The Puritan did the same. Oceanus Hopkins was born on the high seas in the Mayflower, 1620; Peregrine White came into the world as the same vessel touched at Cape Cod; Sea-born Egginton, whose birth “happened in his berth,” as Hood would say, is set down as owner of some land and a batch of negroes later on (Hotten, p. 453); while the marriage of Sea-mercy Adams with Mary Brett is recorded, in 1686, in Philadelphia (Watson’s “Annals of Philadelphia,” 1. 503). Again, we find the following:—
“1626, Nov. 6. Grant of denization to Bonaventure Browne, born beyond sea, but of English parents.”—C. S. P.
No doubt his parents went over the Atlantic on board the Bonaventure, which was plying then betwixt England and the colonies (vide list of ships in Hotten’s “Emigrants,” pp. vii. and 35).
We have another instance in the “baptismes” of St. George’s, Barbados:
“1678, Oct. 13. Samuel, ye son of Bonaventure Jellfes.”
Allowing the father to be forty years old, his parents would be crossing the water about the time the good ship Bonaventure was plying.
Again, we find the following (Hotten, p. 245):—
“Muster of John Laydon:
“John Laydon, aged 44, in the Swan, 1606.
“Anne Laydon, aged 30, in the Mary Margett, 1608.
“Virginia Laydon (daughter), borne in Virginia.”
All this, as will be readily conceived, has tended to give a marked character to New England nomenclature. The very names of the children born to these religious refugees are one of the most significant tokens to us in the nineteenth century of the sense of liberty they felt in the present, and of the oppression they had undergone in the past.
If we turn from these lists of passengers, found in the archives of English ports, not to mention “musters” already quoted, to records preserved by our Transatlantic cousins, we readily trace the effect of Puritanism on the first generation of native-born Americans.