The Pilgrims by Sam Fitzgerald

Author:Sam Fitzgerald [Sam Fitzgerald]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781612307602
Publisher: New Word City, LLC
Published: 2014-02-18T05:00:00+00:00

The colony of sixty Pilgrims was thankful for its settlement, a row of rude, thatched huts with straw roofs lining Plymouth’s Town Brook. Their closest English neighbors were fishermen dispersed in small villages along the coast of Maine or far south in Virginia.

In the Canadian far north were the hostile French. In lands surrounding New York harbor and the Hudson River (later known as Albany), the Dutch set up a trading post. The Pilgrims’ native homeland lay thousands of miles across the Atlantic. Behind them to the west was the wilderness of New England. Everywhere, they were surrounded by Indians – Pamet and Nauset on Cape Cod, Wampanoag and Narragansett to the south and west, and Massachusetts to the north.

Families divided were reunited just a year after the Pilgrims first set foot on land off Cape Cod, when a ship from London (the Fortune) sailed into Plymouth Harbor, carrying thirty-five men, women, and children. Among those onboard were William Brewster’s son, Jonathan, and Edward Winslow’s younger brother, John. The Leiden congregation’s former deacon, Robert Cushman, arrived in the colony with his son, Thomas, and a nineteen-year-old French-speaking Walloon, Philip De La Noye, an ancestor of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

As well as passengers, the Fortune delivered vital documents, including a patent signed by Sir Ferdinando Gorges and members of the new Council of New England, previously the Plymouth Company, promising the colonists each 100 acres of land after seven years of working for the company in the New World.

There was also a furious note from Thomas Weston, demanding that they sign their contract with the Merchant Adventurers – the same contract they had refused to sign before they left England. Weston said the preliminary terms had been so disadvantageous to the Merchant Adventurers that he hadn’t discussed them with the investors, and if he had, the Pilgrims would have never left England. He demanded that the Pilgrims account for the funds they had received since he had been forced to give the investors only a vague summation of where their money had gone. He also bemoaned that the Mayflower had returned to England with no cargo. “Thank you send no lading in the ship is wonderful,” Weston wrote, “and worthily distasted. I know your weaknes was the cause of it, and I believe more weakness of judgmente, than weaknes of hands. A quarter of the time you spente in discoursing, arguing, and consulting, would have done much more, but that is past.”

Money and supplies from London would cease, Weston said, unless the contract was signed. In the sole conciliatory note, Weston promised that if the Pilgrims held up their end of the bargain, he would never quit the business, even if every other member of the Merchant Adventurers did so. In his Sunday sermon on “The Dangers of Self-Love,” Deacon Cushman urged the Pilgrims to sign the contract. They did.

Governor Bradford wrote a sharp response to Weston’s hectoring letter, which had been addressed to John Carver, who, he said, was dead,

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