[EMBARKATION OF THE PILGRIMS]
From Southampton
(August 5, 1620)
Copyright, 1898, by Edward Moran.
VII.
EMBARKATION OF THE PILGRIMS FROM SOUTHAMPTON, AUGUST 5, 1620.[J]
A sadder journey than that of the Pilgrims, both in its inception in leaving home and kindred and fleeing from persecution, and in its ending in the inconceivable hardships which they had to endure in the new world, was probably never undertaken than when, on August 5, 1620, the "Mayflower" sailed out of the harbor of Southampton.
It must have been with heavy hearts and the gloomiest forebodings, and yet buoyed up with the hope of finding a permanent refuge beyond the ocean, for the exercise of that freedom of conscience for which they had previously found only a temporary abode at Leyden, Holland, that the hundred brave men and women, representing twenty-three different families, consigned their lives and fortunes into the hands of the crew of the little one hundred and sixty ton vessel that for almost five long months was to battle with storm and winds across the dreaded Atlantic, until on December 21, 1620, they anchored on the shores of Massachusetts, and, with that spirit of loyalty, still, to the land from which they had fled, named the spot where they first landed, Plymouth Rock, to which they had been driven in the stress and storm, instead of reaching the Virginia colony, for which they had set sail.
What that departure of the Pilgrims from England meant to those left behind on the shore at Southampton can hardly be conceived by those who, in our day, at some magnificent steamship pier, amid the strains of music and a shower of flowers, now and anon wave a farewell to their friends, perhaps bound on a pleasure tour in some leviathan of the ocean, of twenty thousand or more tons burden, and fitted up in more regal splendor than the most gorgeous palaces of the age of the Pilgrims.