happy culture at Merrymount, which grew famous for its Maypole, symbol of spring frivolity back in England.
So the Puritans moved against Merrymount, further cementing their reputation as "proto-Nazis," in the words of one historian. Fictionalized in a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne titled "The Maypole of Merry Mount," Puritan Alpha male John Endicott hacks the pole down with his sword and makes sure the community is destroyed while poor Morton is banished to England.
In fact, the Pilgrims dispatched Morton and the Puritans cut down the maypole. But credit Hawthorne for his grasp of the two strands of our local history, symbolized by the maypole and the whipping post.
Secure people are confident enough of their own standing to acknowledge the contributions of others. Boston doesn't look so good on that score.
We're like the drunk who passes out in the porch hammock after a night of debauchery and claims to his wife the next morning that he spent the night there. He looks her straight in the eye and avers, "That's my story and I'm sticking to it."
Sam Allis can be reached at allis@globe.com.
