"About them seemed but ruin and decay, Cheerless, forlorn, a rank autumnal fen, Where no good plant might prosper, or again Put forth fresh leaves for those that fell away; Nor could they find a place wherein to pray For better things. In righteous anger then They turned; they fled the wilderness of men And sought the wilderness of God. And day Rose upon day, while ever manfully Westward they battled with the ocean's might, Strong to endure whatever fate should be, And watching in the tempest and the night That one sure Pharos of the soul's dark sea-- The constant beacon of the Inner Light." In the spring of 1677 the "goode shippe Kent," Gregory Marlowe, master, sailed from London, bound for West Jersey, with two hundred and thirty Quakers, about half coming from London and the others from Yorkshire; two dying on the voyage. They ascended the Delaware to the meadow lands below the mouth of Assiscunk Creek, landing there in June, and in October made a treaty with the Indians, buying their lands from the Rancocas as far up as Assunpink Creek at Trenton. Their settlement was first called New Beverly, and then Bridlington, from the Yorkshire town whence many of them came, but it finally was named Burlington. They made a street along the river, bordered with greensward, and called the "Green Bank," and drew a straight line back inland, calling it their Main Street, and the Londoners settled on one side and the Yorkshiremen on the other. The old buttonwood tree, to which was moored the early ships bringing settlers, still stands on the Green Bank, a subject of weird romance. Elizabeth Powell, the first white child, was born in July, 1677. The next May, 1678, they established a "Monthly Meeting of Friends" at Burlington, of which the records have been faithfully kept. In June the graveyard was fenced in, and the old Indian chief, Ockanickon, a Quaker convert to Christianity, was among the first buried there. In August the first Quaker marriage was solemnized in meeting, this first certificate being signed by ten men and three women Friends as witnesses. In 1682, just as Penn was coming over, they decided to build their first meeting house--a hexagonal building, forty feet in diameter, with pyramidal roof, which was occupied the next year. In 1685 they decided that a hearse should be built, the entry on the record being an order for a "carriage to be built for ye use of such as are to be laid in ye ground."