The Pilgrims

5 Key excerpts on "The Pilgrims"

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  eBook - ePub

  The Romantic Story of the Mayflower Pilgrims, and Its Place in the Life of To-day

  • A. C. (Albert Christopher) Addison(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Perlego

    (Publisher)

  By the July of 1623 a total of about two hundred and thirty-three persons had been brought out, including the children and servants, of whom one hundred and two, composed of seventy-three males and twenty-nine females, eighteen of the latter wives, were landed from the Mayflower. At the close of that year not more than one hundred and eighty-three were living. The survivors bravely persevered. Gradually the Pilgrim Colony took deep root. The New Plymouth men were a steady, plodding set, and the soil, if hard, was tenacious. They got a firm foothold. They suffered much, for their trials by no means ended with the first winter; but their cheerful trust in Providence and in their own final triumph never wavered. By 1628 their position was secure beyond all doubt or question. The way was now prepared; the tide of emigration set in; and the main body of the Puritans began to follow in the track of their courageous and devoted advance-guard.

  Copyright, 1904, by A. S. Burbank, Plymouth Captain Miles Standish

  Out there in the West these Pilgrims, or first-comers, settled themselves resolutely to the task which lay before them. They were no idle dreamers, though their idealism was intense, and they were united by the bonds of sympathy and helpfulness, one towards another. Their works were humble, their lives simple and obscure, their worldly success but small, their fears many and pressing, and their vision of the future restricted and dim. But they consistently put into practise the conceptions and ideals which dominated them and were to be the inheritance of the great Republic they unconsciously initiated and helped to build up. They established a community and a government solidly founded on love of freedom and belief in progress, on civil liberty and religious toleration, on industrial cooperation and individual honesty and industry, on even-handed justice and a real equality before the laws, on peace and goodwill supported by protective force. They were more liberal and tolerant in religion than the Puritan colonists of Massachusetts Bay, and more merciful in their punishments; they perpetrated no atrocities against inferior peoples, and cherished the love of peace and of political justice.

  Although at first the relations of The Pilgrims with their Puritan neighbours were none of the best, a better state of feeling before long prevailed. We have seen how John Winthrop and his pastor plodded over to Plymouth to attend its Sunday worship. Three years earlier, in 1629, Bradford and some of his brethren went by sea to Salem to an ordination service there, and, says Morton in his "Memorial," "gave them the right hand of fellowship." There were other visits, letters of friendship, and reciprocal acts of kindness. We read of Samuel Fuller, physician and deacon, going to Salem to tend the sick, and of Governor Winthrop lending Plymouth in its need twenty-eight pounds of gunpowder.

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  The First Thanksgiving

  What the Real Story Tells Us About Loving God and Learning from History

  • Robert Tracy McKenzie(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • IVP Academic

    (Publisher)

  The popular understanding that The Pilgrims came to America “in search of religious freedom” is technically true, but it is also misleading. It is technically true in that the freedom to worship according to the dictates of Scripture was at the very top of their list of priorities. Indeed, it was nonnegotiable. They had already risked everything to escape religious persecution, and the majority never would have knowingly chosen a destination where they would once again wear the “yoke of antichristian bondage.” To say that The Pilgrims came “in search of” religious freedom is misleading, however, in that it implies that they lacked such liberty in Holland. If a longing for religious freedom alone had compelled them, they might never have left Leiden, that city where God had allowed them, in Bradford’s estimation, “to come as near the primitive pattern of the first churches as any other church of these later times.” As Winslow recalled, God had blessed them with “much peace and liberty” in Holland. They hoped to find “the like liberty” in their new home. 26 But that is not all that they hoped to find. While they cherished the freedom of conscience that they enjoyed in Leiden, the Separatists had two major complaints about their experience there: they found it a hard place to maintain their English identity and an even harder place to make a living. So it would be literally true to say that The Pilgrims came to America in search of a land where they could preserve their ethnic heritage and significantly improve their standard of living—but that, too, would be misleading. To our modern ears, those motives sound as if they had nothing to do with The Pilgrims’ religious convictions. In fact, they had everything to do with them, for they reflected a growing concern among the Separatists for the very survival of their church

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  The Crusade of Frederick Barbarossa

  The History of the Expedition of the Emperor Frederick and Related Texts

  • G.A. Loud(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  1

  The prologue for the History of The Pilgrims commences.

  Often and for a long time, O venerable man, I have weighed my own abilities and ‘how they refuse to bring what they ought to completion’,2 and that paucity of skill has previously dissuaded me; but finally your order had forced me to set this in motion. Although some say, perhaps ironically, that I ‘have dreamed in Parnassus’,3 I deem it more tolerable, however, to expose my muse among those who charge [me] with presumption or to the teeth of detraction rather than to disobey your order by continuing to remain silent. And if in this little work the beauty of song or the arrangement of words does not caress the ears of the reader, the importance of the subject can at least be set against the poison of an uncultivated pen. I intend, insofar as my ability to explain allows me, to write about this subject briefly and succinctly, so that I shall seek out the unvarnished truth about the journey of our pilgrims and the deeds they accomplished, without the addition of any invention or the insertion of any tales. It is especially proper to explain among other matters how both Frederick, the most Christian and most invincible Emperor of the Romans, a man of great experience imitating Charles in his valour,4 and his most distinguished son, the illustrious Duke of Swabia, an heir not unworthy of the uprightness and name of his father, like two shining beacons and bastions of the Christian faith under the banner of the life-giving Cross, striving bravely and in proper fashion, were the guides and leaders of the army of Christ, so that they now rightly enjoy the payment of eternal reward in Heaven and that on earth their reputation is rendered more celebrated to those who come after them. For Thou, lord God, along with them, ‘hast led forth the people which Thou has redeemed’,5 thus Thou would not allow either the untrustworthiness of the Greeks nor the deceits and battles of the Turks to prevail over them. It was indeed a miracle, not of human power but of Divine virtue, that the people of God, though so few, having triumphantly entered through the passes and bounds of Greece, should subdue almost all that land and bring it to surrender; afterwards they passed through all sorts of anxieties and many different tribulations, which the following history will explain each in its own place. Finally ‘the snare of the fowler is broken’6 and they stormed Iconium, defeating six hundred thousand Turkish cavalry. A little while earlier, as if secure and glorying in their triumph over them, the enemy was saying: ‘I have pursued mine enemies and overtaken them’ [and] ‘I will divide the spoil; my lust shall be satisfied’.7

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  The Pilgrims of New England

  A Tale of the Early American Settlers

  • Mrs. (Annie) Webb-Peploe(Author)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • Perlego

    (Publisher)

  THE PILGRIMS OF NEW ENGLAND:

  A TALE OF THE EARLY AMERICAN SETTLERS.

  BY

  MRS. J. B. WEBB, AUTHOR OF NAOMI, JULAMERK, ETC.

  PREFACE

  In the following story, an attempt has been made to illustrate the manners and habits of the earliest Puritan settlers in New England, and the trials and difficulties to which they were subjected during the first years of their residence in their adopted country. All the principal incidents that are woven into the narrative are strictly historical, and are derived from authentic sources, which give an impartial picture both of the virtues and the failings of these remarkable emigrants. Unhappily, some of these incidents prove but too clearly, how soon many of these exiles 'for conscience sake' forgot to practice those principles of religious liberty and toleration, for the preservation and enjoyment of which they had themselves abandoned home and kindred, and the church of their forefathers; and they tend to lessen the feelings of respect and admiration with which their piety, and their disinterested spirit, must necessarily inspire us. We cannot but regret to find how early, in many of the Puritan communities, that piety became tinged with fanaticism, and that free spirit degenerated into bigotry and intolerance in their treatment of others, who had an equal claim with themselves to a freedom of private judgement, and to the adoption or rejection of any peculiar forms or mode of discipline.

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  The Transatlantic Genealogy of American Anglo-Saxonism

  • Michael Modarelli(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  3   Christianography in New England

  The Anglo-Saxonism of Bradford, Winthrop, and Mather

  In the summer of 1620, a handful of Separatists, having fled the England of Elizabeth and James I to Holland, began to decide on a proper course of migration to the New World. The Plymouth Company, the Virginia Company of London’s sister company in New World undertakings, was one option for the group. Unlike its more southern counterpart, all Plymouth Company claims were assigned to the northern part of the New World coast; but growth of operations had been slow. The company’s previous attempt to settle in Kennebec, Maine, proved unsuccessful.1 Thus, the northern territory was virtually unchartered by the English, which, coupled with the fact that there was no strong individual leader in the band of Leyden exiles that had been taking refuge in Scrooby since 1608 who could, like Captain John Smith, forcibly head a new settlement, complicated matters for the Plymouth Company-Leyden Puritans’ operation. Even Smith, whose allegiance later switched to Plymouth from the Virginia Company, avoided such a connection at that time, providing the Puritans with only brief consultation and maps for northern New England. That Smith wanted to go there is without question. The Leyden members hadn’t enough money to pay him, however, and desiring as little attention as possible, they probably shied away from Smith because of the negative publicity his name carried.

  Instead, The Pilgrims thought to go straightaway to the parent company with their plans. They knew, however, that a course for Virginia brought with it very real and natural dangers; of this Smith had at least warned them. And they were not a “hardy” folk; while in Scrooby, The Pilgrims had been merely eking out a living as artisans. William Bradford was a weaver, William Brewster made his living as a tutor and printer, and, in England, Robert Cushman worked as a loomer. In other words, as members of the artisan class, The Pilgrims knew little of geographic survival. Further, the danger of religious intoleration, the very peril from which they were fleeing, made the voyage plan that much more risky, as the other English group, comprised largely of the Virginia adventurers, might not welcome them. With mounting group dissention, they nevertheless needed a plan. Thus, they agreed to settle on a plan to associate themselves loosely with the Virginia Company’s southern patent, which gesture at the time seemed safe and uncontroversial.

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