“Neither the English of this plantation nor of any other in these parts,” remarks Bradford, “had knowledge of wampum till now. But the settlers bought fifty pounds’ worth of it from De Rasières, who told them how vendable it was at their Indian stations, and did persuade them that they would find it so at Kennebec; and so it came to pass, for though at first it stuck, and they were two years in working off a small quantity, yet afterwards, when the inland tribes knew of it, the traders could scarce ever get enough to supply the demand, for many years together.”[570]
De Rasières was a close and shrewd observer, and nothing escaped his keen eyes at Plymouth. On his return he wrote a letter in which he described at length the salient characteristics of the Pilgrim colony. Let us take a peep into the quaint old manuscript, and see how New England in its Pilgrim babyhood looked in his eyes:
“New Plymouth lies on the slope of a hill stretching east towards the sea-shore. It has a broad street about a cannot-shot of eight hundred feet long, looking down the slope, with a street crossing this in the middle, and running northward to a rivulet, very rapid but shallow, which there empties into the sea, and southward to the land. The houses are built of hewn planks, with gardens, also enclosed behind and at the sides by hewn planks, so that their gardens, court-yards, and houses are arranged in very good order, with a stockade against a sudden attack. At the ends of the streets there are three wooden gates. Their government is after the English form. The governor is annually elected. In inheritance they place all children in one degree, only the eldest has an acknowledgment of seniority. They have made stringent laws on the subject of adultery and fornication, and these ordinances they enforce very strictly, even among the savage tribes which live amongst them.
“Their farms are not so good as ours at New Amsterdam, because they are more stony, and consequently not so fit for the plough. They have their freedom without rendering an account to any one; only, if their king should choose to send them a governor, they would be obliged to recognize him as sovereign chief. The maize-seed which they do not require for their own use they deliver over to the governor, at three guilders the bushel, who, in his turn, sends it in sloops to the north for the traffic in skins amongst the savages. They reckon one bushel of maize against one pound of beaver-skins. They have better means of living than ourselves, since fish swim in abundance before their very doors. There are also many birds, such as geese, herons, and cranes, and other small-legged birds, which are seen in flocks here in the winter.
“The tribes in this neighborhood have the same customs as with us, only they are better conducted than ours, because the English treat them fairly, and give them the example of better ordinances and a better life; and also, to a certain degree, give them laws, by means of the respect they have from the very first established amongst them.”[571]
In 1629, the bulk of the long lingering Leyden exiles—among the rest the wife and two sons of John Robinson[572]—at length landed at Plymouth.[573] The reunited flock, now sadly thinned by death, greeted each other with mutual tears and caresses; and tightly-clasped hands and wet eyes told what the voice was too choked to say. But in the midst of sadness they were joyous, for
“Hope was changed to glad fruition;
Faith to sight, and prayer to praise.”
The expense of transporting these friends was very heavy, amounting in the aggregate to six hundred pounds, as we learn by opening Allerton’s charge roll.[574] Nor was this all; destitute and homeless, they had to be maintained the better part of fifteen months before they were able to stand on their own feet, and pay their way. They had no harvest of their own to reap. Land was given them and block-houses were run up for their shelter. Then they planted “against the coming of another season.”[575] The Pilgrims, though already overloaded with debt, did not grudge this large addition to the budget of expense, but showed herein “a rare example of brotherly love and Christian care;” for Bradford says that “even thus they were, for the most part, both welcome and useful, as they feared God and were sober livers.”[576]
But if the devout colonists of the Plymouth slope were “sober livers,” all their neighbors were not. It seems that some years before this time, perhaps in 1625, perhaps a twelvemonth earlier, an English Captain Wollaston, inoculated with the general rage for planting settlements, had attempted to drop one on that rocky height near Boston bay which still bears his name.[577] Like the foolish architect in the Bible, he built on a sandy foundation, though his colony was bottomed on a rock—so strange are the paradoxes of this mortal life. “Not finding things to answer his expectations,” he did not tarry long in his eyry, but pressed on into Virginia with a portion of his emigrants, intending soon to return for the rest.[578] So much for the intention. But in his absence one of his followers, Thomas Morton, “who had been a kind of pettifogger, of Fernival’s Inn,” London, and was now broken down into an uneasy bloat, ripe for mischief, obtained an ascendency over the waiting colonists, and thereby assumed control. “Then,” says the old recitor, “they fell into great licentiousness of life, in all profaneness, Morton becoming lord of misrule, and maintaining, as it were, a school of atheism. Having gotten some goods into their hands by much trading with the Indians, they spent all vainly in quaffing both wine and stronger liquors in great excess—as some have reported, as much as ten pounds’ worth of a morning. They also set up a May-pole, and danced and drank around it, frisking about like so many fairies, or furies rather: and worse practices they had, as if they sought anew to revive and celebrate the obscene feast of the Roman goddess Flora, or the beastly practices of the mad Bacchanalians. Morton pretended withal to be a poet, and composing sundry rhymes and loose verses, some tending to lasciviousness and others to detraction and scandal, he affixed these to his idle, or idol, May-pole. The name of the height was changed; it was called ‘Merry-Mount,’ as if this jollity would have been perpetual.