Category Archives: 17th Century

The Mayflower pilgrim’s first encounters with the natives don’t fall neatly into contemporary narratives.

In 1628 a handful of men left the fishing village of Salem and trekked twelve miles west along the Massachusetts Bay to the point of land where the Mystic and Charles Rivers met. There they found “land full of Indians called Aberginians” and “an uncooth Wilderness full of timber” and, perhaps most surprising, “a singleContinue reading “The Smith and the Witch”

“Wessagussett Colony: Ill-conceived. Ill-executed. Ill-fated.” – Charles Francis Adams Jr., Massachusetts Historical Society In their second spring in the New World, when most crops in Plymouth Colony had barely sprouted from in the rocky soil, a small shallop arrived carrying ten men and some letters but “no victuals nor any hope of any”. The PlymouthContinue reading “The Forlorn Hope of Sixty Men”

The Mayflower carried many people we have chosen to remember well. Even admire. Brewster and Bradford. Standish and Alden. Howland and Hopkins.
But the Billingtons? Not so much. They were the colony’s outspoken rebels. The scoundrels. The fringe. Who would want to claim them as their ancestors?
Okay, I admit its tempting.

We know more about William Brewster than most who stepped off the Mayflower. Few were less prepared for life in the wilderness. Fewer still did more to bring them there.

“I would not wish any companion in the world but you.” – William Shakespeare’s The Tempest Sometime during the summer of 1620, while the Mayflower lay at anchor in Southampton harbor awaiting the repairs for its sister ship the Speedwell, the ship’s captain Christopher Jones hired an additional crewmember: John Alden. He was twenty-one yearsContinue reading “The First New England Love Story”

In 1609 Stephen Hopkins left his wife Mary and their three small children near her family in the small English village of Hursley. He had just signed a seven-year contract to serve as a minister’s clerk in the fledgling Jamestown Colony of Virginia.

Elizabeth Ring sailed from Delfshaven, in the Netherlands, aboard the Speedwell in the summer of 1620. She was traveling with her parents, William and Mary Ring, and also her two younger siblings, Susannah and infant Andrew. Elizabeth is believed to have been about eleven years old.

The first settlers in New England were not Puritans. In May of 1607, some thirteen years before the Mayflower landed in Massachusetts, about 120 colonists sailed from Plymouth (England) aboard two ships, the Gift of God and the Mary & John, en route to the New World.