Further Than Before

Who would have known that Religion would become so confusing after England broke away from the Roman Catholic Church and created a new church called the Church of England?  I joined a group of travelers and we were on a journey to find a holy place where we could experience solace in our lives.  We felt that something needed to change, King James I needed to come down off his throne and leave us all alone.  We called ourselves pilgrims because we are the true Christians, and we are determined to purify the Christian church and return to a scripture-based service.  We immigrated to Holland to escape persecution but we feared the loss of our English heritage while living in this foreign country, so we purchased a charter to establish a colony in the New World that would enable us to set up our own society where we could be free to worship as we pleased.

Our intent was to establish a farming village in the northern part of the Virginia Colony at the mouth of the Hudson River near the Big Apple.  We would live under the English government, but we would worship in our own, separate church.  Our group originally started out on two different ships, the Mayflower and the Speedwell, but the Speedwell began to leak almost immediately after we left port, so both ships headed back to where we started.  We managed to squeeze everyone and all of our belongings onto the Mayflower and then we set sail once again.  Because of the delay caused by the leaky Speedwell, we had to cross the Atlantic at the height of storm season, which made our journey horribly unpleasant and so many of us got seasick.  Treacherous shoals and storms drove our ship off course and after two miserable months at sea over the great Atlantic Ocean, we landed on the salty shorelines of the wrong place.  What a fiasco, it was like a comedy of errors as we had no right to be where we actually ended up, so in order to establish ourselves as a legitimate colony, we named our landing spot Plymouth after the English port from which we had departed.

We knew that life without laws could prove to be catastrophic, so our leaders Myles Standish, William Bradford, John Carver, William Brewster and Edward Winslow created a doctrine that we called the Mayflower Compact, which was a contract that was supposed to ensure that a functioning social structure would prevail.  Several scouting parties were sent out, but most of us still lived on the Mayflower and we were ferried back and forth from shore to build our new storage and living quarters.  More than half of us died during that first winter, death became a concomitant of poor nutrition, inadequate housing and harsh weather.

After we built our settlement, I came into contact with Tisquantum, who I called Squanto, and he was English-speaking Native American of the Pawtuxet tribe.  I traded some of my beads with him for some of his food and we became good friends.  He was my accomplice when I went out exploring.  One day we came across this tree that was decorated with colorful tapestry, and Squanto said that this would be a nice place for me to get my groove on.  Squanto said that this was the place where he would go to smoke tobacco and make wishes for peace in the world.  Squanto and I would both dance by this tree, although he had some different moves that I had never seen before.  We listened to the sounds of nature as we danced by this tree with the hanging ribbons and feathers and he had this one move that caused me to tremble and then explode and this left a smoking crater inside of my mind with a rainbow that spiraled round and round.

Written for Daily Addictions prompt – Doctrine, for FOWC with Fandango – Accomplice, for July Writing Prompts – Salty shorelines, for Sheryl’s A New Daily Post Word Prompt – Concomitant, for Ragtag Community – Groove, for Scotts Daily Prompt – Contract, for Mindlovemisery’s Menagerie Tale Weaver/ Fairy Tale # 179 – Voyage of Discovery, for Teresa’s Haunted Wordsmith Three Things Challenge prompts – tapestry, comedy and Big Apple, for Sue Vincent’s Daily Echo Thursday photo prompt – Wishes and for Word of the Day Challenge Prompt – Solace.