All his arrangements being completed, William Penn, at the age of thirty-eight, well, strong, and hopeful of the best results, embarked for his colony, on board the ship Welcome, of three hundred tons, Robert Greenaway master, on the last of August, 1682. While in the Downs he wrote a _Farewell Letter to Friends, the Unfaithful and Inquiring_, in his native land, dated August 30th, and probably many private letters. He had about one hundred fellow-passengers, mostly Friends from his own neighborhood in Sussex. The vessel sailed about September 1st, and almost immediately the small-pox, that desolating scourge of the passenger-ships of those days, appeared among the passengers, and thirty fell victims to it. The trials of that voyage, told to illustrate the Christian spirit which submissively encountered them, were long repeated from father to son and from mother to daughter. In about six weeks the ship entered the Delaware River. The old inhabitants along the shores, which had been settled by the whites for about half a century, received Penn with equal respect and joy. He arrived at New Castle on October 27th. The day was not commemorated by annual observances until the year 1824, when a meeting for that purpose was held at an inn, in Laetitia court, where Penn had resided. While the ship and its company went up the river, the proprietor, on the next day, called the inhabitants, who were principally Dutch and Swedes, to the court-house, where, after addressing them, he assumed and received the formal possession of the country. He renewed the commissions of the old magistrates, who urged him to unite the Territories to his government. After a visit of ceremony to the authorities at New York and Long Island, with a passing token to his friends in New Jersey, Penn went to Upland to hold the first Assembly, which opened on December 4th. Nicholas Moore, an English lawyer, and president of the Free Society of Traders, was made speaker. After three days' peaceful debate, the Assembly ratified, with modifications, the laws made in England, with about a score of new ones of a local, moral, or religious character, in which not only the drinking of healths, but the talking of scandal, was forbidden. By suggestion of his friend and fellow-voyager, Pearson, who came from Chester, in England, Penn substituted that name for Upland. By an act of union, passed on December 7th, the three Lower Counties, or the Territories, were joined in the government, and the foreigners were naturalized at their own request.