[16] On the board were a saltcellar, wooden plates or trenchers, wooden or pewter spoons, and knives, but no china, no glass. Forks, it is said, were not known even in England till 1608, and the first ever seen in New England were at Governor Winthrop's table in 1632. Those who wished a drink of water drank from a single wooden tankard passed around the table; or they went to the bucket and used a gourd.
[17] This was a large sum in those days, and about as much as was raised by taxation in a year. The General Court which voted the money, it has been said, was "the first body in which the people, by their representatives, ever gave their own money to found a place of education."
[18] The Friends, or Quakers, lived pure, upright, simple lives. They protested against all forms and ceremonies, and against all church government. They refused to take any oaths, to use any titles, or to serve in war, because they thought these things wrong. They were much persecuted in England.
[19] Another incident which gives us an insight into the character of these early times is the witchcraft delusion of 1692. Nearly everybody in those days believed in witchcraft, and several persons in the colonies had been put to death as witches. When, therefore, in 1692, the children of a Salem minister began to behave queerly and said that an Indian slave woman had bewitched them, they were believed. But the delusion did not stop with the children. In a few weeks scores of people in Salem were accusing their neighbors of all sorts of crimes and witch orgies. Many declared that the witches stuck pins into them. Twenty persons were put to death as witches before the craze came to an end.
[20] The New Haven Colony was destroyed as a distinct colony because its people offended the king by sheltering Edward Whalley and William Goffe, two of the regicides, or judges who sat in the tribunal that condemned Charles I. When they fled to New England in 1660, a royal order for their arrest was sent over after them, and a hot pursuit began. For a month they lived in a cave, at other times in cellars in Milford, Guilford, and New Haven; and once they hid under a bridge while their pursuers galloped past overhead. After hiding in these ways about New Haven for three years they went to Hadley in Massachusetts, where all trace of them disappears.
CHAPTER VI
THE MIDDLE AND SOUTHERN COLONIES
THE COMING OF THE DUTCH.—We have now seen how English colonies were planted in the lands about Chesapeake Bay, and in New England. Into the country lying between, there came in 1609 an intruder in the form of a little Dutch ship called the Half-Moon. The Dutch East India Company had fitted her out and sent Captain Henry Hudson in her to seek a northeasterly passage to China. Driven back by ice in his attempt to sail north of Europe, Hudson turned westward, and came at last to Delaware Bay. Up this the Half-Moon went a little way, but, grounding on the shoals, Hudson turned about, followed the coast northward, and sailed up the river now called by his name. He went as far as the site of Albany; then, finding that the Hudson was not a passage through the continent, he returned to Europe. [1]
[Illustration: LANDING OF HUDSON. From an old print.]
DISCOVERIES OF BLOCK AND MAY.—The discovery of the Hudson gave Holland or the Netherlands a claim to the country it drained, and year after year Dutch explorers visited the region. One of them, Adrien Block, (in 1614) went through Long Island Sound, ascended the Connecticut River as far as the site of Hartford, and sailed along the coast to a point beyond Cape Cod; Block Island now bears his name. Another, May, went southward, passed between two capes, [2] and explored Delaware Bay. The Dutch then claimed the country from the Delaware to Cape Cod; that is, as far as May and Block had explored.