Meantime “the career of maritime discovery had been pursued with daring intrepidity and rewarded with brilliant success. The voyages of Gosnold, and Smith, and Hudson, the enterprise of Raleigh, and Delaware, and Gorges, the compilations of Eden, and Willes, and Hakluyt, had filled the commercial world with wonder. Calvinists of the French church had already sought, though vainly, to plant themselves in Brazil, in Carolina, and, with De Monts, in Acadia;”[82] and now, in 1617, some bold thinker and unshrinking speaker among the Leyden Pilgrims, perhaps Brewster, perhaps Bradford, perhaps Robinson himself, proposed to colonize “some of those vast and unpeopled countries of America which were fruitful and fit for habitation, but devoid of all civilized inhabitants; where there were only savage and brutish men, who ranged up and down little otherwise than as wild beasts.”[83]
At the outset the Pilgrims listened to this proposal, some with admiration, some with misgiving, some openly aghast. Bradford’s quaint pages afford us some glimpses of their debates. The doubters said, “It is a great design, and subject to inconceivable perils; as besides the casualties of the seas, which none can be freed from, the length of the voyage is such that the weak bodies of many worn out with age and travel, as many of us are, can never be able to endure; and even if they should, the miseries to which we should be exposed in that land will be too hard for us to bear; ’tis likely that some or all will effect our ruin. There we shall be liable to famine, and nakedness, and want of all things. The change of air, diet, and water, will infect us with sickness; and those who escape these evils will be in danger of the savages, who are cruel, barbarous, and most treacherous in their rage, and merciless when they overcome; not being content only to kill, but delighting to torment men in the most bloody way, flaying men alive with the shells of fishes, cutting off the joints by piece-meal, broiling them on coals, and eating collops of their victims’ flesh while they yet live, and in their very sight.”
As these horrors darkened in their imaginations, the deeply-interested exiles who thronged the council-chamber shuddered with affright. Mothers, hearing the shrill war-whoop in advance, strained their babes yet closer to their breasts. “Surely it could not be thought but the very hearing of these things must move the very bowels of men to grate within them, and make the weak to quake and tremble.”
But the opponents of the project urged still other objections, “and those neither unreasonable nor improbable.” “It will require,” they said, “more money than we can furnish to prepare for such a voyage. Similar schemes have failed;[84] and our experience in removing to Holland teaches us how hard it is to live in a strange country, even though it be a rich and civilized commonwealth. What then shall we do in the frozen wilderness?”
Fear chilled the hearts, doubt paralyzed the nerves of the assembled exiles. Then the more resolute stood up, and, fixing their eyes on the sky, exclaimed, “God will protect us; and he points us on. All great and honorable actions are accompanied with great difficulties, and must be both undertaken and overcome with answerable courage. We grant the dangers of this removal to be tremendous, but not desperate; the difficulties are many, but not invincible; for though many of them are likely, all are not certain. It may be that sundry of the things surmised may never happen; others, by provident care and the use of good means, may be prevented; and all of them, through the help of God, by fortitude and patience may either be borne or overcome. True it is that such attempts are not to be undertaken without good reason; never rashly or lightly, as many have done, for curiosity or hope of gain. But our condition is not ordinary; our ends are good and honorable; our calling lawful and urgent; therefore we may invoke and expect God’s blessing on our proceeding. Yea, though we should lose our lives in this action, yet may we have comfort in it, and our endeavor would be honorable. We live here but as men in exile; and as great miseries may befall us in this place, for the twelve years of truce are now nigh up, and here is nothing but beating of drums and preparations for war, the events whereof are always uncertain. The Spaniard may prove as cruel as the savages of America, and the famine and pestilence as sore here as there, and our liberty less to look out for a remedy.”[85]
It was thus that the undaunted apostles of the future pleaded; and now as always, the policy of active, trustful, and religious courage overbore the timid pleas of the undecided, the plausible doubts of the skeptical, and the wailing dissent of the croakers who paused distrustful of the unknown future and enamoured of the anchored past. The Pilgrims announced their decision to follow in the wake of Columbus, and launch boldly across the Atlantic, trusting God.
CHAPTER IV.
FAREWELL.
“Like Israel’s host to exile driven,