voyage, but an ample record of that of his successor in the emigration, Rev. Francis Higginson, who came as the spiritual leader with his colleague Skelton- of the first large party of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. They came in summer (1629), and all their early impressions were in poetic contrast to the stern landing of the Pilgrims. Francis Higginson says, in his journal as preserved in Hutchinson's Collection: "By noon we were within three leagues of Cape Ann; and as we sailed along the coasts we saw every hill and dale and every island full of gay woods and high trees. The nearer we came to the shore the more flowers in abundance, sometimes scattered abroad, sometimes joined in sheets nine or ten yards long, which we supposed to be brought from the low meadows by the tide. Now what with fine woods and green trees by land, and these yellow flowers painting the sea, made us all desirous to see our new paradise of New England, whence we saw such forerunning signals of fertility afar off." There came in this expedition five (or possibly six) ships, of which the Mayflower was one. They brought two hundred persons; whereas only some forty had arrived with Endicott; in the following year eight hundred came with Winthrop, who, being governor of the company itself, superseded all other authorities. It was the most powerful body of colonists that had yet reached America. Its members were by no means limited to Salem, nor did this long remain the centre of the colony. Charlestown was settled in 1629, and Dorchester, Roxbury, Boston, Medford, Watertown, and Cambridge in 1630. The company itself was transplanted bodily from England. It was an organized government under a royal charter; the freemen were to meet four times a year and choose a governor, deputy-governor, and eighteen assistants, who were to meet once a month, and exercise all the functions of a State. As Mr. Lodge has tersely said, "It was the migration of a people, not the mere setting forth of colonists and adventurers." Considered as a colony, it was far larger and richer than that at Plymouth; it had chosen a more favorable situa tion, and it encountered less of hardship, though it had quite enough. Its leaders had not expected, in advance, to break with the Church of England, as had been done by the "Separatists" at Plymouth. "We will not say," said Francis Higginson, on looking back to the receding shores of England we will not say, as the Separatists were wont to say at their leaving of England, 'Farewell, Babylon! farewell, Rome!' but we will say,Farewell, dear England! farewell, the Church of God in England, and all the Christian friends there.' . . . We go to practise the positive part of Church reformation, and to propagate the Gospel in America." Yet, when once established on this soil, there was not much difference in degree of independence between the two colonies. Indeed Endicott, when he sent back two turbulent Churchmen to England,-or when he defaced the cross, then deemed idolatrous, upon the English flag,- -or when he suppressed Morton and his roisterers at Merry Mount, went farther in the assertion of separate power than the milder authorities of Plymouth Colony ever went. Both colonies aimed at religious reformation. Neither colony professed religious toleration, though the Plymouth colony sometimes practised it. Rhode Island, on its establishment by Roger Williams, both professed and practised it; and though his banishment from Massachusetts was not on religious grounds alone, but partly from his contentious spirit in other ways, yet it resulted in good to the world, at last, through his high conceptions of religious liberty. In the New Hampshire settlements, which were formed as early as 1623, there was less of strictness in religion, and perhaps less of religion; nor was there ever any great rigidity of doctrine or practice in the few scattered villages of Maine. The two Connecticut colonies-Connecticut and New Haven-being framed at first by the direct emigration of whole religious societies, might have been supposed to carry some severity with them into their banishment; but they seemed to leave it behind, and were not sterner at the outset than the men of the other early settlements, even those of Virginia. What changes came over this type of manhood in the second generation, in the banishment of a colony and the asceticism of a life too restricted, we shall see. But these New England men were, at the outset, of as high a mould as ever settled a State. "God sifted a whole nation," said Stoughton, "that He might send choice grain over into this wilderness." Between the years 1629 and 1639, twenty thousand Puritans came to America; it was not a mere colonization, it was the transfer of a people. Thus were four colonies established on the North Atlantic coast before the year 1630, in the vast region once called Virginia. Three of them were English at the beginningVirginia, New Plymouth, and Massachusetts Bay - and the other was destined to become such, changing its name from New Netherlands to New York. These may be called the pioneer colonies; and if we extend our view to the year 1650, we take in three other colonies, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Haven - which had gone forth from these - while two independent colonies, one English and one Swedish, had made separate settlements in Maryland and Delaware; thus making nine in all, of which seven were English. The men of the Maryland settlement also called themselves, like those of Plymouth, " Pilgrims," but the name had not come to them by such arduous experience, and it has not attached itself to their descendants. The Roman Catholics and others who came to "Mary's Land" in the Ark and the Dove, in March, 1634, under Leonard Calvert, named their first settlement St. Mary's, in honor of Queen Henrietta Maria, and they called themselves "the Pilgrims of St. Mary's." The emigration was made up very differently from those which John Smith recorded in Virginia, for it consisted of but twenty "gentlemen" and three hundred laboring men. They came under a charter granted to George Calvert, Lord Baltimore, who had for many years been trying to establish a colony, which he called "Avalon," much farther north, and who had grown, in the words of a letter of the period, "weary of his intolerable plantation at Newfoundland, where he hath found between eight and nine months' winter, and upon the land nothing but rocks, lakes, or morasses like bogs, which one might thrust a pike down to the butt-head." But he died before the new charter was signed; and was succeeded by his son Cecil, the second Lord Baltimore, who fully adopted his father's plans, and amply defrayed the cost of the first expedition, this being £40,000. |