Showing posts with label mayflower. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mayflower. Show all posts

Saturday, March 26, 2016

Sexual Deviance In Colonial Plymouth


Keep in mind... Al Capone died in his bed, albeit in a jail cell. Jeffery Dahmer only got the death penalty because it was meted out by a prisoner. Charles Manson still draws breath, the Tsarnaev kid is still kicking, Whitey Bulger will most likely die of old age and Sirhan Sirhan still applies for parole.

However, America saw fit to put Thomas Granger up on the gallows.

I first became aware of his case when someone was trying to identify the grave of Myles Standish. They narrowed it down to a pair of graves, and even got some ground-penetrating sonar to make sure that they had a short guy (Standish, although more man than most, was about 5 feet tall). They then dug up the body, and because it didn't have some old Standish leg injury, they knew that they had mistakenly disinterred the previously-unknown grave of the kid who was put to death for, and I quote from memory via the Duxbury Reporter article from the late 1980s, "having gained carnal knowledge of the Brewster livestock."

Granger's crime? "Buggery with a mare, a cow, two goats, divers sheepe, two calves, and a turkey." He was caught in the act, with a horse.

E-I-E-I... Oh!

We're delving into Buggery (aka Bestiality, a term not invented in 1642) today because Granger is one of my homeboys, from Duxbury.

Granger was the second person (after murderer John Billington, of Billington Sea fame) to be put to death by the Europeans in 'Merica, and he was the first juvenile to go up a rope. He was an indentured servant to Love Brewster, and was 16 or 17 years old. He didn't make 18.

Granger's 1642 sentence came straight from Leviticus, and, in keeping with the Bible's commands, the animals that he tenderized with the Meat Hammer were slaughtered in front of him. They were then buried, with no use being made of any of them. After that, they had a Thomas Granger necktie party.

There was probably a 0.0% chance of a casual sexual encounter for a white-slave farm hand in Puritan America, and even The Scarlet Letter (based in the same 1642 year that the Granger trial was) story had to be based in the more hard-partying Massachusetts Bay Colony. History is quite clear on what happened in Colonial Plymouth when you let the freak flag fly freely, friend.


Plymouth was Freak City in America for a while, and probably shamed Sodom on a per capita basis. John Walker was tried but released on charges of "laying with a bitch." It could have been a dog or a lewd women (both uses for "bitch" were common in 1642), history doesn't specify. William Honeywell skated in 1655 on a Buggery case when no evidence could be put against him.

Thomas Saddeler lost a Buggery case in 1681, but he avoided the death penalty by being branded with a P (for Pollution) on his forehead. He also had to sit atop the gallows with a rope around his neck, to remind him that he was getting off easily. Saddeler, ironic name joke coming, was caught buggering a horse.

People tend to think of the Colonial-type people as dour, prudes, and sexless. However, they did have children, and that involves sex. Now, this was pre-YouTube, and Larry Flynt's great-great-great grandfather was still a few hundred years from being born, but love will find a way. Granger has a resume that would shame any modern porn star, and he built it up 375 years before Sinn Sage was born.

To keep it Duxbury for a bit, let's examine the case of Mary Mendame, of "Duxburrow." She snuck off on her hubby one day a whole bunch of days when what I shall call Forest Fever took over, and she entered into a dalliance with Tinsin, a local Wampanoag with a taste for The Other White Meat. There were numerous and, yes, diverse dalliances, and "the act of uncleanness was committed."

Mary was lashed for these dalliances, and was forced to wear some sort of scarlet letter thingy. If she was caught without it, she was to be burned in the face with a hot iron. Tinsin, who drew some sympathy as the seductee, just got whipped with a halter for going Five Hole on the colonial cutie.

The Native Americans come up if you research this topic, but they also come off looking pretty conservative. Colonists were amazed to learn that rape wasn't a part of Native American culture, and that they didn't rape their war prisoners. To my knowledge, there was only one instance of a Native raping anyone of any tribe or ancestry.

"Sam, The Indian" was convicted of raping Sarah Freeman in 1682. Rape was one of three crimes (murder, rape, and I'm assuming Buggery... Adultery too, but the Big A dropped down into the minor leagues by the 1680s) that had the death penalty back then, but Sam,who was noted to have "limited capacity," was given some slack because they very progressively felt that he may not have been aware of the concept of rape. "Given some slack" in this case means a lashing and exile.

Sam pulled off one of two rapes recorded in early Colonial history. The other case involved Ambrose Fish and a Lydia Fish. Ambrose escaped the gallows because there was only one witness (Lydia), and Ambrose refused to confess. He got a whipping instead. Ambrose and Lydia, of Sandwich, may have been brother/sister. It beats a sheep, I suppose...


Now, we started off with the heavy freak stuff for a reason. I don't think that too many people these days would bemoan the execution of a rapist, and a good beating is probably what a buggerer needs more than anything but therapy. I feel badly for Tinsin, but American blacks were being lynched for lesser interracial sexual "offenses" 300 years after Tinsin skated with a whipping. The Pilgrims don't really look that extreme at this point.

Where the colonists start looking somewhat overbearing is when they start judging less-spectacular sexual offenses. If the big three are murder, rape and buggery, there is a decided second tier of fornication, adultery, homosexuality, propositioning and a sort of shepherd's pie of lesser offenses like "frequently kisses a woman who is not his wife," "fails to be properly motivated to find a wife," and "enjoying a quick scrappe."

OK, I made up that last one. I found no information on solo flights (Woody Allen, when told he was a great lover, replied "I practice a lot when I'm alone."), but I'm also doing concurrent researchin/writin'. I'll rely heavily on a research paper that I stumbled across.

Adultery, as you recall (if I'm right), is what the "A" that Hester Prynne had to wear stood for. Puritans viewed Adultery as any sex act with a married or betrothed person who you weren't married or betrothed to.

Adultery was viewed as worse than Fornication, as marriages often involved a dowry that could make or break a family. Leviticus demands death for the A, but Deuteronomy provides a little wiggle room if the woman protests during the shagging. However, the onus of the punishment fell on women for their infidelity against their husband, because Dark Ages.

There were 9 cases of Adultery brought up in colonial Plymouth courts. Three involved straight philandering, three were brought up by someone seeking divorce, one was Tinsin and Mary Mendame, Two were "other," and I saw a reference to "whoredom."

Anne Linceford was caught riding the D Train with Thomas Bray when Mr. Linceford was out on the town. They were sentenced to lashings in both Plymouth, where the court was, and Yarmouth, where the deed went down. Anne had to wear an AD scarlet lettering (they feared that just an "A" would be taken by people as if she was wearing it for "Anne," like LaVerne DeFazio used to do with her "L" sweaters), for ADultery.

Katheren Aimes also got a two-town lashing for doing the shagnasty with William Paule, getting tiiiiied to the whippin' post in both Plymouth and Taunton. She also had a scarlet B, for (I think) Behavior. Aimes' husband, who may have abandoned her, was also punished, and did some time in the stocks.

Many times, the proof of Adultery was in the form of a baby. Mary Attkinson and John Bucke were charged with Adultery that resulted in a child. They weren't even sure if Mr. Attkinson was alive when Mary got Bucke Wild. They each paid a ten-pound fine and avoided a whipping.

Other cases involved sailors/whalers being gone for a year, coming home to their wives, and somehow having a newborn baby in a crib.

People were feeling the Bern even in 1681, when John Glover petitioned for divorce from Mary Glover because she took pipe from another man and then infected her hubby "with that filthy & noysome disease called the pox."

In some cases, even where divorce for Adultery was granted, the woman was not punished. Perhaps they felt that the shame was enough punishment, who knows?


Fornication was sex outside of the covenant of marriage. A baby being born 4 months after a hastily-arranged wedding was enough to merit a whipping and a scarlet letter.

A mutually-pleasing 69 cases of fornication were brought before Plymouth courts in the colonial era. They actually have some stats for this, which appeals to the fantasy-football geek in me. 48% involved people who were never married. 46% involved people who were not married or betrothed, but who eventually (and perhaps at the end of a musket) were betrothed, and 6% involved people who had entered into a wedding contract and just couldn't wait until the wedding to hit skins.

Punishment was generally a fine or a whipping, but they played it case-by-case. John Tompson paid a five shilling fine and skipped imprisonment for an out-of-marriage hippy hippy shake. Jane Powell, who put in work with a fellow servant, had her name cleared, as she was "in a sadd and miserable condition," and thought that the servant would marry her. Sarah Ensigne, convicted of whoredom, got the worse than usual penalty of being "whipt att cart's taile." Thomas Burge got a double-whipping for his sack time with Lydia Gaunt.

In fornication cases, it was not unusual for a man to get corporal punishment while the woman got a fine or a scarlet letter.

Two cases of Incest were recorded. Both were Daddy's Little Girl cases. Thomas Atkins was whipped in 1660 for propositioning his daughter Mary while drunk. Martha Hewitt's 1689 baby-sans-father was blamed on her own father, especially when Mary threw her name in the gully by refusing to name the baby's daddy. Pops skated when some paperwork was lost.

"Attempts and Propositions" sounds like where Patrick Bateman works, but it was a crime in Plimoth. You couldn't just walk up on a girl and go "Yo baby, wassup?" in 1650. Plymouth courts had 15 such cases in Funny Hat times.

John Pecke was fined fifty shillings for not leaving a maid alone. Edward Crowell and James Maker were lucky to slide with a four-pound fine after trying to break into a house while the man was at sea and demanding sex from his wife and sister.

My favorite was "Richard Turtall... presented to the court ... for laciuiouse carriage toward Ann Hudson, the wife of John Hudson, in taking hold of her coate and inticing her by words, as alsoe by taking out his instrument of nature that hee might prevaile to lye with her in her owne house" History does not record his punishment.


The oldest profession was practiced in New England, but at least one web page says that it wasn't as bad as we think it was. Of course, that page is called Doing The Nasty In Colonial America. False charges of whoredom were common, and could be made without a scrap of evidence. A charge of whoredom could be used as an economic weapon against females who owned property.

The type of rampant prostitution that you see in Jack The Ripper specials was more of an Industrial Revolution-era thing, and tended to be urban in nature. However, there are always women of the trade working any town where sailors come ashore.

There were a few cases of Child Support that made it to court, at least indirectly. In one case, Nathaniel Soule was sentenced to both a lashing and a child-support payment of ten bushels of Indian Corn. The payee, a Wampanoag girl, was also whipped for Fornication. A similar punishment was meted out to a male slave, who was assigned an 18 pence per week payment to a female slave named "Bonny" for one year, to be put to the maintenance of a child.

"Lascivious and Suspicious Conduct" could mean a lot of things, often where intercourse could not be proven. Hugh and Mary Cole were fined for LaSC, but the court could not prove Fornication. Johnathan Hatch and Frances (or Francis) Crippin escaped from being busted in a mutual extramarital affair with a warning for Hatch to stay away from the Crippin household. Ann Savory (awesome name) had to sit in the stocks just for being drunk in public with a man who she was not betrothed to.

LaSC was also used to persecute homosexuals of any gender. The wife of Hugh Norman and a Mary Haimmon were caught in bed together. No lashings went down, but Mrs.Norman (and maybe Mary Haimmon, I couldn't find her punishment) was forced to make a statement before the court.


So, in the end, those Pilgrims weren't so boring after all.

Just don't order the lamb chops.

Tuesday, November 24, 2015

If The Right People Were Running Plymouth....


Plymouth has a lot going for it. They have miles of coastline. They are dripping with history. They have an active downtown area. They have hotels and tourist-type places.

Plymouth also owns Thanksgiving. Her rule there is undisputed. There is no number one contender to that title. Plymouth owns it outright.

They take advantage of it. Pilgrims and Wampanoags are used to advertise businesses, decorate homes, and to generally set the mood of the community.

Just this past weekend, I went to a wonderful Thanksgiving parade that brought in locals by the thousands. All of those people spent money in the local economy, and Plymouth was the happening spot for a day.

There's nothing wrong with that.

I'd like Plymouth to happen a little harder.


Nothing burns the frontal lobes of a writer with nada in the pipeline than an underutilized resource.

You might think that my feelings on this are greedy and perhaps even crazy. They are definitely not in tune with the spirit of the season.

Thanksgiving is about being happy with what you have, not about thinking "How can I make money?" and so forth. There admittedly are some errors in my argument when viewed from that viewpoint.

However, a rising tide lifts all boats that don't have a big hole punched in the bottom. You can always be thankful, but you can always also be More thankful.

Here are a few ideas I have that might get this town on a payin' basis. We have a lot of nuclear reactor money to make up.


Thanksgiving Football

Is there anything that compelling beaming out of ESPN on, say, a holiday Thursday? Why not make the Plymouth North/Plymouth South Thanksgiving football game be a national event?

A big part of Thanksgiving lore in America involves going to the holiday high school football game, either the one where you went to high school at or the one in the town your kids go to school in. I'm about five years from having to make a very painful Duxbury-to-Bourne switch when my kid finally gets School Spirit.

ESPN should show a game. Sure, if they get one from Texas where they have 300 pounders all along the offensive line and the cornerbacks run a 4.4, and that would get you a higher level game. However, a lot of the charm is lost if it looks too much like a pro game, especially if they play it at one of those Texas schools with the 50,000 seat stadiums and the History textbooks that end with Jimmy Carter in the White House.

I would instead radically re-design the football stadium for one of the schools, or perhaps even build a stadium on a neutral site. I'd put it near the sea, preferably near wherever the Pilgrims actually set foot ashore.

There are a lot of woodlands around the nuclear reactor (if you ever want to see a satellite view of suburban sprawl coming to a skidding halt on either side of something, do a Google Map of the Pilgrim nuclear power plant), maybe they could build it in there.



Thanksgiving Stadium (my idea, I'll name it) would have less than 50,000 seats, but would possess several interesting visual facets:

- A giant replica Mayflower III on the seaside wall of the stadium, craftily positioned so that it would look like it was floating with the right camera angles. When either team scored, it could wobble back and forth as if in surf, while Rock The Boat (Don't Tip The Boat Over) plays on the loudspeakers.

- A complete recreation of a Pilgrim and a Wampanoag village in either end zone.

- A much better version of Plymouth Rock. I would use the largest boulder that can be moved by modern machinery,and make it be the non-sea-side wall of the stadium. I'd use a Disney-style fake rock if moving a small mountain became problematic.

- This Plymouth Rock would be hollowed out enough that the "1620" can be lit with fire or plasma rays. If we could somehow project the 1620 onto the moon, I'd be a-ight with that.

- A completely functional and life-sized lighthouse, which admittedly may be redundant with the 1620 neon sign.

- A seven hundred foot Turkey Of Vengeance robot who bursts forth from the sea to seek dinner-related vengeance on the crowd. We'd stop him before he killed too many people, of course.


Once we have the stadium in place, we'd need to get the schools up to speed.

We don't need to have the kids playing pro-level football, but it can't look like a Pop Warner game. Top coaches should be brought in, players from other schools should be lured in and the phys-ed classes K-12 should be hyper-intensified. I would not be put off by Soviet Union/Red Army comparisons.

We'd have to re-mascot the schools, as well. North could be the Pilgrims, South would be the... OK, this gets touchy.

"Wampanoags" is sort of a mouthful. "Indians" seems almost like a slur. "Sachems" lacks brand name recognition, and I think Middleboro or someone may already be the Sachems. "Warriors" is a bit bloody-minded. "Squantos" has a ring to it, although there was only one Squanto and we'd be heading into Lone Rangers territory. "Natives" sounds like what the Tea Party would name a team if they had one.

I suppose we could go Team Standish vs Team Alden, for the Massasoit Trophy. To be fair, Team Metacom vs Team Wamsutta for the Mayflower Trophy also works.

We'd also have to get the cheerleaders to step up their game. I'm thinking this, and this.


In turn for pretty much handing them their holiday viewing (and  30 for 30 special, or whatever they call those) for every Thanksgiving, ESPN will see that Plymouth gets a little financial compensation.

Compensation would be in order. I'm not sure that "free publicity" means much to a town that is in the early chapters of every American History textbook, Likewise, nationally televised stadium advertising would be limited, as very few people in Chicago are going to be ordering delivery from The Pizza Factory on Home Depot Road in America's Hometown.

No, Plymouth will be requiring little green pieces of paper with Founding Father Faces.

America would adopt the game as their own. It might not sell out East where many are going to their own HS games, but it would be prime morning viewing for anyone a time zone or three over.


Thanksgiving Parade

Speaking of compulsory national Thanksgiving viewing, we could make some improvements to the Thanksgiving parade and get it up on the tube.

Macy's has a Thanksgiving parade. Philadelphia and Detroit also have prominent Thanksgiving parades. New York was an Algonquian trading post with 5000 Lenape natives when the first Thanksgiving was held in 1621. Why should they have the Thanksgiving parade?

F*** them.

The Thanksgiving parade held in Plymouth should be televised nationally. The Macy's parade gets 88 million eyes a year. It is a national tradition that the much smaller Plymouth has little chance of vanquishing.

Plymouth could work some odd angle for their parade, to distinguish it from the giant Macy's parade that we have no chance of defeating straight up.


The Macy's parade starts at 9 AM, and ends about when the North/South football team would be starting. We'd be fools to run opposite of that.

Why not try the night before, or even Thanksgiving night?

7 PM, either night. I like the Thursday night idea better, as we'd be trying to wedge in between the 4 PM NFL game and the 8:30 PM game. We'd have all of the vacationers in town already, as opposed to a Wednesday night event.

We'd have to weed out the weaklings among the parade attractions. We'd have to hunt up corporate sponsorship, which could be used to super-power the floats.

We'd have to consider altering the parade route. I like Benny's as much as the next person doesn't, but it's not the place for a Jump Off. I'm thinking of using 3A, maybe make the parade run from Plimoth Plantation to Plymouth Rock. That may also prove problematic. but we can sweat the details later.

The important part is the ending, which is also why Thursday night is crucial to the parade.

Plymouth is already the home of Thanksgiving. Why not also take the running-unopposed title for Black Friday?

That's right... go from humbly thanking the Gods for what you have to the Gimme Gimme Gimme of the Christmas shopping season. It's the most important day of the consumer year, and no one owns it.

Plymouth could take possession of Black Friday simply by already having the eyes of the nation on them already via the football game and the parade. End that parade at Plymouth Rock, and light a mammoth Christmas tree there.

A simple, symbolic act, lighting that tree. It will match the neither Rockefeller Center tree, nor even the Boston tree. However, what it lacks in prestige, it makes up for in timing. Tied to the Thanksgiving parade, at a slack hour between football games.... Boom.

Why let Barry steal our thunder?

Granted, I'm aiming high, with stadiums and new holidays and all. Plymouth should aim high. If we don't, someone might come along and take Thanksgiving from us. New York already has the nationally televised parade that by all rights should belong to Plymouth.

We can take it back, if we Think Big.

Whether that makes enough money to pay for the effort remains to be seen. I'm more of an idea guy than a bean counter. The bean counters would have the hard job.

However, if Plymouth has a chance to profit heavily off of a holiday that they already own, and if they have a chance to claim a second holiday, would they not be wise to look into the best case scenario?