Scarcity changes a community. When there is enough food, shelter, medicine and labor to meet everyone’s needs, generosity can feel relatively uncomplicated. But when there is not enough—when helping another person may mean having less yourself—the question becomes harder: What do we owe one another when survival itself is uncertain?
The settlers at Plymouth confronted that question in ways most Americans today never will. During their first winter, illness swept through the settlement. Houses were unfinished. People were weakened by the Atlantic crossing and suffering from scurvy and other diseases. According to the General Society of Mayflower Descendants, roughly half of the Mayflower passengers died during that first winter. Yet William Bradford’s account of that terrible winter preserves something remarkable. At the moment when Plymouth possessed the fewest healthy people and the greatest number of desperate needs, some members of the community gave more of themselves—not less.
Their example raises a question worth considering four centuries later. Perhaps a healthy community owes its members neither unlimited provision nor the cold instruction to fend for themselves. Perhaps it owes them something more demanding: a commitment to protect the vulnerable while expecting every able member to contribute to the common survival.
When Almost Everyone Was Sick
Bradford’s description of Plymouth’s first winter is difficult to read. Within two or three months, he wrote, approximately half the company died. At times two or three people died in a single day. Of the roughly 50 who remained alive, there were periods when only six or seven were healthy enough to care for everyone else. And those few did.
According to Bradford, the healthy colonists worked “night nor day” tending the sick. They gathered wood, built fires, prepared food, made beds, washed clothing, dressed and undressed those too ill to care for themselves and performed the unpleasant necessities of nursing. Bradford specifically named Elder William Brewster and military commander Myles Standish among those who served the sick, including Bradford himself. Most importantly, Bradford said they did these things willingly. He praised their conduct as an extraordinary demonstration of love toward their friends and brethren.
Consider what that meant. The healthy were themselves survivors of the same grueling voyage. They were living through the same winter. They faced the same inadequate shelter and uncertain future. Caring for sick neighbors was not risk-free. Bradford explicitly noted that they did it at hazard to their own health. Yet they served.
That tells us something important about community. Need creates an obligation that cannot always be measured by convenience. When a person genuinely cannot provide for himself, a community reveals its character by what it does next.
Vulnerability Did Not End With Illness
Death created another problem: children were left without parents. The Mayflower Society’s passenger records document families devastated during the first winter and children—including Mary Chilton, Samuel Fuller, Priscilla Mullins and Elizabeth Tilley—who were orphaned by the deaths around them. The surviving community could not restore those children’s parents. It could, however, refuse to abandon the children.
The historical record also shows how extensively Plymouth’s surviving women carried responsibilities beyond their immediate households. The Mayflower Society notes that only five of the eighteen women who began the voyage were still alive by spring 1621. Bradford recorded women performing domestic work for other families, and the Society notes that surviving women accepted responsibility for raising orphaned children as well as preparing homes and working crops.
That makes the idea of “community” remarkably concrete. It meant someone else’s child needed a home. Someone else’s meal needed preparing. Someone else’s clothes needed washing. Someone else’s sick body needed tending. Community was not sentiment. It was work.
Scarce Resources Had to Be Distributed
Food presents the dilemma even more clearly. Plymouth did not simply enjoy abundance after surviving its first winter. Food sufficiency remained a serious concern as colonists struggled to raise crops and become effective at fishing and foraging. Pilgrim Hall Museum preserves Bradford’s account that fishing eventually provided cod, bass and other fish, “of which every family had their portion.” He also recorded an allowance of meal—or later Indian corn—distributed in proportion.
The significance is easy to overlook. Resources were being apportioned. When survival resources are scarce, a functioning community must make decisions about who receives what. That requires justice. It requires leaders to resist favoritism. It requires members to recognize that taking more than one’s share can impose a real cost upon somebody else. And it requires distinguishing between want and need—something abundance allows us to avoid doing.
But Community Responsibility Has Another Side
It would be easy to stop the story here and conclude that Plymouth teaches only communal sharing. The historical record complicates that conclusion. By 1623, Plymouth changed the way agricultural labor was organized.
According to Bradford, families were assigned parcels of land for their own present use, proportioned according to household size. Pilgrim Hall emphasizes that this was not yet a permanent division of land for inheritance; it changed the colony’s earliest arrangement in which land had been held in common.
Bradford reported that the change produced striking results. People became more industrious. More corn was planted. The arrangement reduced the burden upon the governor and produced greater satisfaction. Bradford even observed that women willingly went into the fields with their children to plant corn. That gives us the other half of the equation.
A community owes care to people who cannot carry their burden. But able members also owe something to the community. They owe effort. They owe productivity when they are capable of producing. They owe restraint when resources must be shared. They owe responsibility for the people legitimately entrusted to their care.
Compassion without responsibility eventually exhausts the people providing the compassion. Responsibility without compassion abandons people who genuinely cannot help themselves. Plymouth needed both.
The Difference Between “Cannot” and “Will Not”
This may be the hardest distinction any community must make. During the first winter, the sick did not need a lecture about working harder. They were dying. The orphaned children could not simply become more self-sufficient. Those were genuine vulnerabilities, and other members of the community stepped into the gap.
But when people were able to work, Plymouth’s survival depended upon their willingness to do so. That distinction remains relevant in families, churches, schools, neighborhoods and nations. Justice does not necessarily mean treating every circumstance identically. A bedridden person and an able-bodied worker may have different responsibilities precisely because their capacities are different. A child and an adult do not owe the community the same thing. The person temporarily overwhelmed by circumstances may need to receive today so that he can contribute tomorrow.
The question is not simply, “Did everyone receive the same amount?” A more useful question may be:
“Did each person receive what was reasonably necessary, and did each person contribute what he or she was reasonably capable of contributing?” That is a considerably more demanding definition of community.
Scarcity Also Requires Learning
There is another dimension of Plymouth’s experience worth remembering. The colonists had to learn how to survive in an unfamiliar environment. Pilgrim Hall notes that although local waters and lands offered substantial food resources, the English settlers initially lacked skill in hunting, fishing and foraging in their new surroundings. Indigenous corn became particularly important to Plymouth’s survival, and the English gradually adopted local foods and foodways.
A community facing scarcity therefore owes its members more than distribution. It should also help create capacity.
- Feed the hungry person—but whenever possible, also help create the knowledge, skills, relationships and opportunities that reduce tomorrow’s hunger.
- Care for the vulnerable—but whenever possible, help people regain the ability to care for themselves and others.
- Preserve life in the crisis—but learn from the crisis so the community is better prepared for the next one.
Plymouth survived not because its settlers discovered one perfect economic arrangement or because every decision they made was correct. They adapted. They learned.
What Do We Owe One Another?
The Pilgrims lived in circumstances profoundly different from ours, and we should be cautious about converting their experience into a simple formula for modern public policy. But history can still sharpen the questions we ask. Plymouth asks us to consider whether community requires something from both giver and receiver.
- What do the strong owe the weak?
- What do the able owe those temporarily unable to provide for themselves?
- What does a family owe an orphaned child?
- What does a leader owe people when there is not enough to satisfy everyone?
- And what does an able person owe the community that sustains him?
The first winter at Plymouth gives us one powerful answer. When almost everyone was sick, the few who remained healthy did not retreat behind the argument that everyone was responsible for himself. They carried wood. They made fires. They prepared food. They washed filthy clothes. They cared for people who could give them very little in return.
Later, as Plymouth struggled to produce sufficient food, the colony also discovered the importance of connecting household responsibility with productive labor. Those lessons belong together. A strong community does not say, “You are on your own.” Neither does it say, “Someone else will always carry you.” It says: When you cannot stand, we will help carry you.
And when you can stand, we need you beside us carrying something too.
For a Christian community, perhaps that is the more challenging vision of life together: not independence from one another, and not dependence upon one another, but interdependence shaped by love, responsibility, sacrifice and service. Plymouth’s first winter shows how costly that can become. It also shows why communities sometimes survive because ordinary people decide that another person’s life is worth some portion of their own comfort, labor and strength.
Four centuries later, that may be one of the Pilgrims’ most important lessons.
The article relies principally on four pages from well-researched sites. Pilgrim Hall Museum — Winter of 1621 contains Bradford’s extraordinary firsthand description of the six or seven healthy people caring for the rest of the colony.
Pilgrim Hall Museum — Plymouth Colony Menu documents early food availability, distribution among families, the difficulties colonists initially had exploiting local food resources, and the importance of Indigenous corn.
Pilgrim Hall Museum — William Bradford in 17th Century Documents provides Bradford’s account of the 1623 division of land and his description of its effect on agricultural effort and corn production.
Finally, General Society of Mayflower Descendants — Women of the Mayflower documents the devastating mortality among the women and describes the responsibilities assumed by the survivors, including care for orphaned children.
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