two of the party managed to drag their blood-caked bodies through the sand to the Spanish garrison. At St. Augustine the Commandant and the other residents divided their scanty supplies with the fugitives, and nursed them until they were fit to be sent on their way to the Carolinas. The aged Quaker, Robert Barrow, survived all these experiences just long enough to greet the Friends who were awaiting him at Philadelphia. There he died three days later, on 4 April, 1697,
having passed through great Exercises, in much Patience; and in all the times of our greatest Troubles, was ready to Counsel us to Patience, and to wait what the Lord our God would bring to pass: And he would often express, That it was his Belief, that our Lives should be spared, and not be lost in that Wilderness, and amongst those People, who would have made a Prey of us.
The same fundamental religious impulse which sustained Robert Barrow on the storm-swept Florida beaches had settled the New England Puritan colonies. This same overwhelming impulse drove into these colonies, half a century after their permanent establishment, a succession of groups of wanderers whose peregrinations left a broad and often blood-stained trail the length of the continent and seaward to the islands. The men and women who made up these groups, called in derision Quakers, wrote as freely as they discoursed, and the spirit that animated them brooked no interference with either speech or progress. The names of several, Mary Dyer, Marmaduke Stevenson, and George Fox, whom Roger Williams “digg'd out of his Burrowes,” to wit Edward Burroughs, are better known, but none of them wrote more forcefully than Alice Curwen. In the year 1660, “hearing of the great Tribulation that the Servants of the Lord did suffer in Boston, of cruel Whippings, of Bonds and Imprisonments, yea, to the laying down of their natural Lives,” Mistress Curwen felt the call to go and profess in that bloody town. “Having this Testimony sealed in my Heart,” she writes, “I laboured with my Husband day and night to know his Mind, but he did not yet see it to be required of him,” he having but just returned from the Lancashire gaol in which he had been confined for refusing to pay the tythe. The call reached him in season to enable him to embark on the vessel on which his wife had taken
