Cod toward the mainland to find a place to build their cabins and spend
the winter, for it was late in November and very cold. While waiting for
the shallop to be finished, this Pilgrim “Lookout Committee,” led by
Myles Standish, started out afoot on their great search, not knowing
what might happen to them. Captain John Smith had explored that part of
the country after he lived two years at Jamestown, Virginia; he had made
a map of all that region which he named New England. The men went ashore
from the _Mayflower_ and had walked along the Cape a mile or more when
they saw a party of Indians with a dog coming toward them. When the red
men saw the white strangers they hid in the bushes and whistled to their
dog, which followed them out of sight. Myles Standish and his men tried
to catch up with the Indians and speak with them, but they were afraid
of the strangers who wore helmets and armor over their bodies and
thighs, and carried “fire-sticks,” as the Indians called the guns.
The Pilgrims followed the natives about ten miles without seeing them
again. Then they built a hasty camp of logs and brush in which eighteen
men slept while three stood on guard outside. Nothing happened that
night to disturb them.
Next day they saw wild ducks and deer and discovered a kettle and some
fresh mounds of earth, “which,” William Bradford wrote in his diary, “we
digged up, and found a fine, great, new basket, full of very fair corn
of this year, with some six and thirty goodly ears of corn, some
yellow, and some red, and other mixed with blue. The basket was round
and narrow at the top. It held about three or four bushels, which was as
much as two of us could lift up from the ground, and was very handsomely
and cunningly made. But, whilst we were busy about all these things, we
were in suspense what to do with it, and at length, after much talk, we
concluded to take as much corn as we could carry away with us; and when
our shallop came, if we could find any of the people, we would satisfy
[pay] them for their corn. The rest we buried again; for we were so
laden with armor that we could carry no more.”
[Illustration: THE MARCH OF MYLES STANDISH.
_From the painting by G. H. Boughton_]
As they walked slowly on, noting all the strange things they met, they
found a deer trap. One of their number wrote down afterward just what
happened at this point: “As we wandered we came to a tree where a young
sapling was bowed [bent] down over a bow and some acorns strewed
underneath. Stephen Hopkins said it had been to catch some deer. So as
we were looking at it, William Bradford, being in the rear, when he came
and went about, it gave a sudden jerk up and he was caught by the leg.
It [the deer trap] was a pretty device, made with a rope of their own
making and having a noose as well made as any ropemaker in England can
make.” Even those solemn Pilgrims had to laugh to see Brother Bradford
with one foot up in the air and his head on the ground!
The men returned to the ship and reported what they had seen. When the
shallop was completed they sailed away in that, and went farther on
little voyages of discovery; but Cape Cod is a long peninsula, and they
went back and forth several times between the land and their ship, which
remained at anchor near the end of the Cape.
One time they came back from their site-hunting and found that another
Pilgrim had been born in the _Mayflower_. This baby (William White was
its father) was the first white child born in this part of America. They
named the baby Peregrinus, the Latin word for Pilgrim; so he was called
Peregrine White.
There was a mischievous small boy in the _Mayflower_--“that Billington
boy,” the Pilgrims called him--who found some gunpowder and proceeded to
make trails of it on the deck, then touched a live coal to it and made
it flash up. So young Francis Billington made the first fireworks in New
England. He also shot off a musket. There were two kinds of musket; one
called the matchlock, lighted by punk or “slow match” (there were no
friction matches for two hundred years after that); and the other kind
called the snaphance, or flintlock. While playing with fire, “that
Billington boy” flashed a line of powder which ran back to the kegs of
gunpowder and came very near blowing up the _Mayflower_ and all on
board!
Another time the home hunters had had a hard day, and, being tired and
hungry, made their camp and went to rest after placing men on guard.
Bradford wrote in his journal:
“About midnight we heard a great and hideous cry; and our sentinels
called, ‘Arm, arm!’ So we bestirred ourselves, and shot off a
couple of muskets, and the noise ceased. We concluded that it was a
company of wolves or other wild beasts, for one told us he had
heard such a noise in Newfoundland.
“About five in the morning we began to be stirring; and two or
three [men who] doubted whether their pieces would go off or no,
made trial of them, and shot them off, but thought nothing at all.
After prayer we prepared ourselves for breakfast, and for a
journey; and, it being now twilight in the morning, it was thought
meet [best] to carry the things down to the shallop.
“Anon, all of a sudden, we heard a great and strange cry, which we
knew to be the same voices, though they varied their notes. One of
the company came running in and cried, ‘They are men! Indians!
Indians!’ and withal their arrows came flying amongst us.
“Our men ran with all speed to recover their arms, as by the good
Providence of God they did. In the meantime, Captain Myles
Standish, having a snaphance ready, made a shot; and after him
another. After they two had shot, other two of us were ready, but
he wished us not to shoot till we could take aim, for we knew not
what need we should have; and there were four only of us which had
their arms there ready.
“Our care was no less for the shallop; but we hoped all the rest
would defend it. We called unto them to know how it was with them;
and they answered, ‘Well, well!’ everyone; and, ‘Be of good
courage!’ We heard three of their pieces go off; and the rest
called for a firebrand to light their [punk] matches [for their
matchlock muskets]. One took a log of the fire on his shoulder, and
went and carried it unto them. The cry of our enemies was dreadful,
especially when our men ran out to recover their arms. Their note
was after this manner, ‘Woach! woach! ha ha hach woach!’”
This “hideous and great cry” was the first Indian warwhoop the Pilgrims
ever heard. It must have curdled the blood of those quaint old Puritans
who had never heard a modern college yell! The white men’s matchlocks
and snaphances seem to have scared the Indians even more than their
warwhoop and arrows--tipped with brass, buckhorn, and eagles’
claws--frightened the white men. So the red men ran away and lived to
fight another day.
The Indians who first fought with the Pilgrims proved to be the Nausets,
an unfriendly tribe living on Cape Cod. The white men named this place,
“The First Encounter.” The Lookout Committee went on after this until
they reached the main land and soon found the site they had been
searching for so long. Bradford’s diary contains the record:
“On the Sabbath day we rested; and on Monday we sounded the harbor,
and found it a very good harbor for shipping. We marched also into
the land and found divers cornfields and little running brooks--a
place very good for situation. So we returned to our ship
[_Mayflower_] again with good news to the rest of our people, which
did much comfort their hearts.”
Though Bradford did not then think it worth mentioning, there was a big
boulder in the edge of the harbor upon which these men sprang out of the
shallop. This happened on the 21st of December, 1620, and is known as
the Landing of the Pilgrims on Plymouth Rock. December 21st is
celebrated now, more than three hundred years after that event, as
Forefathers’ Day. This place was marked Plymouth on Captain John Smith’s
map of New England, and the Pilgrims, who had sailed from Plymouth,
England, were glad to give their new-found settlement that name.
Four days after this landing, the _Mayflower_ sailed from the end of
Cape Cod and came to anchor in Plymouth harbor. The first thing the
Pilgrims did was to build a common house of logs to be used later as a
sort of town hall. Then they erected a square cabin on top of the hill
for both church and fort. On its flat roof they mounted three brass
cannon. Christmas Day came while they were building their first cabin,
but they worked all that day, for they were too strict even to celebrate
Christmas. While they were building their village of log cabins with
thatched roofs, some of them stayed in their quarters on the
_Mayflower_.
It seemed a long time before they saw Indians again. But one day while
the grave and reverend Pilgrims were holding a council in their common
house, a tall red man came stalking up to their door, saying: “Welcome,
Yankees! Welcome, Yankees!” “Yankees” was the nearest the Indian could
pronounce “Englishmen”! From this, the people of New England are still
called Yankees.
This Indian’s name was Samoset. He had learned a little English from
some fishermen farther north on the New England coast. He came again to
Plymouth bringing another red man named Squanto, who, years before, had
been carried away with other savages by an English captain and sold into
slavery. Squanto had been taken to London and learned to speak English.
He was glad to stay with the Pilgrims and talk for them to the tribes
around Plymouth, for while he was away a slave in foreign lands, his own
people had been taken with a dreadful disease called a plague, and when
he came back they had all died, and poor Squanto was left alone in the
world.
The Pilgrims elected Myles Standish, who was the only soldier in the
company, their captain. But about the first work Captain Standish had to
do was to take care of the sick, and he did so, according to the poet
Longfellow, “With a hand as gentle as woman’s.”
In the spring there were only fifty-one of the Pilgrims--just one-half
the number that had landed on Plymouth Rock. Among the first to die was
Rose Standish, the Captain’s beautiful wife. Although they were not
attacked that winter, they knew the Indians were lurking about, so the
Pilgrims did not make mounds of the graves in their poor little burial
ground on the hill for fear the savages would see how few white men were
left, and attack them while they were all so ill. At one time only two
men were well enough to nurse all the rest and bury them as fast as they
died.
In April the men were well enough to plant corn and do other work. It
was so hot that Governor Carver, the oldest of all the Pilgrims, was
prostrated by the heat and died. William Bradford was elected Governor
in his place.
When the Pilgrims had erected cabins enough to house all who were left
of them, they built a stockade, or wall of upright logs, around the
settlement. In April, 1621, the _Mayflower_ started back to England.
Much as they had suffered through the long, dreary winter, none of the
Pilgrims wished to return home on their little ship. That plucky band of
men and women had come to America to stay.
They marched to their church-fort on the hill every Sunday, led by their
governor, minister, and captain. The men carried their muskets to be
ready to defend themselves if the Indians tried to surprise them while
at their worship. The Pilgrims believed in watching and fighting as well
as praying.
After a long time, Massasoit, the great Indian chief, came with a
company of his braves to see the Pilgrims, and the white men and the red
made a treaty of peace and friendship. Afterwards the chief of a more
distant tribe sent an Indian runner to Plymouth with a bundle of arrows
tied together with a rattlesnake skin. Captain Standish promptly filled
the snake skin with powder and bullets and sent it back. This frightened
the Indians, for they thought the white “medicine man” had the power to
send a plague among them which would make them all sicken and die.
After a time the people of Plymouth were comfortable and at peace with
their Indian neighbors. Then a lad known as “that Billington boy”
disobeyed the rules by going outside the limits and was lost. The
settlers were alarmed, and Captain Standish took a small company of men
and made a search for the lad. They found him with the unfriendly
Nausets, the Indians they had fought with at “The First Encounter.”
The Indians around Plymouth laughed at the little red-headed white
captain because he was so small. He was so quick-tempered that they
named him “Little-Pot-That-Soon-Boils-Over.” Once when a tall, wiry
Indian north of Plymouth insulted him, the fiery little captain had all
he could do to control himself. Standish and three other white men had
gone up to that place for the purpose of punishing the Indians who were
threatening the whole colony with death. Watching his chance, the white
captain sprang upon the big Indian chief who had sneered at him,
snatched the savage’s own knife, and killed him with a single stab. The
other white men dispatched their Indians. The account of this brave deed
of the Captain of Plymouth was reported among the Indians far and near,
and the Pilgrims had long years of peace because the red men had gained
a wholesome respect for Myles Standish, whose name they now changed to
Sword-of-the-White-Man.
JOHN WINTHROP, A PURITAN MAKER OF MASSACHUSETTS
John Winthrop can not be called a boy’s hero; yet he was a hero, and his
life was strange and interesting. He was a son of a good Puritan family
in England. When a young man he met Oliver Cromwell, who became Lord
Protector of England. He was acquainted with John Milton, the blind
Puritan poet who wrote “Paradise Lost,” one of the greatest poems in the
English language. John Winthrop had also to transact certain business
with Cromwell’s cousin, John Hampden, the great English patriot who
opposed King Charles when he sought to impose taxation upon the people
without their consent.
[Illustration: GOVERNOR JOHN WINTHROP.]
Young Winthrop was married the first time when he was seventeen, and his
son Henry was born when the young father was eighteen. In 1629, the
father decided to go to America where he could worship God as he thought
best. He and four hundred men and women set sail from England in a
fleet of small ships, intending to join the settlement at Salem, started
a year before. One of these ships was the _Mayflower_, in which the
Pilgrims of Plymouth had sailed nine years before.
On their second morning out from England they spied eight ships coming
behind them. The captain of the _Arabella_, the ship on which Winthrop
sailed (as he wrote in the logbook or journal of the voyage),
“caused the gun-room and gun-deck to be cleared. After noon we
still saw those eight ships to stand towards us. Having more wind
than we, they came up apace. We all prepared to fight with them,
and took down some cabins which were in the way of our ordnance
[cannon] and out of every ship were thrown such bed matters as were
subject to take fire. We drew forth our men and armed them with
muskets and other weapons and instruments for fireworks. To try it
our captain shot a ball of wildfire fastened to an arrow, out of a
crossbow, which burnt in the water a good time.
“The women and children were removed into the lower deck that they
might be out of danger. All things being thus fitted, we went to
prayer upon the upper deck. It was good to see how cheerful all the
company appeared; not a woman or child showed fear.
“It was now about one of the clock, and the fleet seemed to be
within a league of us; therefore our captain, because he would show
he was not afraid of them, and that he might see what was to be
done before night should overtake us, tacked about and stood to
meet them. And when they came near, we perceived them to be our
friends.
“So every ship (as they met) saluted each other and the musketeers
discharged their small shot; and so, God be praised, our fear and
danger was turned into mirth and friendly entertainment. Our danger
being thus over, we espied two boats fishing in the Channel. So
every one of our four ships manned out a skiff, and we bought of
them great store of excellent fresh fish of divers sorts.”
The voyagers were seventy-six days--nearly eleven weeks--crossing the
Atlantic. They had passed through storms, but when, early in June, they
sighted America, Winthrop wrote in his journal:
“We had now fair sunshine weather, and so pleasant a sweet air as
did much refresh us; and there came a smell off shore like the
smell of a garden. There came a wild pigeon into our ship, and
another small land bird.”
In four days the _Arabella_ was anchored in Salem Harbor. The poor
little settlement welcomed some of the newcomers with “a good supper of
venison pasty. In the meantime most of our people went on shore upon the
land of Cape Ann, which lay very near us, and gathered store of fine
strawberries.”
“Salem, where we landed, pleased us not,” wrote one of the men on board
to a countess in England. Winthrop, who had been elected governor of the
colony they were to found, looked about for a better place to settle,
and decided on a site they called Charlestown, on the Charles River.
Although they had left England because of their obstinate and foolish
king, Charles the First, they named rivers and towns for him, and one of
their earliest churches was called King’s Chapel. When no one was
allowed to think for himself, or even to wear such clothes as he saw
fit, it would have been regarded as almost a crime to speak a word
against the king, no matter how much he deserved a bad name.
When Governor Winthrop came back from Charlestown to Salem, he wrote in
his journal: “We went to Massachusetts to find out a place for our
sitting down.” By “Massachusetts” he meant only that part of the country
along Boston Harbor, about fifteen miles south of Salem. Just after his
return, his eldest son Henry, who had come over on another ship, arrived
at Salem. That very day the young man started with several of the ship’s
officers to visit some Indian wigwams. In his journal the father
describes what happened:
“They saw, on the other side of the river, a small canoe. He would
have had one of the company swim over and fetch it, rather than
walk several miles on foot, it being very hot weather, but none of
the party could swim but himself; and so he plunged in, and, as he
was swimming over, was taken with a cramp a few rods from shore,
and drowned.”
“My son Henry! My son Henry!” wrote the bereaved governor to his wife in
England. “Ah, poor child. Yet it grieves me much more for my dear
daughter. Yet for all these things (I praise my God) I am not
discouraged.”
Henry, the son of John Winthrop’s first wife, had been married in
England. He had come without his bride to the western wilds to build a
little home before sending for her.
Heartsore but not dismayed, Governor Winthrop took his followers and
tried to make the settlement at Charlestown, now part of the great city
of Boston. But their sufferings were not over. As at Jamestown, on the
James River in Virginia about twenty-five years before this, the
settlers were ill with malaria and some of them died.
Then a strange old hermit, who had lived about twenty years alone on a
tree-topped hill on the other side of the river, came to see the new
governor, and invited him to come over the river and build his town on
the hill which had been named Three-mount, Tri-mountain, or Tremont. So
Winthrop and his people moved once more and named the new place for the
city of Boston in England. The old hermit proved to be William
Blackstone, a minister from old England. On the Three Mounts he tilled a
small farm which extended down into the now historic Boston Common. He
had brought from England his library, and spent his time reading,
farming, and raising apples. He had left England because he would not
worship according to the legal forms there. But he did not like the way
the Puritans wished him to worship, either. So he moved away from Boston
as soon as he could dispose of his house and other real estate.
Blackstone also had been kind to the Indians. His influence did much
toward keeping the red tribes friendly with the white settlers of
Boston. On the highest of the three mounts was placed a sort of
lighthouse or beacon which sailors could see far down the harbor. This
gave the name of Beacon Hill to that part of Boston. On this hill the
State House has since been erected. This building has a great dome
covered with gold-leaf which glistens in the sun and can be seen for
many miles around. “All roads lead” to the dome of the State House in
Boston, as the spokes of a wheel come together in the hub. Because of
this fact, a humorous writer gave Boston the title of “The Hub of the
Universe.”
Though the Indians gave the early settlers very little trouble, the
wolves which howled around the settlement were alarming, and sometimes
dangerous to the little children. Sometimes a bear would come ambling
into “Boston Town.” The people’s cows were pastured on the Common. This
made some people who wished to make fun of Boston claim that the narrow,
crooked streets of that city were laid out by the cows, as they wandered
down from the Common to drink at a certain spring.
Sometimes the town suffered from disease and famine. One day, when
Governor Winthrop had divided his last cupful of cornmeal with a
starving beggar, he appointed a day of fasting and prayer to God for
food. On the very day set for this fast, a ship arrived from England
with provisions, and the people had a feast instead. Another time when
the people did not have enough to eat, an Indian chief named
Chickataubot came and presented the governor with a great quantity of
corn. As with the Indians, so with the white settlers at first, it was
either feast or famine.
The people of Boston were kinder to the Indians than to the white men
who failed to agree with them in religion. They banished the Baptists
and hanged the Quakers. Besides Roger Williams, they drove out a good
woman named Anne Hutchinson, because she argued too well against some of
their beliefs. This gifted woman and her family were murdered and
scalped by Indians in the log cabin in which they lived after they were
banished from Boston.
Governor Winthrop finally sent for his wife and his other children. One
of his sons became governor of Connecticut. John Winthrop was twelve
times elected governor of Massachusetts. More than once he was chosen
deputy governor. He was good to the poor and unfortunate. In this he was
far in advance of his time. It was said that he kept his private purse
open for the public. Once, when he found that a man was stealing wood
from his pile, he laughed and said he would stop that. He did so by
inviting the man to come in the daytime and help himself to all the wood
he needed. But the man never came again.
Cotton Mather, one of the greatest of Boston preachers, said of Governor
Winthrop that he was--
“The terror of the wicked, and delight of the sober, the envy of the
many, but the hope of those who had any hopeful design in hand for the
common good of the nation.”
ROGER WILLIAMS, A MINISTER WHO LIVED THE GOLDEN RULE
When the Pilgrim Fathers left Europe in the clumsy little ship, the
_Mayflower_, they came to America to have freedom to think and act as
they believed right in matters of religion. Many men in England who
wished to have their own religious beliefs were called Puritans because
they wished to purify the Church of England from things which they
thought were wrong. King James of England had announced that they must
all worship in the ways of the Church of England or he would “harry them
out of the land.”
Puritans and other people who would not conform to the service of the
Church of England were called Nonconformists. The group of
Nonconformists who went away from their own country in 1620, to come as
strangers to America, were called the Pilgrims. They came to America in
the _Mayflower_, and landed on a big boulder in the edge of the harbor
at a place they named Plymouth. Companies of Puritans sailed from
England a few years later and landed on the shores of Massachusetts Bay,
some at Salem, and some at a place they named Boston, for another town
in England. John Winthrop was the leader of this last company, and was
made governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony.
The Puritans soon found that there were some of their number who did not
believe just as they did. It seems strange now that those who had come
from England just to find a place where they could worship God in the
way they saw fit could not let others do the same. They came to do what
their consciences told them was right, but they would not let others
think that any other way was right.