My family used to be Mayflower descendants. The Mayflower Society says that we are not Mayflower descendants anymore. This would be because my grandmother Bom Bom had a falling out with an uninformed telephone representative who chose an ill-fated path by stating that she was no longer a Mayflower Descendant. Bom Bom was not one to suffer fools, and with an air of bemused condescension, she advised him that for obvious reasons, he could not strip her of her descendency. Bom Bom was not about to waive her principles and reward incompetency, so she parted ways with the Mayflower Society that afternoon.
The Mayflower descendant we descended from is John Howland. As a 4th grader with a Mayflower paper assignment, I gave a lot of thought to John Howland’s duties on board that ship.
He, along with a seven-year-old boy and an eleven-year-old boy, was an indentured servant to John Carver when he boarded the Mayflower. Curiously, he disembarked the Mayflower as a free man. There is evidence with some historical significance, that, in addition to his assigned tasks, John Howland also assumed the bartending duties on the Mayflower. He was twenty-one years old at the time of the voyage, with large amounts of idle time during the journey. It is quite likely that John Carver permitted him to moonlight at the bar. I have no collaborated evidence for making this claim, but as a child amateur historian, I had to choose what to research carefully. This was a moment when I felt my time could be better spent watching “Leave it to Beaver” reruns, than doing research in the library to confirm the obvious. Using certain indisputable facts, it was pretty easy to fill in the gaps about Howland.
John Howland was a passenger who allegedly cheated death twice on the voyage: once when he was swept overboard in a storm, and once when he fell into the voyage rum tank nearly drowning. It has been intimated that falling into the rum tank was a natural consequence of being over-served. After weeks at sea, it is quite imaginable that boredom and poor judgment crept into his daily routine, culminating in that unfortunate mishap. Only two crew members would have had access to the keys to the rum tank, Captain Christopher Jones and the bartender. John Howland was obviously the latter man. Fellow passengers referred to John as a “lusty young man,” and it is well documented, by legitimate historians, that no Mayflower passenger has been credited with creating more descendants.
It would appear that he also performed his bartending duties quite well, offering a wide variety of drinks and bar food. Unlike his fellow indentured servants, he earned enough in tips to buy his freedom upon arrival in Plymouth.
Unlike myself, our family had a number of legitimate scholars who availed themselves of mainstream academia and conventional means of research. Helen, the second oldest grandchild and Toad’s older sister, was one of these scholars. She attended Radcliffe and looked very much like the model Twiggy. When you played intellectual games of knowledge with Helen, she never responded with a straightforward answer. Letting everyone else battle it out, shouting their answers, she would reluctantly pick up the pieces from their overly confident but occasionally incorrect answers. While all of the participants were mesmerized, she would, without conviction, methodically begin thinking out loud. Helen would carefully review the history of the world concluding apologetically, for example, that “Henry the VII must be the correct answer, because we all know that Henry the VI’s reign was interrupted by his frequent bouts of insanity.” Correct again.
Helen was several years older than us, and although she was always kind, she quite understandably had more intellectual interests than hanging out with her younger cousins, who on frequent occasions had the capacity to be overly competitive, loud, and obnoxious. Quite honestly, while we would have welcomed her company, we would have thought less of her if she had wanted to hangout with us. We didn’t want to hang out with us either, but had little choice.
Shortly after college, Helen visited the farm with a hippy beau. We found him to be very polite but painfully quiet and very difficult to read. It never occurred to us that there were people from small families unaccustomed to large, extended families with little cousins who could rapid-fire questions faster than they could be answered.
I don’t recall the source, but rumor had it that he was a member of the notorious “Weathermen”, a radical, leftist underground group. Being in the late ‘60s, we were in the midst of anti-Vietnam war sentiment. We were liberal but the Weathermen were much farther left. Being self-appointed scouts for national security, we planned our very first mission when Helen and the beau went swimming. We snuck into his room to search his luggage for bombs, weapons, and plans for a revolution. What we found was quite unexpected - seemingly normal personal effects and a text book on meteorology. We thought the book might have a secret compartment, but it was full of detailed maps of the U.S. with H’s and L’s all over them.
Finding no smoking guns, we called off our investigation. As luck would have it, he turned out to be a really nice guy who volunteered to take us all crabbing that evening. This was a wonderful offer, as none of us were old enough to drive, and Uncle Owl had hung a plucked dead chicken on the line in the sun for us to use for bait.
Blue crabs have a genuine appreciation for rancid, rotten meat. We would tie the chicken pieces to weighted lines and then toss them in the brackish water at the dock in Port William. Penn and Jack were always the “net men”. We would summon them when we had a line with a crab on it. They would sweep the net underneath the crab and raise it out of the water before he could escape.
They would then deposit the wet crab into the dry cardboard box on the pier, and we would throw the line over again. This exercise was repeated until we had a few dozen crabs. If we spent too much time, the soaked bottom of the cardboard crab box would break open when we picked it up to take the crabs home. Then we would have to scramble around and re-catch the crabs as they dashed for the river.
One might suggest that there was a certain stupidity inherent in our selection of a cardboard box to stow wet crabs. Being well aware of its limitations, we would argue that it was only stupid if we didn’t realize that it was stupid. We preferred to think of it as maintaining tradition and being more sporting.
I never gave much thought to what happened to the crabs after we delivered them to the farm kitchen, but the cook, Rie, would take over and steam them with her top secret spices, and we would spend the evening picking crabs. Helen and the Weatherman joined us that night, and we took great pride in the fact that we had contributed to his character development and youth tolerance skills....that said, we never saw him again.
Clean-up Editor - Toni Gardner, Author of "My Fathers" and "Walking Where the Dog Walks"
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