[A Harbor for Ships]
“It hath a fair river, fit for harboring of ships, and abounds with rich and goodly meadows.” This description of New Haven, or Quinnipiac, as the Indians called it, was brought back to Boston in the summer of 1637, after the Pequot War, by some of the English soldiers who had pursued the flying Pequots into that part of Connecticut and had noticed the good harbor of New Haven as they passed.
The report sounded so pleasant and so satisfactory in the ears of a company of London merchants, who, with their families and their fortunes, had recently come to New England and were looking about for a suitable spot in which to settle, that they decided to visit this place and judge of it for themselves.
These people, about two hundred and fifty in number, had arrived in Boston in June of that same year, after a voyage of two months. Of course in the small ships of those days there must have been many discomforts, even in a pleasant season, and no doubt some of the people were seasick. An old record of that time says, “We fetched out the children and others that lay groaning in the cabins, and having stretched a rope from the steerage to the mainmast, made them stand some on one side and some on the other and sway it up and down till they were warm. By this means they soon grew well and merry. ... When the ship heaved and set more than usual a few were sick, but of these such as came upon deck and bestirred themselves were presently well again, therefore our captain set our children and young men to some harmless exercises, in which the seamen were very active and did our people much good, though they would sometimes play the wags with them.” When at last the Hector dropped anchor in Boston Harbor, and “there came a smell off the shore like the smell of a garden,” her passengers must have been glad that the long voyage was over.
The two leaders of the company were Theophilus Eaton, a successful shipping merchant of London, a man of affairs and of great personal dignity and kindliness, and his friend, Reverend John Davenport, a London clergyman, who, like many other Puritan ministers of those days, had been obliged to leave England on account of his religious opinions. These two men had been schoolboys together in the town of Coventry, they had been associated later in London, they came together to America, and they remained friends to the end of their lives.
As many of their party were merchants, and not farmers like a large number of the settlers on the Connecticut River at Hartford, it was important to select a place for their colony which would be convenient for trade and where there was a good harbor for the commerce they hoped to establish. For this reason the report of Quinnipiac interested them, and in September several members of the company went to Quinnipiac and liked it so well that seven men were left there through the winter to prepare for the coming of the rest in the spring. In April the whole number removed there from Boston.
The people of Massachusetts Bay were sorry to have them go. They would have been glad to have this rich and influential company join their colony, but these new settlers wished to found a colony of their own in which they could carry out their own ideas of what a model state should be, both in civil and religious matters. They took ship, therefore, from Boston for Quinnipiac, carrying all their goods and provisions with them. The expedition was well fitted out and all its details had been carefully planned before they left England. Friends already in the colonies had written offering suggestions: “Bring good store of clothes and bedding with you; bring paper and linseed oil for your windows, with cotton yarn for your lamps.”
As they sailed into Quinnipiac Harbor they saw for the first time the two great cliffs, the East and West Rocks, called by the Dutch “the Red Hills,” which still stand like guardians, one on each side of the present city of New Haven. On the level plain between them, which is watered by several small streams, they determined to build their town and to place it at the head of the beautiful harbor.
They made large and generous plans for it. They laid it out in regular squares and set aside a great open space in the center for a market-place. This is the New Haven Green, which exists to-day just as John Brockett, the surveyor, laid it out in 1638. It is still the largest public square in the heart of any city in the United States. In the middle of the Green they built the first “meeting-house.” It was fifty feet square, made of rough timbers, with a small tower on top where the drummer stood on Sundays to “drum” the people to church; for at first there were no bells. Each person had a seat carefully assigned to him, or her, in the meeting-house. Sometimes the boys sat with the soldiers near the door. We read later in the records that at one time the children in the galleries were so restless during the long sermons, that “tithing-men” were appointed “to take a stick or wand and smite such as are of uncomely behavior in the meeting and acquaint their parents.” On week-days the children went to school in a schoolhouse which was built on the Green.
The town of New Haven was soon noted for its large and fine houses, Eaton’s having nineteen fireplaces according to tradition, and Davenport’s, thirteen. But at first any kind of shelter was used for protection. The people met under an oak tree for service on the first Sunday after landing and Reverend John Davenport preached a sermon to them on the “Temptation of the Wilderness,” so it is said. During the first winter some of them slept in cellars dug out in the banks of one of the creeks and covered with earth. A boy named Michael Wigglesworth, who came to New Haven with his parents in October, 1638, when he was nine years old, lived in one of these cellars. When he grew up he wrote his autobiography and in it he says, “I remember that one great rain brake in upon us and drenched me so in my bed, being asleep, that I fell sick upon it, but the Lord in mercy spared my life and restored my health.”