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Page 41
The company's meetings placed Winthrop and his colleagues in relations
with numerous persons destined to act busy parts in the stirring times
that were approaching--with Brereton and Hewson, afterward two of the
Parliamentary major-generals; with Philip Nye, who helped Sir Henry
Vane to "cozen" the Scottish Presbyterian Commissioners in the
phraseology of the Solemn League and Covenant; with Samuel Vassall,
whose name shares with those of Hampden and Lord Say and Sele the
renown of the refusal to pay ship-money, and of courting the suit
which might ruin them or emancipate England; with John Venn, who, at
the head of six thousand citizens, beset the House of Lords during the
trial of Lord Strafford, and whom, with three other Londoners, King
Charles, after the battle of Edgehil, excluded from his offer of
pardon; with Owen Rowe, the "firebrand of the city"; with Thomas
Andrews, the lord mayor, who proclaimed the abolition of royalty....
He who well weighs the facts which have been presented in connection
with the principal emigration to Massachusetts, and other related
facts which will offer themselves to notice as we proceed, may find
himself conducted to the conclusion that when Winthrop and his
associates prepared to convey across the water a charter from the King
which, they hoped, would in their beginnings afford them some
protection both from himself and through him from the powers of
Continental Europe, they had conceived a project no less important
than that of laying, on this side of the Atlantic, the foundations of
a nation of Puritan Englishmen, foundations to be built upon as future
circumstances should decide or allow. It would not perhaps be pressing
the point too far to say that in view of the thick clouds that were
gathering over their home, they contemplated the possibility that the
time was near at hand when all that was best of what they left behind
would follow them to these shores; when a renovated England, secure in
freedom and pure in religion, would rise in North America; when a
transatlantic English empire would fulfil, in its beneficent order,
the dreams of English patriots and sages of earlier times....
The _Arbella_ arrived at Salem after a passage of nine weeks, and was
joined in a few days by three vessels which had sailed in her company.
The assistants, Ludlow and Rossiter, with a party from the west
country, had landed at Nantasket a fortnight before, and some of the
Leyden people, on their way to Plymouth, had reached Salem a little
earlier yet. Seven vessels from Southampton made their voyages three
or four weeks later. Seventeen in the whole came before winter,
bringing about a thousand passengers....
It is desirable to understand how this population, destined to be the
germ of a state, was constituted. Of members of the Massachusetts
Company, it cannot be ascertained that so many as twenty had come
over. That company, as has been explained, was one formed mainly for
the furtherance, not of any private interests, but of a great public
object. As a corporation, it had obtained the ownership of a large
American territory, on which it designed to place a colony which
should be a refuge for civil and religious freedom. By combined
counsels, it had arranged the method of ordering a settlement, and the
liberality of its members had provided the means of transporting those
who should compose it. This done, the greater portion were content to
remain and await the course of events at home, while a few of their
number embarked to attend to providing the asylum which very soon
might be needed by them all.
The reception of the newcomers was discouraging. More than a quarter
part of their predecessors at Salem had died during the previous
winter, and many of the survivors were ill or feeble. The faithful
Higginson was wasting with a hectic fever, which soon proved fatal.
There was a scarcity of all sorts of provisions, and not corn enough
for a fortnight's supply after the arrival of the fleet. "The
remainder of a hundred eighty servants," who, in the two preceding
years, had been conveyed over at heavy cost, were discharged from
their indentures, to escape the expense of their maintenance. Sickness
soon began to spread, and before the close of autumn had proved fatal
to two hundred of this year's emigration. Death aims at the "shining
mark" he is said to love. Lady Arbella Johnson, coming "from a
paradise of plenty and pleasure, which she enjoyed in the family of a
noble earldom, into a wilderness of wants," survived her arrival only
a month; and her husband, esteemed and beloved by the colonists, died
of grief a few weeks after. "He was a holy man and wise and died in
sweet peace."
[1] From Palfrey's "History of New England." By permission of and
by arrangement with the authorized publishers, Houghton, Mifflin
Co. Copyright, 1873.
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