That which Captain Standish calls a fort is very much like our homes,
or the Common House, except that it is larger, and has small, square
openings high up on the walls to serve both as windows and places
through which our people can shoot at an enemy, if any come against us.
Surely there are none in this new world who should wish us harm, and
yet my father says that we have need to guard ourselves carefully,
because Squanto and Samoset have both insisted that a tribe of savages
who call themselves Narragansetts, and who live quite a long distance
away, may seek to drive us from the land.
This fort, the logs of which are sunken so deeply into the earth that
they cannot easily be overthrown, has been built on the highest land
within the settlement, and extending from it in such a manner as to
make it a corner of the enclosure, is a fence of logs, which Captain
Standish calls a palisade, built to form a square. The fence is made
like the sides of our houses; but the logs rise higher above the
surface than the head of the tallest man.
There are two gates in the palisade, one on the side nearest the fort,
with the other directly opposite, and these can be fastened with heavy
logs on the inside. All the people have been told that at the first
signal of danger, they must flee without loss of time inside the fence
of logs, after which the gates will be barred, and no person may go on
the outside without permission from Captain Standish.
The six cannon, which I told you had been mounted on a platform when
we first began to build the houses, have been taken to the top of the
fort, and from there, so Captain Standish says, we can hold in check
a regular army of Indians; but God forbid that anything of the kind
should be necessary after we have come to this new world desiring
peace, and with honest intentions toward all men.
[Illustration]
Because it is not reasonable to suppose that any human being could wish
to work us harm, Sarah and I look upon that which is called a fort,
rather as a meeting-house than a place of defence, and such it really
looks to be, for the floor is covered with seats made of puncheon
planks placed on short lengths of logs, while at one end is a desk for
the preacher built in much the same fashion as are the seats.
Here, also, so Governor Bradford has promised, we children shall have a
school as soon as a teacher can be persuaded to come over from England.
As it is now, our parents teach us at home, and father believes I can
even now write as well as if I had been all this while at school in
Scrooby. With both a meeting-house and a school, it will seem as if we
had indeed built a town in this vast wilderness.