Cole's Burial Hill, Chief Massasoit Statue, Plymouth Memorial Sarcophagus - First Year Deaths

Look off of Coles hill towards Brewster Gardens

 

“But it pleased God to vissite us then, with death dayly, and with so generall a disease, that the living were scarce able to burie the dead; and ye well not in any measure sufficiente to tend ye sick.”
-William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation

One of the saddest episodes in the early history of Plymouth Colony was that first awful winter, January through March of 1621. As if they did not have enough challenges to face, the majority of the settlers we now call Pilgrims fell ill just weeks after their arrival. As Bradford recounted, sometimes two or three died each day. They had managed to hastily build but one small structure which was completely filled with the sick. Others were bedridden in the Mayflower out in the harbor which did not immediately return to England as planned because most of the crew was sick as well. By April, half the settlers had perished, roughly 50 in number.

Bradford tells us that only seven of them managed to avoid illness. Upon these few fell the task of caring for the afflicted and burying the dead. None of the early sources tell exactly where they were buried. There was neither time nor the resources to mark the graves in any lasting way. And so the location of the burials of half of the Mayflower passengers, including first Governor John Carver, Elizabeth Winslow, and Rose Standish to mention just a few, was lost and forgotten.

Cole’s Hill in Plymouth, now part of Pilgrim Memorial State Park, is a low but fairly steep rise of about 30 feet in elevation, virtually at the water’s edge, overlooking Plymouth Rock and Plymouth Harbor. The area where the burials took place is just over 100 yards north of the first street where the Pilgrims built their primitive houses. It is named for James Cole, an early settler who placed a dwelling there in the 1630s.     

By Patrick Browne

 

Massasoit Sachem (/ˌmæsəˈsɔɪ(ɪ)t/)^[1][2] or Ousamequin (c. 1581 – 1661)^[3] was the sachem or leader of the Wampanoag confederacy. Massasoit means Great Sachem.^[4]

Massasoit's people had been seriously weakened by a series of epidemics and were vulnerable to attacks by the Narragansetts, and he formed an alliance with the colonists at Plymouth Colony for defense against them. It was through his assistance that the Plymouth Colony avoided starvation during the early years.

At the time of the pilgrims' arrival in Plymouth, the realm of the Pokanokets included parts of Rhode Island and much of southeastern Massachusetts.^[5] Massasoit lived in Sowams, a village at Pokanoket in Warren, Rhode Island. He held the allegiance of lesser Pokanoket sachems. In 1621, he sent Squanto to live among the colonists at Plymouth.^[6]

Massasoit smoking a ceremonial pipe with Governor John Carver in Plymouth, 1621

Outbreaks of smallpox had devastated the Pokanokets, and Massasoit sought an alliance with the colonies of New England against the neighboring Narragansetts who controlled an area west of Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island. Samoset was a minor Abenakki sachem (sagamore) who hailed from the Muscongus Bay area of Maine,^[7] and he learned to speak English from fishermen who plied those waters. Massasoit sent him to approach the colonists to find out whether their intentions were peaceful.

Massasoit forged critical political and personal ties with colonial leaders William Bradford, Edward Winslow, Stephen Hopkins, John Carver, and Myles Standish, ties which grew out of a peace treaty negotiated on March 22, 1621. The alliance ensured that the Pokanoket s remained neutral during the Pequot War in 1636.^[8] According to English sources, Massasoit prevented the failure of Plymouth Colony and the starvation that the Pilgrims faced during its earliest years.^[8]

Plymouth Rock Site 

Fountain Depicting Pilgrim Women