Another remarkable fact in this patent was the strict injunction given to Endicott, the governor, to treat with the natives for the equitable purchase of their lands. “If any of the savages,” it is said, “pretend right of inheritance, we pray you endeavour to purchase their title; that no wrong or injury be done to the natives.” This company of emigrants, amounting to about 300 persons, in five ships, with good store of cattle, horses and all necessaries, were accompanied by the excellent Francis Higginson, a nonconformist preacher, whose account of the voyage and the country, immediately sent over to England, excited a still greater enthusiasm for emigration. The seal of the infant colony was an Indian erect, with an arrow in his right hand, and the words, “Come over and help us!” “Farewell, dear England!” said the minister, with his friends and children standing round him, as they lost sight of their native land; “farewell, the church of God in England, and all Christian friends there! We go not to New England as separatists from the church of England, but from her corruptions; we go to practise church reformation, and to propagate the Gospel in America.” At the end of June they reached Salem, where they found about eight or ten mud cabins, with a larger one for the governor, and a few cultivated fields. “There are in all,” says Higginson, “of old and new planters about three hundred; two hundred of whom are settled at Salem, and the rest have planted themselves at Charlestown. We at Salem make what haste we can to build houses, so that shortly we shall have a fair town.” This church of God in the wilderness, which had come hither to practise reformation, soon found members within its bosom who clung to the old forms and ceremonies; and the return of the ships which had brought them out carried back the leaders of this faction—cast out by the church, which would not allow them to remain within her borders, and by Endicott, the governor, that there might not be “spies in the camp.” The following winter brought with it many hardships. Before the next spring nearly half the emigrants, the enthusiastic Higginson among the rest, were removed by death. But not even these misfortunes, nor yet the evil report of intolerance and persecution, which the expelled friends of episcopacy carried back with them to England, could damp the ardour for colonisation which filled the hearts of the English Puritans; to them the Indian from the wilderness appealed, “Come over and help us;” and the report of Higginson, though now dead, testified to them of a land abundant as that of Canaan.