The Plymouth Papers

The Plymouth Papers is a unique, multilayered historical novel about an American founding myth. It is the story of the Mayflower and the founding of the first permanent colony in New England told from multiple points of view and focusing on one of the most interesting Mayflower passengers, Stephen Hopkins, and his family, particularly his sons, Giles and Caleb, and his daughter, Ruth. It is also the story of the Indians, primarily the Wampanoag, without whom the so-called "Pilgrims" would not have survived. What is unique about the story is that it explores not only the relationship Giles has with his wife, a half-Wampanoag woman, but also the relationships Caleb has with a Wampanoag man and Ruth has with a two-spirit woman-man, Pequas. Needless to say, these characters do their best to hide these relationships from the Puritans, whose penalties for homosexuality include whipping, branding, and even death. The "Plymouth Papers" are discovered on Cape Cod during the Civil War by Caleb Taylor, a book publisher, abolitionist, and self-described devotee of Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne from Boston. The Plymouth Papers are documents from the 17th century written by some of Caleb Taylor's ancestors: journals, memoirs, and letters by Stephen Hopkins, his sons Giles and Caleb, his daughter, Ruth, Giles's wife, Catherine, and her father, Gabriel Whelden. Caleb Taylor transcribes the manuscripts in 1864 with his own running commentary on the war, the government's separate war on the Indians, and his efforts to dissuade his 16-year-old nephew, Paul, from joining the Union Army. Caleb Taylor plans to publish the Papers himself until he makes a startling, and for him, shocking discovery, and it is not about the fact Stephen Hopkins had been shipwrecked in 1609, reprieved from a sentence of death for mutiny, and returned home to find himself a widower who is later recruited by the Separatist Puritans to sail on the Mayflower and help found New Plymouth in 1620. Nor is it about the fact that Caleb's ancestor, Giles Hopkins, married a half-Indian woman, a Wampanoag. Caleb Taylor's discovery has to do with the longest document in the Papers, the confessional memoir by Giles Hopkins. A member of the Church of England, Giles tells the story of the Mayflower and Plymouth Colony from a non-Separatist point of view sympathetic to the Indians, who suffer atrocities at the hands of the Puritans. As he and his father recount the tale of the founding of Plymouth and Stephen's role as emissary to the Indians, Giles also remembers those who were persecuted by the Puritans because of their religion (the Anabaptists and the Quakers) and tells the story of those who suffered such punishments as whipping, branding, and even hanging for breaking laws against certain sexual behaviors. When Giles discovers a truth about his younger brother, Caleb, Giles snaps and commits a crime so heinous he sends his brother literally to sea. Eventually Caleb dies on Barbados. The stories are connected in several ways. Each main character lives in a time of injustice, war, and puritanical intolerance and hatred. All are related by blood to each other. All feel sympathy for, even a spiritual connection with, Native Americans. All are involved in controversial or contentious relationships either with a significant other and/or with a family member. And all are thoughtful, educated, spiritual men who, like the men and women they love, are seeking to love and be loved. This is the central theme of the novel, this need to love and be loved.