The Empire Annual for Girls, 1911

by Various

The "Mayflower"

Perhaps a little of what they did that day they knew. Yet could they, we wonder, have realised that in quitting England with their husbands and fathers in order, with them, to worship God according to the manner bidden by their conscience, they were giving themselves a name glorious among women? Or that, because of them and theirs, the name of the little tattered, battered ship they were soon to leave, after weary months of danger from winds and seas, was to live as long as history. Thousands of great ships have gone out from England since the day on which the "Mayflower" sailed from Plymouth, yet which of them had a name like hers?

Tried as the "Mayflower" women were, their trials were only beginning. Even while they waited for their husbands to find a place of settlement, one of their number, wife of William Bradford—a man later to be their governor—fell overboard and was drowned. When they did at last land they had to face, not only the terrors of a North American winter, but sickness brought on by the hard work and poor food following the effects of overcrowding on the voyage.

Soon the death-rate in this small village amounted to as much as two to three persons a day. Wolves howled at night, Indians crept out to spy from behind trees, cruel winds shook their frail wooden houses and froze the dwellers in them, but the courage of the women pioneers of New England never faltered, and when, one by one, they died, worn out by hardship, they had done their noble part in building an altar to Him whom, in their own land, they had not been permitted to serve as they would.

For many years the task of helping to found settlements was the only work done by women in the way of opening up new territory. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries most of our discoveries were still those of the mariner, who could scarcely take his wife to sea. But in the nineteenth came the rise of foreign missions, as well as the acknowledgment of the need of inland exploration, and in this work the explorer's wife often shared in the risks and adventures of her husband.

When Robert Moffat began his missionary labours in South Africa in 1816, he had not only to preach the gospel to what were often bloodthirsty savages, but he had to plunge into the unknown. Three years later he married Mary Smith, who was henceforth to be his companion in all his journeys, and to face, with a courage not less than his own, the tropical heat, the poisonous insects, the savage beasts, the fierce natives of a territory untrod by the white man, and who had to do all this in a day before medicine had discovered cures for jungle-sickness and poisons, before invention had improved methods of travel, and before knowledge had been able to prepare maps or to write guides.

It was the daughter of Mary Moffat who became the wife of the greatest of all explorers, David Livingstone, and who like her mother, was to set her foot where no white men or women had stood before.

Their first home was at Mabotsa, about two hundred miles from what is now the city of Pretoria. But soon Livingstone began the series of journeys which was to make his name famous. With his wife he travelled in a roomy wagon, drawn by bullocks at a rate of about two miles an hour. But they often suffered intensely from the heat and the scarcity of water. Then the mosquitoes were always troublesome, and frequently even the slow progress they were making would be interrupted by the death of one of the bullocks, killed by the deadly tsetse. At other times they would halt before a dense bunch of trees, and would have to stop until a clearing had been cut through.

Such was the life of Mrs. Livingstone during her first years in Africa. For a time, following this, she lived in England with her children, and had there to endure sufferings greater than any she had shared with her husband, for during most of her time at home Livingstone was cut off from the world in the middle of Africa. When he reached the coast once more she went back to him, unable to endure the separation longer.

But, soon after landing, her health gave way. At the end of April her condition was hopeless; she lay upon "a rude bed formed of boxes, but covered with a soft mattress," and thus, her husband beside her, she died in the heart of the great continent for which she and those most dear to her had spent themselves.