On the first ships to the NewWorld, three of its 102 passeng…
On the first ships to the NewWorld, three of its 102 passengers were pregnant. The fates of the three pregnant women and their children illustrate the fears that early American women facing childbirth must have held for themselves as well as for their children’s survival. One of the passengers, Elizabeth Hopkins, gave birth at sea to a baby boy she named Oceanus. Oceanus Hopkins died during the Pilgrims’ first winter in Plymouth. Two weeks after Oceanus’s birth, Mayflower passenger Susanna White bore her son, Peregrine, who lived into his eighties. The spring after the Mayflower arrived in Plymouth, passenger Mary Norris Allerton died giving birth to a stillborn baby. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a large percentage of all births resulted in the death of the mother from exhaustion, infection, dehydration (too much water lost from the body), or hemorrhage (heavy bleeding). Since the typical mother gave birth to between five and eight children in her lifetime, her chances of dying in childbirth ran as high as one in eight. Even when the mother survived childbirth, she had reason to be anxious about the fate of her child. In even the healthiest seventeenth-century communities, one in ten children died before the age of 5. Less healthy settlements saw three out of ten children dying in their early years. The author’s attitude toward the facts is
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