If there is any more touching incident in the history of man’s
inhumanity to man, I do not know it, or cannot now recall it; and it was
to visit the scene of it near “Grimsbe,” or Great Grimsby, as it is now
called, that we set out, after viewing their prison in Boston, over wide
plains, with flights of windmills alighted on them everywhere. Here and
there one seemed to have had its wings clipped, and we were told by a
brighter young fellow than we often had for a travelling companion
that this was because steam had been put into it as a motive power more
constant than wind, even on that wind-swept coast. There seems to have
been nothing else, so far as my note-book witnesses, to take up our
thoughts in the short run to Great Grimsby, and for all I know now I
may have drowsed by many chicken-yards marking the birthplace of our
discoverers and founders. We got to Great Grimsby in time for a very
lamentable lunch in a hostelry near the station, kept, I think, for such
“poore people” as the Pilgrims were, with stomachs not easily turned by
smeary marble table-tops with a smeary maid having to take their orders,
and her ineffective napkin in her hand. The honesty as well as the
poverty of the place was attested, when, returning to recover a
forgotten umbrella, we were met at the door by this good girl, who had
left her bar to fetch it in anticipation of all question.
At Great Grimsby, it seemed, there was no vehicle but a very exceptional
kind of cab,--looking like a herdic turned wrongside fore, and unable
to orient itself aright,--available for the long drive to that “large
comone a good way distante from any towne,” which we were to make, if
we wished to visit the scene of the Pilgrims’ sufferings in their second
attempt to escape from their dread lord. In this strange equipage,
therefore, we set out, and nine long miles we drove through a country
which seemed to rise with increasing surprise at us and our turnout on
each inquiry we made for the way from chance passers. Just beyond the
suburbs of the town we entered the region of a vast, evil smell which
we verified as that of the decaying fish spread upon the fields, for
a fertilizer after they had missed their market in that great fishing
centre. Otherwise the landscape was much the ordinary English landscape
of the flatter parts, but wilder and rougher than in the south or west,
and constantly growing more so as we drove on and on. Our cabman kept
a good courage, as long as the highway showed signs of much travel,
but when it began to falter away into a country road, he must have
lost faith in our sanity, though he kept an effect of the conventional
respect for his nominal betters which English cabmen never part with
except in a dispute about fares and distances. We stayed him as well
as we could with some grapes and pears, which we found we did not
want after our lunch, and which we handed him up through his little
trap-door, but a plaintive quaver grew into his voice, and he let his
horse lag in the misgiving which it probably shared with him. Nothing
of signal interest occurred in our progress except at one point, near
a Methodist chapel, where we caught sight of a gayly painted blue van,
lettered over with many texts and mottoes, which my friend explained
as one of the vans intinerantly used by extreme Protestants of the Anne
Askew persuasion to prevent the spread of Romanism in England.
The signs of travel had not only ceased, but a little in front of us the
way was barred by a gate, and beyond this gate there was nothing but a
sort of savage pasture, with many red and brown cattle in it, gathered
questioningly about the barrier, or lifting their heads indifferently
from the grass. Just before we reached the gate we passed a peasant’s
cottage, where he was sociably getting in his winter’s coal, and he and
his wife and children, and the carter, all leaned upon whatever supports
they found next them, and stared at the extraordinary apparition of two,
I hope, personable strangers driving in a hansom of extreme type into a
cow pasture. But we were not going to give ourselves away to their too
probable ignorance by asking if that were the place where the Pilgrims
who founded New England were first stopped from going to Holland.
My friend dismounted, and opened the gate, and we drove in among the
cattle, and after they had satisfied a peaceful curiosity concerning us,
they went about their business of eating grass, and we strayed over “the
large comone,” and tried to imagine its looks nearly three hundred years
before. They could not have been very different; the place could hardly
have been much wilder, and there was the “creeke hardby wher they lay,”
the hapless women and children, in their boat “at lowwater,” while the
evening came on, no doubt, just as it was doing with us, the weather
clearing, and the sunset glassy and cold. Off yonder, away across the
solitary moor, was the course of the Humber, marked for us by the trail
of a steamer’s smoke through the fringes of trees, and for them by the
sail of the Dutchman, who, when he saw next day that “great company,
both horse and foote, with bills and gunes, and other weapons,” coming
to harry those poor people, “swore his countries oath, ‘sacremente,’
and having the wind faire, waiged his ancor, hoysed sails, and away,”
leaving those desolate women and their little ones lamenting.