But no, there riding up the mast was the red and white cross of St. George. They were English! Briskly the newcomers lowered away boats and rowed for shore. The citizens of Plymouth crowded down to the beach to welcome them. Who was that standing up in the prow of the lead boat? Could it be yes, their old friend Robert Cushman! It was help from home, not a stray fisherman in search of fresh water or a curious trader on the way to Virginia, but their friends who had not forgotten them.
For William Brewster there was special joy. His twenty-eight-year-old son Jonathan stepped ashore. Edward Winslow joyfully embraced his brothers, John and Kenelm. All together there were thirty-five passengers on board the good ship Fortune, most of them men and all healthy. They had had only one death on the way over, a man named Ford whose widow, Martha, gave birth to a son the night she landed. Within eighteen months she would be married to Peter Brown.
Among the new men were some welcome skills. William Wright was an expert carpenter, and Stephen Dean was an experienced miller, who eventually built a small mill to grind the colony’s corn. Robert Hicks’s wife was later to become the town’s first schoolteacher. Philipe de la Noye, a young French Huguenot, was not especially distinguished and never became a leader at Plymouth, but in centuries to come he would acquire some posthumous fame as the first American ancestor of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Plymouth was delighted to see its thin ranks filled by these new recruits, although William Bradford was somewhat disturbed to discover that they bad brought not so much as a “biscuit cake” in provisions, nor had they bedding or any other household goods with them. It meant the colony would have to go on short rations for the winter. But this was a minor problem compared to the enormous significance of these new arrivals in other ways.
Robert Cushman had with him a new patent from the. Council for New England confirming their possession of Plymouth and their shipboard compact and authorizing them to establish laws and ordinances for governing themselves on a majority-rule basis. Cushman’s collapse and withdrawal at the beginning of the voyage now seemed a providential thing. His presence in England had played a vital part in getting prompt approval of their patent, and he had also smoothed over the quarrel with their merchant backers and had persuaded them to send the Fortune with these badly needed reinforcements. Cushman returned to London with the Fortune and until his death in 1625 was to do extremely effective work as their representative, continuing, in Bradford’s admiring words, “to be a special instrument for their good and to do the offices of a loving friend and faithful brother unto them.”
The new colonists were well pleased with what they found in “New Plymouth.” The Fortune carried back with it to England a letter from one of the arrivals, a young man named William Hilton, who summed up their impressions.
Loving Cousin,
At Plymouth in New England we found all our friends and planters in good health, though they were left sick and weak, with very small means. The Indians round about us peaceable and friendly. The country very pleasant and temperate, yielding naturally of itself great store of fruits as vines of diverse and great abundance . . . flocks of turkeys, quails, pigeons and partridges . . . lakes abounding with fish, fowl, beavers and otters. The sea affords us as great plenty, all excellent sorts of sea fish as the rivers and isles cloth a variety of wild fowl of most useful sorts. . . . Better grain cannot be than the Indian corn, if planted on as good ground as a man need desire. We are all freeholders, the rent day doth not trouble us and all those good blessings we have of which and what we list in their seasons for taking. Our company are for most part very religious, honest people; the word of God sincerely taught us every Sabbath; so that I know not anything a contented mind can here want. I desire your friendly care to send my wife and children to me where I wish all the friends I have in England.
Plymouth would have more trouble in the years to come. There would be starving times and unnerving litigation over their patent, which was vague about the colony’s boundaries, and upsets with the London merchants and with the Indians, although the basic treaty of peace with Massasoit would endure for the lifetime of that good and great chief - another forty years. But as Governor William Bradford looked at the strong bodies and eager faces of the new arrivals, and the ship riding in the harbor, he must have known that the worst was over for him and his fellow exiles. They would survive and prosper.
Others would follow in their footsteps, men of different beliefs, who would found more powerful colonies in Massachusetts Bay, at Hudson’s River, and along other great harbors and rivers of this mighty continent. But none would contain the essentials of the American experience, that unique combination of courage and faith, in such pure and dramatic form, as little Plymouth. Her story, told by William Bradford in his History of Plymouth Plantation, would be the touchstone toward which a great nation would look for values and ideals, in its years of maturity.
Perhaps already William Bradford felt the quiet pride evident in the words he would later write, words that are both the summary and the reason for this book. “As one small candle may light a thousand, so the light kindled here has shown unto many, yea in some sort to our whole nation. . . . We have noted these things so that you might see their worth and not negligently lose what your fathers have obtained with so much hardship.”
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Published by New Word City, Inc., 2011
www.NewWordCity.com
© Thomas Fleming
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ISBN 978-1-61230-146-4
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One Small Candle: The Pilgrim's First Year in America (The Thomas Fleming Library) Page 18
