John Howland
When John Carver boarded Mayflower he had five servants with him, one of whom was John Howland. Howland was the only one of Carver’s servants who survived the voyage and the first winter to go ashore in the colony. After just over a month ashore John Carver died and his wife followed him in death five weeks later. Howland thus became a freeman, responsible for a ward for whom Carver had been providing, Elizabeth Tilley. Her parent’s had succumbed during the first winter in the New World. Despite being assigned the status of servant at the time, John Howland was a signer of the Mayflower Compact.
Howland received the Carver estate and began to establish himself in the fur trade. He was one of a group of men who built a fur trading post on the Kennebec River in what is now Maine. Howland was in charge of the Plymouth Colony’s northern post when a dispute with encroaching fur traders from the Massachusetts Bay Colony led to the death of Moses Talbot, one of the men employed by Howland. Howland’s men shot and killed Talbot’s murderer in retaliation. The Massachusetts Bay Colony men were supposed to be on the Piscataqua River, and it was this incident which led to the arrest of John Alden.
Howland was one of the colonists who was asked to join the group which wanted to take over the colony’s debt by purchasing it from the Merchant Adventurers, giving the colony more autonomy. The colonists paid a total of $4,200 to clear the investor’s land claims and other debts and received in return a monopoly on the fur trade, which in the early days of the colony was its most lucrative product. Howland served as a member of the committee which regulated the fur trade among the colony’s own trappers and hunters and the trade with the Indians, who found blankets imported from England to be preferable to some furs.
Howland married Elizabeth Tilley sometime after 1623. They had ten children together, all of whom lived to adulthood, and Howland eventually had a staggering 88 grandchildren. Among his direct descendants as a result of this issue can be found the actors Humphrey Bogart and Christopher Lloyd, and the Baldwin brothers. Ralph Waldo Emerson was also a direct descendant of Howland’s, as was another poet, Florence Earle Coates.
The Howlands lived in Plymouth for a time, then in Duxbury, and finally on a farm in Kingston which was known as Rocky Nook. Late in his life John Howland would spend his winters in the home of his son Jabez. This house still stands in Plymouth, the only remaining structure in which one of the passengers from Mayflower lived. John Howland died at the age of 80 in 1672. Elizabeth Tilley Howland lived another 15 years. She is buried in what is now East Providence, Rhode Island. The whereabouts of John Howland’s grave is uncertain.