In the morning the longed-for ship arrived; but through some negligence of the sailors, the vessel containing the women, their little ones, and the property, had run aground. The men stood in groups on the shore; and that no time might be lost, the captain sent his boat to convey some of them on board, while a squad of sailors were detailed to help get the grounded barque once more afloat. But alack, by this time so considerable a gathering in such a place, and at an hour so unusual, had attracted attention; information was conveyed to the neighboring authorities; and as the boat which had already taken the great part of the men to the ship, was again returning to the shore, the captain espied a large company, some on horseback, some afoot, but all armed, advancing towards the spot where the hapless barque still lay aground with the few remaining men grouped about it. Alarmed, the mariner put back to his vessel, swore by the sacrament that he would not stay, and deaf to the importunities of his sad passengers, he spread his sails, weighed anchor, and was soon out of sight.[35]

We may imagine with what aching hearts the poor exiles in the ship looked towards the receding shore, to their disconsolate companions, and to their precious wives and children, who stood there “crying for fear and quaking with cold.” Those on board the ship had no property, not even a change of raiment; and they had scarcely a penny in their pockets. But the loss of their possessions was as nothing to the cruel stroke which had severed them from those they best loved on earth.[36]

“Robinson—honest and able general as he was in every sense—had resolved to be the last to embark. He was therefore a witness of the scene of distress and agony which ensued on the departure of the ship. The outburst of grief was not to be restrained. Some of the women wept aloud; others felt too deeply, were too much bewildered, to indulge in utterance of any kind; while the children, partly from seeing what had happened, and partly from a vague impression that something dreadful had come, mingled their sobs and cries in the general lamentation. As the sail of the ship faded away upon the distant waters, the wives felt as if one stroke had reduced them all to widowhood, and every child that had reached years of consciousness felt as one who in a moment had become fatherless. But thus dark are the chapters in human affairs in which the good have often to become students, and from which they have commonly had to learn their special lessons.”[37]

On the approach of the officers some of the men escaped, others remained to assist the helpless. These were apprehended and “conveyed from constable to constable, till their persecutors were weary of so large a number of captives and permitted them to go their way.”[38]

As to the voyagers, the very elements seemed to war against them. They soon encountered foul weather, and were driven far along the coast of Norway; “nor sun, nor moon, nor stars, for many days appeared.” Once they gave up all for lost, thinking the ship had foundered. “But when,” says a writer who was himself on board, “man’s hope and help wholly failed, the Lord’s power and mercy appeared for their recovery, for the ship rose again, and gave the mariners courage once more to manage her. While the waters ran into their very ears and mouths, and all cried ‘We sink! we sink!’ they also said, if not with miraculous, yet with a great height of divine faith, ‘Yet, Lord, thou canst save! yet, Lord, thou canst save!’ And He who holds the winds in his fist, and the waters in the hollow of his hand, did hear and save them.”[39]

Eventually the storm-tossed ship dropped anchor in Amsterdam harbor; and “in the end,” says Young, “notwithstanding all these tortures, the Pilgrims all got over, some at one time and some at another, and met together again, according to their desire, with no small rejoicing.”[40]

CHAPTER II.
THE HALT.

“Weep ye not for the dead, neither bemoan him; but weep sore for him that goeth away: for he shall return no more, nor see his native country.” Jer. 22:10.

When the Pilgrims stepped from the deck of their vessel upon the quays of Amsterdam, they felt that sad, aching sense of utter desolation which always smites exiled hearts in a strange country. But there was much about Amsterdam which tended to increase this natural homesickness, and to make the blood pulse still more coldly through their veins. Every thing was novel; the manners, the costume, the architecture, the language of the people. Their first steps were involved in an apparently inextricable maze; they were confounded by the bewildering confusion of land and water. Canals, crawled with their sluggish water, before them and behind them, to the right and to the left. Indeed, the town was so much interwoven with havens, that the oozy ground was cut up into ninety-five islands or detached blocks, connected with each other by two hundred and ninety fantastic bridges. The principal havens, called grachts, were from a hundred to a hundred and forty feet wide, and extended in semicircular curves one after the other through the town.