Entered in the Ledger at Plymouth, autumn 1621. Told by Mrs. Whiskers III, who was on that boat. Written down by Obedience Tibbs, who was also on that boat and would like that noted.
THE RAT
Wine.
Old wine, soaked into the planks so deep that no amount of scrubbing would ever get it out.
Wet straw. Goats.
A hundred and two people, and every one of them sick.
One rat.
I was on that boat.
My grandmother was on the other one, the one to Virginia, thirteen years before. You’ve heard her. She stayed in Virginia with the corn, and she had a great many children, and one of them, my mother, couldn’t abide the fort and went back to London on a ship full of tobacco.
That’s what Virginia sold in the end. Not gold. Tobacco. A plant you can’t eat, packed into barrels and shipped across the ocean so men in London could set fire to it.
My mother said the voyage home was the worst of her life, because it turned out tobacco smelled even worse than the fort. Then she had me, under a wharf at Rotherhithe on the Thames, and when I was old enough I went looking for a ship that smelled better.
I found one that smelled of wine.
Her name was the Mayflower. She was a merchant ship, about a hundred feet long, and for most of her life she had carried wine from France to London and cloth from London to France, and she had never carried passengers in her life.
Sailors called her a sweet ship. They meant the smell. Years of spilled wine had soaked into her hold, and it covered everything else, the bilge and the tar and the pitch, the way perfume covers a gentleman.
I moved in that June, while she was tied up at the wharf, and for a month I lived the best life a rat has ever lived. Then the passengers arrived.
There were two kinds.
The first kind called themselves the Saints. They had left England years before, because they disagreed with the Church of England about God, and gone to live in Holland, where nobody minded, and then left Holland because their children were growing up Dutch. Now they were going to America, so their children would grow up English, somewhere England couldn’t reach.
The second kind the Saints called the Strangers. They were people the investors in London had hired to go along: carpenters, servants, soldiers, families who wanted land. They didn’t much care about the Saints’ disagreements with God. They cared about the land.
Nobody called anybody Pilgrims. That word came later. Much later. It came from a single line in a book written by one of them, and then, two hundred years after that, people started printing it on plates.
They were meant to go in two ships.
The other one was called the Speedwell, which turned out to be the first joke of the voyage. She came over from Holland with the Saints aboard, and she met the Mayflower in Southampton, and the two ships set out together in August.
The Speedwell leaked.
They turned back to Dartmouth to fix her. They set out again. She leaked again. They turned back to Plymouth. Out and back, and out and back again, the second time from three hundred miles at sea, in the best sailing weather of the year, while the food ran down and the money ran out and the summer went by.
At Plymouth they gave up on her. Twenty people went home in the Speedwell, and everyone else, and everything they owned, crammed into the Mayflower.
I heard the rest of it from a rat who’d come over on the Speedwell, and who came aboard at Plymouth with nowhere else to go.
“She doesn’t leak.”
I asked her what she meant.
“She’s overmasted. Too much sail for her hull. You crowd her with canvas and she strains, and she opens up at the seams.” The Speedwell rat flattened her ears. “Take the extra sail off and she’s sound as a church.”
Did the crew know?
“The crew,” she told me, “had signed on for a year in America, and decided they’d rather not go.”