Three ships, bearing the earliest Pilgrim Fathers from England to America, had already sailed from England in the year 1606, and these were followed by the historic _Mayflower_ and the _Plymouth Rock_, in 1620. While these exiles for conscience sake established for themselves a new England in the west, a colony of Scotchmen in the year 1622 took possession of a tract of land which they named Nova Scotia. Maryland, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey, Carolina, Pennsylvania, and other colonies were successively formed by parties of Englishmen--the final outcome of peaceful settlement, or the arbitrament of the sword, being that the greater part of the eastern seaboard, and the country beyond it, came under the sway of the English Crown, until injudicious taxation and ill-advised repression led at length to open discontent and disloyalty, and finally to revolution and the birth of the great Republic of the West. So long as the Colonists owed allegiance to the British crown, one would naturally have taken for granted that they would have been found beneath the national flag, but this was not altogether the case. In the early days of New England the Puritans strongly objected to the red cross on the flag: not from any disloyalty to the old country, but from a conscientious objection to the use of a symbol which they deemed idolatrous. By the year 1700, though the Cross of St. George was still the leading device, the different colonies began to employ special devices to distinguish their vessels from those of England and of each other.[57] This, though it indicated a certain jealousy and independence amongst the colonies themselves, was no proof of any desire for separation from the old country, and even when, later on, the dispute between King and Colonists became acute, we find them parting from the old flag with great reluctance. Fig. 142 is a very good illustration of this; its date is 1775. In the early stages of the Revolution each section adopted a flag of its own, and it was only later on, when the desirability of union and uniformity became evident, that the necessity for one common flag was felt. Thus, the people of Massachusetts ranged themselves beneath banners bearing pine trees; the men of South Carolina went in for rattle-snakes; the New Yorkers adopted a white flag with a black beaver thereon; the Rhode Islanders had a white flag with a blue anchor upon it; and, in like manner, each contingent adopted its special device.