#44 ALSO AT FIRST THANKSGIVING

                                                                  

                                                                  JOHN COOKE

John accompanied his father, Francis Cooke, on the 1620 Mayflower sailing. As he was about ten years old, he did not sign the Mayflower Compact. He survived that first brutal year in Plymouth and sat at the first Thanksgiving celebration. 

John's mother, Hester, and his sisters arrived in Plymouth in 1623; they sailed aboard the Anne. Also arriving on the Anne were Elizabeth Warren and her daughter, Sarah. John Cooke married Sarah Warren in Plymouth in 1636.

Sarah Warren was the oldest daughter of Richard and Elizabeth (Walker) Warren. Richard Warren, a London merchant, sailed on the Mayflower, signed the Mayflower Compact, was at the first Thanksgiving, was one of the five assistant governors from 1624-28. (Richard Warren was a "Stranger" (ie. not a Puritan) and an investor when he migrated from Holland to the New World; this suggests that he had money to invest and would have been an influential figure on the Mayflower.) Sarah Warren, her mother and her four sisters followed their father to Plymouth in 1623 on the Anne. Two brothers were born later. Richard Warren died in Plymouth in 1628, leaving his wife and seven children. His widow, Elizabeth would live to be over 90 years old. All their known children survived to adulthood, married, and also had large families. It is claimed that Warren has the largest posterity of any Pilgrim, numbering 14 million, the Mayflower passenger with the most descendants.

John and Sarah Cooke had nine children--2 sons, 7 daughters.

John was active in military affairs and volunteered for the 1637 Pequot War. He was part owner of the first vessel (40 tons) built in Plymouth; consequently, the court ordered him to build a ferry to connect the colony to Rhode Island. As he was very studious and thus, better educated than others, he held many town offices; for many years he was Deputy for Plymouth at the General Court. The settlers’ cattle and sheep were easy prey for wolves, and unless kept in an enclosure had to be guarded. In 1642, the General Court had twenty-seven wolf traps constructed and watched. Town bounties were often approved, and in 1650, the General Court voted to “pay fifteen shillings to every one who should bring in the head or skin of a wolf, and that any Indian who would kill an old wolf should receive two coats, and for a young wolf an axe or hatchet.” John Cooke agreed to furnish the needed coats.

John was appointed by the Plymouth Pilgrims to attend Quaker meetings “to endeavour to reduce them from the errors of their ways”, but instead he turned sympathizer, realized the wrongs endured by them, forgot that the Governor [was in the room] and giving full expression to his feelings was excommunicated for his opposition to the colony’s [Puritan] prescriptive laws. John believed in doing his own thing in religious matters, so in 1676, he became a Baptist, and later a preacher.  His travelling for church purposes on Sunday brought him into censure.

John was one of 32 men from Plymouth who, in 1652,  “bought land” around Dartmouth from the Indian chief, Massasoit. In exchange for the land, rather than money, the English gave the Indians things they wanted—“30 yards of cloth, 8 moose skins, 15 axes, 15 hoes, 15 pairs of breeches, 8 blankets, 2 kettles, 1 cloak, 8 pairs of shoes, 1 iron pot and 2 English pounds in Wampum (white or purple beads). John Cooke was one of the signers for the English.

While John continued to own property in Plymouth, he purchased more than 3200 acres, 40 miles away in Dartmouth. He was one of the few purchasers who actually went to live in Dartmouth. He had become a Baptist minister so because his views  differed from those of the Plymouth colony, he was forced to leave Plymouth. For many years Dartmouth did not have a church so John often preached in his own house.

Cooke was one of the most prominent men during the early years of Dartmouth, which was incorporated in 1664. In 1667 he was authorized  to perform legal duties such as solemnizing marriages, issuing warrants and administering oaths. He was appointed twelve times  as a Representative to the Court at Plymouth and he also served as a selectman nine times between 1670 and 1683, with consecutive years broken only by the destruction of the town during the King Phillip War.

                                                foundations of a Dartmouth stockade

John built a garrison house as protection against the Indians. The stockade around his house, about 20 feet square, had high strong walls of close-fitting logs standing upright in the ground; there were slits through the wall through which to shoot. John’s stockade was certainly needed in 1675 when the town was laid to waste in King PhIllip’s War. Native Chief King Phillip, Massasoit’s son, had many complaints against the white settlers, many of whom took land without paying for it, or traded land for valueless trinkets. Phillip feared the whites would sell and enslave his people as some early English sea captains had done. The Natives felt that hunting land belonged to all of them and they  did not understand the whites’ idea of private ownership. Skirmishes between Natives and white settlers and English militia escalated. That summer, 80 Native men, women and children were captured by the English; despite the objections of the Church, these prisoners were taken to Plymouth and sold into slavery in the manpower-hungry British Indies. Now Phillip was really angry and attacked Dartmouth. Many settlers were warned and they fled to safety in Cooke’s stockade; they were the only ones who escaped to tell the story. Other settlers were caught unawares. Thirty-seven homes in Dartmouth were burned, as were the barns and sheds. Crops were destroyed, cattle too, and the people who had not found safety were cruelly killed. 

One of the first houses burned was John Cooke's. As a prominent person in colonial affairs and in the new settlement and having much to do with the purchase of lands, he was likely a particular target of Indian hostility.

King Phillip was betrayed, caught and killed. Because the town of Dartmouth had suffered so great a loss of homes, animals and crops during King Phillip’s War, the citizens were exempt from paying taxes for many years. (The Court, however, hinted that the devastation was perhaps a “visitation of God to chastise their contempt of the gospel.”—proof that the Pilgrims were not sympathetic to those who did not worship God in the exact way they did.)

Cooke’s house was rebuilt after the war. (107 years later, the house was burned by the British in the American Revolution. It was not rebuilt.)

John Cooke preached and looked after his farm and properties until his death on November 23, 1695, aged 88. By then he was the last male alive who had been on the Mayflower in 1620. John’s wife, Sarah, survived him as did four of his daughters. At the time of his death, aged 88, he had 32 grandchildren and 27 great-grandchildren. There is a hillock in Fairhaven, MA; a bronze tablet, on a boulder, is inscribed with “Sacred to the Memory of John Cook who was buried here in 1695.” His burial there is controversial for it may be that he was, as per tradition, buried somewhere on his own extensive property. Sarah died in Plymouth the following year, July 15, 1696, aged 82.

 His estate inventory was taken on 07 Dec 1696, and was valued at about £300, of which £200 was his house and lands.  His livestock amounted to £20, and he had more than £25 in silver money. Other items listed in his estate were his wearing apparel, bed and bedding, cloth remnants, pewter and tin vessels, a warming pan, two Bibles and six other books, iron pots, skillets and kettles, linen, yarn, six spoons, two chains and plow irons, a gun, a sword, powder and bullets, two chests, a table, five bushels of corn, and "lumber of all sorts."

   JOHN COOKE                                                                                                                                                           b. bet Jan 1 to Mar 31, 1607 in Leiden, Holland                                                                                          m. Sarah Warren (1614-1696) on Mar 28, 1634 in Plymouth, Massachusetts                                             d. abt Nov 23, 1695 in Dartmouth, Massachusetts                                                                              12th times great uncle (Homuth/Farnum line)

 

In 1902, the headlines in The Constitution: Atlanta Georgia was “Cooke’s Body Badly Wanted”. This was a spoof advertisement by Russell Hathaway calling for the return of Cooke’s body after it supposedly went missing. John Cooke was a founder of Fairhaven, Ma.  so there was always interest in him.

Some two hundred years after Cooke left his earthly abode, the Fairhaven people thought it would be a fitting thing to erect a memorial in honor of the founder of the town, especially as he was one of the Mayflower band. Cooke’s grave was located by a local antiquarian and the people were horrified to learn that the remains of the sturdy Puritan were reposing in a hen yard. The village improvement association raised enough money to purchase the property and finally after years of effort, succeeded in getting together a sum sufficient to erect a monument thereon. A couple of weeks ago the monument was carried to the henyard-graveyard and the work of digging a trench for the foundation was begun. Either the slope had washed away or John Cooke had not been buried very deep, for a little way below the surface the pick ax struck his coffin. There was no doubt as to the identity of the man, as the name “John Cooke” was marked on a primitive coffin plate. The coffin contained a skeleton in a good state of preservation, but all traces of clothing had long since disappeared. The coffin with its enclosed bones was carried into a nearby shed owned by a fisherman. The news that John Cooke’s remains had been exhumed spread like wildfire and the next morning an expectant, curious crowd were on hand at the fisherman’s shed. The fisherman had sailed before daybreak on a two week’s fishing trip and had left the key to the shed in his wife’s keeping. When the man in charge of the work of erecting the monument appeared on the scene, the fisherman’s wife let him have the key to the shed. Turning the key in the lock, he opened the door; the crowd followed him and saw—fishing nets, lobster pots, eel spears, scallop drags, oyster rakes, but no coffin and no bones. An examination of the shed was without result. What was mortal of John Cooke seemed to have joined the immortal. High up on the rafters, just under the peak of the roof, a big bundle of canvas was stored away, but nobody thought of examining it. It was nothing but a bundle of sails, they thought. And then the search began. “What has become of John Cooke?” was the question on every tongue. Had some one, imitating Bulgarian brigands, stolen the bones, and were they holding them for ransom? How could the remains be recovered? These were but a few of the questions. Some proposed to advertise for the bones; others thought a reward should be offered. The wiser, however, suggested that before taking any active steps to get hold of what was left of John Cooke, it would be a good plan to wait until the fisherman’s vessel returned. This counsel prevailed, but until the return of the mariner the mysterious disappearance of the Pilgrim father was discussed by every person, in every place and during every hour. On the day scheduled for the fisherman’s return a good-sized crowd waited eagerly on the wharf for a possible solution of the mystery. At last the much wanted man stepped ashore only to be besieged by a volley of questions. As soon as he was permitted to answer, he said: “Wal, thought yer’d lost him, did yer? Hum! That’s a good ‘un. I wuz afeared that some o’ them durn boys would steal him, jest out of deviltry. So I wrapped him up in a piece of sail cloth an’ put him up under my shed roof; kind er laid him out across the beams. Didn’t none o’ yer look thar?’

 

In the article, Cooke’s body was dug up and somehow wound up wrapped in sail cloth and hidden in the rafters of a fisherman’s shed, who apparently had stored the body while he was out at sea. The story is loosely connected to a news article in the Fairhaven Star November 1902 about the recovery of four unidentified  people—2 adults, 2 children—in badly decayed wooden boxes fastened with copper nails; there is no mention of  a copper plate identifying anyone, nor any speculation as to their identities. But Reporter Hathaway spun it into a good story about Fairhaven’s founder. A strange story, with no truth, but it does underline the mystery of Cooke’s final resting place.