It is a strange commentary on the justice of history that the men who had spent their lives on New England colonization had almost no share in the first successful plantation in Massachusetts. We have seen what an outpouring of futile struggle men like Gorges and Smith and Dermer had expended on the failures that set the stage for the Pilgrims. It was now to fall to the lot of a group of English exiles, who had lived twelve years in the Netherlands, to arrive by accident in Massachusetts at the precise moment when the merchant adventurers, whom they despised, had succeeded in producing the conditions for success. The Pilgrim legend is well founded, in the tribute it pays to the forthright courage and persistence of the forefathers, but it ignores their utter dependence on the maritime renaissance of England as the foundation on which their success rested. The line of succession stemming from the exploits of Drake and Hawkins and the ships that sank the Armada carried directly on into the efforts of Gosnold, Pring, Gorges, Smith, Hobson, and Dermer to set the stage for Plymouth. The fur trade and the fisheries by which New Plymouth finally paid off its creditors had been painstakingly developed by many hazardous years of experiment by small shipowners of Bristol and Plymouth and other smaller havens in the west of England. Faith in New England ventures, so nearly destroyed by the Sagadahoc failure, had been kept alive and sedulously cultivated by a little group of earnest men around Gorges and John Smith, so that money could be available to finance even the risky trading voyages necessary to keep a foothold on the coast. We have seen how recently peace had been made with the Indians. The Pilgrims ascribed all these blessings to acts of Providence in their behalf. But Providence has a way of fulfilling its aims through the acts of determined men. Any visitor to Plymouth who reveres the Pilgrims should also honor those representatives of the glorious maritime energies of the Old World whose discoveries and explorations prepared the way for permanent settlement. To them also applies the phrase which Bradford used of the Plymouth colonists: “They were set as stepping-stones for others who came after.” Transcriber’s Notes Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they were not changed. Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left unbalanced. Illustrations in this eBook have been positioned between paragraphs and outside quotations.