Whose holy works the natives may enlight,—
If Heaven grant this, to see there built I trust,
An English kingdom from the Indian dust.”[476]
But while “unmerciful disaster followed thick and followed faster” this enterprise of Gorges and several kindred ones,[477] smiting them into early graves, Plymouth, clasping hands with God, strengthened daily, and walked forward to assured success. Early in 1624, the annual election occurred. Governor Bradford, anxious to retire, pleaded hard for “rotation in office,” and alleged that that was the “end of annual elections.” But the Pilgrims rightly regarded him as a pivotal-man, and with rare good sense they reëlected him unanimously.[478] When the election was over the “Little James” was well victualed and despatched to the eastward on a fishing expedition. On reaching Damarin’s cove “there arose such a violent and extraordinary storm that the seas broke over such places in the harbor as were deemed absolutely secure, and drove the vessel against great rocks, which beat a hole in her hulk that a horse and cart might have gone through, and afterwards drove her into deep water, where she sank. The master was drowned; the rest of the men, except one, saved their lives with much ado; and all the provisions, salt, tackle, and what else was in her, was lost.”[479] Saddened by this mishap, but undismayed, the Pilgrims now commenced their preparations for planting. “A great part of liberty,” says Seneca, “is a well-governed belly, and to be patient in all wants.”[480] And Corbett, borrowing the same idea, put it into homely English by affirming that “the stomach is the cause of civilization.” He meant that hunger begets labor to satisfy its cravings. “Wants awaken intellect. To gratify them disciplines the mind. The keener the want, the lustier the growth.”[481]
The famine of the past had revealed to the Pilgrims the weakness and inefficiency of the communal plan. It educated them; for on an individual basis they reaped plenty. They overcame hunger by patience. They flanked famine by a skilful social arrangement. Now, as before, each man broke ground for himself.[482] There was no longer an Elysium for sluggards; each reaped as he had sown.
In March, 1624, Winslow returned to Plymouth, after an absence of eight months.[483] He brought with him three heifers and a bull—the first neat cattle that came into New England.[484] The exiles could no longer say, “We are without cattle, and we have no Egypt to go to for corn.”[485] Cattle they now had, and they created an Egypt.
Winslow also brought some “clothing and other necessaries; a carpenter, who died soon, but not until he had rendered himself very useful;” a “salt-man,” who proved “an ignorant, foolish, self-willed fellow,” and only made trouble and waste; and “a preacher, though none of the most eminent and rare”—to whose transportation Cushman wrote that he and Winslow had consented only “to give content to some in London.”[486] Winslow informed his coadjutors of a sad “report that there was among the Merchant-adventurers a strong faction hostile to Plymouth, and especially set against the coming of the rest from Leyden”[487]—which explains the long tarry of Robinson and his flock in Holland.
“It will be remembered,” remarks Palfrey, “that the London adventurers were engaged in a commercial speculation. Several of them sympathized more or less in religious sentiment with the Pilgrims; but even with most of these considerations of pecuniary interest were paramount, and they were, besides, a minority when opposed to the aggregate of those adventurers who had no mind to interest themselves in religious dissensions to the damage of their prospect of gain. Under such circumstances, the policy of the English partners would naturally be to keep in favor with the court and with the council for New England, of which Sir Ferdinand Gorges and other churchmen were leaders. This it was that occasioned the thwarting embarrassments which were persistently interposed to frustrate Robinson’s wish to collect his scattered flock in America. Neither the Virginia Company, nor the Merchant-adventurers as a body, would have preferred to employ Separatists in founding American colonies, and giving value to their land. But the option was not theirs. At the moment, no others were disposed to confront the anticipated hardships, and none could be relied upon like these to carry the business through. This was well understood on both sides to be the motive for the engagement that was made.
“If Separatists were per force to undertake the enterprise, it was desirable that they should be persons not individually conspicuous, or obnoxious to displeasure in high quarters; and when Brewster, and not Robinson, accompanied the first settlers to New England, it was a result, if not due to the intrigues of the Adventurers, certainly well according with their policy. Brewster was forgotten in England; nor had he ever been known as a literary champion of his sect. The able and learned Robinson was the recognized head of the Independents, a rising and militant power. He had an English, if indeed it may not be called a European reputation. No name could have been uttered in courtly circles with worse omen to the new settlement. The case was still stronger when, having lost their way, and in consequence come to need another patent, the colony was made a dependency of the Council for New England, instead of the Virginia Company. In the Virginia Company, laboring under the displeasure of the king, and having Sandys and Wriothesley for its leaders, there was a leaven of popular sentiment. The element of absolutism and prelacy was more controlling in the councils of the rival corporation.
“From these circumstances the quick instinct of trade took its lesson. To the favor of the Council for New England, with Sir Ferdinand Gorges at its head, and the king taking its part against Sir Edward Coke and the House of Commons, the Merchant-adventurers were looking for benefits which some of them had no mind to hazard by encouraging their colony to exhale any offensive odor of schism. This gives us an insight into the policy of that action to which Robinson referred when, in a letter to Brewster, now brought by Winslow, he wrote: ‘I persuade myself that for me, they of all others are unwilling I should be transported, especially such of them as have an eye that way themselves, as thinking if I come there their market will be marred. And for these Adventurers, if they have but half the wit to their malice, they will stop my course when they see it intended.’