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It’s November 11, 1620, 41 men aboard a battered ship gather together as best they can. As the Mayflower bobs, travel weary, atop the rough, cold waters off Cape Cod, William Bradford clears his throat and begins to read. “In the name of God, Amen. We whose names are underwritten, the loyal subjects of our dread Sovereign Lord King James, by the Grace of God of Great Britain, France, and Ireland King, Defender of the Faith…” He goes on, reading roughly 200 words outlining how the government of this new colony will work and then one by one the men sign. With those signatures, they vow to create fair and just laws for the Plymouth Colony. They vow to obey those laws. They declare their loyalty to the King of England and to God. And they agree to work together for the good of the colony. This document, the Mayflower Compact, was the first to outline self-governance in the so called “New World” and it would go on to serve as a foundation for both the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution. Our government was practically built upon the Mayflower Compact signed by those 41 men on a cold November day. But did you know, not all of them would uphold the vow they made that day when they signed their names upon the parchment? One in particular, John Billington, would go so far against them as to become the first convicted murderer in American history. Let’s fix that.
Hello, I’m Shea LaFountaine and you’re listening to History Fix where I discuss lesser known true stories from history you won’t be able to stop thinking about. Thanksgiving and murder, what’s not to love? I’m jumping on the true crime bandwagon this week to bring you the story of Mayflower passenger John Billington who earned himself the reputation of America’s first convicted killer. But I do want to be clear about that title before we get too deep. That’s admittedly a very Eurocentric title. There were certainly murders committed within Native American communities before this. I want to acknowledge that the indigenous people in the area had their own methods of administering justice and punishment well before the arrival of John Billington. And so, no he’s not really the first convicted murderer in America. But it’s hard to explain all of that in the title of the episode. John Billington was, however, the first English colonist to be convicted of murder in America. Many had murdered before him, mostly the murders of indigenous people, think of Wingina’s head in Edward Nugent’s hand from the 1585 Roanoke colony. But none of them were tried. None of them were convicted. There was no justice for the murders of indigenous people. But John Billington didn’t kill an indigenous person. He killed a fellow white man and so he was tried, he was convicted, and he was the first settler to be executed in the Plymouth colony.
But if you knew John Billington and his family, you wouldn’t be all that surprised. They were a rough bunch. He was a “knave” according to governor William Bradford and that was not a term used lightly at the time. And you may be thinking, Mayflower, Plymouth Colony, weren’t they like super religious and holy? What is this knave doing mixed up in their company? Well, let’s take a look at how exactly those 102 people found themselves aboard the Mayflower in September of 1620. It started years before that back in England and of course it has to do with Henry VIII. I told you guys he’s one of the big shockwave starters of history. Him and freaking Columbus. How many times have I said this now? It all comes back to Henry breaking with the Catholic church so he could divorce his wife and marry his mistress. He then established the Church of England, his own protestant church that he controlled so he could grant himself his own divorce yada yada. Well some people weren’t digging this new church. They thought it was too similar to the Catholic church. Henry was raised Catholic after all, it's kind of all he knew. So a lot of the Catholic rituals and practices were carried over into the Church of England. It wasn’t exactly a clean break. But there were folks who wanted it to be more of a clean break than it was. And the folks in this camp split into two groups: the Puritans who I talked about a few weeks ago in the Salem episode, and the Separatists. And I always thought they were one in the same but apparently they’re a little different. Puritans wanted to purify the church of England by getting rid of all the Catholic remnants. Like, it’s fine, we’ll keep it but we’ll just fix it, we’ll clean it up a little. Separatists didn’t think it could be changed or fixed or purified. They just wanted to start over entirely, separate from the Church of England and start their own thing.
But it was really hard to be a separatist in England. The church controlled everything, what you ate, what you wore. You could be fined for not attending church. And so establishing their own separate church was a really dangerous affair and it had to be done in secret. One separatist leader named William Brewster set up a secret church in his home in the village of Scrooby in North Nottinghamshire. Scrooby dooby doo, sorry I had to. Brewster had a strong influence on William Bradford who would later become governor of the Plymouth Colony for 30 years. In the nearby town of Gainesborough, another separatist group is brewing, Brewstering. Alright, sorry, I’m done. As English authorities start cracking down more and more on separatists groups just trying to do their thing, the two groups come together and realize that they can no longer stay in this country. They have to go somewhere else so they can worship how they want to worship. And so they decide to go to Holland.
They leave England and they settle down in Leiden, Holland which is known as a city of free thinkers who exercise religious tolerance. It’s also known to offer shelter to refugees, folks who have had to flee their countries for whatever reason. So it’s really kind of perfect for this group of separatist escapees. But as lowly refugee immigrants to this country, it’s actually kind of a hard life. They have to work really hard to stay afloat. They have big families crammed into tiny houses. They’re poor. Their children are becoming Dutch, how dare them. Plus there’s a war with Spain looming that has them all nervous and they start to think, hey maybe Holland isn’t the answer. Maybe we need to go much farther than this. Maybe we need to get out of Europe altogether. And they, some of them at least, set their sights on America, the Virginia Colony. This is about 10 years after the Jamestown Colony was established. It’s an absolute disaster over there but of course no one really knows that, the reports coming back to England are being pretty heavily glorified in order to keep investors onboard and please the King. So they don’t know how horrible it truly is, they start thinking this is their next move. We’ll go carve out a chunk of the new world where we can do our thing.
Many stayed in Holland, they’re like “nah, we’re good.” But some headed back to England to try to organize this trip to the Virginia colony. They didn’t want to go too close to Jamestown because they were Church of England guys there too and they felt like it would be just like being in England. They would be oppressed there as well. So they set their sights farther north to an area near the Hudson River which is today New York but back then it was still part of the Virginia Colony. And they get permission from the Virginia Company to land here and establish a colony. They also work to drum up investors for the colony, promising merchants, businessmen that they’ll send back goods so there’s a return on their investment. But of course these merchant investors had a say in who joined this excursion and they sent some folks who were not separatists. They were just regular guys who were mostly skilled laborers that would help actually build the infrastructure for the colony. The separatists called these guys strangers. And so John Billington and his family were strangers. They were not going to America for religious freedom like the separatists, they were going probably because they kind of sucked and no one liked them back in England, honestly. But they weren’t the only ones. Of the 102 passengers that would make this voyage, only 37 of them were actually separatists.
The voyage was, honestly, kind of doomed from the start. They started out with two ships. The Speedwell was supposed to take the group of separatists from Holland to America and the Mayflower was going to carry the strangers, the non-separatists from England to America. But the Speedwell sucked. It was a crappy ship and it immediately started leaking. It was supposed to meet up with the Mayflower in Southampton and then they were going to set off together for America but by the time it got there, it had developed a leak. They make repairs in Southampton and then on August 15th, the two ships set off. But, pretty soon after that, the crappy Speedwell starts taking on water again and they have to turn back. They make repairs again, give it another go, and… yeah it’s still leaking so they turn back, drop anchor at Plymouth and it’s pretty quickly determined that it ain’t happening. The Speedwell ain’t making it across the ocean it is not seaworthy. So they’re down to one ship, the Mayflower. Some of the passengers are like screw this, and they decide not to go, but 102 of them pile aboard the Mayflower along with 30 crew members.
Now at this point, these poor people have already been on ships for 6 weeks and they haven’t even left yet. That’s about how long they were expecting the whole journey across the ocean to take and they’re still in England. What a nightmare. On September 16th they finally depart, for real, from Plymouth. It takes a total of 66 days to cross the ocean and it does not go smoothly. Throughout October they are battered by storms that often prevent them from being able to raise the sails and so they just drift, tossed about by rough seas and wind. Passengers are crammed below deck in complete darkness, many of them seasick. One stranger is swept overboard. A woman named Elizabeth Hopkins gives birth amidst the horror to a baby boy named Oceanus. There were three women on the Mayflower who were at least 6 months pregnant by the way.
Remember they were hoping to land near the Hudson River, where they had been granted permission to settle. But they missed their target and landed farther north off the coast of Cape Cod. So they’re like “alright, that sucks but let’s just head back south, we gotta go south” and they try to head down to the Hudson River but they’re immediately met with rough seas that almost wreck the ship. So they are forced to stay near Cape Cod, anchoring near what is now Provincetown Harbor. Now, they have no right to be here though. They had permission to settle near the Hudson River. They do not have permission to settle near Cape Cod. In the minds of some of the strangers, including John Billington, this made their contracts with the investors null and void. They had agreed to work six days a week to establish the colony and send trade goods back to investors. But that was at the Hudson River spot. This is someplace else. And so some began to argue that the contracts meant nothing and they could do whatever they wanted. William Bradford steps up, he’s like this is borderline a mutiny, we gotta do something. We need some kind of legal standing. And they come up with the Mayflower Compact and convince all the men on the Mayflower to sign it.
And you may be like, cool they made it, they’re on land, they signed the compact thingy, great, things are looking up. No. They’re not. Cause it’s all about to get way way worse. For the next month and a half they stayed on the ship anchored in the harbor while small groups went to shore to try to find a place for the settlement. It’s December. It’s cold and they are still packed onto this dark, dirty, ship. But this horrifically dire situation apparently does not phase the Billington boys. Because John Billington did not come over on the Mayflower alone. He brought is wife, Eleanor who is sometimes referred to as Ellen, and his two teenage sons John Jr. and Francis. And let me tell you these boys are a piece of work. While they’re still living aboard the ship that first winter, 14 year old Francis almost burns the whole thing down with his antics. He’s apparently playing around with squibs which are like homemade fireworks made out of gunpowder and paper. And if you’re a Harry Potter fan like me you may be surprised to find that JK Rowling apparently borrowed that word although her version has a totally different meaning. Anyway, Francis is lighting off squibs inside the ship cause he’s a 14 year old boy and that’s enough of a reason. He’s also playing with his father’s gun. He’s playing with guns and fireworks inside a wooden ship and he manages to ignite half a barrel of gunpowder. Cause there’s barrels of gunpowder on this wooden ship with fireworks and 14 year old boys. And it almost catches the whole ship on fire but they manage to put it out in time and narrowly avoid an absolute catastrophe. William Bradford writes in his 1630 book “of Plymouth Plantation” quote “By God’s mercy, no harm was done.”
So they HAVE to get off of this ship. They are so over it. And so they’re scrambling to find a place to build the settlement. They’re exploring the shoreline, scouting for locations, they steal some corn at one point, they get attacked by an indigenous group called the Nauset and then they come upon an abandoned village. This was a Native American village called Patuxet. It was once home to a Wampanoag man named Tisquantum but you probably know him better as Squanto. And I covered all this I’m pretty sure in the Thanksgiving episode last year so revisit that one if you want to go even deeper into this story. But long story short, Squanto was abducted along with 27 other men mostly Patuxet by an English guy named Thomas Hunt back in 1614 who took them back to Europe and attempted to sell them into slavery. Squanto somehow escaped, made his way to England, learned English and then miraculously returned to his Patuxet village but sadly found it abandoned and most of his people dead. And soon after this is when the Mayflower arrived and the colonists also found Patuxet abandoned and lots and lots of graves. So what happened? Well after Squanto was shipped off to Europe by this Thomas Hunt guy, the people of Patuxet and surrounding areas began to die of various diseases that would collectively come to be known as “the great dying.” This most likely included leptospirosis, a bacterial infection carried by rats on European ships, smallpox, measles, influenza, and cholera, all diseases that indigenous Americans had never encountered before and therefore had no natural immunity to. And these diseases were almost certainly brought over by Europeans like Thomas Hunt. And their effects were profound, killing an estimated 90% of indigenous populations and leaving entire towns, like Patuxet abandoned save for the graves of the dead.
And so Squanto discovered his town abandoned and his people dead and so did the Mayflower colonists and it seemed a convenient place indeed to establish their colony. On December 25, they pulled up their anchor in Provincetown Harbor and headed to what is now Plymouth Bay, Massachusetts, near the site of the abandoned Patuxet village. And it was there, on the ruins of that village, that they started to build their settlement. They built a fort and a watchtower as well as a common building that was first used as a hospital. And then they began construction on individual houses. But this all took some time. Most of these houses weren’t ready to move into until February and so they are still on the godforsaken ship for months, nearly all winter. By March of 1621, more than half of the Mayflower passengers are dead, mostly of disease and malnourishment. Only 47 of 102 colonists survived that first winter. Half of the ship’s crew died as well. During the worst of times, according to reports, only 6 or 7 colonists were well enough to care for the rest. But William Brewster and William Bradford survived. Myles Standish survived who was military advisor to the colony. The Mayflower captain Christopher Jones survived and soon sailed the ship back to England once the half of his crew that survived had recovered. And John Billington, his wife, and his two naughty sons survived, of course.
Meanwhile, as they’re trying to survive and setting up the colony, they are being watched by the Wamponoag people. This is their land after all. They’ve been here for 10,000 years. They’re in bad shape themselves, their population decimated by European disease and war with neighboring tribes. They’re licking their wounds and watching as the English settle on their ruins. But luckily, thanks to men like Thomas Hunt and the like who came before, several of the Wamponoag men can speak some English, including Squanto. And this goes a long way in helping them to establish peaceful relations with the settlers. And the first Thanksgiving and yada yada, like I said, please revisit last year’s Thanksgiving episode, episode 36, please do actually, it’s a pretty powerful one. And no that peace will not last, it will blow up a generation later with King Philip’s War, the bloodiest war in American history per capita but for now there is some semblance of peace. Everyone, the Wampanoag and the settlers are just trying to get back on their feet and they decide, for now, that helping each other, supporting each other, is the only way to bounce back.
But the Billingtons are still causing trouble. William Bradford reports in “History of Plymouth Plantation” that John Billington Sr., the father, soon prompted the very first legal action in the colony when he refused to follow the orders of Myles Standish who is remember the military leader of the colony. You have to do what Myles Standish says. You have to. And John Billlington refuses. Possibly worse, he does what Bradford refers to as quote “opprobrious speeches,” towards Standish, he mouths off. This is like, if you’re an Office fan, this is like the episode where Stanley yells at Michael and Toby is like “you gotta do something, you can’t have employees being loudly and publicly defiant.” And that’s the case here too. You can’t have a colonist, a stranger at that, being openly defiant towards a leader of the colony. It’s anarchy. Donna Curtin who is the executive director of the Pilgrim Hall Museum in Plymouth, Massachusetts says in a History.com article by Dave Roos quote “It’s dangerous that Billington would be so brazen as to articulate in public his disagreement with Standish. Billington was extraordinarily outspoken for this period, especially in this context and in this place,” end quote. And so he’s prosecuted for this. A judge found him guilty of quote “contempt of the Captain’s lawful command” and sentenced him to have his neck and heels tied together. Which is absurd but I mean, sounds pretty awful, I’m sure it’s effective. The real reason they did that, according to historian Frank Bremer, is because they didn’t have a jail built yet. They didn’t have stocks or cells or any other way to incarcerate him other than to tie his neck to his heels. And even though he ended up evading this punishment by quote “humbling himself and craving pardon” Bradford still recorded it as the first legal action taken in the colony.
So little hiccup there, but overall the colony is finally getting on its feet. They’ve signed a peace agreement with Massasoit, the leader of the Wampanoag confederation. They’ve built houses, they’ve started planting some crops, people aren’t dying in mass anymore. And then, a problem. And it’s little John Billington, the son who is like 16 years old. He wanders off, gets lost in the woods, possibly. There are some historians who believe he intentionally ran away to escape his bully of a father but there’s obviously no proof of that, just speculation. But he’s gone. He’s gone 5 days and they’re like “crap, we lost one.” Meanwhile, after wandering in the woods for 5 days, John comes upon a Wampanoag village called Manomet led by a sachem or leader named Canacum. And it kind of seems like Canacum would turn John over to fellow Wampanoag leader Massasoit who has a peace agreement with the English but he doesn’t. Instead, he gives John to the Nauset who live on the elbow of Cape Cod. Yes, you’ve heard of them, these were the folks who attacked a group of colonists as they searched for a settlement site when they first arrived. They’re also the folks the colonists stole corn from when they first arrived. The Nauset hate the English for good reason. Remember Thomas Hunt, the guy who abducted 27 indigenous men and sold them into slavery, including Squanto? Well 20 of those men were Patuxet like Squanto but the other 7 were Nauset. And the Nauset had not forgiven the English for this. So, for some reason that historians are kind of confused about, Canacum gives John to the Nauset instead of his own head Wampanoag sachem, Massasoit. And they’ve theorized that this might reveal that Massasoit had feigned more dominance to the English than he actually had in the region. It’s possible the Nauset were actually the dominant force at the time. They seemed to have suffered fewer casualties during the great dying than the other groups. So Canacum gives John to the Nauset and then he tells Massasoit about it and Massasoit tells William Bradford. And he’s like “crap, we gotta go get this insolate wayward teen from the guys who attacked us, the guys whose corn we stole, the guys who hate us, cool.” And he sends a group of 10 men as a recovery party to go get John Jr. And this is significant. 10 men is roughly half the men left in the colony. If this doesn’t go well, they risk losing half of their adult males. Which are the only ones allowed to do anything or make any decisions at this point in history. So that would be a problem. Let me tell you, if my husband, the father of my children had to go risk his life to go retrieve this fool’s kid. Mmm.
On their way to get this punk kid from their mortal enemies, they encounter another group called the Cummaquid (kid) who invite them ashore to meet their sachem, their leader Lyanough. And Lyanough is pretty great. He actually offers to accompany them to go talk to the Nauset and Squanto is with them too so they have some translators. But before they set back out, they meet an old woman at the Cummaquid village. Colonist Edward Winslow wrote about this encounter in his 1622 book “Mourt’s Relation: A Journal of the Pilgrims at Plymouth” quote “One thing was very grievous unto us at this place. There was an old woman, whom we judged to be no less than a hundred years old, which came to see us because she never saw English, yet could not behold us without breaking forth into great passion, weeping and crying excessively. We demanding the reason of it, they told us that she had three sons who, when Master Hunt was in these parts, went aboard his ship to trade with him, and he carried them captives into Spain by which means she was deprived of the comfort of her children in her old age. We told them we were sorry that any Englishman should give them that offense, that Hunt was a bad man, and that all the English that had heard of it condemned him for the same; but for us, we would not offer them any such injury though it would gain us all the skins in the country. So we gave her some small trifles, which somewhat appeased her,” end quote. And so they’ve been reminded of Thomas Hunt’s indiscretions and now they’re setting back out toward the Nauset who they know lost 7 men to Hunt.
They arrive, Squanto and Lyanough go to shore to tell the Nauset sachem Aspinet why they are there. Although I’m sure he could have guessed. The Nauset come out to the shore where the colonists are waiting in their boat. Winslow wrote that they were quote “very thick amongst us, and were earnest with us to bring in our boat.” He says they hesitated because quote “we had least cause to trust them, being they only had formerly made an assault upon us in the same place, in time of our winter discovery for habitation,” end quote. But they do, they bring the boat into the shallows and they allow two Nauset men to board. One of them was the man they had stolen the corn from when they first arrived. He has a bone to pick. So he hops in the boat and they agree to repay him for the stolen corn and he’s pleased, he’s like “cool, that’ll do.” Now they’re just waiting around for someone to give them back John Billington. After sunset, the sachem Aspinet arrives with 100 warriors wading through the water and one of them is carrying John who is quote “behung with beads.” So this is a whole thing. This is an obvious show of dominance. They have 100 warriors. Massasoit only has 60, another reason some historians believe he was exaggerating his dominance to the colonists. Aspinet clearly wants them to know that he has 100 warriors. But also, they’re carrying John Billington aloft hung with beads like he’s a peace offering of some sort. It’s like they are trying to establish peace with the colonists but also show them, you know “don’t mess with us.” They bring John to the boat. A peace agreement is made. And actually, peace with the Nauset continues even throughout King Philip’s war. So, I mean on one hand, this event helped the colonists establish peace with the Nauset and apologize and make up for their corn theft, sort of smooth things over there. But on the other hand, like, come on John Jr. what the heck were you doing? Why you gotta wander off and make half the men in your whole village risk their lives to come looking for you. Just… annoying. But weirdly kind of beneficial in the end.
In 1624, John Billington Sr. gets himself wrapped up in another scandal. This became known as the Oldham-Lyford scandal. Basically, the investors back in England are trying to keep an eye on their investment. So they send a clergyman named John Lyford to the Plymouth colony. He’s supposed to be there as a religious figure, right a priest, but he’s actually a spy for the Merchant Adventurers which was a group of about 70 London businessmen who had invested in the colony. So they send this mole in basically to gather information for them. Bradford wises up pretty quickly though and he intercepts letters between Lyford, the spy, and a non-separatist colonist, a stranger, named John Oldham. And the content of the letters is not great. They are basically bashing the colonists to the investors back in London. So Bradford gets his hands on these letters and he’s like “what the heck guys?” Lyford and Oldham are put on trial for this and they say they were just relaying what was told to them by some of the colonists, most notably, defiant gossip boy John Billington. Lyford and Oldham are banished from the Plymouth colony, I assume they sail back to England and aren’t just like cast out into the wilderness. Billington claims he’s innocent, he didn’t say any of those terrible things. And he’s allowed to stay. But, I mean, come on, we know John Billington. They know John Billington, he’s not fooling anyone. But they don’t have any proof so he gets to stay. Bradford’s furious though. He writes a letter to a friend in England that mentions Billington saying quote “He is a knave, and so will live and die,” end quote. And remember, knave is serious. Thems are fighting words.
Sometime between 1627 and 1630, the younger John, the prodigal son, dies young, in his 20s. We don’t know why, probably some disease. But John Sr., Eleanor, and young Francis are still alive and kicking for now. In 1630, Billington, who Roos calls a “quick-tempered angry man” gets in an argument with a neighbor. Now Billington is like 50 years old at this point and this neighbor, John Newcomen is 17. So he’s fighting with a kid basically over something farming related, I don’t know. Bradford says that he quote “waylaid a young man, one John Newcomen and shot him with a gun, whereof he died,” end quote. So this is like, there’s no covering up this murder. He killed this guy. Everyone knows he killed this guy. He goes to trial. Here’s what Bradford writes quote “This year John Billington the elder (one that came over with the first) was arraigned; and both by grand, and petty jury found guilty of willful murder; by plain and notorious evidence. And was for the same accordingly executed. This as it was the first execution amongst them, so was it a matter of great sadness unto them; they used all due means about his trial, and took the advice of Mr. Winthrop, and other the ablest gentlemen in the Bay of Massachusetts, that were then newly come over, who concurred with them that he ought to die, and the land be purged from blood. He and some of his, had been often punished for miscarriages before, being one of the profanest families amongst them,” end quote.
And so, although it was a difficult decision, and they even got the advice of newcomers in Boston, they decided to hang Billington. Bradford writes in this same section about the Billingtons quote “They came from London, and I know not by what friends shuffled into their company,” end quote. Basically being like “I have no idea how these people ended up in our colony, like, who vouched for them?” And we know very little about the Billingtons before they boarded the Mayflower. We don’t know how John Billington and his family ended up part of that. All we have before that is a line in the will of a man named Francis Longland who leaves some of his land to the Billington’s son Francis. The Longland guy leaves the land to Francis Billington and another guy who was his nephew. So historians believe that Francis Billington may have also been a nephew of the Longland guy. It’s possible his mother was originally Eleanor Longland but there’s really nothing to prove that. The property was in Spalding in the county of Lincolnshire. So maybe that’s some clue as to what hole these miscreants crawled out of.
Eleanor Billington, who was one of only 5 women to survive the first year of the colony by the way, she herself was punished in 1636. She was sentenced to sit in the stocks and be whipped for slandering a church deacon and politician named John Doane, which seems harsh. And who knows, I mean she’s a woman, he’s a powerful man. He might have actually deserved that, I really don’t know. I’m not going to cast any stones at Eleanor for that. But it does show that, you know, this sort of defiant, bad mouthing, obstinance definitely runs in the family. Eleanor remarried a colonist named Gregory Armstrong in 1638. Francis, the only surviving son, married a woman named Christian Eaton in 1634 and the two had 9 children together. He lived to be an old man, almost 80 years old. And those 9 children had children who had children who had children. And so there are a lot of Billington descendants about today including actor Richard Gere. In fact, according to Mayflower 400, 35 million people alive today can trace their ancestry back to various Mayflower passengers.
So that’s the Billington family, just a thorn in the side of the Plymouth colony. It’s really no wonder that John Billington went down in history as America’s first killer. But it’s also pretty insulting to refer to him as such. By giving Billington the title of first murderer, we are dismissing all of the many many murders committed by colonists and explorers before him, the murders of indigenous people. By only counting this murder, the murder of a white man, a fellow English colonist, it’s like saying that all those murders of indigenous people didn’t count. Their lives didn’t matter. So it certainly wasn’t America’s first murder but, sadly, it was the first time an English American, or future American at least, was held accountable for murder. After decades of murdering native people without batting an eye, turn the gun on a white man, and now justice is served. John Billington’s crime was no worse than Ralph Lane’s or Edward Nugents or Thomas Hunt’s or any of them, he just picked the wrong skin color.
Thank you all so very much for listening to History Fix, I hope you found this story interesting and maybe you even learned something new. Be sure to follow my instagram @historyfixpodcast to see some images that go along with this episode and to stay on top of new episodes as they drop. I’d also really appreciate it if you’d rate and follow History Fix on whatever app you’re using to listen, and help me spread the word by telling a few friends about it. That’ll make it much easier to get your next fix.
Information used in this episode was sourced from “Of Plimoth Plantation, “Mourt’s Relation: A Journal of the Pilgrims at Plymouth,” History.com, the Mayflower Society, Mayflower 400, New England Historical Society, and Wikipedia. As always, links to these sources can be found in the show notes.
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