Governor Draper then introduced the President. "This Monument," he said, "shows that our people and our State and National Government honour and revere the Pilgrims and the great principles of government they enunciated," and for that reason, he added, "It is most fitting that this Monument, whose cornerstone was laid by one President, should be dedicated by another."
President Taft declared that the spirit which animated the Pilgrim Fathers had made the history of the United States what it was by furnishing it with the highest ideals of moral life and political citizenship. "It is meet therefore," said he, "that the United States, as well as the State of Massachusetts, should unite in placing here a Memorial to the Pilgrims. The warships that are here with their cannon to testify to its national character typify the strength of that Government whose people have derived much from the spirit and example of the heroic band. Governor Bradford, Elder Brewster, Captain Miles Standish are the types of men in whom as ancestors, either by blood, or by education and example as citizens, the American people may well take pride."
The ceremonies were brought to a close by Miss Barbara Hoyt, a descendant of Elder Brewster, unveiling a bronze tablet over the door of the Monument facing the harbour which bears an appropriate inscription written by Dr. Eliot.
And so this magnificent Monument stands as a landmark which, seen from afar across the ocean, will remind the traveller of the small beginnings of New England when, in the words of Dr. Eliot, fired and led by the love of liberty, the Mayflower Pilgrims here "founded and maintained a State without a king or a noble, and a Church without a bishop or a priest."
It is upon record that in the early days of the Plymouth Plantation an expedition was made in the Mayflower's shallop, a big boat of about fourteen tons, to a point lower down on the coast, where the party made friends with the Shawmut Indians and found a fine place for shipping, and forty-seven beautiful islands, which they greatly admired as they sailed in and out amongst them. This was the future Boston Harbour.
It is interesting to reflect that when, a decade and more after the Pilgrim Fathers had landed in America, some hundreds of Puritan colonists embarked for Massachusetts, many of the leading burgesses of the then only Boston—that Old Boston, scene of the Pilgrims' detention and suffering—were of the number. The town cannot claim a contribution to the Mayflower, but it has a boast as proud, for it was because the ancient seaport sent so large a contingent of Puritans to America that it was ordered "that Trimountain," the site overlooking the sheltered waters and the island group which delighted Pilgrim eyes, "shall be called Boston."
Photograph by Hackford, Boston
A Bit of Old Boston