Fathers." It is in itself an interesting event: the pilgrimage of a little host of voluntary exiles, for the sake of their religion, from their native country, to establish a new country in the wilderness of the New World. It is more interesting from the fact, that their associates and descendants have grown into one of the most intelligent and powerful portions of the freest, and, perhaps, happiest nation on the globe. Their landing on the coast of Massachusets was effected under circumstances of peculiar hardship. It took place at a spot to which they gave the name of New Plymouth, on the 11th of November, 1620. The weather was extremely severe; and they were but badly prepared to contend with it. During the winter one half of their number perished through famine, and diseases brought on by their hardships. The natives, too, came down to oppose their settlement,[1] and it is difficult now to imagine how such religious people could reconcile to their consciences an entrance by force on the territories of a race on whom they had no claim. They had, indeed, purchased a tract of land of one of the chartered companies in England; but one is at a loss to conceive how any English company could sell a country in
- ↑ The natives of this coast had some years before been carried off in considerable numbers by a British kidnapper, one Captain Hunt, who sold them in the Mediterranean to the Spaniards as Moors off Barbary. The indignation of the Indians on the discovery of this base transaction and their warlike character, put a stop to this trade, which might otherwise have become as regular a department of commerce as the African slave-trade; but it naturally threw the most formidable obstacles in the way of settling colonies here, and brought all the miseries of mutual outrage and revenge on both settlers and natives.—Douglass's Summary of the First Planting of North America, vol. i. p. 364.
