But the Third Discovery was to have a better result. On December 6 they set out, again by boat, and rounded Billingsgate Point before they landed to camp for the night. About five in the morning, their picket rushed in with cries of “Indians! Indians!” and they roused to savage war-whoops and arrows rattling down upon the camp. But when they fired their muskets the Indians, probably some of the Nausets whom Thomas Hunt had despoiled of men, ran away as they had come, with no one harmed on either side. The place, situated near Great Meadow Creek in Eastham, was named “The First Encounter.” Again the explorers took boat, and passing the harbor and fertile lands of Barnstable in a driving northeast gale and snowstorm, drenched with the freezing spray that made their clothes “many times like coats of iron,” they pressed on to Plymouth Bay. So thick was the weather that their pilot, who had probably sailed with Smith or Dermer, lost his bearings. “Lord be merciful, my eyes never saw this place before,” cried he as they passed the Gurnet. He would there and then have beached the boat, but one of stouter heart shouting, “About with her, or we are all dead men,” they turned and ran under the lee of Clark’s Island where they landed. There, in storm and wet, they miserably bivouacked over the next day, a Sunday; and on the Monday exploring the mainland and finding harbor, meadow, and brook to their mind, they determined to make here at Plymouth their permanent settlement. Very likely they had bethought them of Dermer’s commendation of it to Fernando Gorges, although they seem not to have been amenable to advice from John Smith, who cites them as a warning in his “advertisemente to Unexperienced Planters.” “For want to good take heede,” writes he of them in 1630, “thinking to finde all things better than I advised them, spent six or seven weekes in wandering up and downe in frost and snow, winde and raine, among the woods, cricks, and swamps.” On December 16, Old Style, the whole company, reunited at Plymouth, set about the building of their new home. The Pilgrims had been little more than a month at Provincetown, but, beside the great achievement of the Compact, history had been making to open the annals of Anglo-Saxon New England: Edward Thompson, Jasper Moore, and James Chilton had died; Dorothy, the young wife of William Bradford, had fallen overboard to her death; and Mrs. William White had been delivered of a son, fittingly named Peregrine, the first born of English parents in New England. Not unreasonably does Cape Cod claim precedence of Plymouth when homage is paid the Pilgrim Fathers. II