Page 8 THE VILLADOM TIMES II • November 24, 2010 Ridgewood David Emerson brings Mayflower voyager to library by John Koster Area residents who visited Ridgewood Library’s Belcher Auditorium recently heard about the voyage of the Mayflower from “Stephen Hopkins,” one of the Englishmen who came ashore in 1620. Hopkins was portrayed by actor and reenactor David Emerson. Emerson has been doing impersonations of Hopkins at the recreated Plimoth Plantation and elsewhere since 1989. He now works with the American Historical Theater, supported by the New Jersey Council for the Humanities. Hopkins was an actual person, head of the largest family on the Mayflower. He was a widower married to a widow, but not a Pilgrim; Hopkins was a member of the King’s Church (The Church of England or the Episcopal Church) rather than the Congregation of Saints. “You end up shoveling up some worms,” Hopkins said, demonstrating how to eat weevily biscuit and boiled salt cod in the dark hold of the Mayflower with a wooden trencher and a horn spoon. “Some folks found that disagreeable. We used to crawl over the deck and throw it up into the bilge, where the sailors would pump it out later. That’s why the sailors called us ‘gibblegabble puke-stockings.’ My wife said that once the biscuit fell from her trencher and the biscuit started to crawl across the deck and it was twice its weight with all the vermin. “They style us ‘strangers,’ which is kind of curious since there are more of us than there are of them,” Hopkins noted, reflecting his sectarian loyalty. The hymns of the separate sects had similar melodies, he said, but different words. Hopkins added that the first English settlers never used the term ‘Pilgrim,’ which they associated with Catholic religious practices, didn’t call the traditional Harvest Home holiday ‘Thanksgiving,’ and celebrated the harvest in October. The presentation includes so much research about Hopkins’s life and times that the voyager easily comes alive for the audience, despite some disruptions of the stereotype of the first New England settlers. Hopkins dressed not in stark black and white, but in a green wool suit with dark green stockings, a green flat cap, and laced brown shoes of soft rough leather with hard soles. His talk was offered in authentic 17th century rustic English that sounds something like Australian with a German accent. (As the critic Christopher Morley observed, if people met William Shakespeare in 20th century New York, they would have mistaken the Bard of Avon for an Australian.) Hopkins said “ain’t” a lot, referred to his children as “childer,” pronounced “I” as “oy,” and S as Z. The Mayflower, he said, was “at zee for zix and zixty days.” Mayflower era artifacts include (foreground) a cloth ‘pudding’ worn as a toddler’s head protector, a ‘poppet’ (doll) used to teach sewing, and a bat and ball used for ‘stool ball,’ a game like cricket; middle, a leather tankard coated with pitch, and a wooden trencher and pewter spoon; back, salt meat and ‘turkey corn.’ Hopkins called the original inhabitants “naturals” – the New Englanders understood they weren’t in India -- and said that while some “naturals” fled or shot arrows on seeing whites, Samoset and Tisquantum had probably saved their lives by teaching them how to plant “turkey corn” (colorful Indian corn) and to hunt turkeys when the fishing wasn’t good. Another key to New England’s success was that the Indians threw away their winter beaver coats when they showed wear, but the settlers bought them for a song because the remaining hairs of the beaver pelts were perfect for English “felters” to turn into beaver hats, the standard of elegance in London. Racial prejudice against the Indians was nil. Hopkins remarked that people were shocked when John Rolfe married Pocahontas, but not for racial reasons: “Can you believe it, a commoner married to a princess? I can tell you, it caused a scandal!” Some of Hopkins’ comments were droll: “They should have called the Speedwell the Leakwell,” he said, but explained that the smaller Speedwell had to crowd on more sail to keep up with the larger Mayflower, previous a sort of wine tanker – “a sweetsmelling ship, at least at first” – and that the pressure on the mast opened up some of the Speedwell’s seams and let in so much water that the ship had to turn back and let the Mayflower sail on alone. “I thought he was great,” said Hank O’Connor, a Ridgewood resident. “I learned a lot of things I didn’t know.” “He was good,” said Leonard Eisen, another Ridgewood resident. “He knew his stuff, and I bet he knew a lot more than he had time to tell us.” David Emerson as Stephen Hopkins. GEWOOD RID YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD NEWSPAPER ���������������������������� KEANE FIT & WELLNESS ��������� Sheila Keane Shop & Dine in Ridgewood for the holidays! 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