Chapter I: Part 1

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THE ROMANTIC STORY
_of the_
MAYFLOWER PILGRIMS

ALBERT CHRISTOPHER ADDISON]

Well worthy to be magnified are they
Who, with sad hearts, of friends and country took
A last farewell, their loved abodes forsook,
And hallowed ground in which their fathers lay.

Wordsworth]

The breaking waves dash'd high
On a stern and rock-bound coast;
And the woods, against a stormy sky,
Their giant branches toss'd.

Mrs. Hemans]

THE ROMANTIC STORY _of
the_ MAYFLOWER PILGRIMS

AND ITS PLACE IN THE
LIFE OF TO-DAY

_High ideals in the conduct of life are what survive, and that is why the Pilgrim Narrative stands forth in the pages of every history as one of the great events of the time._--SENATOR LODGE, _at the dedication of the Pilgrim Memorial Monument at Provincetown, August 5th 1910_.

_Photograph by A. S. Burbank, Plymouth_
_From the Painting by W. F. Halsall_

THE MAYFLOWER IN PLYMOUTH HARBOUR]

THE

ROMANTIC STORY

OF THE MAYFLOWER

PILGRIMS

AND ITS PLACE IN THE

LIFE OF TO-DAY

BY
A. C. ADDISON

AUTHOR OF "OLD BOSTON: ITS PURITAN SONS
AND PILGRIM SHRINES," ETC.

WITH NUMEROUS ORIGINAL ILLUSTRATIONS

BOSTON
L. C. PAGE & COMPANY
MDCCCCXI

COPYRIGHT, 1911, BY
L. C. PAGE & COMPANY
(INCORPORATED)

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

FIRST IMPRESSION, SEPTEMBER, 1911

THE.PLIMPTON.PRESS.NORWOOD.MASS.U.S.A

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I. OLD WORLD HOMES AND PILGRIM SHRINES 1

II. THE ARREST AT BOSTON AND FLIGHT TO
HOLLAND 27

III. LIFE IN LEYDEN--ADIEU TO PLYMOUTH--THE
VOYAGE TO THE WEST 47

IV. "INTO A WORLD UNKNOWN"--TRIALS AND
TRIUMPH 71

V. THE PILGRIM ROLL CALL--FATE AND FORTUNES
OF THE FATHERS 123

VI. NEW WORLD PILGRIMS TO OLD WORLD
SHRINES 159

INDEX 189

THE PUBLISHERS WISH TO ACKNOWLEDGE THE COURTESY OF MR. A. S. BURBANK, OF PLYMOUTH, MASS., IN AUTHORIZING THEIR USE OF HIS PHOTOGRAPHS, REPRODUCTIONS OF WHICH FORM A CONSIDERABLE PORTION OF THE ILLUSTRATIONS OF THIS BOOK

ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE

The Mayflower in Plymouth Harbour _Frontispiece_

The Cells, Guildhall, Boston xi

A Bit of Old Gainsborough 5

The Old Manor House, Scrooby, where William Brewster was
born.--Scrooby Church 9

The Cottage at Austerfield where William Bradford was born 13

The Old Hall, Gainsborough, in which the Separatist Church
was founded in 1602 17

Guildhall and South Street, Boston 21

The Old Courtroom, Guildhall, Boston 25

The River Witham, Boston 29

The Pilgrim Cells, Guildhall, Boston, showing the Kitchen
beyond 33

Old Town Gaol, Market-place, Boston 37

Trentside, Gainsborough 41

Elder William Brewster 45

John Robinson's House, Leyden, where the Pilgrim Fathers
worshipped 49

St. Peter's Church, Leyden 53

Bust of Captain John Smith 57

The Embarkation of the Pilgrims 61

Model of the Mayflower 65

Plymouth Harbour, as seen from Cole's Hill 69

The Landing of the Pilgrims 73

The March of Miles Standish 77

The Canopy over Plymouth Rock 81

The Old Fort and First Meeting-House 85

Pilgrims going to Church 89

The Departure of the Mayflower 93

Captain Miles Standish 97

Governor William Bradford 101

The Pilgrim Memorial Monument at Provincetown 105

Plymouth Rock 109

A Bit of Old Boston 113

The Site of the Old Fort, Burial Hill, Plymouth 117

First Church, Plymouth 121

The Pilgrim Fathers' Memorial, Plymouth 125

John Alden.--Priscilla Mullins 129

Governor Bradford's Monument, Burial Hill, Plymouth 133

Governor Carver's Chair and Ancient Spinning Wheel 137

Elder Brewster's Chair and the Cradle of Peregrine White 141

The Grave of John Howland 145

The Grave of Miles Standish, Duxbury 149

The Miles Standish Monument, Duxbury 153

Governor Edward Winslow 157

Mayflower Tablet on the Barbican, Plymouth, England 161

Scrooby Village 165

The Ancient Kitchen, Guildhall, Boston 169

Robinson Memorial Church, Gainsborough 173

Tablet in Vestibule of Robinson Memorial Church,
Gainsborough.--Memorial Tablet on St. Peter's Church,
Leyden 177

Design by R. M. Lucas for the Tercentenary Memorial at
Southampton 181

The Font, Austerfield Church.--The Font, Primitive Methodist
Chapel, Lound 185

PREFACE

By a strange yet happy coincidence, on the very day the writer of these lines sat silent in a Pilgrim cell at Boston--the Lincolnshire town where the Pilgrims were imprisoned in their first attempt to flee their native country--pondering on the past and inscribing his humble lines to the New World pioneers, the President of the American Republic was at Provincetown, Massachusetts, dedicating a giant monument to the planters of New Plymouth, the last of the many memorials erected to them. The date was the fifth of August, 1910. President Taft in his address at the commemoration ceremonies declared very truly that the purpose which prompted the Pilgrims' progress and the spirit which animated them furnish the United States to-day with the highest ideals of moral life and political citizenship. Three years before, another American President, Mr. Roosevelt, at the cornerstone laying of this monument, enlarged on the character of their achievement, and in ringing words proclaimed its immensity and world-wide significance.

Down through the years the leaders of men have borne burning witness to the wonderful work of the Pilgrim Fathers. Its influence is deep-rooted in the world's history to-day, and in the life and the past of our race it stands its own enduring monument.

The object of the present narrative is to give to the reader an account of the Mayflower Pilgrims that is concise and yet sufficiently comprehensive to embrace all essentials respecting the personality and pilgrimage of the Forefathers, whom the poet Whittier pictures to us in vivid verse as:

those brave men who brought
To the ice and iron of our winter time
A will as firm, a creed as stern, and wrought
With one mailed hand and with the other fought.

In the pages which follow, the Old World homes and haunts of the Pilgrim Fathers are depicted and described. The story has the advantage of having been written on the scene of their early trials, concerted plans of escape, and stormy emigration, by one who, from long association, is familiar with the history and traditions of Boston and the quaint old sister port of Gainsborough, and perhaps imparts to the work some feeling of the life and local atmosphere of those places in the days that are dealt with, and before. The Pilgrims are followed into Holland and on their momentous journey across seas to the West. The story aims at being trustworthy and up-to-date as regards the later known facts of Pilgrim history and the developments which reflect it in our own time. It does what no other book on the subject has attempted: it traces the individual lives and varying fortunes of the Pilgrims after their settlement in the New World; and it states the steps taken in recent years to perpetuate the memory of the heroic band. The tale that is told is one of abiding interest to the Anglo-Saxon race; and its attractiveness in these pages is enhanced by the series of illustrations which accompanies the printed record. Grateful acknowledgment is made of much kindly assistance rendered during the preparation of the work, especially by the Honourable William S. Kyle, Treasurer of the First (Pilgrim) Church at Plymouth, Massachusetts.

_Men they were who could not bend;
Blest Pilgrims, surely, as they took for guide
A will by sovereign Conscience sanctified._

* * * * *

_From Rite and Ordinance abused they fled
To Wilds where both were utterly unknown._

--WORDSWORTH, "_Ecclesiastical Sonnets,"
Part III. Aspects of Christianity in
America, I. The Pilgrim Fathers._

_In romance of circumstance and the charm of personal heroism the story of the Pilgrim Fathers is pre-eminent._

--J. A. DOYLE'S "_English in America_."

_The coming hither of the Pilgrim three centuries ago ... shaped the destinies of this Continent, and therefore profoundly affected the destiny of the whole world._

--PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT, _at the laying
of the corner-stone of the Pilgrim
Memorial Monument at Provincetown,
Massachusetts, August 20th, 1907_.

FROM A PILGRIM CELL

THE PILGRIMS' CELLS,
GUILDHALL, BOSTON, LINCOLNSHIRE.

This is written in a Pilgrim cell, one of those dark and narrow dungeons which the Pilgrim Fathers tenanted three hundred and four years ago, in the autumn of 1607, and behind the heavy iron bars of which men have for generations delighted to be locked in memory of their lives and deeds. The present-day gaoler, less terrible than his predecessor of Puritan times, has ushered me in and closed the rusty gate upon me, and left me alone, a willing prisoner for a space. I look around, but do not start and shrink in mortal dread as must once the hapless captives here immured.

'Tis a gloomy place as a rule; but just now some outer basement doors, flung open, admit the autumn sunlight, which floods the hall floor and penetrates to the cell where I am seated. To get here I have stooped and sidled through an opening a foot and a half wide and five feet deep, set in a whitewashed wall fourteen inches thick. I stand with arms outstretched, and find that the opposite walls may be pressed with the finger-tips of each hand. The cell extends back seven feet, and the height is the same between the bare stone floor and the roughly boarded roof. All is dingy, cobwebbed, musty, and silent as the grave. Like the neighbouring tenement it is cold, mean, melancholy, fit only to be shunned. Yet its associations are dear indeed. For this is holy ground, a hallowed spot, a Mecca of modern pilgrims. It has a history held sacred in two hemispheres, that of religious persecution, of loyal resolution, of physical fetters and spiritual freedom.

Such is the story inscribed upon these walls, a record which may be read in all their time-worn stones, on every inch of their rusted bolts and bars. For they are the cells of the Pilgrim Fathers. Here was the first rude break in their weary worldly progress, a journey which was to continue with affliction into Holland, thence back to Plymouth, and, after a last adieu there to English soil, on in the little Mayflower to New Plymouth and a New England.

Alone in a Pilgrim cell! What thoughts the situation kindles; how eagerly the imagination shapes and clothes them; what scenes this mouldy atmosphere unfolds. The very solitude is eloquent with pious reminiscence; the void is filled again, peopled with those spectres of an imperishable past; their prayers and praise fall on the listening ear, a soft appeal for grace and strength, the lulling notes of a rough psalmody; then answering dreams and visions of the night.

THE AUTHOR.

1911.

I

OLD WORLD HOMES AND PILGRIM SHRINES

THE ROMANTIC STORY _of the_ MAYFLOWER PILGRIMS

I

OLD WORLD HOMES AND PILGRIM SHRINES

_View each well-known scene:
Think what is now and what hath been._--SCOTT.

Lincolnshire stands pre-eminent among the English shires for inspiriting records of trials borne and conflicts waged for conscience' sake. The whole country, from the lazy Trent to the booming eastern sea, teems moreover with religious interest. To read what happened between the births of two famous Lincolnshire men--Archbishop Langton in the twelfth century; and Methodist John Wesley in the seventeenth--is like reading the history of English nonconformity. The age of miracles was long since past; yet Stephen Langton, Primate of England and Cardinal of Rome, was a champion of the national liberties. He aided, nay instigated, the wresting of Magna Charta from King John. That was not the result of his education; 'twas the Lincolnshire blood in his veins. For the outrage on the Romish traditions the Archbishop was suspended by the Pope. Probably he would have been hanged if they could have got at him.

But we can go back farther even than Langton's time. Not many miles from Gainsborough is the Danish settlement of Torksey, rich in ecclesiastical lore. Here Paulinus baptised the Lindissians on the sandy shore of the Trent, in the presence of Edwin, King of Northumbria. Hereabout, they say, King Alfred the Great was married to the daughter of Etheldred, and the old wives of Gainsborough used to recite tales of Wickliffe hiding on the spot where once stood the dwelling-place of Sweyn and of Canute.

A BIT OF OLD GAINESBOROUGH]

Lincolnshire has always had the courage to bear religious stress, and strange things are read of it. It was near Louth that the insurrection known as "The Pilgrimage of Grace" began. Eighty-five years before the sailing of the Mayflower, and thirty years before William Brewster was born, the ecclesiastical commissioners for the suppression of monasteries (which were plentiful in Lincolnshire) went down to hold a visitation at Louth. But the excursion was not to their pleasure. As one of them rode into the town he heard the alarm bell pealing from the tower, and then he saw people swarming into the streets carrying bills and staves, "the stir and noise arising hideous." He fled into the church for sanctuary, but they hauled him out, and with a sword at his breast bade him swear to be true to the Commonwealth. He swore. That was the Examiner. When the Registrar came on the scene he was with scant ceremony dragged to the market cross, where his commission was read in derision and then torn up, and he barely escaped with his life. For the same cause there were risings at Caistor and Horncastle--two of the demurest of modern towns. The Bishop's Chancellor was murdered in the streets of Horncastle and the body stripped and the garments torn to rags; and at Lincoln the episcopal palace was plundered and partially demolished.

But Lincolnshire need rest no fame upon such merits as these. Greater honour belongs to the county, for it was Lincolnshire that made the most important of all contributions to the building of America when it sent forth the Pilgrim Fathers, and afterwards the Puritan leaders, who met for conference in the eventful days of the movement in Boston town, in Sempringham manor house, or in Tattershall Castle, to lay the foundations of the Massachusetts settlements. And, as Doyle in his "English in America," truly says, "In romance of circumstance and the charm of personal heroism the story of the Pilgrim Fathers is pre-eminent. They were the pioneers who made it easy for the rest of the host to follow." Their colony was the germ of the New England States.

Amid the quiet pastures threaded by the Ryton stream, where the counties of York and Lincoln and Nottingham meet, are two small villages, the homes of the only Pilgrim Fathers satisfactorily traced to English birthplaces. A simple, pathetic interest clings to these secluded spots. At Scrooby is the manor house wherein William Brewster, the great heart of the pilgrimage and foremost planter of New Plymouth, was born. Archbishops of York had found a home here for centuries; Wolsey, at the close of his strangely checkered career, lodged there and planted a mulberry tree in the garden; Bishop Bonner dated a letter thence to Thomas Cromwell. And when William Brewster became Elder Brewster, pensive Puritans often gathered there to worship, "and with great love he entertained them when they came, making provision for them to his great charge." His condition was prosperous and he could well afford to do it. A Cambridge man, Brewster early took his degree at Peterhouse; he next saw service at Court, and accompanied Secretary Davison to the Netherlands; afterwards succeeding his father and grandfather as post on the great North Road at Scrooby, a responsible and well-paid office, which he filled for nearly twenty years.

The parish church, "not big, but very well builded," as Leland said; the quaint old vicarage; the parish pound, and all that remains of the parish stocks: these stand witness to the antiquity of Scrooby. A little railway station and rushing Northern expresses are almost the only signs of twentieth century activity.

THE OLD MANOR HOUSE, SCROOBY, WHERE WILLIAM BREWSTER WAS BORN]

SCROOBY CHURCH]

The Scrooby community was an off-shoot from that at Gainsborough, the first Separatist church formed in the North of England, of which the pastor was John Smyth, a graduate of Cambridge, an "eminent man in his time" and "well beloved of most men." Smyth preached at Gainsborough from 1602 to 1606, when he was driven into exile. The members of his church gathered from miles around to its services, crossing into Gainsborough by the ferry-boat on the Trent. This continued for two or three years, until at length "these people became two distinct bodies or churches, and in regard of distance did congregate severally; for they were of sundry towns and villages."

Richard Clyfton, once rector of Babworth near Retford--"a grave and reverend preacher"--was the first pastor at Scrooby; and with him as teacher was "that famous and worthy man Mr. John Robinson," another seceder from the English Church, who afterwards was pastor for many years "till the Lord took him away by death."

Next to Brewster, William Bradford was the most prominent of the lay preachers among the Scrooby fraternity. He became Governor Bradford of the Plymouth Colony--"the first American citizen of the English race who bore rule by the free choice of his brethren"--and the historian of the Plymouth Plantation. Bradford, a yeoman's son with comfortable home surroundings, lived at Austerfield, an ancient agricultural village about three miles from Scrooby on the Yorkshire side. The pretty cottage of his birth is still shown by the roadside near the Norman church, and the parish register bears the record of his baptism, on March 19, 1589. A youth of seventeen years, he walked across the fields to join the Scrooby brethren in their meetings. He and Brewster, the two men who were to impress their individuality so powerfully upon the religious life of the American people, became firm friends, and, says their later historian,[1] that friendship, "formed amid the tranquil surroundings of the North Midlands of their native land, was to be deepened by common labours and aspirations, and by common hardships and sufferings endured side by side both in the Old World and the New."

THE COTTAGE AT AUSTERFIELD WHERE WILLIAM BRADFORD WAS BORN]

But it was Robinson to whom they jointly owed much guidance. When, in Bradford's own words, "They could not long continue in any peaceable condition, but were hunted and persecuted on every side;" when "some were taken and clapt up in prison, and others had their houses beset and watched night and day, and hardly escaped their hands;" and when "the most were fain to fly and leave their homes and habitations and the means of their livelihood," it was John Robinson, the devout and learned pastor, who led them out of Nottinghamshire into Holland, and there inspired within them the vision of complete earthly freedom in the new country across the Atlantic.

Robinson was a Lincolnshire man. Gainsborough claims him, and on Gainsborough his first solid memorial has been raised. Many are familiar with Gainsborough who have never seen the town. Up the Trent sailed Sweyn, the sanguinary Dane, to conquest; and his son Canute--he that ordered back the rising tide, and got a wetting for his pains--was at Gainsborough when he succeeded him as King of England.

Gainsborough is the St. Ogg's of "The Mill on the Floss," and the Trent is the Floss, along which Tom and Maggie Tulliver "wandered with a sense of travel, to see the rushing spring-tide, the awful AEgir, come up like a hungry monster"--the inrush of the first wave of the tide, a phenomenon peculiar at that time to both the Trent and the Witham.

What George Eliot wrote of St. Ogg's describes old Gainsborough to-day--"A town which carries the trace of its long growth and history like a millennial tree, and has sprung up and developed in the same spot between the river and the low hill from the time when the Roman legion turned their backs on it from the camp on the hillside, and the long-haired sea-kings came up the river and looked with fierce eyes at the fatness of the land."

And in sketching the history of St. Ogg's the novelist remembered that time of ecclesiastical ferment now written about, when "Many honest citizens lost all their possessions for conscience' sake, and went forth beggared from their native town. Doubtless there are many houses standing now," she said, "on which those honest citizens turned their backs in sorrow, quaint gabled houses looking on the river, jammed between newer warehouses, and penetrated by surprising passages, which turn at sharp angles till they lead you out on a muddy strand over-flowed continually by the rushing tide." Did not Maggie Tulliver, in white muslin and simple, noble beauty, attend an "idiotic beggar" in the still existing Old Hall, where the Fathers worshipped and John Smyth taught--"a very quaint place, with broad, jaded stripes painted on the walls, and here and there a show of heraldic animals of a bristly, long-snouted character, the cherished emblems of a noble family once the seigniors of this now civic hall"?

In this Old Hall the Separatist church was founded in 1602, and here it had the friendly protection of the Hickman family, Protestants whose religious sympathies had brought them persecution and exile in the past.

THE OLD HALL, GAINSBOROUGH, IN WHICH THE SEPARATIST CHURCH WAS FOUNDED IN 1602]

But the "foreign-looking town" which George Eliot endowed with romance had, like the neighbouring estuary town of Boston, which her language might have served almost as well to paint, been the abode of hard, historic fact. We can imagine the Scrooby brethren crossing the ancient ferry to bid their friends at Gainsborough farewell. For in 1607 we read, this "groupe of earnest professors of religion and bold assertors of the principle of freedom and personal conviction in respect to the Christian faith and practice" had formed the resolution to seek in another country the liberty they found not at home.[2] But it was as unlawful to flee from their native land as to remain in it without conforming, for the statute of 13 Richard II, still in force, made emigrating without authority a penal crime.

Not Gainsborough alone in the North and East appeals to the never-ending stream of reverent New World pilgrims to Old World shrines. On an autumn day of the year above named came Elder Brewster to the famed new borough of Boston. There he cautiously looked about him, and made a bargain with the captain of a Dutch vessel to receive his party on board "as privately as might be." But they were betrayed, arrested, stripped of their belongings and driven into the town, a spectacle for the gaping crowd, then haled before the justices at the Guildhall and "put into ward," there to await the pleasure of the Privy Council concerning them.

Boston is a unique old shrine--a place "familiar with forgotten years," as George Eliot says; a town, as already hinted, resembling Gainsborough in many outward features, but even wealthier in associations dear to the hearts of New World pilgrims. Boston and Gainsborough are regarded as the two most foreign-looking towns in England. Many of Boston's inhabitants still hold the brave spirit which enabled their ancestors to endure the religious stress of the seventeenth century. It has been a cradle of liberty since that idea first held men's thoughts and roused them to action.

The quaint buildings, the ancient towers of Hussey and of Kyme, the Guildhall, the Grammar School, the great church with its giant tower all crusted o'er with the dust of antiquity: these stood when Bradford and Brewster and their companions in search of freedom were arraigned before the magistrates for the high crime and misdemeanor of trying to leave their native land.

GUILDHALL AND SOUTH STREET, BOSTON]

They must have had secret friends in the place; for some time after their Boston adventure the Government sent down Commissioners to make serious inquiry as to who had cut off the crosses from the tops of the maces carried before the Mayor to church "on Sundays and Thursdays and solemn times." John Cotton, the Puritan vicar, openly condemned the act. Suspicion fell upon churchwarden Atherton Hough. But he denied it, though "he confessed he did before that year break off the hand and arm of a picture of a Pope (as it seemed) standing over a pillar of the outside of the steeple very high, which hand had the form of a church in it." The confession seems to have been safely made, and doubtless churchwarden Hough was proud of it. He might have been better employed at that moment; but if any be tempted to censure his Puritan zeal, let them remember the temper of the times in which he lived. There was something more than wanton mischief behind it all. It was not in fact a "picture" of a Pope, but an image much more innocent. But the resemblance was sufficient for Atherton Hough.

The venerable Guildhall, where Brewster and the rest faced the justices, stands in a street containing the queerest of riverside warehouses. One of them, old Gysors' Hall, was once the home of a family belonging to the merchant guilds of Boston, which gave to London two Mayors and a Constable of the Tower in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The Guildhall itself dates from the thirteenth century; the image of St. Mary which once adorned its front shared the fate of the "picture" on the church tower, with the difference that the Virgin vanished more completely than the "Pope." The hall is regularly used by the public; and local authorities with long and honourable history still deliberate in the ancient court-room, with its wagon roof, its arch beams, its wainscoted walls, and the Boston coat-of-arms and the table of Boston Mayors since 1545 proudly displayed to view. Except for its fittings and furniture the chamber presents much the appearance now that it did when the Pilgrim Fathers, brought up from the cells which exist to-day just as when they tenanted them, stood pathetic figures on its floor and were interrogated by a body of justices, courteous and well-disposed, but powerless to give them back their liberty.

THE OLD COURTROOM, GUILDHALL, BOSTON

_Where the Pilgrims' Fathers faced the Justices. In the floor on the left is the trap door to the staircase leading down to the Cells. The Court ceased to be held here in 1843_]

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Dr. John Brown in "The Pilgrim Fathers of New England and their Puritan Successors."

[2] "Seeing themselves thus molested, and that there was no hope of their continuance there, they resolved to go into y^e Low Countries, wher they heard was freedome of religion for all men; as also how Sundrie from London, and other parts of y^e land had been exiled and persecuted for y^e same cause, and were gone thither and lived at Amsterdam and in other places of y^e land, so affter they had continued togeither about a year, and kept their meetings every Saboth, in one place or other, exercising the worship of God amongst themselves, notwithstanding all y^e dilligence and malice of their adversaries, they seeing they could no longer continue in y^t condition, they resolved to get over into Hollad as they could which was in y^y year 1607-1608."--Bradford's "History of Plymouth Plantation."

II

THE ARREST AT BOSTON AND FLIGHT TO HOLLAND

THE RIVER WITHAM, BOSTON]

II

THE ARREST AT BOSTON AND FLIGHT TO HOLLAND

_Well worthy to be magnified are they
Who, with sad hearts, of friends and country took
A last farewell, their loved abodes forsook,
And hallowed ground in which their fathers lay._

WORDSWORTH.

Great things were destined to result from that none too joyous jaunt of Elder Brewster's when, late in 1607, charged by the Scrooby community to find them a way out of England, he went down to Boston and chartered a ship. William Bradford was of the Boston party. Everything was quietly done. In all likelihood the intending emigrants never entered the town, but gathered at some convenient spot on the Witham tidal estuary where the rushing AEgir hissed.

Whether the Dutch skipper was dissatisfied with the fare promised him, or he feared detection and punishment, cannot be told. Yet, when the fugitives were all on board his vessel, and appeared about to sail, they were arrested by minions of the law. Bitter must have been their disappointment; stern, we may be sure, their remonstrance. But they could do nothing more than upbraid the treacherous Dutchman. They were not kept long in doubt as to their fate. Put back into open boats, their captors "rifled and ransacked them, searching them to their shirts for money, yea, even the women further than became modesty, and then carried them back into the town, and made them a spectacle and wonder to the multitude who came flocking on all sides to behold them." A goodly sight for this curious Boston mob. "Being thus first by the catchpole officers rifled and stripped of their money, books, and much other goods," proceeds the account, with an honest contempt for the writings of the law, "they were presented to the magistrates, and messengers were sent to inform the Lords of the Council of them; and so they were committed to ward."

The basement cells in which the prisoners were placed had been in use at that time for about sixty years, for "in 1552 it was ordered that the kitchens under the Town Hall and the chambers over them should be prepared for a prison and a dwelling-house for one of the sergeants." There must have been more cells formerly. Two of them now remain. They are entered by a step some eighteen inches high; are about six feet broad by seven feet long; and in lieu of doors they are made secure by a barred iron gate.

THE PILGRIM CELLS, GUILDHALL, BOSTON, SHOWING THE KITCHEN BEYOND]

Into these dens the captives were thrust. Short of a dungeon underground, no place of confinement could have been more depressing. Only the heavy whitewashed gate, scarce wide enough to allow a man to enter, admits the light and air; and the interior of each cell is dark as night. We can imagine the misery of men fated to inhabit for long such abodes of gloom; it must have been extreme. They look as if they might have served as coal cellars for feeding the great open fireplaces which, with their spits and jacks and winding-chains, still stand there in the long open kitchen much as they did when they cooked the last mayoral banquet or May Day dinner for the old Bostonians.

A curious winding stair (partly left with its post), terminating at a trapdoor in the court-room floor, was the way by which prisoners ascended and descended on their passage to and from the Court above.

Now these justices who had the dealing with the Pilgrim Fathers were humane men, and were not without a feeling of sympathy for the unhappy captives. It is therefore reasonable to suppose that during some portion of this time, when their presence was not required by the Court, they may have found them better quarters than the Guildhall cells. There was a roomy ramshackle pile near the church in the market-place, half shop, half jail, of irregular shape, with long low roof, which in 1584 was "made strong" as regards the prison part, though in 1603--four years before the date under notice--it was so insecure that an individual detained there was "ordered to have irons placed upon him for his more safe keeping," with a watchman to look after him! And thirty years later the jail, "and the prison therein called Little-Ease," were repaired.

We know what "Little-Ease" means well enough; and so did many a wretched occupant of these barbarous places. The Bishop of Lincoln, in the old persecuting days, had at his palace at Woburn "a cell in his prison called Little-Ease," so named because it was so small that those confined in it could neither stand upright nor lie at length. Other bishops possessed similar means of bodily correction and spiritual persuasion.

This was worse than the Guildhall cells, with all their gloomy horror; and if the magistrates entertained their unwilling guests at the town jail, we may rest satisfied they did not eat the bread of adversity and drink the water of affliction in Little-Ease, but in some more spacious apartment. We have no evidence that they did so entertain them, and the traditional lodging-place of these intercepted Pilgrims is the Guildhall and nowhere else. It is probable, all the same, that a good part of their captivity was spent in the town prison.

OLD TOWN GAOL, MARKET-PLACE, BOSTON]

Although the magistrates, from Mayor John Mayson downward, felt for the sufferers and doubtless ameliorated their condition as far as they could, it was not until after a month's imprisonment that the greater part were dismissed and sent back, baffled, plundered, and heart-broken, to the places they had so lately left, there to endure the scoffs of their neighbours and the rigours of ecclesiastical discipline.

Seven of the principal men, treated as ring-leaders, were kept in prison and bound over to the assizes. Apparently nothing further was done with them. Brewster is said to have been the chief sufferer both in person and pocket. He had eluded a warrant by leaving for Boston, and we know this was in September, because on the fifteenth of that month the messenger charged to apprehend Brewster and another man, one Richard Jackson of Scrooby, certified to the Ecclesiastical Court at York "that he cannot find them, nor understand where they are." On the thirtieth of September also the first payment is recorded to Brewster's successor as postmaster at Scrooby.

How the imprisoned Separatists fared, there is nothing to show. No assize record exists. The Privy Council Register, which could have thrown light on the matter, was destroyed in the Whitehall fire of 1618; and the Boston Corporation records, which doubtless contained some entry on the subject that would have been of the greatest interest now, are also disappointing, as the leaves for the period, the first of a volume, have disappeared.

Eventually the prisoners were all liberated. That dreary wait of many weeks was a weariness of the spirit and of the flesh. Patiently they bore the separation, and by and by they met to make more plans. Next spring they agreed with another Dutchman to take them on board at a lonely point on the northern coast of Lincolnshire, between Grimsby and Hull, "where was a large common, a good way distant from any town." This spot has been located as Immingham, the site of the new Grimsby docks.

The women, with the children and their goods, came to the Humber by boat down the Trent from Gainsborough; the men travelled forty miles across country from Scrooby. Both parties got to the rendezvous before the ship, and the boat was run into a creek. This was unfortunate, as when the captain came on the scene next morning the boat was high and dry, left on the mud by the fallen tide, and there was nothing for it but to wait for high water at midday.

TRENTSIDE, GAINSBOROUGH]

Meanwhile the Dutchman set about taking the men on board in the ship's skiff, but when one boatload had been embarked he saw to his dismay, out on the hills in hot pursuit, "a great company, both horse and foot, with bills and guns and other weapons," for "the country was raised to take them." So the laconic historian says, "he swore his country's oath--Sacramente," and heaving up his anchor sailed straight away with the people he had got. Their feelings may be imagined; and their plight was aggravated by a violent storm, which drove them out of their course and tossed them about for a fortnight, until even the sailors gave up hope and abandoned themselves to despair. But the ship reached port, at last, and all were saved.

The scene ashore meantime had been scarcely less distressing than that at sea. Some of the men left behind made good their escape; the rest tarried with the forsaken portion of the party. The women were broken-hearted. Some wept and cried for their husbands, carried away in the unkindly prudent Dutchman's ship. Some were distracted with apprehension; and others looked with tearful eyes into the faces of the helpless little ones that clung about them, crying with fear and quaking with cold.

The men with the bills and guns arrested them; but, though they hurried their prisoners from place to place, no Justice could be found to send women to gaol for no other crime than wanting to go with their husbands. We know not what befell them. The most likely suggestion is that "they took divers ways, and were received into various houses by kind-hearted country folk." Yet this we do know. They rallied somewhere at a later day, and John Robinson and William Brewster, and other principal members of the devoted sect, including Richard Clyfton, "were of the last, and stayed to help the weakest over before them;" and Bradford tells us with a sigh of satisfaction that "notwithstanding all these storms of opposition, they all gatt over at length, some at one time and some at another, and some in one place and some in another, and mette togeather againe according to their desires, with no small rejoycing"--to take part in the wonderful movement, begun by the Pilgrims and continued by the Puritans, that gave to a new land a new nation. Thus, wrote Richard Monckton Milnes, in some verses dated "The Hall, Bawtry, May 30th, 1854"--

Thus, to men cast in that heroic mould
Came Empire, such as Spaniard never knew--
Such Empire as beseems the just and true;
And at the last, almost unsought, came gold.

ELDER WILLIAM BREWSTER]

III

LIFE IN LEYDEN--ADIEU TO PLYMOUTH--THE VOYAGE TO THE WEST

JOHN ROBINSON'S HOUSE, LEYDEN, WHERE THE PILGRIM FATHERS WORSHIPPED]

III

LIFE IN LEYDEN--ADIEU TO PLYMOUTH--THE VOYAGE TO THE WEST

_Then to the new-found World explored their way,
That so a Church, unforced, uncalled to brook
Ritual restraints, within some sheltering nook
Her Lord might worship and His Word obey
In Freedom._--WORDSWORTH.

The first stage of the pilgrimage from the Old England to the New was now accomplished. Before the end of 1608 the whole body of the fugitives had assembled at Amsterdam. Two Separatist communities were already there, one from London, of which Francis Johnson was pastor and Henry Ainsworth teacher, and the other from Gainsborough under John Smyth. But these brethren were torn with dissensions, and the Scrooby Pilgrims, seeking peace, moved on to Leyden, where, by permission of the authorities, they settled early in 1609. Here they embarked upon a prosperous period of church life, and after awhile purchased a large dwelling, standing near the belfry tower of St. Peter's Church, which in 1611 served as pastor's residence and meeting-house, while in the rear of it were built a score of cottages for the use of their poor.

Eleven quiet years were spent in Holland. Governor Bradford says they continued "in a comfortable condition, enjoying much sweet and delightful society and spiritual comfort," and that they "lived together in love and peace all their days," without any difference or disturbance "but such as was easily healed in love."

The conditions of life were stern and hard, but they bore all cheerfully. With patient industry they worked at various handicrafts, fighting poverty and gaining friends. William Bradford was a fustian worker when, in 1613, at the age of twenty-three, he married Dorothy May of Wisbech; the marriage register which thus describes him is preserved in the Puiboeken at Amsterdam. Brewster, who was chief elder to John Robinson, now sole pastor of the congregation since Richard Clyfton had remained behind at Amsterdam, at first earned a livelihood by giving lessons in English to the students at the University. Then, in conjunction with Thomas Brewer, a Puritan from Kent, he set up a printing press, and they produced books in defence of their principles, such as were banned in England. Similar literature, emanating from the Netherlands, had excited the wrath of King James, who still possessed sufficient influence with the States of Holland to enable him to reach offending authors there. This James attempted to do in the case of Elder Brewster through Sir Dudley Carleton, then English ambassador at the Hague. The result was ludicrous failure.

Brewster quitted Leyden for a time and went to London, not as was thought to elude the vigilance of the Ambassador, but to arrange with shipmasters for a voyage to the West, which the Pilgrims had begun to think about. While Brewster was being sought by the Bishop of London's pursuivants, Sir Dudley Carleton, unaware of the hunt proceeding in London, was actively searching for him at Leyden, and at last triumphantly informed Secretary Naunton that he had caught his man. But as it turned out, the bailiff charged with the arrest, "being a dull, drunken fellow," had seized Brewer instead of Brewster! The prisoner was nevertheless detained, and after some ado consented to submit himself for examination in England, on conditions which were observed. Nothing came of it however. Brewster returned free and unmolested and Brewer remained in Leyden for some years, when, venturing back to England, he was thrown into prison and kept there until released by the Long Parliament fourteen years later.

Events were meanwhile shaping the destiny of the little Pilgrim community. Holland, though a welcome temporary asylum, was no permanent place for these English exiles, and their thoughts turned before long towards a settlement in North America. By good fortune this was a country then being opened up, and it appeared as a veritable Land of Promise to these refugees in search of a new home.

The first attempt to found an English colony on the mainland of North America was made in 1584, when Sir Walter Raleigh took possession of the country and named it Virginia in honour of his Queen. Nothing came of this venture, but in 1607 a company of one hundred and five men from England, sailing in three small ships, had landed on the peninsula of Jamestown in Chesapeake Bay, and the first permanent settlement was established.

The chief of this Virginian enterprise was the redoubtable John Smith, a Lincolnshire man, the first of those sons of empire to go out from the East to the West. Strange that this pioneer in the wilderness, who gave to New England its name, should have come from a country which was to contribute so much to the peopling of the New England States. It is upon record that in 1619 Smith, who was then unemployed at home, volunteered to lead out the Pilgrims to North Virginia, but nothing came of the offer.

BUST OF CAPTAIN JOHN SMITH

_Presented by General Baden-Powell to the Louth Grammar School_]

The Leyden brethren in their hour of need turned to the Virginia Company, and the negotiations for a settlement in the chartered territory were not altogether unsatisfactory. The obstacle was their religion. On the Council of the Company they had good friends; but its charter not only enforced conformity, but provided stringent measures of church government. Yet, though the Pilgrims could obtain no formal grant of freedom of worship, the presumption that they would not be disturbed was so strong that they accepted the conditions and were about to embark when the Merchant Adventurers in London with whom they were associated secured powers from the Plymouth Company, and they decided to sail for New England instead of for Virginia.

Arrangements were not completed without "many quirimonies and complaints;" but the exiles were saddled with such substantial difficulties as want of capital and means of transport, and the bargaining was all in favour of the merchants who were to finance and equip the expedition. At length the compact was made and preparations for the voyage were pushed forward, and the eventful day arrived when the Pilgrims were to make the long, lone journey across the seas.

Pastor Robinson and a portion of his flock were to stay behind at Leyden until the first detachment had secured a lodgment on the American continent; and those about to sail, the majority of the little community, went on board the Speedwell, a vessel of sixty tons. The Pilgrims embarked included such stout-hearted pioneers as Brewster and Bradford, John Carver, Edward Winslow, Isaac Allerton, Samuel Fuller, and John Howland, all "pious and godly men;" also Captain Miles Standish, who, though not a member of the congregation then or afterwards, was a valiant soldier whose military experience and well-tried sword would, it was suspected, prove of service in a country where "salvages" were known to exist in large numbers and might have to be encountered with the arm of flesh.

That was a touching scene and one which stands out boldly in the history of the movement when, on a bright sunny morning in July, 1620, the Pilgrim Fathers knelt on the seashore at Delfshaven and Mr. Robinson, his hands uplifted and his voice broken with emotion, gave them his blessing. Affecting also was the parting of the emigrants with those they were leaving behind. They had need of all their courage and patience.

They sailed with British cheers and a sounding volley fired as salute, and made a brave enough show on quitting land; but troubles dogged them on the waters. Delays and disappointments soon set in. The Speedwell brought them to Southampton, where, anchored off the West Key, they found the Mayflower of London, a bark of one hundred and eighty tons burden, Captain Thomas Jones, and several passengers, some of them merchants' craftsmen.

Here some anxious days were spent in patching up the compact with the Adventurers, and while the vessels lay detained letters written by Robinson arrived from Leyden, one for John Carver conveying the pastoral promise--never, alas! redeemed--to join them later, and the other, full of wise counsel and encouragement, addressed to the whole company, to whom it was read aloud and "had good acceptance with all and after-fruit with many."

_From the Painting by Weir_

THE EMBARKATION OF THE PILGRIMS]

With ninety people in the Mayflower and thirty in the Speedwell, and a governor and assistants appointed for each company, the two vessels dropped down Southampton water on August 15[3]; but they were scarcely in the Channel when the smaller craft began to leak, and they had to run into Dartmouth and overhaul her. The repairs occupied eight days. At the end of that time the ships again stood out to sea; but, when nearly three hundred miles past the Land's End, Reynolds, master of the Speedwell, reported that the pinnace was still leaking badly, and could only be kept afloat by the aid of the pumps. So there was nothing for it but to turn back a second time, and the vessels now put into Plymouth, the Pilgrims landing at the Old Barbican.

At Plymouth the Speedwell was abandoned and sent back to London to the Merchant Adventurers, and with her went eighteen persons who had turned faint-hearted, among them Robert Cushman, a chief promoter of the emigration, and his family. Finally, after much kindness and hospitality extended to them by the Plymouth people, of whom they carried a grateful remembrance across the Atlantic, the Pilgrim Fathers said adieu, and all crowded on board the Mayflower, which, with its load of passengers, numbering one hundred and two souls, followed by many a cheering shout and fervent "God-speed" from the shore, set sail alone on September 16 on its dreary voyage to the West. The weighing of the anchor of that little ship changed the ultimate destiny of half the English-speaking race!

We have to remember that a trip like this in such a vessel as the Mayflower, crowded for the most part with helpless people, was a hazardous undertaking. The dangers of the deep were dreaded in those days for all-sufficient reasons, and here was a tiny craft, heavily submerged, making a winter voyage on a stormy ocean to a destination almost unknown. It must have required the strongest resolution, both of passengers and crew, to face the perils of the venture; the step was a desperate one, but, urged on by circumstances and an indomitable spirit, they took it unfalteringly, having first done what they could to make the lumbering little ship seaworthy.

MODEL OF THE MAYFLOWER]

The weather was cold and tempestuous, and the passage unexpectedly long. Half way across the Atlantic the voyagers incurred the penalty of those early delays, which now left them still at sea in the bad season. Caught by the equinoctial gales, they were sadly buffeted about, driven hither and thither by boisterous winds, tossed like a toy on the face of great rolling, breaking billows, the decks swept, masts and timbers creaking, the rigging rattling in the hard northern blast. One of the violent seas which struck them, unshipped a large beam in the body of the vessel, but by strenuous labour it was got into position again, and the carpenters caulked the seams which the pitching had opened in the sides and deck. Once that sturdy colonist of later years, John Howland, venturing above the gratings, was washed overboard, but by a lucky chance he caught a coil of rope trailing over the bulwark in the sea, and was hauled back into the ship. A birth and a death at intervals were also events of the passage. It was not until two whole months had been spent on the troubled ocean that glad cries at last welcomed the sight of land, and very soon after, on November 21, sixty-seven days out from Plymouth, the Mayflower rounded Cape Cod and dropped anchor in the placid waters of what came to be Provincetown Harbour.

PLYMOUTH HARBOUR, AS SEEN FROM COLE'S HILL]

FOOTNOTES:

[3] New style, which is that adopted for the dates of sailing, and arrival and landing in North American.

IV

"INTO A WORLD UNKNOWN"--TRIALS AND TRIUMPH

_From a Painting_

THE LANDING OF THE PILGRIMS]

IV

"INTO A WORLD UNKNOWN"--TRIALS AND TRIUMPH

_The breaking waves dash'd high_
_On a stern and rock-bound coast;_
_And the woods, against a stormy sky,_
_Their giant branches toss'd._--MRS. HEMANS.

We can imagine with what wondering awe and mingled hopes and fears the Pilgrims looked out over the sea upon that strange New World, with its great stretch of wild, wooded coast and panorama of rock and dune and scrub, wintry bay and frowning head-land, to which destiny and the worn white wings of the Mayflower together had brought them. With thankful hearts for safe deliverance from the perils of the sea, mindful of the past and not despairing for the future, they turned trustfully and bravely to meet the dangers which they knew awaited them in the unknown wilderness ashore.

The point reached by the voyagers was considerably north of the intended place of settlement, the vicinity of the Hudson River; but whether accidental or designed--and some evidence there certainly was which seemed to show that the master of the Mayflower had been bribed by the Dutch[4] to keep away from Manhattan, which they wanted for themselves--the variation was a happy one for the colonists, inasmuch as it saved them from the savages, who were warlike and numerous near the Hudson, while in this district they had been decimated and scattered by disease.

_From a Painting_

THE MARCH OF MILES STANDISH]

Now the Pilgrims were a prudent as well as a pious and plucky people, and while yet upon the water they set about providing themselves with a system of civil government. Placed as they were by this time outside the pale of recognized authority, some fitting substitute for it must be established if order was to be maintained. The necessity for this was the more imperative as there were some on board--the hired labourers, probably--who were not, it was feared, "well affected to peace and concord." Assembled in the cabin of the Mayflower, we accordingly have the leaders of the expedition, preparing that other historical incident of the pilgrimage. There they drew up the document forming a body politic and promising obedience to laws framed for the common good. This was the first American charter of self-government. It was subscribed by all the male emigrants on board, numbering forty-one. Under the constitution adopted, John Carver was elected Governor for one year.

The Mayflower rode at anchor while three explorations were made to discover a suitable place of settlement, one of them on shore under Captain Miles Standish, and two by water in the ship's shallop, which had been stowed away in pieces 'tween decks on the voyage. On December 21st an inlet of the bay was sounded and pronounced "fit for shipping," and the explorers on going inland found "divers cornfields and little running brooks," and other promising sources of supply. They accordingly decided that this was a place "fit for situation," and on December 26th the Mayflower's passengers, cramped and emaciated by long confinement on board, leaped joyfully ashore. Appropriately the spot was named New Plymouth, after the last port of call in Old England.

The Pilgrims landed on a huge boulder of granite, the Pilgrim Stone, still reverently preserved by their descendants: a rock which was

to their feet as a doorstep
Into a world unknown--the cornerstone of a nation![5]