Yes, Provincetown Is the Real America

American Conservative ^ | 9/11/2022 | Declan Leary

[whyilovetexas111]

In the harsh November of 1620, a 100-foot fluyt bearing about 130 people reached the alien eastern shore of the North American continent. Their first sighting of land was a thin, hooked promontory known to early adventurers for the abundance of its fish. They meant to turn southward and establish a new settlement in the Colony of Virginia. But the winds were hard, and their vessel was beaten and overloaded, and after days of struggle they had made no meaningful headway. They turned back, dropping anchor at Cape Cod (where they had first arrived) on November 21.

Of the 102 passengers (the rest were crew), 37 belonged to a Separatist congregation that had formed in Scrooby, a village near the English market town of Bawtry; from there they had fled to Leiden, in Holland, but did not feel at home among the Dutch; they had set sail from Plymouth, England, in September, aboard a ship that had never crossed the ocean and was not built to do so. The remaining 65, a large majority, had made the journey for other reasons—some as indentured servants, some as free men, to try their luck in what was already considered then a kind of Promised Land.

[whyilovetexas111]

A good ready for sure.

[AppyPappy]

Gay capital of the US

[SamAdams76]

Early in our marriage, my wife and I took a weekend getaway in Provincetown. It was a little interesting!

[ameribbean expat]

Thanks for the Omicron outbreak during LGBT weekend.

https://www.wbur.org/news/2022/06/30/ptown-covid-outbreak-anniversary-lessons

[CatHerd]

Yes, another case of Sad But True.

[hellinahandcart]

It’s been totally gay since the 1950s.

[rlmorel]

My wife and I used to go there a lot, but never during the season. We would go there in November through April, and the place was largely closed down. It seemed pretty tame and normal, with a few good restaurants still open (We drove down several hours a few months before I proposed to her, on a weeknight even, to go to "The Lobster Pot" specifically for its Portuguese Soup (kale, carrots, potatoes, kidney beans in a tomato broth with scads of chourizo and linguica that is browned with salt pork) We even went down one year for New Years Eve, and it was a bit strange in parts.

But when we went down in the middle of the season one time in July or August, it was such a flaming freak show on Commercial Street, wall to wall weirdness with hordes of bizarre people.

Never been back in the summer since then. But we did go down in October of 2020, and this is what it looked like back then:

I was the only one not wearing a mask outside. I refused to. I said to my wife, if they want to arrest me and throw me in jail, they can site some statute and do it, but I am not wearing a mask in this town outside.

When I related this story to someone, they wryly observed that I shouldn't have been so cavalier about being thrown in a jail cell in a town like that.

[dadfly]

thx. always good to be reminded of how and by whom what would become the United States of America was really founded.

[SamAdams76]

The mask thing was crazy.

Here in Southern Connecticut where I live now, almost everybody stopped wearing them many months ago. But there are still pockets I've been to recently, like Brattleboro, VT, Manhattan, Cambridge, MA and Naperville, IL where people feel compelled to wear them outdoors. It's like a cult with these mask people. They just don't want to give them up.

[mairdie]

Plymouth Rock was the most disillusioning experience of my history questing. Province Town for the best Portuguese food I’ve ever had.

[Fiji Hill]

Provincetown is the eastern terminus of Rte. 6, which currently begins at Bishop, Calif. But it used to be a coast-to-coast highway that started in Long Beach, in front of the Municipal Auditorium (now the Convention Center) and wound its way up the Harbor Freeway past USC and Chinatown, and then up the Sierra Highway (now the 14 Freeway) to Lancaster and then on to Bishop and points east

I have driven hundreds of miles on Rte. 6 in the West, Midwest and East. I got as far east as Chatham, Mass., but I didn’t make it to Provincetown—which is probably just as well.

[Grampa Dave]

Stephen Hopkins/Jamestown and Mayflower 1581-1644.
He was my 9th great-grandfather!

From the moment Stephen Hopkins first set foot in Plymouth, this has been—in some ineluctable if infinitesimal way—my country. The first of my ancestors arrived in my hometown four full centuries ago. Even in Europe, how many people can say the same today? A century and a half after their arrival my ancestors fought the forces of Parliament to defend their rights as Englishmen; another century later they fought to preserve the independent Union they had established when their countrymen turned arms on them. For better or worse, this—not Hungary, not Poland, not the resurrected Papal States—is the country my forefathers built. This is what tradition means; this is what has been handed down to me.

For the first decade of the 17th century, the twenty-something Stephen Hopkins was a barman in England, the proprietor of a little tavern kept with his wife Mary (née Kent) and Mary’s mother Joan. Sometime early in 1609, the restless 28-year-old took a new job as a minister’s clerk adjacent to the Virginia Company, and in June left the women in charge of the pub to set sail aboard the Sea Venture for the young settlement of Jamestown.

In a five-day storm at the end of July, nearly two months into the transatlantic voyage, the Sea Venture came just short of sinking before she ran aground a mile offshore of the haven of Bermuda. Her passengers made their way to the island, where Sir Thomas Gates—who was on his way to assume the governorship of Jamestown—established a kind of provisional authority. By September, the Sea Venture‘s longboat had been readied to carry a small crew to the mainland; eight men set sail and never returned. When the rescue mission’s failure became evident, Gates ordered the construction of ships to carry the entire body to Virginia.

It was slow work, starting as they were nearly from scratch (albeit with abundant natural resources). Hopkins’ patience had worn thin by the new year, and he began to speak out against Gates’ island regime. He was quickly charged with mutiny and sentenced to execution. The dissident had made some friends, though, in Bermuda, and a few entreaties to the governor found the minister’s clerk spared death.

(It is alleged, by those who believe in that sort of thing, that a man named William Shakespeare read an account of the Sea Venture ordeal and was inspired to write The Tempest, a subplot of which sees a drunken jester named Stefano stage an abortive mutiny after shipwrecking on an island.)

The boats were finished in the spring and Gates’ cohort, Hopkins included, made the 11-day journey to Virginia in May, nearly a full year after their departure. There the striver Hopkins set to work, a portion of his wages supporting Mary and the children back in England. For more than three years he labored in the near-wilderness of Jamestown—which, upon the Gates group’s providential arrival, had been teetering on the brink of starvation. A letter informing of Mary’s death called Hopkins back to the Old World in 1614, where he resumed the care of his children and married again, to one Elizabeth Fisher.

The London life, it seems, did not suit his constitution. In 1620, the Hopkins family learned of another expedition to Virginia, this one to set up a new colony in the region’s northern reaches. Stephen and Elizabeth took Constance (14), Giles (13), and Damaris (2) aboard a little ship setting sail from Plymouth, near the southwestern tip of England. It was a hard journey; Oceanus Hopkins was born en route but would only live to six years old.

In November the sea-weary pilgrims caught sight of land at last, but it would be another month before they disembarked. After difficult weeks spent scouting along the coast, the passengers of the Mayflower finally stepped down onto what had been, a few years prior, the Wampanoag village of Patuxet. They renamed it in honor of the port where their journey began.

That winter of 1620-1621 would be harder than anything Hopkins had yet faced; but shipwreck, a near miss with the executioner, four years of colonial labor, the loss of his beloved wife, and every other brutality of the Old World and the New had prepared him well for what was to come. All through winter, the women and children stayed aboard ship at anchor in Plymouth Harbor. In the morning, Stephen and the other men would crowd into the longboats, row ashore, and work through the still-frigid sunlight hours at the construction of modest houses. Forty-five of the Mayflower’s 102 passengers were dead by winter’s end.

But the houses were built eventually, and the survivors set to farming once the ground had thawed in spring. They did so with the help of natives who had worked the land for generations, including men enshrined in our national myths like the translator Squanto, the sagamore Samoset, and the sachem Massassoit. In fact, it was through Hopkins that many of these relationships were built. The only man at Plymouth with past experience in America, he was thus the only one with any firsthand knowledge of its peoples. He learned their language quickly, and became a crucial conduit between the Wampanoag and Pilgrim leaders. It was at Hopkins’ newly built Plymouth house that the first official summit between the Old World colonists and their New World allies was convened.

It is a more festive convention, though, that we commemorate today. In the fall the Pilgrims, with native aid, saw a modestly fruitful first harvest. Elizabeth Hopkins and the three other women who survived the brutal winter—Mary Brewster, Susannah White, and Eleanor Billington—prepared a feast in celebration. Beer was the Pilgrims’ staple drink, and as the day grew long and the men grew boisterous, muskets were fired into the air as an odd but explosive signal of their joy.

This attracted the attention of the natives. Fearing an attack from the newcomers—whose intentions they had not yet figured out—Wampanoag men hastened to Plymouth ready for a fight. What they found was quite the opposite: The (slightly drunken) Pilgrims welcomed them with open arms. Too proud to come to the party empty-handed, the Wampanoag men went out to the woods, killed five deer, and presented them to Governor William Bradford and Captain Miles Standish. The simple harvest meal then turned into a three day feast, at which Wampanoag outnumbered Pilgrims by more than two to one.

Given late attempts to revise this history, the most remarkable thing about the first Thanksgiving may be just how close the truth is to the storybook version that was taught to us growing up. A year of terror and ruin was coming to a close. The Pilgrims’ fortunes were finally turning after their numbers had been cut in half by weather and disease. A tenuous alliance with a foreign people was solidified in a happy and spontaneous international celebration. Stephen Hopkins really did break bread his wife had baked with men whose language he barely knew and whose land he had just more or less invaded. The natives even brought the corn with which the bread was made.

Though the road ahead would not be without troubles—Damaris, Oceanus, and Elizabeth all would predecease him; alliance with the Wampanoag would not mean total peace, nor would it last two generations—that harvest feast 400 years ago was a turning point for Stephen Hopkins and all of his companions. After a decade wandering and months spent toiling, the man who had first left London a dozen years before had finally found a place to rest. Here, at last, he could put down roots that might take hold.

When Hopkins turns up in the colony’s records at all in his later years, it is always for minor infractions against the law at the tavern he set up on Leiden Street: serving beer on Sundays, letting things get rowdy. None of them brought him back to the gallows, though; he was buried next to Elizabeth in 1644, a remarkable 35 years after his death sentence in Bermuda.

* * *

[AppyPappy]

Same except unbeknownst to us, she was pregnant. I liked Ptown but it was odd. More so than Key West.

[x]

There used to be a large working class Portuguese-American population in Provincetown, but it looks like they are getting priced out of the city.

On the plus side, the city is well-stocked with monkeypox vaccine.

[rlmorel]

I agree.

I try to understand and accept the mindset of elderly people who had the crap scared out of them deliberately, but when I see a young person wearing one...well, I instantly lose any respect whatsoever.

I see them as making a statement with those masks. And it must work, given how I respond to it.

And the fact that they deliberately did this to these poor people fills me with anger.

[xkaydet65]

They did not wish to settle in Virginia where they would would have faced the same discrimination from the King’s Church as in England. When they found themselves on Cape Cod they took advantage of their location to set up their own idea of self govt.

[small farm girl]

Thank you for that Grampa Dave. What an amazing history you have to share with your grandchildren (and us):)

[Grampa Dave]

Thanks for your kind comments.

On both sides of our family (my wife’s and mine), we have some incredible stories on both sides.

This life/story of Stephen Hopkins is truly an incredible one. His DNA is part of ours, and he never gave up even when he and peers were shipwrecked in Bermuda.

Their first year in N.America wasn’t a joy ride.

One might say, “The Hand of God played a role with these brave people, their families and the local natives.”

[Grampa Dave]

Thanks for the info on route 6.

We were not aware of its history.

[Bonemaker]

“Yes, Provincetown Is the Real America...”

Nothing along the east coast from DC north is the Real America. Parts of Maine and New Hampshire maybe.