-The Mystery of the Maid-

Having established that we wanted to write a novel to tie together the story of ‘The Separatists’ of England and ‘The Pilgrim Fathers’ of America, as authors, Roger and I found we needed a ‘thread’ free enough to be drawn through the events of the time to help embroider all these patches of historical fact together into one blanket story.

 To do the story full justice, we needed our ‘thread’ to be free to weave in and out of the known historical facts from the early days of this Separatist group and continue right into the founding of the new colony at Plymouth. Therefore, our main character for the novel needed to have been aboard The Mayflower. Yet they also needed to have led a life so scantly documented as to allow us to ‘use’ them to do just that and to facilitate more freedom within the plot. As we intended to fictionalise this person’s life were decided it would be more ‘fitting’ if this ‘someone’ had also left behind no descendants.

However, as we started to research in earnest into the fine detail of the backgrounds of the fully documented list of passengers aboard The Mayflower, it soon transpired there were very few who might suit our very demanding brief. All of the ‘main players’, in the Pilgrim story have left behind extracts or accounts of events of the time, most notably William Bradford’s ‘Of Plymouth Plantation’, and so we know quite a lot of individual lives details.

Then, as I examined a very graining looking download from the Internet of a section of the hand written Mayflower passenger list dating from Bradford’s time, one entry struck my curiosity immediately. One person was included yet inexplicably left completely unnamed and therefore totally anonymous. She was simply listed as ‘a maid servant’. Not only had I ‘found’ the character needed for the purpose of the novel, but my ever-enquiring mind was left with a real mystery. 

Why in Bradford’s otherwise meticulously detailed account of those early years in America did he leave this maidservant so mysteriously anonymous? She was among only a handful of woman who survived the first winter so he must have known her identity. He recalls the names of everyone else, even the children, yet not hers. 

In entering up his notes on the ‘increasing and decreasing’ of Plymouth (presumably in 1650) with such precision, on recounting the fate of this woman he simply states that “ His (Carver’s) maidservant married and died a year or two after, here in this place....” 

So, is it not strange that he fails to state, even here, neither her name nor whom she married, though he must have surely known. (Simple deduction made from examining his other entries show that she can only have been ‘Dorothy’ whom Francis Eaton married early on in Plymouth). 

More curiously, as  these early marriages were not ‘religious’ in nature, Bradford as Governor of Plimoth Colony must surely have attended, if not presided over this legal ceremony himself.) In light of this, I must surely beg the question as to why the identity of John Carver’s maidservant remains so ‘sketchy’. 

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