Entering the shallop at midnight, Standish and nine others, with three Indians to interpret, of whom Squanto was one, embarked with the ebb-tide.[261] They sailed along the coast to the bay on which Boston now stands, called in the contemporaneous record, _Massachusetts Bay_.[262] “On the second morning after leaving Plymouth, they landed upon a beach under a cliff, and received the submission of a chief on promising to be ‘a safeguard from his enemies.’ They surveyed the ‘fifty islands’ of Boston harbor; and passing the night on board their boat, went on shore again the following day and walked a few miles into the country. They observed land which had been cultivated, two forts in decay, untenanted huts, and other tokens of recent depopulation. They noted ‘the fair entrance’ of the river Charles, and ‘harbors for shipping’ than which ‘better could not be.’ They conciliated the few natives whom they met, and traded with them for some skins. They learned that the principal personage in the neighborhood was the female chief, or ‘squaw sachem’ of the Massachusetts; that this tribe had suffered from the hostile incursions of the Tarratines, and that its people owed a certain allegiance to Massasoit. The third evening, by ‘a light moon,’ the party set sail for home, which they reached before the following noon. The accounts they brought of the seat of their explorations naturally led their friends to ‘wish they had been seated there;’”[263] but “the Lord, who assigns to all men the bounds of their habitations,” remarks Bradford, “had appointed it for another use.”[264] The party “found the Lord to be with them in all their ways, and to bless their outgoings and incomings, for which let his holy name have the praise for ever to all posterity.”[265] Standish and his friends had returned on the 22d of September. Their services were needed; the nodding crops were to be reaped, and all “began now to gather in the small harvest they had.”[266] The husbandry of the year proved a prosperous beginning. The rivers supplied manure in abundance, and the weather had been not unfavorable.[267] “All the summer there was no want.” While “some were thus employed in affairs abroad, others were exercised” in domestic avocations, in “fishing for cod and bass and other fish, of which they took great store, giving every family its portion.”[268] When the fields were gleaned, the pease turned out “not worth the gathering, the sun having parched them in the blossom;” the barley was “indifferent good;” and there was “a good increase of Indian corn.” “They had about a peck of meal a week to a person; or now, since harvest, Indian corn to that proportion.”[269]