JAMESTOWN, THE FIRST ENGLISH SETTLEMENT
As they had been warned, however, to establish this settlement far up a navigable river, out of danger from wandering vessels of the Spanish Main, they entered the beautiful river of Powhatan, which they called the James, and sailed up it for some fifty miles until they came to a wooded island, which they chose as the site of their colony. There they cut logs and built the rude huts which marked the site of Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement within the limits of what we now know as the United States of America.
THE MAYFLOWER
The pilgrim ship is shown as it entered Plymouth Harbor bringing the first New England settlers.
Through sorrow and privations, surrounded by the nameless terrors of an unknown wilderness, harassed by savages, and disheartened by sickness, the little colony survived as by a miracle, and became the nucleus of a nation. Of the old Jamestown nothing now remains but an ancient church tower overgrown with ivy and a few crumbling tombstones. But its honor remains, secure in the hearts of a grateful people.
EDWARD WINSLOW
From the only portrait of a “Mayflower” pilgrim in existence. Edward Winslow was one of the governors of Plymouth colony.
The failure of the Popham colony had discouraged the Plymouth Company, and it was not until Jamestown was a flourishing village that a permanent settlement was made in the northern part of the region which King James had granted to the Virginia Company. Those years had been years of strife and sorrow in England. The king in the narrow bigotry of his ecclesiastical views, had declared that if any refused to conform to the rules of worship prescribed by the established Church of England, he would “harry them out of the land,” and King James had kept his word. Many Englishmen had been “harried out of the land,” and had taken refuge on the continent of Europe; but the band for whom history was reserving the largest place had escaped from Scrooby in Nottinghamshire and established themselves at Leyden, Holland. Here they had prospered; but they were still English, and, seeing their children growing up with distinctly Dutch characteristics, they determined to migrate to a land where the son of an Englishman would grow up an Englishman. It is often said that the chief aim of the Puritans was to settle in a land where they could worship God as they pleased. This, however, they were quite at liberty to do in Holland. It might be said with greater truthfulness that they desired to settle in a land where they could compel others to worship God as they commanded—and this they managed quite effectively for some years after their landing.