The Pilgrim Story / Being largely a compilation from the documents of Governor Bradford and Governor Winslow, severally and in collaboration; together with a list of Mayflower passengers.

by William Franklin Atwood

PREFACE

No phase of early American history presents a finer example of faith, fortitude and determination of purpose than the story of that little band of devout souls who landed at Plymouth in the winter of 1620 and to whom we refer as the Pilgrims.

In the following limited pages the writer attempts to present something of the conditions obtaining in England prior to the Departure, also something of the struggles, privations, courage and forbearance during the first years of the settlement at Plymouth.

In so doing dependence is placed particularly upon the contemporaneous writings of Bradford and Winslow, both members of the Mayflower party.

With the vast bibliography relating to the Pilgrim history, together with the requirements of brevity, it is indeed fortunate that we are able to look to those who played such an important part in this historic episode and who were thoughtful enough to leave a record for posterity.

It is difficult to epitomize a story so broad and sweeping in its ramifications, its religious and material aspects and its touch of romanticism. Consequently it is intended to include only such events as may prove of interest and value to the reader as adduced from the recognized authorities.

These authorities as before indicated are:

Bradford, William: History of Plimouth Plantation. (Printed from the original manuscript in 1898 under the supervision of the Secretary of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.) Young, Alexander: Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers. (1880.) Including Mourt’s Relation (London 1622) by William Bradford and Edward Winslow in collaboration; Good News from England, Winslow’s Journal of 1622-23 (London 1624); Winslow’s Relation and Winslow’s Brief Narrative. Hazard, Ebenezer; Hazard’s Historical Collections, Vol. 1. Including Old Colony and Plymouth Records, Philadelphia (1812).

Note:—With regard to the original manuscript of Bradford’s History of Plymouth Plantation, it may be stated that it was first obtained by Thomas Prince, the historian, from Judge Sewall, to whom it was “lent but only lent” by Major John Bradford of Kingston, son of Major William Bradford, formerly Deputy Governor of the Plymouth Colony, and grandson of Governor William Bradford.

This precious document which seems to have passed through several hands, finally found refuge, together with Prince’s library, in the tower of the Old South Church in Boston, whence it later disappeared.

In 1856 it was found in the library of the Lord Bishop of London, at Fulham Palace. A transcript was made and it was printed in Boston the same year, under the auspices of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

In 1897 the original manuscript was brought to this country by the Hon. Thomas F. Bayard, our Ambassador to England at the time, to whom it had been delivered by the Rt. Rev. Mandell Creighton, Lord Bishop of London. Much credit is due to the late Senator George F. Hoar of Massachusetts, to the former Bishop of London, Dr. Temple, who later became the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the aforementioned Ambassador Bayard, who were all in accord as to the right and justice of the transfer.

This historic document now reposes in the state library in the State House in Boston, priceless in both historic and sentimental value.

W. F. A.

FOREWORD
Expansion on Cape Cod

The early settlements on Cape Cod all came about under the aegis of the parent colony in Plymouth. Several times in Pilgrim chronicles we read how Captain Myles Standish was sent to Sandwich, Barnstable and Yarmouth on tours of inspection and to supervise the division of lands purchased for little or nothing by the newcomers from the remnants of an Indian population decimated years before by disease.

Direct Pilgrim influence on the religious life, the administration and the courts of the Cape settlements continued from the earliest beginnings at Sandwich in 1637, with steadily diminishing strength, until the election of Thomas Prence of Eastham as Governor of Plymouth Colony in 1657. Meanwhile the parent settlement itself was coming under the domination of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and its Puritan hierarchs. The Plymouth connection finally lapsed, for all practical purposes, in 1685, when Plymouth Colony was divided up into Plymouth, Barnstable and Bristol Counties.

First Cape settlement was in 1637, when a band of Puritan families from Saugus and Lynn on the North Shore got permission from the Pilgrim Fathers to migrate to the precincts of the Plymouth Colony, of which the Cape was a part. Some Pilgrim families from Duxbury and Plymouth came along with these first settlers to carve out homesteads in the Sandwich area.

Next towns to be settled were Yarmouth and Barnstable, in 1639, an earlier attempt to populate the Mattacheesett section of what is now Barnstable having failed.

Yarmouth was a direct offshoot of Pilgrim Plymouth, and prominent among its settlers was Giles Hopkins, son of Stephen Hopkins, who came over with his father on the Mayflower.

Barnstable, at its inception, was dominated by the personality of the Rev. John Lothrop, a very strongminded man of dissident Pilgrim persuasion who, together with fifty of his parishioners, had once served two years in jail in England for religious schism. For a time the spirit of controversy continued in the new Cape Colony, fanned by the radical views of Marmaduke Matthews, a firebrand Welshman. But by the time Captain Myles Standish and two companions came down from Plymouth in 1643 to divide up the salt hay marshes, cleared farmlands and woods of Barnstable into legally recorded homesteads, the colony had settled down and become absorbed with more workaday matters.

Last of the very early Cape Cod towns to be settled was Eastham in 1644, by a party led by the Rev. John Mayo, bearer of another of the names later to become famous on the Cape in its great mercantilist period.

Falmouth, in 1686, fissioned off quite directly from Plymouth, and was incorporated in 1686, originally under the name of Succonesset. Harwich officially came into being in 1694, as an offshoot from Barnstable, and very much later, in 1803, gave rise to Brewster. Dennis, meanwhile, had fissioned from Yarmouth in 1794. But by this time Pilgrim origins and influence were but the dimmest of memories.

Also influential on the early Cape, after the middle 1650’s, were the Quakers, at first persecuted, but eventually accepted as a manifestly superior kind of people. They, too, quickly merged during the following century into the Cape Cod way of life, and became indistinguishable from families of Pilgrim or Puritan origin.

Stock Scene, showing church attended by Brewster and approximate location of the stocks in Scrooby