The Landing of the Pilgrims: Standish and Plymouth

These were discouraging circumstances; but far worse troubles were to come. The labor of providing habitations had scarcely begun, when sickness set in, the consequence of exposure and bad food. Within four months it carried off nearly half their number. Six died in December, eight in January, seventeen in February, and thirteen in March. At one time during the winter only six or seven had strength enough left to nurse the dying and bury the dead. Destitute of every provision which the weakness and the daintiness of the invalid require, the sick lay crowded in the unwholesome vessel, or in half-built cabins heaped around with snow-drifts. The rude sailors refused them even a share of those coarse sea-stores which would have given a little variety to their diet, till disease spread among the crew, and the kind ministrations of those whom they had neglected and affronted brought them to a better temper. The dead were interred in a bluff by the waterside, the marks of burial being carefully effaced, lest the natives should discover how the colony had been weakened. The imagination vainly tasks itself to comprehend the horrors of that fearful winter. The only mitigations were that the cold was of less severity than is usual in the place, and that there was not an entire want of food and shelter.

Meantime, courage and fidelity never gave out. The well carried out the dead through the cold and snow, and then hastened back from the burial to wait on the sick; and as the sick began to recover, they took the places of those whose strength had been exhausted. There was no time and there was no inclination to despond. The lesson rehearsed at Leyden was not forgotten, "that all great and honorable actions are accompanied with great difficulties, and must be both enterprised and overcome with answerable courages." The dead had died in a good service, and the fit way for survivors to honor and lament them was to be true to one another, and to work together bravely for the cause to which dead and living had alike been consecrated. The devastation increased the necessity of preparations for defence; and it was at the time when the company was diminishing at the rate of one on every second day, that a military organization was formed, with Standish for the captain, and the humble fortification on the hill overlooking the dwellings was mounted with five guns.

"Warm and fair weather" came at length, and "the birds sang in the woods most pleasantly." Never was spring more welcome than when it opened on this afflicted company.

Their fears of trouble with the Indians proved not unfounded. The friendliness at first displayed by the savages soon gave way to threats of hostilities. In 1622 the Narragansetts sent to the colony a bundle of arrows tied with a snake-skin, as a declaration of war. Bradford, the governor, with grim humor, filled the snake-skin with powder and ball, and returned it. The frightened savages refused to keep it. It passed from hand to hand, and at length came back to Plymouth. A conspiracy to murder the settlers was discovered in 1623, and repressed by Standish, who killed the ringleaders of the plot. This settled all Indian troubles for years. The colony of Plymouth prospered from that time forward. It never attained great dimensions, the Boston colony proving more attractive to settlers, but "the virtue displayed in its institution and management, and the great consequences to which it led," will always claim for it the attention of mankind. After several efforts to found other colonies, one was established at Salem in 1628. This "Colony of Massachusetts Bay" made rapid progress, and by 1634 "between three and four thousand Englishmen were distributed among twenty hamlets along and near the sea-shore." The work of establishing an English agricultural settlement in New England had been accomplished.