ships that brought them, or sought better prospects in other colonies; and two hundred more died before DecemEarly ber. Immediately on his arrival, Winthrop, in hardships fear of famine before the next summer, wisely hurried back a ship for supplies. Its prompt return, in February, saved the colony. According to one story, Winthrop had just given his last measure of meal to a destitute neighbor. Meantime the deserters spread such discouragement in England that for the next two years emigration to Massachusetts ceased. In 1633, however, it began again. Soon after, the King seemed for a time to have established a legal claim to the power of arbitrary taxation (in the famous "ship-money" controversy). This gave new impetus to the Puritan emigration, and it went on, at the average volume of three thousand people a year, until the Long Parliament was summoned.

"The Great

Thus the eleven years of "No Parliament" in England saw twenty-five thousand selected Englishmen transported to New England. This was the "Great Migration" Migration," of 1630-1640. In 1640 the movement stopped 1630-1640 short. Says Winthrop, "The parliament in England setting upon a general reformation both in church and state,... this caused all men to stay in England in expectation of a New World" there. Indeed, the migration turned the other way; and many of the boldest and best New England Puritans hurried back to the old home, now that there was a chance to fight for Puritan principles there. Winthrop's third son and one of his nephews went back and rose to the rank of general under Cromwell, while the Reverend Hugh Peter, rather a troublesome busybody in the colony, became Cromwell's chaplain. Such facts help us to understand that the larger figures on the small New England stage, like Winthrop and his gallant son John Winthrop, Jr., were fit companions for the greatest actors on the great European stage in that great day. The sudden stop in immigration caused serious industrial depression. Until that time the colony had been unable to raise sufficient supplies for its use. Newcomers brought money with

MINGLED MOTIVES

67

them, and gladly paid for cattle and food the price in England plus the cost of transportation. In an instant this was changed. The colony had more of such supplies than it could use, and high freights made export impossible. Both Bradford and Winthrop lament the fall in prices, for a cow from £20 to £5, etc., without very clear ideas as to its cause. The phenomenon has been repeated many times on our moving frontier.

And its

history

New England had no further immigration of consequence until after the Revolution. But this coming of the Puritans, during England's ten hopeless years, is one of the fruitful facts in history. The twenty-five influence on thousand are the ancestors of perhaps a sixth of American our population to-day; and we owe to them much more than a sixth of our higher life in America. Said an old Puritan preacher, with high insight, "God hath sifted a nation, that he might send choice grain into this wilderness." That sifting took place just when England had been lifted to her loftiest pitch of moral grandeur, during the most heroic episode of her most heroic century, and the "choice grain" has given to America not only the troublesome "New England conscience" but also that finer thing, a share in the Puritan's faith in ideals.

Other

religious

True, motives were not unmixed. The twenty-five thousand were not all Puritans; and the Puritans were not all saints. Some little communities were made up wholly of rude fishermen. Old Cotton Mather motives tells how a preacher from another town, visiting besides the Marblehead and praising the devotion of the people to religious principle, was interrupted by a rough voice, "You think you are talking to the people of the Bay we came here to catch fish." Then the Puritan settlements themselves contained many "servants." Winthrop alone brought in his "household" some twenty male servants, several of whom were married. Many of this servant population were a bad lot, with the natural vices of an irresponsible, untrained, hopeless class. On the voyage, cheats and drunkards from among them had to

receive severe punishment; and, arrived in America, the better ones were sometimes demoralized. They saw vaster chance for free labor than they had ever dreamed-but they had ignorantly bound themselves to service through the best years of life. Brooding on this led some to crime or suicide.

The great body of the Puritans themselves had been shopkeepers, artisans, and small farmers in England. They were plain, uneducated men who followed a trusted minister or an honored neighbor of the gentry class. In the main they came, not to build an ideal state, like their leaders, but merely to get away from the pressure of poverty. They had felt keenly the force of Winthrop's plea :

"This Land growes weary of her Inhabitants, soe as man, who is the most pretious of God's creatures, is here . . . of less prise among us than an horse or a sheepe. Why then should we

stand striving here . . . (many men spending as much labour and coste to ... keepe an acre or tuoe of Land as would procure many hundred as good or better in another Countrie) and in the meantime suffer a whole Continent, fruitfull and convenient, to lie waste?"

Nor were the greatest of the Puritans moved by religious motives only. They, too, expected to better their worldly condition. Even John Winthrop had been induced to emigrate, in part, by the decay of his fortune in England. As he explained, in the third person, to his friends, "His meanes heer are soe shortened as he shall not be able to continue in the same place and callinge [as before]; and so, if he should refuse this opportunitye, that talent which God hath bestowed upon him for publick service were like to be buried." Many others of the 1630 migration had been deluded by "the too large commendations" of New England which Higginson had sent back in the preceding

summer.

But when these dreams faded, the more steadfast spirits did not falter, but showed bravely the higher aims that moved them most. After the first hard months Winthrop

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69

Supremacy

motive

wrote back to his wife in noble strain: "I do hope our days of affliction will soon have an end . . . Yet we may not look for great things here . . . [But] we here enjoy God and Jesus Christ. I thank God, I like of the so well to be here as I do not repent my coming; religious and if I were to come again, I would not have altered my course though I had forseen all these afflictions." And Dudley, one of his stout-hearted companions, albeit a blunt man not fond of soft words, speaks with gentle charity of "falling short of our expectations, to our great prejudice, by means of letters sent us hence into England, wherein honest men, out of a desire to draw others to them, wrote somewhat hyperbollically of many things here," and adds:

"If any come hether to plant for worldly ends, that canne live well at home, hee comits an errour of which hee will soon repent him. But if for spirittuall, and that noe particular obstacle hinder his removeall, he may finde here what may well content him: viz., materialls to build, fewell to burn, ground to plant, seas and rivers to ffish in, a pure ayer to breath in, good water to drinke till wine or beare canne be made, which, toegether with the cowes, hoggs, and goates brought hether allready, may suffice for food; for as for foule and venison, they are dainties here as well as in England. Ffor cloaths and beddinge they must bringe them with them, till time and industry produce them here. In a word, wee yett enjoy little to bee envyed, but endure much to bee pytyed in the sicknes and mortalitye of our people. . . . If any godly men out of religious ends will come over to helpe us . . . I thinke they cannot dispose of themselves or their estates more to Gods glory... but they must not bee of the poorer sort yett for diverse yeares. Ffor we have found by experience that they have hindered, not furthered the worke. And for profaine and deboshed persons, their oversight in comeinge hether is wondered at, where they shall finde nothing to content them."

After the first winter the colony was never in danger of absolute ruin; but the settlers long suffered more than the common hardships of a frontier. They did not Not natural take naturally to pioneer life as our later back- pioneers woodsmen did. They had no love for the wilderness, nor

could they adapt themselves readily to its new requirements. But they had soberly and prayerfully committed life, family, and fortune to a daring experiment, and, like the Pilgrims, they too met disaster "with answerable courages." Men, who had left stately ancestral manor houses, took up life calmly in rudely built log cabins, and never looked backward. Famous ministers, who came from the loveliest parish churches in peaceful England, preached and gave the communion, and married, baptized, and buried, in bleak, barn-like "meeting-houses," where each male worshiper brought his musket. A pitiable proportion of the babies died, year by year, in the harsh climate and draughty

Br hands the day & node abow weittor

"MARKS" OF NAHNANACOMOCK AND PASSACONAWAY, affixed to a covenant submitting to an order of the General Court; dated June 12, 1644. From the Massachusetts State Archives.

Early

Sparks from the mud-plastered fireplaces and chimneys set many a fire. Winthrop's "Journal" speaks repeatedly of such loss-home, barn, hay, and stock, often in hardships the dead of a winter night; and Captain John Smith chances to mention that at Plymouth in the third winter seven of the thirty-two homes burned down. Wolves killed the calves of this or that settler, a serious disaster when most stock had still to be brought from England. Men, and sometimes women, were lost in short trips through the woods, and found frozen to death. Inexperienced fishermen were caught by storms and swept away to sea. Amid all this, the gentry kept up as much as they could of the old