in Captain John Smith’s _True Relation of Such Occurences as
Have Happened in Virginia_, published in 1608, and _Generall
Historie_, published in 1624, both of which many modern readers
are inclined to take with a grain of salt; in the _Collections_
of the Virginia Historical Society (which, among many other
important things, contain the Proceedings of the Virginia
Company from 1619 to 1624); in W. W. Hening’s invaluable and
remarkable collection of the _Statutes at Large_ of Virginia,
which begins with the acts of the first assembly, in 1619, and
is brought down, with scarcely an omission, to the end of the
eighteenth century; in Sainsbury’s _Calendar of_ [English]
_State Papers, Colonial_, I. and V.; in the two volumes of
Mr. Alexander Brown’s _Genesis of the United States_, which
is a notable mine of material; in Peter Force’s _Tracts and
Other Papers Relating to the Colonies in North America_; in
the _Collections_ of the Massachusetts Historical Society;
in the notable collection of papers gathered under the
title _Archaeologia Americana_; in the _Virginia Historical
Register_; in the _Virginia Magazine of History and Biography_;
and in the _Southern Literary Messenger_.
II. NEW NETHERLAND AND NEW PLYMOUTH
Meanwhile other colonies were being successfully planted in the north.
On the great river St. Lawrence, which doughty Jacques Cartier had
explored quite seventy years before, the French had set up trading-posts
at Montreal and Quebec. They had established, besides, a struggling
settlement or two nearer the mouth of the river; and to the southward,
within the Bay of Fundy. A little colony of Englishmen had begun to make
homes for themselves in Newfoundland. Dutch traders were established
on the Hudson. A company of English dissenters were building a New
Plymouth within Cape Cod, and little groups of English adventurers were
trying to secure a foothold upon the southern shores of the wide Bay
of Massachusetts. Nowhere except in Virginia had more than a beginning
been made; but the settlement of the continent seemed at last to have
been begun in earnest; and the future looked interesting enough with the
French, the Dutch, and the English all entered as active competitors in
the race for possession.
The Dutch were likely to be harder rivals to beat than the French. Their
little, compact home states in the Netherlands were, it is true, scarcely
one-fourth as big as England, but they teemed with a thrifty people
almost as numerous as the English themselves, and their chief power was
upon the sea. With them, at home, the very land itself was one-half sea.
They had been bred fishermen and mariners time out of mind; and of late,
because the Spaniard provoked them to it, they had put great fleets on
the high seas and had made conquests at the ends of the earth.
[Illustration: VIEW OF QUEBEC ABOUT 1732]
At first they had not thought of conquest. They had simply made
themselves, with their stout craft and seasoned tars, the ocean carriers
for Europe,—because the Portuguese, who had captured rich lands and
set up a great trade all the way from the Persian Gulf to Japan, did
not trouble themselves to bring their cargoes beyond their own port of
Lisbon, and because the Spaniards brought their treasures out of South
America no farther than Seville, and some one was needed to carry what
they would sell to the merchants and princes of the rest of Europe. No
doubt the Dutch would have been content to be only traders and carriers,
had Spain but let them alone. But Spain, in her folly, undertook to force
the Dutch to be Roman Catholics; and they, being stout Protestants and
stubborn men, resisted after a fashion that in the end set the whole
power of rich Spain at naught. The war began in 1568; all Europe was
stirred by it; and when, forty-one years later, the Spaniard, quite out
of breath, agreed to a truce, the world had changed. Holland had become
a great sea-power; had driven the Portuguese from the Orient, taking
their trade and their colonies; was sinking imperial fleets upon the very
coasts of Spain herself, and sweeping Spanish treasure by the ship’s
cargo into her own coffers. She was beforehand even with England in
making herself mistress of the seas, and had turned to this new task of
taking possession of America with confidence and audacity.
[Illustration: TITLE-PAGE OF JOHN SMITH’S “DESCRIPTION OF NEW ENGLAND”]
The Dutch combined conquest with trade, as England did, and it was a
Dutch East India Company of merchants which drove the Portuguese from
their possessions in the East, as it was an English East India Company of
merchants which afterwards conquered India for England. And when their
East India Company had made itself powerful and famous by its conquests
and adventures, the Dutch formed a West India Company also, to trade and
take what it could upon the western coasts of Africa, upon both coasts of
South America, and among the southern islands of the Atlantic. It had, as
Mr. Motley has said, a roving commission to trade and fight and govern
for twenty-four years; and it incidentally undertook to establish Dutch
settlements on the Hudson and the Delaware. Henry Hudson, an English
sailor in the service of the Dutch East India Company, had, in the year
1609, discovered the great river which was to bear his name,—the very
year the baffled Spanish agreed to a truce with the redoubtable states
of the Netherlands. He had also entered the great bay and stream of
the Delaware. The Dutch had promptly named the Hudson the “Great North
River,” the Delaware the “South River,” and all the rich country which
lay about and between them “New Netherland”; meaning from the first to
keep and occupy what their seamen had found.
[Illustration: EARLIEST VIEW OF NEW AMSTERDAM]
There had been a New Netherland Company, formed in 1614, before there
was a West India Company. Its charter had given it commercial control of
all the coast country of America from forty to forty-five degrees north
latitude, a region which the Dutch described as lying “between New France
[on the north] and Virginia.” This was at the very heart of the country
which James of England had granted to the Virginia Company; but the Dutch
knew little of that, and would very likely have thought as little had
they known more. It was the profitable fur trade with the Indians of the
Great North River that had first attracted them. Individual adventurers
among them had built a small “fort” or trading post far up the river in
the heart of the wilderness, as well as a little group of huts on the
seaward point of Manhattan Island in the bay, and had been trafficking
there with the willing natives for quite four years before they formed
their New Netherland Company.
It was the New Netherland Company that grew into the greater West India
Company, whose principal business it was to be to wrest what it could
from the Portuguese and the Spanish in the south, but which was also
to keep an eye all the while on the North and South rivers, where the
New Netherland Company had put its trading posts. It was 1623 before
the great company found time amid its other business to carry out any
systematic plans of settlement in North America; but by 1625 there were
already two hundred colonists on the lands they claimed: some up the
great stream of the North River at the little post which they called Fort
Orange, some within the South River at “Fort Nassau,” some on Manhattan
Island, a few on Long Island,—even a little group of families as far away
as the “Fresh River,” which the English were to call the Connecticut.
It remained to be seen how they would fare scattered there in the
wilderness; but there they were, a very hard people to discourage, by the
time Virginia was fairly established in its own scattered settlements on
the James, and the rights of the great Virginia Company taken into the
hands of the King,—and there they meant to stay.
[Illustration: DEPARTURE OF THE PILGRIMS FROM DELFT HAVEN]
Meanwhile there had come out from Holland itself a band of exiled English
settlers, to be their neighbors and rivals at the north, and so put
them between two growing English colonies,—not “between New France and
Virginia,” as their first charter had said, but between New England and
Virginia. The new-comers were exchanging a temporary exile in Holland for
a permanent exile in America, and effected their settlement within the
sheltering arm of Cape Cod. Englishmen had begun to muster many thousands
strong in Holland within a generation, and the two countries had been
drawn very near to each other. Long before the war began which brought
Spain and the Netherlands to a grapple, hundreds of English merchants
had established themselves in the Dutch seaports; and young Englishmen
were beginning, even before dissenters were shut out from Oxford and
Cambridge, to resort in influential numbers to the Dutch universities.
When the Low Countries grappled with Spain, English volunteers crowded
into their armies. The troops Elizabeth sent over after 1585 found the
Dutch ranks already full of their countrymen. English churchmen, too,
for whom the policy of the Establishment proved too rigorous under the
imperious Tudor queens, had learned to seek in Holland the freedom of
worship denied them at home. At the same time refugees from the ravage
and slaughter of Alva’s armies poured across the sea from the lower
Netherlands into England, and the two countries seemed to be exchanging
populations. Tradesmen, weavers, mechanics, farmers, fled terror-stricken
into the eastern and southern counties of England, often braving the
sea in open boats when danger pressed most desperately. Their coveted
skill and industry, which English statesmen knew how to value, their
foreign birth and humble rank in life, which seemed to depress them
below the level of political influence, gained for them an indulgence in
theological error and separate worship which was denied to Englishmen
themselves, and presently the English towns in the east and south teemed
with thousands of Dutch artisans, who were suffered to be Anabaptists,
Lutherans,—what they would, so long as they taught England the industries
and handicrafts which were to make her rich.
[Illustration: THE MAYFLOWER IN PLYMOUTH HARBOR]
The little company of Englishmen who, in 1620, exchanged Holland for
America were not soldiers and traders like the men who had led and
established the colony at Jamestown, but members, most of them, of a
humble congregation of dissenters who had fled from the very districts
of their native land in which foreign heretics were tolerated, to escape
the tyrannical surveillance of the Church, and who had found a refuge
for a time in the great university town of Leyden. They came now to
America because they did not wish their children to become Dutch or lose
altogether their English speech and customs, and because they could look
to have an even more untrammelled freedom upon the fruitful coasts of
the New World than in the ancient states of the Netherlands, into whose
life they found themselves thrust like those who must be always aliens.
They were Protestants, and had left England because they could not brook
the domination of her Church; and yet the reason for their exile was as
much political as religious. Many men in England, some of them high in
the counsels of the Church itself, held the same doctrines that they
held,—the doctrines which Calvin had made the creed and fundamental
basis of belief among all Protestants of the sterner sort,—and yet were
not exiles, because they had not broken, as these men had, with the
discipline and authority of the Church.
England’s Protestantism had a color and character of its own. Her
“Reformation” had struck at the roots of nothing except the authority
of the Pope at Rome. Her Church had always deemed itself national, had
always held itself less subject than other churches to be ruled by papal
delegates, or turned this way or that by the vicissitudes of continental
politics and the policies of the papal state. She had broken with Rome at
last, when the Reformation came, not because she was deeply stirred in
thought and conscience by the doubts and the principles of belief which
Luther had put afloat to the upsetting of Europe, so much as because
her King, the wilful Henry, was vexed by the restraints put upon his
marriages and divorces by the papal authority, and therefore chose to
lead her still further along upon the road of independence to which her
position and her pride inclined her, in religion no less than in politics.
[Illustration: HOUSE IN PLYMOUTH, ENGLAND, WHERE THE MAYFLOWER PILGRIMS
WERE ENTERTAINED]
When the change had been made, stupendous as it looked amid the ruin of
the monastic houses which the King had promptly despoiled, Englishmen
found themselves very little more at liberty than before to choose
forms of worship or of church government for themselves. The Church
had become more than ever a part of the state. The King was its head
and master, instead of the Pope. He did not insist very much upon
matters of doctrine, being himself in no case to set an example in that
kind; but he did insist upon the authority of the Church in matters of
government,—upon uniformity in worship and in discipline; because the
discipline of the Church was now the discipline of the state, and part
of his own sovereignty. He deemed schism a form of disloyalty, though
opinion, if it kept within discreet bounds, he would not too curiously
look into. It was an easy enough rule. Things might have gone very
quietly and with a normal growth and liberalization, had not Mary, a
fanatical Catholic, become Queen, and tried forthwith to force every one
in the kingdom back into the Church of Rome; had not Elizabeth, in her
turn, proved so absolute a martinet in every matter of obedience to the
crown,—in matters which affected the Church no less than in matters which
affected only her crown and government. Mary drove those who resisted
her to the stake, or out of the kingdom. Elizabeth looked shrewdly into
every movement that threatened the uniformity of worship, as changes of
opinion inevitably did, and saw to it that all men were turned to adopt
her preference.
Most persons quietly submitted. Even men of strong convictions deemed it
better to remain within the Church and purify its beliefs and practices
without schism or revolution than to fling out of it, breaking both its
unity and the peace of the country. Such men even drew together as a
distinct party of “Puritans,”—men who wished the Church to be pure and
to hold the essential doctrines of the great reformers who had given
life and substance to protestantism, but who did not mean to lead it
faster than it could go in the new ways, or to separate themselves from
it and set up a Church and worship of their own, even though it were the
excellent forms and beliefs of the church of Geneva. Others, however,
were of a more exacting conscience, a more imperious and separate way of
belief. It meant a great deal to them to have come into direct contact
with the Word of God, to have thought upon its living sentences with
the free, unbidden, individual right of interpretation of which great
Luther had set the example. It was King Henry himself who had authorized
the publication of the Bible in English, and who had commanded that it
be made accessible everywhere in the churches; and when once they had
thought upon it for themselves and had found their thought, sober and
chastened as it was, running in unsanctioned channels, some men preferred
their own consciences and their own views of the truth to obedience,
and refused to conform. They followed the example of the Dutch, now
to be found almost everywhere among them, and set up independent
congregations,—became “Separatists,” secretly and in defiance of the
crown.
[Illustration: JOHN WINTHROP]
[Illustration]
Elizabeth, bent upon being sovereign in all things, had grown harsher and
harsher towards those who would not submit to authority in matters of
belief and worship. Law upon law had been passed to prevent Englishmen
from organizing any worship of their own which the bishops did not
sanction; and whatever was law Elizabeth saw to it should be executed.
And then, when Elizabeth was gone, James of Scotland came to the throne
and completed the discomfiture and despair of those who had clung to the
Church through all that had gone before, in the hope of better times and
more liberal ways of government. He had seemed a veritable Presbyterian
so long as he was King of Scotland; but when he became King of England
also he turned out to be of another opinion. “A Scottish presbytery,”
he exclaimed, “agreeth as well with a monarchy as God with the devil.”
He was head of the Church, he declared, not only because Henry had
cast loose from Rome, but also because it was of divine ordinance and
appointment that he should be. The bishops of the Church were his agents.
“No bishop, no King,” he said; and men found that they must obey the King
in matters of religion as never before.
[Illustration: ELDER BREWSTER’S CHAIR]
It was in the disheartening days of this new tyranny that the little
company of “Separatists” fled from England into Holland who were
afterwards to seek new shelter within Cape Cod in America. They had
waited only until there should be peace between the Netherlands and
Spain; and the truce had come at last in 1609 which gave them their
freedom to go, following after scores of their countrymen who had gone
before them. They had formed their separate association for worship in
England three years before, in defiance of the law, meeting quietly in
the old manor house at Scrooby, a little hamlet just within the borders
of Nottinghamshire, on the great north road from London to Edinburgh.
They were humble folk, for the most part, of no social consequence, with
only two or three scholars among them,—William Brewster, their elder, and
John Robinson, their “teacher,” and one or two others bred at Cambridge,
men of strong convictions and an exalted sense of independence and duty,
who had been driven from the Church for nonconformity. But, humble though
they were, they could not keep their ways of worship hid from prying
eyes. The law was rigorously enforced against them, and they soon found
that they could have no peace in England.
[Illustration]
They fled first to Amsterdam, but after about a year removed to Leyden
(1609). There they made comfortable enough homes for themselves, by
dint of careful thrift and hard labor. Their new neighbors liked them
and helped them, because they found them capable, honest, and diligent.
But it was not like being in England, after all. They felt themselves
exiles all the while. Mr. Robinson, with his learning and his sweet
eloquence, made friends and found congenial tasks at the university,
where his gifts were recognized and honored; and Mr. Brewster established
himself as a teacher, “instructing students at the university, Danes and
Germans, in the English language,” and even set up a printing-press,
where books forbidden as heretical in England could be printed. Scholars
were by breeding men of the world, and could adopt the manners and
enjoy the companionships of a new country with a certain zest and
relish. Mr. Brewster had known these strange places before. Close upon
five-and-twenty years before, when the great war and tragic grapple with
Spain was at its heat, he had come into the Netherlands with William
Davison, the hard-headed Scottish Puritan whom Elizabeth was pleased
to employ as her ambassador in that quarter. He counted statesmen and
travellers and men about the sovereign’s person among his friends, and
could be well enough at ease wherever duty or employment led him. But
the majority of the little band were humble folk and found their lot
hard. Even a bare living was difficult to eke out in a strange country,
whose manners were as unfamiliar to them as its language. They saw
their children growing up, too, as the years went by, in a way that
threatened to make them as Dutch as their neighbors, and forfeit their
nationality altogether; and that was deeply distasteful to them. When
the truce approached its end, therefore, and war was again at hand, a
final argument of discouragement was added, and they determined to try
their fortunes in the New World, where Virginia had now become fairly
established and seemed secure of its future.
[Illustration: A PILGRIM BABY’S CRADLE]
They sent agents to London to speak with the managers of the Virginia
Company, and obtain leave to settle within their grant. Mr. Brewster
could go to Sir Edwin Sandys as to a man who knew him and would befriend
him willingly. He had lived at Scrooby manor house as agent of Sir
Samuel Sandys, Sir Edwin’s brother, and Sir Edwin knew his integrity
and was of too liberal a temper to distrust him for his independency in
matters of belief and worship. The exiles could count upon favor in that
quarter, now that a statesman ruled in the counsels of the great company.
They did not wish to go to Jamestown or to lose in any way their separate
organization as a congregation by being merged with plantations already
made; and for a little, while their negotiations with the Virginia
Company dragged slowly, because Sir Edwin Sandys and its other leaders
were of necessity called off to other things, they thought of entering
into some arrangement with the Dutch West India Company to secure a
separate allotment of land near the Great North River of New Netherland.
But that plan fell through, and some of them at last set forth with a
charter from the Virginia Company,—a charter conceived in the liberal
spirit of the men who had sent Sir George Yeardley out to give Virginia a
representative assembly and the full privileges of Englishmen.
By it their leaders were authorized to associate with themselves “the
gravest and discreetest” of their companions and to make for themselves
such “orders, ordinances, and constitutions for the better ordering and
directing of their business and servants” as they should deem best,
provided only that they should ordain nothing contrary to the laws of
England. They were to be from the first their own masters in making a
way to succeed. Not all could go. There was not money, there were not
ships enough. Sir Edwin Sandys, with his generous public spirit in such
matters, loaned them three hundred pounds without interest; but they had
no resources of their own, and the rest of the money they needed they
were obliged to borrow from unwilling merchants who exacted the utmost
usury, and made many delays about letting them have the little they
consented to lend. It was the month of September, 1620, before those
who could go, a hundred and two in all, got fairly upon their way, in a
single small vessel, the _Mayflower_. Mr. Brewster went with them, as
their leader, but Mr. Robinson stayed behind; for the greater number
remained, to await a later opportunity, and wished to keep their pastor
with them.
[Illustration: TITLE-PAGE OF MORTON’S “NEW ENGLISH CANAAN”]