The mystery of the Mayflower and the vanishing crown jewels
Letter from Josiah Wimslow
President Trump could have another cultural heritage headache on his hands in the year that celebrates the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower ship arriving in America in 1620. The Wampanoag Indians want Britain to return their royal family’s crown jewels.
As with the Elgin Marbles, Britain has form on American heritage issues. It took fifty years for the priceless manuscript that recorded the Mayflower’s voyage to be surrendered by various Bishops of London. By chance it had ended up in Fulham Palace, then a public registry for colonial documents.
To members of New England’s Wampanoag Indian tribe, the existence in the UK of their heroic last king Metacom’s orb and sceptre is a worrying issue. But it is also a live one. The international transatlantic celebrations will at last focus on the Mayflower’s legacy from the native Americans’ point of view, as much as that of the European newcomers. As their spokesperson Paula Peters emphasised at the press conference to mark the beginning of international Mayflower year, “It’s not just a treasure, it’s our story”.
What makes it difficult for Britain to comply with this demand is that the Wampanoag regalia vanished in 1677. They were put on a ship bound for London by Josiah Winslow, one of the last governors of Plymouth colony. His father Edward was a Mayflower passenger, and close friend of the Wampanoag king, Massassoit, who saved the Mayflower passengers from starvation in the first year of settlement. Massassoit was also Metacom’s father.
By the late 1670s the cultural symbiosis at Plymouth Colony, reflected in the true story of Indian and English at the first Thanksgiving, had given way to the major conflict known as King Philip’s War — Philip being the name under which Metacom was known to the English. The arrival of 80,000 English colonists over the past century, demanding land and bringing European diseases to which the Indians had no immunity, destroyed any hope of peace. The children of Massassoit and the Pilgrim Fathers were pitted against one another.
Governor Josiah Winslow thought he had played a blinder when he sent the Indian king’s regalia to London. It would make the perfect present to lure his own king, Charles II, into granting Philip’s last remaining territories to Plymouth Colony, reminding him of the sacrifices colonists had made to defeat the legendary “sachem [chief] Philip the grand rebel”. The National Archives at Kew show a letter to Charles II accompanied the treasure: “to crave your favourable acceptance of these few Indian rarities, being the best of our spoils, and the best of the ornaments and treasure of sachem Philip the grand rebel; the most of them taken from him by Capt Benjamin Church (a person of great loyalty, and the most successful of our commanders) when he was slain by him; being his Crown, his gorge, and two belts of their own making, of their gold and silver”.
The Wampanoag crown jewels were said to have been delivered to a member of the aristocratic Waldegrave family, at a manor house named Ferriers, in Bures St Mary, East Anglia, which has long connections with the 17th-century colonising movement. The artifacts were meant to be presented at court to Charles II at Whitehall by Waldegrave Pelham, the brother-in-law of the governor of Plymouth Colony, but they never arrived at Whitehall.
The disappearance of the Indian crown jewels is a mystery that has never been solved. Researching my book about the Mayflower and its legacy, I went to Ferriers and was shown round this very remarkable 17th-century home. But there seemed nowhere the treasures could have been hidden, unless they had been plastered under the rafters with their strange witch marks.
Perhaps Waldegrave Pelham did not understand the emotional resonance of the royal ornaments, and had forgotten the considerable monetary value in New England of the Indians’ “gold and silver”, the white and purple shells. This was the currency known as “wampum” that New Englanders adopted for the first forty years because of the chronic shortage of specie. They were sewn together as belts and Metacom had two of them on him when he was killed. One sad possibility is that Metacom’s belt and other treasure may simply have been disposed of in the melancholy East Anglian marshland that stretches as far as the eye can see.
Despite the obstacles in her path, Paula Peters has refused to give up. When I met her researching her documentary about the Mayflower, I discovered she had requested officials at the Royal Collection to have a sweep through the attics of the Royal Palaces, to see if the treasure really was delivered to Charles II. Another Wampanoag colleague has asked the British Museum to give back their own wampum belts, in case one proves to be Metacom’s.
Paula hopes that the touring exhibition she is bringing to Britain, of artifacts made by today’s craftsmen, may spark a memory somewhere. It will feature a replica of Metacom’s treasure. There are hundreds of county museums that contain wampum belts. Perhaps one will find that the Wampanoag treasure is hidden in their collection, and restore it to their rightful owners.
