The summer proved fine, and the harvest good. In November, by which time less than fifty of the original settlers remained alive, Robert Cushman arrived among them, in the ship Fortune, with thirty-five recruits (ten of them women). He also brought a patent (granted by the President and Council of New England), allowing to each settler a hundred acres of land and the power to make laws and govern. In December 1621, in a letter sent home in the ship Fortune, the settlement was first called New Plymouth.

The after history of the settlement may be indicated briefly. It is a story of the slow but noble triumph of all that is finest in the English temper. By honest industry and by that justice which, until the last two generations, usually marked and ennobled our dealings with native tribes, the settlement prospered. The pilgrims honestly paid the Indians for the lands acquired from them. In 1623, they were able to stop an Indian war, which had been provoked by some intemperate colonists, sent out by Thomas Weston to a place twenty miles to the north of New Plymouth.

In 1624, the London merchants sent out one John Lyford, to be clergyman to the community. He was sent home for trying to set up the ritual of the Church of England. Another clergyman, who was sent to them four years later, went mad.

In 1626, many of the London adventurers were bought out. They surrendered their shares for the sum of eighteen hundred pounds, payable in nine yearly instalments. Eight leading planters and four principal merchants in London undertook to make the first six payments in return for the monopoly of the foreign trade. In the reorganization of the company the most prosperous men of the community were made stockholders. They were allotted one share for each member of their families. Each head of a family was granted an extra acre of land, and a title to his house. The cattle, being still few in number, were allotted among groups of families. Few laws were made, though the men sometimes met in General Court to discuss public business.

In 1630, when the second charter arrived, the colony numbered three hundred souls. After that time, its growth was slow, steady, and not very eventful, till the disastrous Indian war of 1676. In 1691 it was merged in the bigger “civil body politic” of Boston.

Emigration nowadays is seldom an act of religious protest, still more seldom an endeavour to found a more perfect human state. Man emigrates now to obtain greater personal opportunity, or in tacit confession of incompetence. When he emigrates in protest, it is in æsthetic protest. The migration is to some place of natural beauty, in which the creation of works of art may proceed under conditions pleasing to their creators.

A generation fond of pleasure, disinclined towards serious thought, and shrinking from hardship, even if it may be swiftly reached, will find it difficult to imagine the temper, courage and manliness of the emigrants who made the first Christian settlement of New England. For a man to give up all things and fare forth into savagery, in order to escape from the responsibilities of life, in order, that is, to serve the devil, “whose feet are bound by civilization,” is common. Giving up all things in order to serve God is a sternness for which prosperity has unfitted us.

Some regard the settling of New Plymouth as the sowing of the seed from which the crop of Modern America has grown. The vulgarity of others has changed the wood of the Mayflower into a forest of family trees. For all the Mayflower’s sailing there is, perhaps, little existing in modern England or America “according to the Primitive Patern in the Word of God.” It would be healthful could either country see herself through the eyes of those pioneers, or see the pioneers as they were. The pilgrims leave no impression of personality on the mind. They were not “remarkable.” Not one of them had compelling personal genius, or marked talent for the work in hand. They were plain men of moderate abilities, who, giving up all things, went to live in the wilds, at unknown cost to themselves, in order to preserve to their children a life in the soul.

John Masefield.