to Smith. He seems to have been in frequent conflict with them, and
finally he returned to England to defend himself against their charges
and to have treatment for a painful wound. After his departure, took
place the terrible “Starving Time.” The colonists refused to work,
they were attacked by the Indians, and laid waste by disease. By
famine, fever, and war, the colonists in a few months were reduced in
numbers from five hundred to sixty. They embarked to leave the scene of
misery, but met a ship containing food and supplies and turned back.
Thus near failure came the colony which laid the foundation of English
civilization, and religious and civil liberty in America. After a time
the common-store system was abolished and each man was given land to
cultivate for himself; then “three men did more than thirty before.” In
1612 John Rolfe began the cultivation of tobacco and this became the
currency of the colony, the source of its wealth and prosperity.
Captain Smith never revisited the Jamestown colony. In 1614 he came as
“Admiral of New England” to explore North Virginia, as the northern
part of America was called, and made a map of the country which he
called New England. The next year Smith set out with the intention
of planting a colony in New England. But he was taken prisoner by
the French, and finally made his way back to England. There he spent
quietly the sixteen years remaining to him. He wrote in 1616 a
“Description of New England;” in 1624 he contributed a description of
Virginia to a “General History of Virginia,” which was compiled at the
request of the London Company. At the time of his death, in 1631, he
was busy writing a “History of the Sea.”
Pocahontas
An Indian Princess
The white men who came to America naturally felt much interest in the
new race of people which they called Indians. These were divided into
tribes, differing in dialects, habits, and customs, but resembling one
another in many respects. They lived, for the most part, in tents,
called wigwams, made of skins or bushes. Their garments were usually
made of the skins of buffaloes, deer, and other animals; they wore,
also, beautiful mantels of feathers, strings of pearl, and ornaments
of copper, silver, and gold. Their food was the game and fish obtained
by the skill of the men, and the maize and beans raised in the fields
tilled by the women and children. Their tools and weapons were made of
sharp stones and of sticks hardened in the fire; the use of iron was
unknown.
Powhatan was the chief of the strong and warlike tribes of Indians
which the English colonists found dwelling on the banks of the River
James. Powhatan had many children, one of whom, a daughter, called
Pocahontas, was about twelve years old when the English settled in
Jamestown. Captain Smith says that when he was a prisoner in one of
her father’s wigwams she visited and made friends with him. When he
was sentenced to death, he tells us that she interceded for him and
that his life was spared at her request. According to Indian custom,
the enemy whose life was thus granted became a son of the tribe; and
Captain Smith lived for awhile with Powhatan’s tribe. In the course of
time he was allowed to return to his countrymen at Jamestown.
There were few farmers among the English settlers and they had to learn
to adapt their methods to the crops and climate of the new land. Their
crops were scanty at first and they often suffered for food. In times
of need, the Indian maiden, Pocahontas, more than once came to their
relief, bringing food. She went, too, at night to warn the people of an
intended Indian attack. No wonder the English called her “the dear and
blessed Pocahontas.”
Powhatan seems to have been from the first suspicious of the white
men; as time passed he came more and more to dislike and fear them. He
had allowed them to settle on his land, thinking that they wanted it,
Indian-fashion, for a season of hunting and fishing. But year after
year passed and the white men remained in possession. Many died and
some returned to England, but for every one that died or went away ten
came. Powhatan would have liked to drive them away, but the Indians,
with bows and war clubs, were no match for the white men, with guns and
swords. Powhatan resolved to get guns and swords and make them fight
against the white men. In one way and another, he got possession of
many weapons,--some were bought with corn, some were stolen, some were
taken from prisoners.
The matter became so serious that Captain Argall devised a plan to
get back the weapons and also some prisoners taken by Powhatan. At
this time, 1614, Pocahontas was visiting some friends who lived near
the Potomac River. Captain Argall persuaded an Indian named Japazaws,
and his wife, to entice Pocahontas on board his vessel. The Indian
woman pretended that she wished to go on board to see the ship and her
husband told her she could not go alone. To gratify her, Pocahontas
agreed to accompany her. Captain Argall “secretly well rewarded
Japazaws with a small copper kettle” and some other articles, which we
are told he valued so highly that “doubtless he would have betrayed
his own father for them.”
Pocahontas was carried to Jamestown, and messages were sent to her
father that “Powhatan’s delight and darling” would be held prisoner
until the English men and weapons were surrendered. “This news was
unwelcome and troublesome unto him partly for the love he bore to his
daughter and partly for the love he bore to our men, his prisoners ...
and those swords and firearms of ours,” says an old historian. After
three months delay, Powhatan sent seven men and some guns and offered
these and a store of corn for his daughter’s release; the English,
however, refused to release Pocahontas till all that they required was
done.
Month after month passed. It was now eight years since Pocahontas, the
child, had first seen English faces. She was a woman grown--gentle,
generous, and noble of nature. John Rolfe, “a gentleman of approved
behavior and honest carriage,” loved the Indian maiden and his love
was returned. Pocahontas was baptized and given the Christian name of
Rebecca. Then she and Rolfe were married in the church at Jamestown,
April 5, 1614. “Ever since then,” says the historian Hamor, “we have
had friendly commerce and trade, not only with Powhatan, but also with
all his subjects round about us.”
About two years after Pocahontas and Rolfe were married they went to
England, carrying with them their little son. John Smith wrote a letter
to the queen telling how Pocahontas had saved his life and the colony
and bespeaking for her the queen’s favor. She was received at court
like a princess. “She did not only accustom herself to civility,” says
a writer of the time, “but carried herself as the daughter of a king.”
The Indian princess never returned to her native land. On the eve of
her departure, she was taken ill and died in England, leaving one
little son.
Miles Standish
A Pilgrim Leader
Early in the seventeenth century, James I. was king of England. He was
a very self-willed man and was unwilling for his subjects to differ
from him in religious or political matters. Naturally, all men were not
willing to accept his opinions. Some were so unwilling to be dictated
to by the king that they preferred to leave their homes in England and
go where they could worship according to their own preferences. Some
of these men, called Separatists because they had separated themselves
from the established church of England, went in 1607 to Holland.
There they had full liberty in religious matters, but after a time they
became dissatisfied.
The Dutch people were not strict enough in the observance of Sunday
to please them, and their children were learning Dutch language and
customs and would grow up to be Dutch men and women instead of English.
These Separatists loved their native land and wanted their children to
grow up English, but with their own religious views. Moreover, fighting
between Spain and Holland was beginning again after ten years of peace
and the Englishmen did not wish to become involved in this war.
So they resolved to go to the New World and establish a settlement
there. They discussed many places before they decided where to go.
They thought of Guiana which Raleigh had described as being fertile
of soil and mild of climate, but they remembered his fights with the
Spaniards and wished to avoid so troublesome a neighbor. There was the
same objection to Florida, where a French colony had been destroyed
by the Spaniards. They did not care to go to the English settlement
at Jamestown, where the people were devoted to the Established Church
of England and observed its forms even more strictly than people in
England. They did not wish to go to the far north, for some Englishmen
had already tried to settle in Maine and had come home with pitiful
tales of their suffering during the severe winters. The Pilgrims, as
these English religionists began to be called, from traveling about
so much, at last decided to settle between Jamestown and Maine, about
the coast of what is now New Jersey. They obtained a charter from the
“North Virginia Company,” the Plymouth branch of the Virginia Company,
which controlled from 41 to 45 degrees, giving them permission to
settle in the southern part of North Virginia.
One hundred and two Pilgrims sailed in the Mayflower from Plymouth,
England, in September, 1620. One of the men on board the Mayflower
was Miles Standish, who was to be the soldier-savior of the northern
English colony as John Smith was of the southern one.
Miles Standish was born about 1584 in England; he is said to have been
the heir of a noble English family who was deprived of his rights. He
entered the army and was sent by Queen Elizabeth to help the Dutch in
their war against Spain. He was probably about nineteen or twenty then,
and he seems to have remained in Holland after peace was made, and
there he met the Pilgrims. His portraits represent him as a small man
clad in leathern jacket and high boots, wearing a cartridge belt across
his shoulder. He did not adopt the Pilgrims’ faith or ever become a
member of their church, but he was a brave and faithful comrade.
The voyage was a long and stormy one. During it one member of the
party died and was consigned to an ocean grave. Two months after
leaving England, land was sighted, November 20, 1620. This land was
a point marked Cape James on Captain Smith’s map; the name Cape Cod
was given it later on account of the quantity of codfish caught there
by Gosnold’s men in the expedition of 1602. Cape Cod was farther
north than the Pilgrims had intended to go, and they sailed southward
but were turned back by “dangerous shoals and roaring breakers” and
unfavorable winds.
The men met in the cabin of the Mayflower to discuss the situation. The
shore they were approaching was not the land granted by their charter
and therefore its laws did not apply there. They decided to establish
their colony on the coast and they signed an agreement to obey such
laws as they should make for their guidance. John Carver was chosen
governor.
The Pilgrims made several trips ashore to get wood and water and
to explore the country. Captain Standish led his party of sixteen
soldiers, in warlike array, armed with muskets and swords; they had no
need to use their weapons, as the only Indians they saw fled at their
approach. The chief event of the expedition was finding some corn in a
mound; they carried it to the ship and later, when they were informed
to whom it belonged, they paid the owners for it.
Other expeditions were made along the coast and up the streams in a
shallop, or small boat. Often the spray froze on their clothes and
“made them many times like coats of iron.”
While the Pilgrims tarried on the coast a child was born, son of
William White and they called him Peregrine from a Latin word meaning
“pilgrim.”
After exploring the country for several weeks, the Pilgrims determined
to settle at a place called on Captain Smith’s map Plymouth, which
was the name of the city from which they had sailed. On December 21,
1620, the men landed on the great boulder known as Plymouth Rock.
Their first work was to build a “Common House”; January 31, 1621,
this was completed and the women and children landed. The Pilgrims
were not molested by Indians, but cold and famine were enemies that
almost destroyed them. During the winter most of the colonists were ill
and more than half of the hundred died; of eighteen women, only four
survived the winter. One of those who died was Captain Standish’s wife.
At one time only seven men--one of whom was Captain Standish--were able
to work. These seven, says Bradford their historian, tended the sick,
cooked, washed, and did all the work indoors and outdoors. Rude houses
were built of logs, with thatched roofs and windows of oiled paper. A
church was erected which had cannon on top of it, so that at need it
might serve as a fort.
To keep the Indians from suspecting their weakness, the Pilgrims
leveled the graves and in the spring planted corn over them. On the
whole, the Indians were friendly. One day an Indian approached the
settlement and “saluted us in English and bade us ‘welcome.’” This
was Samoset, “a tall straight man, the hair of his head black, long
behind and short before and no beard. He was naked except for a strip
of leather about his waist, which had a fringe a span long or more. He
had a bow and two arrows, the one bended the other not.” Samoset had
learned broken English from fishermen who came to the coast of Maine.
With him came later Squanto, the only survivor of the tribe which had
lived near Plymouth and which had been destroyed by plague. Squanto
showed the English how to plant corn and to enrich the soil with fish.
Another of the visitors was Massasoit, an Indian chief, who made a
“treaty of friendship” which was kept fifty years.
In April the Mayflower returned to England, but despite the hardships
and sufferings of that terrible winter, not one of the Pilgrims went
back. They were busy making cabins, cultivating gardens and fields,
getting fish and game for food, building up a home in the wilderness.
They traded with the Indians for beaver skins, collected sassafras,
and sent furs and lumber back to England, laboring to repay the money
borrowed to defray their expenses. At first and for several years the
Pilgrims, like the Jamestown settlers, labored together; they prospered
more after the land was divided and each man worked for himself.
They had a prosperous season and good crops and in the fall they
celebrated their harvest and the end of their first year in the new
land by a feast,--the first Thanksgiving. Fish and wild fowl and game
were cooked in the big fireplaces or on wood fires out of doors.
Massasoit came with about ninety men, bringing five deer as his
contribution to the feast. There was a military drill and a shooting
match, and three days were spent in merry-making. Year after year the
Pilgrims observed this festival, and it came at last to be a national
holiday.
The Narragansett Indians were unfriendly and the Pilgrims had to be
on their guard against them. At one time Canonicus, their chief, sent
the settlers a rattlesnake skin filled with arrows as a declaration of
war; it was sent back filled with powder and balls, in token that the
white men were ready to defend themselves. A strong fence, or palisade,
was built around the settlement. In many ways the Pilgrims lived like
soldiers on duty. Sunday morning at beat of drum, people marched to
church. Each man had his weapon near in case of Indian attack.
More than once Indians tried to kill Miles Standish, the brave and
prudent little captain. One gigantic Indian, Pecksuot, ridiculed him
because he was small; in a fight soon after Pecksuot was killed. “I see
you are big enough to lay him on the ground,” said one of the Indians.
About 1623 Captain Standish married a second time, his wife being an
English woman, the sister of his first wife. In “The Courtship of Miles
Standish” Longfellow tells a romance--for so far as we know it had
no foundation in fact--about the fiery little Captain’s unsuccessful
wooing by proxy of a maiden named Priscilla Mullins. The poem gives a
vivid picture of Captain Standish and of life in the New England colony.
In 1625 Captain Standish made a voyage to England on business for
the colony, but he returned in a few months. He subdued the English
settlers at Merrymount who were selling arms to the Indians, and were
living idle, drunken lives.
In eight years the Plymouth colony had grown so that Elder Brewster,
John Alden, and Miles Standish went one summer to Duxbury on the north
side of the bay; Standish made his home there on a high hill called
Captain’s Hill. His sword and musket were now laid aside and he was
busy plowing and tending his farm, settling sites for mills, practicing
his skill in medicine, and serving the public welfare in peaceful ways.
The brave, honorable, helpful man died October 3, 1656, and was buried
at his home on Captain’s Hill. For forty years he had been the leading
spirit in every undertaking requiring courage and military skill.
“For Standish no work was too difficult or dangerous, none too humble
or disagreeable. As captain and magistrate, as engineer and explorer,
as interpreter and merchant, as a tender nurse in pestilence, a
physician at all times, and as the Cincinnatus of his colony, he
showed a wonderful versatility of talent and the highest nobility of
character.”
John Winthrop
A Puritan Governor
After the death of King James, his son Charles became king. Like his
father, he was bent on having his own way; as often happens, his
stubbornness made those opposed to him more stubborn. The people
refused to submit to his dictation, and many of those who differed from
the king in matters of religion and politics came to America, where
a new England was being built up. From 1628 to 1640 there were more
emigrants from England to America than came during the whole of the
century which followed.
In 1628 a company of men secured from the Council of New England
a patent to a tract of land in Massachusetts between the Merrimac
and Charles Rivers and extending from the Atlantic to the Pacific
Ocean which was thought to be near the Hudson River. John Endicott
was sent out that year with a small colony which settled at Salem,
Massachusetts. He was a self-willed, blunt man and tried to regulate
the affairs of the colony according to his ideas. He made laws
against wearing wigs, for instance, and required women to wear veils to
church.
[Illustration: GOVERNOR JOHN WINTHROP]
The first winter was a hard one for the colonists and they were “forced
to lengthen out their own food with acorns.” Like the Pilgrims,
however, the Puritans, whose religious belief was similar to that
of the Pilgrims, held fast their resolution and endured hardship
rather than return to old England where they were not free to worship
according to their own faith.
In March, 1629, a company of prominent and wealthy Puritans secured a
charter from the king, giving them the right to make for their colony
such laws as they pleased provided they were not contrary to the laws
of England. Under this charter six ships came, bringing men, women,
children, cattle, arms, and tools, to establish a Puritan commonwealth.
One of the six ships was the Mayflower which had brought over the
Pilgrims nine years before. The six-weeks voyage seemed “short and
speedy” in those days, and the Puritans landed on a June day when
the land was fair with summer. How unlike the wintry landing of the
Pilgrims! In one year the Salem colony outnumbered the Plymouth colony
which had been established nearly ten years.
The Puritans had obtained a charter from the king, but the question
was would they be able to keep it? The king was as ready to break as
to make a promise, and the Puritan leaders feared that he would call
for and withdraw the much-prized charter. How could they keep it safe?
At last they devised a plan. It was not stipulated where the Company
should meet, so they resolved to move its headquarters and carry the
charter to the New World. The Puritans took good care not to let the
king know of this plan. The members who did not wish to leave England
resigned, and in their places were elected men who were willing to
emigrate to secure civil and religious privileges.
The king was much displeased when he learned that the Massachusetts
Company and its charter had gone across the ocean, but just then
nothing was done about the matter. Later on, an unsuccessful attempt
was made to get the charter from the people.
The governor elected by the Massachusetts company was John Winthrop,
one of the noblest men who aided in the making of New England. Winthrop
was a gentleman by birth, gracious, gentle, and charitable in private
life, intense--and sometimes intolerant--in his religious views. When
he joined the “great emigration” of 1630, he was forty-one years
of age, having been born the very year that the Spanish Armada was
destroyed. With eight hundred men and the precious charter, Winthrop
sailed to the New World. A few days were spent at Salem, and then it
was decided to make a settlement at Charlestown. But the site proved
unfortunate. There was much sickness the first summer, caused, it was
thought, by impure drinking water.
Not far from the little settlement was what was called Shawmut
peninsula; here lived a Mr. Blackstone who had come from England to
lead a hermit’s life. He pitied the sufferings of his neighbors and
countrymen, and invited them to come to Shawmut where the air and water
were excellent. They came and found the situation so favorable that
they bought land from Mr. Blackstone; in September they laid there the
foundations of a city which they called Boston for the English city
of Boston from which many of them came. Shawmut peninsula was called
Trimountain Peninsula from its three hills.
Like the settlers at Plymouth, the Salem colonists were often in want
of food during the first years. Until they could cultivate farms and
raise crops, food had to be brought from England, for there was no
farmers and no tradespeople in the New World from whom it could be
obtained. The loss or delay of a ship bearing supplies meant want
and suffering for the colonists. On one occasion, expected supplies
failed to come to the Puritans and a fast day was appointed to pray for
relief. As Governor Winthrop was dividing his last handful of meal with
a needy neighbor, a ship laden with food entered the harbor. The devout
people went to church to give thanks and changed the appointed fast to
a feast.
Not all the people who had come to Massachusetts were willing to endure
the hardships of the new life. About a hundred went back to England,
but Governor Winthrop, with the more unselfish and zealous Puritans,
remained.
Governor Winthrop endeavored to set the people an example of a sober
and upright life. He became convinced that the drinking of healths
at meals according to the English custom led to intemperance. He
restrained it at his own table and thus became the leader of temperance
reform in the New World.
One winter day he was informed that a poor man who lived near him was
taking fuel from his woodpile. “Go call that man to me,” he said, “I’ll
warrant I’ll cure him of stealing.” When the man came he said, “Friend,
it is a severe winter and I doubt you are but meanly provided with
wood; wherefore I would have you supply yourself at my woodpile till
this cold season be over.” He then asked his friends whether he had not
cured this man of stealing his wood.
Winthrop’s charity, however, did not extend to matters of religion.
He wished to have those of unlike religious views “well whipt.” The
Puritans had come to America to establish a colony which should be
ruled according to their own views and faith. They did not tolerate in
it men who differed from them in belief. “Let such go elsewhere,” they
thought; “there is room enough.”
The Puritan leaders of the Massachusetts Company encouraged colonists
of their own faith to emigrate. By 1634 four thousand had come and
about twenty villages had been founded on or near the bay. Houses,
churches, and shops were built; farms were tilled; fur, lumber, and
salt fish were sent to England and manufactured goods were brought back.