Tracing my family history led me back four centuries to a pilgrim named
Edward Bangs, the man said to anchor every Bangs family line in America. Young Edward was born in 1592 in Panfield,
England. He was a shipwright by trade and apparently had some education as he had
signed his name on several documents over the years.
What exactly made Edward want to pull up stakes, get on a cramped wooden boat and sail over the Atlantic ocean to a completely foreign place is beyond me. A sense of adventure? Tired of the lack of religious freedom in England? We’ll probably never know but he tried three times to do it so we can say with some certainty that he really wanted to be here.
First, a quick and oversimplified explanation of the situation. The pilgrims, before leaving England, had an arrangement with investors who put up the capital for the soon-to-be-formed colony. The pilgrims, or “planters” as they were called, were to establish a settlement (Plymouth Colony) and build it up for seven years and at the end of that time the assets would be divided between colonists and investors.
Under the agreement, three ships brought these “planters”: the Mayflower in 1620, the Fortune in 1621 and the Anne in 1623. No other ships brought passengers under this agreement for the next seven years. It was the third ship, the Anne, that arrived in July 1623 with 32 year old Edward Bangs aboard. Legend has it that in England, shipwright Bangs had been called upon to get the ship seaworthy for her voyage across the Atlantic, and decided to join them.
Aboard the second ship was the Robert Hicks family. Hicks had been a successful fellmonger (hide and wool merchant) in England. Edward married his daughter, Lydia, in 1633 and they had a son, John, shortly after which Lydia passed away. In 1635, Edward married Rebecca Hobart, whose widowed father came to the New World just two years prior with Rebecca and her brother and sister. Edward and Rebecca went on to have nine children.
Edward served on numerous juries, and oftentimes acted as an overseer of others. His name appears over and over in the Plymouth colony records in a number of different capacities. He served on the staff of Gov. Bradford with Captain Myles Standish, Thomas Prence, Mr. Howland, John Alden, Stephen Hopkins, William Collier, Manaseh Kempton, Joshua Pratt and Stephen Tracy.
When the seven years were up, the colony was divided between the men. It was the original settlers, including Robert Hicks and Edward Bangs, that became owners of the Plymouth Colony, in common. However, there wasn’t enough land to divide. England granted them more land, and new settlements were made and new settlers came in. There was a lot of fussing about rights, who paid what, etc. Finally in 1640 an agreement was reached and the Colony was to reimburse settlers who had to pay out their own money to acquire land. Under this agreement the original settlers were to select 2-3 tracts of land that they wanted in specific areas and no one else could claim that land. What was left over belonged to the Colony and the Colony Court would decide on the disposition of it.
There was only one problem (well, two if you were Edward Bangs.) (But more on that later) First, the land was not exactly uninhabited. Indians lived there. Pilgrims were quick to concede that the Indians were the rightful owners of the land and that they could not just take it from them. It was concurred that they’d need to purchase the land in order to get rightful title. These colonists were the only ones with a legal right to purchase the land, and there might have been no problem had they done so in a prompt manner. But since they’d already established homes within Plymouth Colony, there didn’t seem to be any hurry. The wording of the agreement said that the right to purchase the land was theirs and their descendants’ “for all time.” And the ones who did promptly purchase the land weren't in a big hurry to occupy it.
As more and more settlers came to the area, the interest in this “reserved”
land was greatly increased. The chief of the Indians in this area was
Mattaquason and the new settlers began purchasing this reserve land from him. Meanwhile,
this land had been promised to the colonists in the earlier agreement; some had
put off purchasing for years because the had been granted the rights “for all
time.” Others had purchased right away
but not settled on it. At any rate, new
settlers were buying it.
Unfortunately for Edward Bangs, his land was in this reserve. And just when you think things couldn’t get any more complicated, enter William Nickerson, another settler from England. Nickerson was not a colonist but came over independently with his wife, minor children, and adult children and their families, desiring to found a new, private settlement for themselves. They left England aboard the ship John and Dorothy in 1637. He was tired of the oppression of the King of England.
Great, but the only problem was he bought a lot of reserved land from Chief Mattaquason. And some of the land he bought had already been purchased by Edward Bangs.
And so began years and years of court hearings, trials, fines, and, due to William Nickerson’s extreme belligerence and disdain for the King's law, time spent in the stockade and jail. Edward Bangs was found to be the wronged party, but his land was already settled so the Court awarded him land elsewhere and he eventually settled in Nauset, which was later renamed Eastham, Massachusetts.
I mentioned before that if you were Edward Bangs, you had two problems. And the second problem? Edward’s granddaughter, Mary Bangs, married William Nickerson’s grandson Thomas Nickerson. That would have made for some interesting family reunions.
In the end, Edward Bangs lived a good and profitable life filled with community service in Eastham, as he had in Plymouth Colony. And William Nickerson spent most of his life fighting for the land he believed was rightly his, and also a life filled with civic duty. Edward died in 1678, at the age of 86 and William died about 1690 at about age 84 and is buried on the land he fought so hard for.
**Note: This is oversimplified and severely edited because no one wants
to be here reading this into next week. Plus, all the "goings on" were complicated. All images used were generated by CoPilot and are
copyright-free.
