The Beginners of a Nation: A History of the Source and Rise of the Earliest English Settlements in America, with Special Reference to the Life and Character of the PeopleEggleston, Edward
History
The Beginners of a Nation: A History of the Source and Rise of the Earliest English Settlements in America, with Special Reference to the Life and Character of the People
Eggleston, Edward
United States -- History -- Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775
The first effect of the slender success at Plymouth was to stimulate
speculative and merely adventurous migration. From 1607 until the
arrival of the Pilgrims in 1620 no English colony had landed on the
northern coast; but after the Pilgrims came, fish-drying and
fur-buying stations began to appear on the banks of the Piscataqua and
the coast eastward in 1622 and 1623. These tiny settlements were germs
of New Hampshire and Maine, the only New England plantations begun
without any admixture of religious motives. A commercial colony was
tried in Massachusetts Bay as early as 1622, but it failed. There were
other like attempts. In 1624 some men of Dorchester, headed by John
White, the "Patriarch" Puritan clergyman, sent out a colony to Cape
Ann. The members of this company were to grow maize to supply fishing
ships, and in the season the same men were to lend a hand on board the
ships, which would thus be saved the necessity for carrying double
crews. But this plausible scheme proved a case of seeking strawberries
in the sea and red herrings in the wood. Farmers were but lubbers at
codfishing, and salt-water fishermen were clumsy enough in the
cornfield. Losses of several sorts forced the Dorchester Company to
dissolve. Four members of their futile colony, encouraged by a message
from White, remained on Cape Ann. Removing to the present site of
Salem, they waited at the risk of their lives for the coming of a new
colony from England.
[Sidenote: Individual settlers.]
[Sidenote: Note 1.]
Solitary adventurers of the sort known on nearly every frontier were
presently to be found in several places. The scholarly recluse was
represented by Blackstone, who had selected for his secluded abode a
spot convenient to a spring of good water where the town of Boston was
afterward planted; the inevitable Scotch adventurer was on an island
in Boston Harbor; Samuel Maverick, a pattern of frontier hospitality
and generosity, took up his abode on Noddle's Island; while the
rollicking and scoffing libertine was found in Thomas Morton, who with
some rebellious bond servants got possession of a fortified house in
what is now Braintree. Here Morton welcomed renegade servants from
Plymouth and elsewhere. He wrote ribald verses which he posted on his
Maypole, and devised May-dances in which the saturnine Indian women
participated. He broke all the commandments with delight, carried on
a profitable trade in selling firearms to the savages in defiance of
royal proclamations, and wrought whatever other deviltry came within
his reach, until his neighbors could no longer endure the proximity of
so dangerous a firebrand. Little Captain Standish, whom Morton
derisively dubbed "Captain Shrimp," descended on this kingdom of
misrule at last and broke up the perpetual carnival, sending Morton to
England.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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