♂John Howland

John Howland (died February 1672/73) was a Mayflower passenger from Fenstanton in Huntingdonshire who crossed in 1620 as a servant in the household of John Carver^W, and rose to be an Assistant and a long-serving Deputy of Plymouth Colony. During the crossing he was washed overboard in a storm and survived by catching hold of a rope trailing from the ship. He was the ninth great-grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through his daughter Desire Howland (1625–1683).

Early life

Elizabeth Pearson White’s volume on him in the Mayflower Families series states that he was reared at Fenstanton, a town nine miles northwest of Cambridge, the son of Henry Howland, a yeoman who died there on 17 May 1635, and his wife Margaret, who was buried there on 31 July 1629. No baptism has been found for him. White bases the identification on the probate records of his brother Humphrey Howland, a London draper, whose will of 1646 names his brothers Arthur, John and Henry and a sister Margaret, the wife of a Fenstanton shoemaker. Two of those brothers, Henry and Arthur, later followed John to Plymouth Colony, so that three separate Howland families were settled there within twenty years. When he died he was said to be above eighty, and a compiled genealogy places his birth before 1593. Caleb Johnson and R. C. Anderson prefer about 1598, from his place as a younger son of Henry Howland of Fenstanton, his servant’s status in 1620 and his marriage about 1623.

The Mayflower

He left home before 1620 and went to London, where he was taken into the household of John Carver, soon to be the first governor of the colony, as a servant. At Cape Cod on 11 November 1620 he signed the Mayflower Compact. Governor William Bradford^W called him “a lusty younge man”, and records what happened to him on the voyage. In a storm, with the sails taken in, he came up on deck and was thrown into the sea, but “it pleased God that he caught hould of ye halliards which hunge over board, and rane out at length; yet he was held up … and then with a boat hooke and other means got into ye ship again.”

The Carvers came through the first winter, but in April 1621 the governor came in from his field ill and “never spake more”, and his wife died soon after. They had no children, and John Howland is thought to have taken over what was left of their household. In the division of land of 1623 he was given four acres as head of a household. White reports two accounts of the shares. One researcher counts one share for John Howland himself and three for Elizabeth Tilley^W and her parents, John and Joan Tilley, who had died in the first winter. Franklyn Howland’s family history instead has the household at four people: John Howland with Desire Minter, a girl who had crossed with the Carvers; a boy, William Latham; and Elizabeth Tilley. White goes on to reckon four shares on that second count.

Marriage and family

He married Elizabeth Tilley at Plymouth, on or about 25 March 1623 in White’s account, the first day of the year in the reckoning then used. She had been baptized at Henlow in Bedfordshire on 30 August 1607, and so was not yet sixteen. White, citing Bradford’s record of the division of the colony’s cattle on 1 June 1627, has the couple listed with two children, Desire and John. They had ten in all, born between about 1625 and 1649: six daughters and four sons. White writes that they named their eldest, Desire, after Desire Minter, who had gone back to England and died there.

Kennebec and colony office

In 1626 Bradford, Isaac Allerton^W and Myles Standish took him in as one of the “undertakers” who were granted the colony’s trade in return for taking on its debt to the London merchants who had backed the voyage. He was put in charge of the colony’s trading post on the Kennebec River, in what is now Maine, where furs were bought from the Native people, and White suggests that some of his children may have been born there. In 1634 a rival trader, John Hocking^W, anchored above the post to cut off its trade and refused to leave. Howland sent three men in a canoe to cut his cables; when Hocking levelled a gun at one of them, Moses Talbot, Howland, in the words of the colony’s report, called to him “desiring him not to shut his man but take himselfe for his mark”. Hocking shot Talbot dead and was himself killed by a shot from the Plymouth boat. The killing led to John Alden’s arrest in Boston, and the court there later found Hocking at fault.

He was chosen an Assistant, one of the governor’s council, on 3 March 1634/35. Over the next thirty-five years he represented Plymouth or Duxbury at the General Court many times, and was a Deputy in 1652, 1659 and every year from 1661 to 1668, and again in 1670. He also served as an assessor, a surveyor of highways and a selectman. On 2 February 1638/39 he paid John Jenny £82 for a house and land at Rocky Nook, then part of Plymouth and now in Kingston, and he lived there for the rest of his life. In 1639 he took up land at Yarmouth on Cape Cod, where his daughters Desire and Hope settled, and he later gave his son John a farm at Barnstable.

Death

He died at Rocky Nook, on 23 February 1672/73 according to White and later compilers, and was buried at Plymouth on 25 February 1672/73. Nathaniel Morton, the colony’s secretary, wrote that he “lived untill hee attained above eighty yeares in the world hee was one of the first Comers into this land and proved a usefull Instrument of Good in his place & was the last man that was left of those that Came over in the shipp Called the May Flower that lived in Plymouth hee was with honor Intered att the Towne of Plymouth on the 25 February 1672”. The minister John Cotton called him “a good old disciple & had bin sometime a magistrate here, a plaine-hearted christian”. A compilation of Mayflower families places his grave on Burial Hill^W.

His will, dated 29 May 1672 and proved on 5 March 1672/73, divided his lands among his sons John, Jabez, Isaac and Joseph, the last to have the Rocky Nook house after his mother’s death, and left twenty shillings to each of his married daughters, “Desire Gorham, Hope Chipman, Elizabeth Dickinson, Lydia Browne, Hannah Bosworth and Ruth Cushman”, and the rest of his estate to his “Deare and loveing wife Elizabeth howland”. His personal estate was valued at £157 8s 8d; among it were “one great Bible and Annotations on the five books of Moses” and the works of Tyndale and Wilson. Elizabeth outlived him by nearly fifteen years and died at Swansea, at the home of their daughter Lydia, on 21 December 1687.

Notes

The date of his marriage is not settled. White gives on or about 25 March 1623 without stating her grounds; Susan E. Roser’s Mayflower Increasings (1995), citing the Mayflower Descendant, puts it about 1624–25.

Morton’s words make him the last man of the Mayflower company living at Plymouth. He was not the last passenger: Mary Allerton^W, who had crossed as a small girl, lived at Plymouth until 1699.