The Pilgrims were well satisfied with the site of their settlement, hard and sterile as it was. Indeed, they had a devout habit of looking on the good, rather than the evil of events, and this made even their crosses easier to be borne. “This harbor,” they said, “is a bay greater than Cape Cod, compassed with goodly land; and in the bay are two fine islands,[158] uninhabited, wherein are nothing but woods, oaks, pines, walnuts, beech, sassafras, vines, and other trees which we know not. The bay is a most hopeful place, and has innumerable store of fowl and excellent food; it cannot but contain fish in their seasons; skate, cod, turbot, and herring, we have tasted of. Here is abundance of muscles, the greatest and best we ever saw, also crabs and lobsters in their time, infinite. The place is in fashion like a sickle or fish-hook. The land for the crust of the earth is a spit’s depth, excellent black mould, and fat in many places; and vines are everywhere, and cherry-trees, plum-trees, and many others whose names we know not. Many kinds of herbs we find in winter hereabouts, as strawberry-leaves innumerable, sorrel, yarrow, carrot, brook-lime, liverwort, water-cresses, great store of leeks, and an excellent strong kind of flax or hemp. Here is sand, gravel, an excellent clay, no better in the world, exceeding good for pots, and it will wash like soap; we have the best water that ever we drank, and the brooks will soon be full of fish.”[159] So runs the journal of the Pilgrims. Hopeful and thankful for what they had, they seemed anxious to be pleased, and to make the best even of their ills. It was in no sour and bitter spirit that they “Leaned their cheeks against the thick-ribbed ice, And looked up with devout eyes to Him Who bade them bloom, unblanched, amid the waste Of desolation.” After all, perhaps it was well even for their present safety that they had landed on the bleak New England strand. “Had they been carried, according to their desire, unto Hudson’s river,” says Cotton Mather, “the Indians in those parts were at this time so many and so mighty and so sturdy, that in probability all this feeble number of Christians had been massacred by the bloody savages, as not long after some others were; whereas the good hand of God now brought them to a country wonderfully prepared for their entertainment by a sweeping mortality that had lately been among the natives. ‘We have heard with our ears, O God, our fathers have told us, what work thou didst in their days, in the times of old; how thou dravest out the heathen with thy hand, and plantedst them; how thou didst afflict the people, and cast them out.’ The Indians in these parts had newly, even about a year or two before, been visited with such a prodigious pestilence, as carried away not a tenth, but nine parts of ten; yea, ’tis said, nineteen of twenty among them; so that the woods were almost cleared to make room for a better growth.