Of the well-known story of the Pilgrims it seems necessary to recall here, first of all, the fact that they were Englishmen who had lived for several years among the Dutch, a people who described themselves upon their coinage as a nation whose "way is on the sea." More than a thousand ships were built every year in Holland where the Pilgrims were sojourning, and everybody lived in a seafaring atmosphere. Though a distinct people, the Pilgrims necessarily absorbed, as one may say, something of the Dutch aptitude for trade and sea life. Thus, when ready to migrate to America, they were able to secure the capital they needed for the venture from merchants who were acquainted with the success that had attended the fishing voyages to the coast. It is worth noting, too, that Captain Thomas Jones, of the _Mayflower_, had fished in Greenland waters, and that Mate Robert Coppin was carried as the pilot of the ship because he had been on the parts of the coast to which the expedition was bound. The Pilgrims intended to settle somewhere near the Hudson River, but on November 11, 1620, the _Mayflower_ was found at anchor under Cape Cod. While lying there a number of the company came to think that a settlement there would serve their purpose well, and the reasons given in support of this proposition are of interest because they show what business ideas animated these Pilgrims. The location, they said, "afforded a good harbor for boats." It was "a place of profitable fishing." "The master and his mate and others experienced in fishing" preferred it to the Greenland fishery where whaling made large profits. Moreover, the situation was "healthy, secure and defensible." While the desire for "freedom to worship God" was perhaps uppermost in their talk, as it was in their writings, the Pilgrims were "intensely practical in applying their theories of Providence and Divine control to the immediate business in hand," as Weeden says, in his _Economic History of New England_.