Part 4 (1/2)
[Ill.u.s.tration: _Photograph by A. S. Burbank, Plymouth_
_From the Painting by A. W. Bayes_
THE DEPARTURE OF THE MAYFLOWER]
When the Fortune sailed back to England, she carried a cargo of merchandise valued at five hundred pounds. This was intended for the Adventurers, but they never received it, for when nearing port, the vessel was captured by the French and the cargo seized. The s.h.i.+p was allowed to proceed, and Cushman, who returned in her, secured the papers on board, among them Bradford and Winslow's Journal, known as Mourt's Relation, and a letter from Edward Winslow to his ”loving and old friend” George Morton, who was about to come out, giving seasonable advice as to what he and his companions should bring with them--good store of clothes and bedding, and each man a musket and fowling-piece; paper and linseed oil for the making of their windows (gla.s.s being then too great a luxury for a New England home), and much store of powder and shot.
Soon arrived further parties from Leyden and stores from the Adventurers in London in the Anne and the Little James pinnace, the people including such welcome additions as Brewster's two daughters, Fear and Patience; George Morton and his household; Mrs. Samuel Fuller; Alice Carpenter, widow of Edward Southworth, afterwards the second wife of Governor Bradford; and Barbara, who married Miles Standish. Then from the Leyden pastor came letters for Bradford and Brewster. The writer was dead--had been dead a year--when those letters reached their destination, but this they only knew when Standish gave them the tidings on his return from a voyage to England. John Robinson pa.s.sed away at the age of forty-nine on March 1, 1622, in the old meeting-house at Leyden, and they buried him under the pavement of St. Peter's Church. Brewster lost his wife about the time the sad news was known, and the messenger who brought it had further to tell of the death of Robert Cushman. Truly the tale of affliction was a sore one.
By the July of 1623 a total of about two hundred and thirty-three persons had been brought out, including the children and servants, of whom one hundred and two, composed of seventy-three males and twenty-nine females, eighteen of the latter wives, were landed from the Mayflower. At the close of that year not more than one hundred and eighty-three were living. The survivors bravely persevered. Gradually the Pilgrim Colony took deep root. The New Plymouth men were a steady, plodding set, and the soil, if hard, was tenacious. They got a firm foothold. They suffered much, for their trials by no means ended with the first winter; but their cheerful trust in Providence and in their own final triumph never wavered. By 1628 their position was secure beyond all doubt or question. The way was now prepared; the tide of emigration set in; and the main body of the Puritans began to follow in the track of their courageous and devoted advance-guard.
[Ill.u.s.tration: _Copyright, 1904, by A. S. Burbank, Plymouth_
CAPTAIN MILES STANDISH]
Out there in the West these Pilgrims, or first-comers, settled themselves resolutely to the task which lay before them. They were no idle dreamers, though their idealism was intense, and they were united by the bonds of sympathy and helpfulness, one towards another. Their works were humble, their lives simple and obscure, their worldly success but small, their fears many and pressing, and their vision of the future restricted and dim. But they consistently put into practise the conceptions and ideals which dominated them and were to be the inheritance of the great Republic they unconsciously initiated and helped to build up. They established a community and a government solidly founded on love of freedom and belief in progress, on civil liberty and religious toleration, on industrial cooperation and individual honesty and industry, on even-handed justice and a real equality before the laws, on peace and goodwill supported by protective force. They were more liberal and tolerant in religion than the Puritan colonists of Ma.s.sachusetts Bay, and more merciful in their punishments; they perpetrated no atrocities against inferior peoples, and cherished the love of peace and of political justice.
Although at first the relations of the Pilgrims with their Puritan neighbours were none of the best, a better state of feeling before long prevailed. We have seen how John Winthrop and his pastor plodded over to Plymouth to attend its Sunday wors.h.i.+p. Three years earlier, in 1629, Bradford and some of his brethren went by sea to Salem to an ordination service there, and, says Morton in his ”Memorial,” ”gave them the right hand of fellows.h.i.+p.” There were other visits, letters of friends.h.i.+p, and reciprocal acts of kindness. We read of Samuel Fuller, physician and deacon, going to Salem to tend the sick, and of Governor Winthrop lending Plymouth in its need twenty-eight pounds of gunpowder.
This good feeling strengthened as time went on, and drew together the Plantations of Plymouth, Ma.s.sachusetts, and Connecticut for mutual support and protection; and in May, 1643, the deputies of these Colonies, meeting at Boston, subscribed the Articles of Confederation which created the first Federal Union in America. This league prospered well until 1684, when the Colonial charter was annulled and a Crown Colony was established under an English governor. Less than a decade later Ma.s.sachusetts became a Royal province, and that period in American history was entered upon which ended with the Declaration of Independence and the creation of the United States.
[Ill.u.s.tration: _Copyright, 1904, by A. S. Burbank, Plymouth_
GOVERNOR WILLIAM BRADFORD]
While the federation of 1643 did much for the United Colonies, it overshadowed, but could not obscure, Plymouth and the unique annals and traditions which have preserved for it a foremost place in all American history. With the order of things inaugurated in 1692 the body politic framed by the men of the Mayflower ceased to have separate existence, but it remains deep in the foundations of the nation which absorbed it.
In the modest language of William Bradford used in his day, ”As one small candle may light a thousand, so the light here kindled hath shone to many, yea, in some sort to our whole nation,” a truth which has a far wider application now than it had in Bradford's time.
Such is the story of the Mayflower Pilgrims, romantic, heroic, idyllic, based also upon the principles which have molded and maintained a mighty free nation. Its place in the life of to-day is honoured and conspicuous, and rests upon the rock of a people's grat.i.tude.
During the nineteenth century it was proclaimed by many orators, among them John Quincy Adams, Daniel Webster, Edward Everett, Robert Charles Winthrop, and George Frisbie h.o.a.r--to name only the century's dead--who as New Englanders and lovers of liberty were well fitted to voice the virtues of the Pilgrim Fathers, the hards.h.i.+ps they endured, their high merits as colonists compared with other colonists of ancient and modern times, and the immense issues springing from their devout, laborious, and self-sacrificing lives.
Pa.s.sing on to the twentieth century we have the story taken up by one American President and continued by another at the cornerstone laying and dedication of a combined tribute of State and Nation to the lives and work of the Forefathers. This was the Pilgrim Memorial Monument, erected at Provincetown on a commanding site above the harbour in whose waters the Mayflower dropped her anchor nearly three centuries ago.
The gatherings there of 1907 and 1910 stand out prominently in Pilgrim history, especially so that of August 5 of the latter year, which was grandly impressive alike in its magnitude and its purpose and character.
President Taft, the successor of President Roosevelt, arrived in his yacht Mayflower with imposing naval display amid rejoicing and the booming of guns. He was greeted by Governor of the State Eben S. Draper, Captain J. H. Sears, president of the Cape Cod Pilgrim Memorial a.s.sociation, and members of the local committee. Accompanying him were Secretary of the Navy George von L. Meyer, United States Senators Henry Cabot Lodge and George Peabody Wetmore, and Justice White of the United States Supreme Court. The scene and the ceremonies, soul-stirring and significant, are worthy of permanent record.
Escorted by a company of bluejackets, of whom two thousand, with marines from the wars.h.i.+ps, lined the street from the wharf, President Taft and the other guests were driven up the hill to the Monument, where, from the grandstand at its base, Captain Sears reviewed the plans which resulted in its erection.
[Ill.u.s.tration: _Photograph by A. S. Burbank, Plymouth_
THE PILGRIM MEMORIAL MONUMENT AT PROVINCETOWN]
President Charles W. Eliot of Harvard University gave an historical address. In graphic language he contrasted the desolate prospect confronting the Pilgrims at Cape Cod with the picture upon which the present concourse gazed, a happy and prosperous population filling the smiling land and in the harbour traversed by the Mayflower a varied throng of s.h.i.+ps, ”with them numerous representatives of a strong naval force maintained by the eighty million free people who in nine generations from the Pilgrims have explored, subdued, and occupied that mysterious wilderness so formidable to the imagination of the early European settlers on the Atlantic coast of the American continent.”
With force and pathos Dr. Eliot spoke of the debt they all owed to the Pilgrim Fathers. ”We are to hear the voices of the Chief Magistrate of this mult.i.tudinous people and of the Governor of the Commonwealth acknowledging the immeasurable indebtedness of the United States and of the Colony, Province, and State of Ma.s.sachusetts to the adult men and the eighteen adult women who were the substance or seed-bearing core of the Pilgrim company; and we, the thousands brought hither peacefully in a few summer hours by vehicles and forces unimagined in 1620 from the wide circuit of Cape Cod--which it took the armed parties from the Mayflower a full month to explore in the wintry weather they encountered--salute tenderly and reverently the Pilgrims of the Mayflower, and, recalling their fewness and their sufferings, anxieties and labours, felicitate them and ourselves on the wonderful issues in human Joy, strength, and freedom of their faith, endurance, and dauntless resolution.”