“If Master Hilyard believe he serve the Lord when he empty the night waste, mayhap he does.”

“He’ll serve more better,” said Christopher Jones, “if he holystones that shit stain.”

Hilyard turned to Jones, and in the manner of a good English seaman, tugged at his forelock.

While the Saints considered Hilyard one of the most obstreperous of the Strangers, Jones held a higher opinion of him. He knew Hilyard from the North Sea whaling trade. Hilyard’s shipmates had called him the Rat because he was as slender as a ratline and just as strong. And whaling masters had allowed him his independent spirit because few men could better place the lance. Few men on this ship, thought Jones, were better equipped for America.

“The buckets are not to be emptied until after we say amen to the morning prayer,” said Ezra Bigelow to Jones.

“Master, you’ll forgive me,” said Jack Hilyard, “but one of the ladies got the flux. It raise a stench tween-decks and start the others to retchin’. God won’t mind if we breaks a rule to stop a bit o’ retchin’. ”

Ezra Bigelow stepped up to Hilyard. He was taller than anyone else on the ship, and whenever he argued, which seemed quite often, he used his own height and the holy height of Scripture to make his points. “What can such as thee know of God’s mind?”

“As much as thee, sir, wif all thy learnin’.”

“Thou wilt show respect and use the proper form of address. When thou speakst to thy superiors, address them as you.”

“When thou shows respect to me, I’ll show it to thee.”

The savages might destroy this colony, thought Christopher Jones, or the colonists might starve before bringing in a harvest. But it was as likely that they would come apart because Saints and Strangers disagreed over something as petty as the disposal of the morning slop… or which word to use for the second person pronoun.

The Saints had recruited some of the Strangers. Others, like Jack Hilyard, had been brought on by the London Adventurers, the financial backers. Most were decent, some devout, and all had accepted the same terms—seven years of contracted labor—forced upon the Saints themselves. But some Strangers had come seeking their fortune first, not their God, and that might be the undoing of them all.

Saint and Stranger faced each other across the mouth of the slop bucket, and for a time, the only sound was the rush of the wind through the sails. On a small ship and a long journey, hostility was unwelcome but inevitable. All waited to see who would strike first, Ezra Bigelow with his lofty rhetoric or Jack Hilyard with his slop bucket.

Then a gull cried. Master Jones did not notice, for the cry of a gull was a common sound to men who plied the European coastal trade. But when the bird cried a second time, Jones felt it at the base of his spine before he heard it. He saw the bird at the same moment that a wild cry echoed from the foretop: “Land! Land ho!”

Jack Hilyard and Ezra Bigelow looked up, and Hilyard leaped for joy, because the voice crying out the sight of land belonged to his own son, Christopher.

Bigelow seemed to smile, although his face barely moved. “God gives thy son a great gift, the first sight of our promised land.”

Through his glass, Master Jones saw the horizon waver for the first time in sixty-four days. The sight filled him with joy and relief. Though modern man had known for over a century that the world was not flat, no one had seen it from far enough away to know for certain, and even a good seaman like Jones had moments of doubt.

There were few aboard the Mayflower—Saints, Strangers, or sailors—who did not rejoice at the cry of Christopher Hilyard. They poured from the tween-decks and the forecastle as though thinking to see the face of God himself. They lined the rail and hung in the rigging and for a few moments forgot the bitter journey just ended.

But their joy was soon tempered. Instead of God’s face, they saw only the wilderness. First, black patches of evergreen stood out against the horizon; then gray masses of beech and oak lifted their bare November arms in threat, like soldiers upon a great parapet of sand that rose from behind the curve of the earth, until it stood full before them, a hundred feet high, defying their ship as surely as it did the ocean wearing at its base.

“A continent protected by sand,” said Jack’s wife, Kate. “The foolish man build his house on the sand—”

“Show more faith,” chided Simeon Bigelow. “You see a goodly land, wooded to the brink of the sea. God could have given us no better.”

“I sees sand,” said Jack Hilyard.

“ ’Tis what God has offered.” Ezra Bigelow raised his voice, as if to raise his own spirits and those around him with the Scripture.