In four days the Arabella was anchored in Salem Harbor. The poor little settlement welcomed some of the newcomers with “a good supper of venison pasty. In the meantime most of our people went on shore upon the land of Cape Ann, which lay very near us, and gathered store of fine strawberries.”
“Salem, where we landed, pleased us not,” wrote one of the men on board to a countess in England. Winthrop, who had been elected governor of the colony they were to found, looked about for a better place to settle, and decided on a site they called Charlestown, on the Charles River. Although they had left England because of their obstinate and foolish king, Charles the First, they named rivers and towns for him, and one of their earliest churches was called King’s Chapel. When no one was allowed to think for himself, or even to wear such clothes as he saw fit, it would have been regarded as almost a crime to speak a word against the king, no matter how much he deserved a bad name.
When Governor Winthrop came back from Charlestown to Salem, he wrote in his journal: “We went to Massachusetts to find out a place for our sitting down.” By “Massachusetts” he meant only that part of the country along Boston Harbor, about fifteen miles south of Salem. Just after his return, his eldest son Henry, who had come over on another ship, arrived at Salem. That very day the young man started with several of the ship’s officers to visit some Indian wigwams. In his journal the father describes what happened:
“They saw, on the other side of the river, a small canoe. He would have had one of the company swim over and fetch it, rather than walk several miles on foot, it being very hot weather, but none of the party could swim but himself; and so he plunged in, and, as he was swimming over, was taken with a cramp a few rods from shore, and drowned.”
“My son Henry! My son Henry!” wrote the bereaved governor to his wife in England. “Ah, poor child. Yet it grieves me much more for my dear daughter. Yet for all these things (I praise my God) I am not discouraged.”
Henry, the son of John Winthrop’s first wife, had been married in England. He had come without his bride to the western wilds to build a little home before sending for her.
Heartsore but not dismayed, Governor Winthrop took his followers and tried to make the settlement at Charlestown, now part of the great city of Boston. But their sufferings were not over. As at Jamestown, on the James River in Virginia about twenty-five years before this, the settlers were ill with malaria and some of them died.
Then a strange old hermit, who had lived about twenty years alone on a tree-topped hill on the other side of the river, came to see the new governor, and invited him to come over the river and build his town on the hill which had been named Three-mount, Tri-mountain, or Tremont. So Winthrop and his people moved once more and named the new place for the city of Boston in England. The old hermit proved to be William Blackstone, a minister from old England. On the Three Mounts he tilled a small farm which extended down into the now historic Boston Common. He had brought from England his library, and spent his time reading, farming, and raising apples. He had left England because he would not worship according to the legal forms there. But he did not like the way the Puritans wished him to worship, either. So he moved away from Boston as soon as he could dispose of his house and other real estate.
Blackstone also had been kind to the Indians. His influence did much toward keeping the red tribes friendly with the white settlers of Boston. On the highest of the three mounts was placed a sort of lighthouse or beacon which sailors could see far down the harbor. This gave the name of Beacon Hill to that part of Boston. On this hill the State House has since been erected. This building has a great dome covered with gold-leaf which glistens in the sun and can be seen for many miles around. “All roads lead” to the dome of the State House in Boston, as the spokes of a wheel come together in the hub. Because of this fact, a humorous writer gave Boston the title of “The Hub of the Universe.”
Though the Indians gave the early settlers very little trouble, the wolves which howled around the settlement were alarming, and sometimes dangerous to the little children. Sometimes a bear would come ambling into “Boston Town.” The people’s cows were pastured on the Common. This made some people who wished to make fun of Boston claim that the narrow, crooked streets of that city were laid out by the cows, as they wandered down from the Common to drink at a certain spring.