Among these was the mother of the two children, of whom we just spoke. The boy's name was Fred, and he was eight years old; the name of his sister was Agnes, and she was seven.
They were strong and healthy children, but their frail mother could not stand the hardships of the voyage. For six years she had lived in anxiety, for in 1624 her husband had left England to settle in the plymouth Colony, which the Pilgrims had established in 1620. He was very sincere in his faith, and rather than stay in good old England and do what his conscience forbade him, he joined the sturdy emigrants who left their homes for the Lord's sake, as they were fully convinced.
He arrived safely in Plymouth Colony and at first sent cheering letters to his wife. But suddenly these ceased, and she worried day and night over her far-away husband. She toiled diligently, so that her children did not suffer for lack of bread, but the worry broke her heart, and when she had saved a little sum of money, enough to pay for her voyage, she left England and joined the colonists who in ever larger numbers sought the land of freedom across the sea.
She did not live to set her foot on that strange, unknown land, but the good Lord called her out of all trouble, and she was buried in the sea.
Fred was old enough to realize what the death of his beloved mother meant, and Agnes, too, wept bitterly when they took away her mother and softly and slowly laid her away in the rolling waves.
The little band of emigrants at first worried considerably about what to do with the children. The majority of them were poor and blessed with large families so that they did not have any food to spare. Hence their joy was great when Clara Bradley volunteered to adopt the children as her own.
She herself was on the way to meet her husband, who two years before, in 1628, had left England with the Puritans to settle in the new territory granted by the King to the Massachusetts Company. The Puritans, as you know, differed from the Pilgrims in many respects; in consequence, they wished to establish their own settlements far enough away from the Plymouth Colony to avoid misunderstanding and trouble.
As soon as Mr. Bradley had arrived in the new settlement he wrote a long letter to his wife in which he described the wonderful country in which he had found a new home. But he begged her to wait for some time until he had built a house, cleared a small piece of land, and made other preparations to welcome his young and beautiful wife.
In England Mr. Bradley had been a merchant, and his wife came from a rich family so that he did not care to burden her with the hardships of primitive pioneer life. But she was a sensible woman, who was not afraid to work, and since she loved her husband dearly, she insisted that she would come and share with him the woe and weal of his life.
When, therefore, in 1630, the Massachusetts Company gave the people in the Colony the right to govern themselves, and in consequence, thousands of Puritans were willing to go to America, she would stay in England no longer, but sold her property, collected her belongings, and sailed with the first band of emigrants, in whose midst was also John Winthrop, the new governor.