Cooke, the comic actor, who hated to be crowded, once so successfully used upon a stage-driver his extraordinary power of changing the expression of his face,—getting in at one door of the coach, slipping out of the one opposite, and again presenting himself with a new style of visage,—that he took all the inside to himself. And so it has been with the New England character. It has so many phases that it requires almost the entire omnibus of American history to itself. One point is quite certain, that the first settlers had a hard place to land on, and a great many sharp Indian points to provide against after they had landed.
St. Augustine was fifty-five, Jamestown fourteen, and the baby Dutch settlement on Manhattan Island ten years of age, when the little English congregation which had passed thirteen years at Leyden in Holland,—stowed away in two small vessels, one of sixty and the other of one hundred and eighty tons,—stepped out of their cold cabins upon the colder rock of Plymouth. It was four days before Christmas; but for want of good fireplaces they did not hang up their stockings. It was as much as they could do to keep from hanging themselves. Their nearest white neighbors were at Port Royal, Nova Scotia, five hundred miles distant,—a trifle too far away to invite New-Year’s calls.
Most of the party were obliged to wade on shore, thus breaking the ice for those who followed; the spray of the sea freezing as it fell upon them, making them quite ice-clad, in fact almost as shaggy and pointed as their inside purposes and character.
They carried on shore one dead body, the only one who had died on the voyage of one hundred and six days; the first planting in that field, which in time, like the rest of the world, was to be claimed as God’s acre.
Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers and Mothers.
(p. 118)
The soil upon which they settled bore more charters, Indian arrows, and gravestones than pumpkins or corn; and even two years after the landing, we are told that the stock on hand of the latter was so small that only five kernels were allowed for each private,—an allowance which, since the great Rebellion, seems incredibly small.
There was a Carver among the party, and, being a sharp fellow, he was appointed Governor; but as there was but little meat to be sliced,—deer being scarce and high priced,—and the Indians seldom giving any quarter, he soon pined away and died. Cape Cod was not far distant, but the emigrants being without boats, the fish, especially without potatoes, were poor picking. A few years later, however, and there were large fishing-parties made up, which not only took in fish, but each other, by hook and by crook. The grapes of Martha’s Vineyard, at the time of which we speak, hung so high as to be very sour. Besides the Puritans, it is well known, set their faces against the cup, as they did against kissing. The modern town of Dux-bury, which nudges Plymouth on the east, was then too young to afford much game, even for the long reaches of Miles Standish, who was obliged to content himself with such small shooting as the Narragansetts afforded.
Massasoit, however, was the fast friend of the settlers, and made a treaty which, in the bluest times, he always kept in-violate.
In 1629 a patent was received from that accomplished penman Charles I., incorporating “The Governor and Company of Massachusetts Bay, in New England”; which eventually proved to be, what most patents are, not worth the paper it was written on. New Hampshire and a part of Maine, included in this patent, was as early as 1622 sold out to two enterprising young gentlemen, Sir Ferdinand Gorges and Captain John Mason; but after an experiment of nineteen years, these royal speculators resold their state rights to Massachusetts, which held on to them until 1680, when Charles II., in order to make a place for a friend and to encourage lawsuits about titles in the idle courts, erected New Hampshire into a separate Province, independent of Massachusetts, but dependent on himself.