Taking up the settlement of the colonies more in detail, we may commence with New England. The first inhabitants of Massachusetts were pre-dominantly from the eastern half of England. This contains the counties in which Nordic influence had probably been the strongest, and the early settlement of Massachusetts was by an overwhelmingly Nordic stock, judging alike by place of origin and by family and personal names. A study of the origin of the pioneers of Plymouth, Watertown, and Dedham shows that two-thirds of them came from a region along the English coast between London and the Wash and mostly from the southern part of that stretch of territory.
Although given an important position by historians because of its priority and the romantic incidents connected with its founding, Plymouth Colony, because of its small size, played only a minor part in the early development of the American nation. Its settlers, as shown by the detailed accounts available concerning many of them, were people of the lower and middle classes, mostly of good character but attracting to their numbers also adventurers and men of more doubtful quality.
Within five or six years after the landing at Plymouth Rock, the Plymouth settlers were already outnumbered by other settlers in New England, while Plymouth itself was the parent of a number of other settlements that outstripped it. During the decade 1630-40 it became a province of eight small towns, seven of them stretching for fifty miles along the shore of Cape Cod Bay, from Scituate to Yarmouth, with Taunton lying twenty-five miles inland. The entire colony would probably have moved to the Connecticut River valley, had not the competition of settlers from Massachusetts Bay been too strong. Two generations after the original settlement there the number of inhabitants of Plymouth was no greater than it was at the start.
In the decade of 1620-30 there was a rapid but sporadic settlement of small towns on or near the Massachusetts coast, but the first great migration was that represented by the arrival of Governor Winthrop's fleet in Massachusetts Bay in 1630. The new arrivals settled Boston, Charlestown, Medford, Watertown, Roxbury, Lynn, and Dorchester. During the next decade the Puritan emigration from England continued, again largely from the northern and eastern counties, overwhelmingly of as nearly pure Nordic stock as Great Britain could show.
Showing Highlands and Lowlands of Scotland.
The difference in antecedents of the Massachusetts Bay Colony from that of Plymouth is reflected in the differences in geographical and social origin. The Pilgrim Fathers, as every one knows, took their start from Scrooby in Yorkshire at the point where this county joins Lincolnshire and Northamptonshire, under the leadership of Bradford, the local postmaster and Robinson the clergyman. The capital for the enterprise was almost all subscribed in London, and only one-third of the first settlers were members of Robinson's congregation. The part of Scrooby and Holland in that colony has therefore often been exaggerated. The English founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony were on the other hand not merely religious dissenters, but powerful members of the Puritan nobility. The group attracted to their enterprise was therefore one of a somewhat wider social outlook. It was distinguished for the same reason from most of the later emigration.
The people who settled in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the decade of 1630-40 doubtless had every desire to better their condition, and their zeal in seizing land from the Indians showed that they were able to put this desire into effect successfully. Their motive in emigrating, however, was more political than was that of many later colonists, most of whom came frankly to find fortune in a new country.