The Plymouth Lions: Peter Browne & John Goodman

The Plymouth colony was only two months old when two of its founding settlers found themselves in a bit of a predicament. It was a cold January day and the settlement was in its incipient stages. A few days earlier the walls of the common house had been completed, and lots were drawn up for families who would be building their own houses. Peter Browne, and John Goodman along with two other unidentified men were working about a mile from the settlement cutting thatch when a cold drizzle began to fall. Browne and Goodman decided to move further inland and the other two men would follow after binding the thatch. They took with them two dogs, an English mastiff and a spaniel. After the other two men completed their work they attempted to find their two fellow settlers, but could not locate them so they returned to the village. A search party was sent out, but they too were unsuccessful in locating the two men. When they still had not returned by morning it was feared by all that they had been waylaid by some of the natives. Another search party consisting of ten men or so was sent out to locate the men in the morning. In Mourt's Relation, a journal of the first months of the Plymouth colony it was written:

These two that were missed, at dinner time took their meat in their hands, and would go walk and refresh themselves. So going a little off they find a lake of water, and having a great mastiff bitch with them and a spaniel, by the water side they found a great dear; the dogs chased him and they followed so far as they lost themselves and could not find the way back. They wandered all that afternoon being wet, and at night it did freeze and snow. They were slenderly apparelled and had no weapons but each one his sickle, nor any victuals. They ranged up and down and could find none of the savages' habitations. When it drew to night they were much perplexed, for they could find neither harbor nor meat, but, in frost and snow were forced to make the earth their bed and the element their covering. And another thing did very much terrify them; they heard, as they thought, two lions roaring exceedingly for a long time together, and a third, that they thought was very near them. So not knowing what to do, they resolved to climb up into a tree as their safest refuge, though that would prove an intolerable cold lodging; so they stood at the tree's root, that when lions came they might take their opportunity of climbing up. The bitch they were fain to hold by the neck, for she would have been gone to the lion; but it pleased God so to dispose, that the wild beasts came not. So they walked up and down under the tree all night; it was an extreme cold night.

     The next morning after a cold, dreary night the two hungry and tired men set off once again in an attempt to find the settlement. They finally chanced upon a hill where they were able to locate the harbor, and from there followed the shoreline back. The rest of the colonists had almost given them up for dead. John Goodman's feet were terribly frostbitten. A few days after this encounter with the lions Goodman once again had an encounter with some wild beasts. This time he was walking along with his spaniel when the dog was chased by two large wolves. Goodman picked up a stick and threw it at one of the wolves hitting it on the head. The wolves drew back but soon returned. This time he found a fence-stave and and waved it at them. The two wolves then left Goodman and his terrified spaniel to themselves.

      It has often been suggested that the lion screams heard by Browne and Goodman on the evening of January 12, 1621 were caused by a mountain lion, or a bobcat. They also could very well have been caused by a lynx. It is interesting to speculate as to what they might have heard that night. could their imaginations have gotten the best of them? After all, they were cold, tired, hungry and scared. any noise in the night might have sounded like a big cat. A lynx has a very distinctive scream which John Burroughs, the naturalist, describes as "a cry or scream so loud that I could distinctly hear the echo in the woods about 400 yards away, a cry that tapered off into a long-drawn wail, which for despondency and agony of soul I have never heard equalled."(Rue, pg.194) The lynx is also a night hunter which the author of this post knows only so well! In the summer of 1980, whn I was 12, I rode my bike from my house in Massachusetts to Mt. Monadnock in southern New Hampshire. I was with my father and cousin, and we made camp in the woods near the the base of the mountain. Sometime during the night I noticed a glaring set of eyes staring at us from the treeline near our camp. It was a lynx on the hunt, and it must have took an interest in our food for we were forced to chase it off with sticks. Peter Browne and John Goodman could very well have encountered an ancestor of my lynx wailing into the primeval New England forest on that night long, long ago.