After a week of anxious waiting their return must have been hailed with delight on board the Mayflower, and their good tidings warmly welcomed. As with all sails set the good ship made her way into the harbor, eager eyes doubtless watched with joy the high hills of Manomet, the wooded bluffs, the shining, protecting beaches, the fair island, the low friendly stretch of the mainland sloping back to the picturesque hillsides, which make Plymouth harbor at all times and seasons a goodly sight to look upon. And here at length lay safely at anchor the
“ ... simple Mayflower of the salt-sea mead!”
And now, “Courteous Reader,” as writes that most faithful secretary of the Pilgrims, Nathaniel Morton, in his New England Memorial (1669), “that I may not hold thee too long in the porch,” even in such goodly company, I bid you welcome to the Plymouth of to-day. For in the harbor, the sand-dunes, the green hillsides and the fresh valleys and
meadows, in the blue streams and ponds, the past is inseparably blended with the present. A small theatre it is, and the actors were but few who played such important rôles in the building up of a nation, but the few memorials in which that early struggle for existence is recorded are here lovingly preserved.
From the Rock where they landed we may follow their weary footsteps up the steep ascent of the first street, now named for Leyden, their city of refuge, and which may well be called the Via Sacra of Plymouth. Running back from the waterside to the foot of Burial Hill, and parallel to the Town Brook, it formed the centre of their daily toil, the scene of their early joys and sorrows. Here on either hand were staked out the homesteads for the nineteen first families; here with sturdy courage and endless labor they dragged the trees felled outside the clearing, and built their rude houses, thatching them with swamp-grass.
The site of their first or “Common-House” is now marked, and near the lot assigned to Elder Brewster still we may stop to drink from the Pilgrim Spring: the “delicate water” is fresh and sweet now as when our thirsty forefathers delighted in it.
