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The FRENCH, DUTCH and ENGLISH to AMERICA (3 of 10)

In addition to the Jamestown area, English migrants from 1620 went to Barbados, an uninhabited island in the Caribbean where Arawak Indians had once lived. Another group that sailed from England were those called Pilgrims. Originally these were Puritans called Separatists, a sect that had wished to free itself from domination by bishops of the Church of England. In small bands, between 1607 and 1609, they sneaked out of England -- English law forbidding people to leave without permission -- and went to the land of refugees and Calvinism: the United Netherlands. While there the Thirty Years' War had erupted, and Spain was still a threat to the Dutch. Some of the Pilgrim refugees had decided that they would be better off in America. It was five years before King James revoked the Virginia Company's charter, and the Pilgrims agreed to work for the Virginia Company in exchange for the company providing them passage. And King James approved the Pilgrim's journey following the Pilgrim's promise to live peaceably in his colony.

In 1620, after sailing from the Netherlands to England, 35 of the Pilgrims boarded a ship called the Mayflower, and they were joined by 67 other Englanders. The Mayflower was blown off course, and rather than land in Virginia it landed at Plymouth, where there was a deep harbor and land with fresh water, timber and good soil. Europeans had been touching the coastline for years, and the Indians along this northern coastline had been decimated by smallpox that had migrated with the Europeans.

Not having been exposed to small pox for as long a period as the Europeans, the Indians had less resistance to the disease. The Pilgrims found most of the nearby Indian villages recently abandoned. Of the 3,000 or so Massachuset Indians living in the area in 1614, their number had been reduced to less than 800 by the time the Pilgrims arrived. Another people living in the area were the Wampanoag -- whose language, like the Powhatan, Pamunkey and Massachuset, was a branch of Algonquin. Disease had killed as many as 90 percent of the Wampanoag between 1616 and 1618, leaving around 1,200 who were in need of allies against hostile neighboring tribes. [note]

No land at Plymouth had been given the Pilgrims by the Virginia Company, the King of England or the Indians. The Pilgrims believed that the land under their feet had been given them by their god, Jehovah. The colonists had agreed to abide by majority rule and to cooperate for the general good of the colony. But it was December, 1620, when they landed, and Plymouth was colder than Jamestown farther south. Only half of the settlers survived the winter. Those who did inhabited abandoned Wampanoag villages and raided Wampanoag food caches.

The following spring, the settlers found streams teaming with fish, and Wampanoag showed them how to plant corn, how to cook squash and pumpkins, how to make corn pudding, and how to gather greens. The Wompanoag brought the Pilgrims the meat of deer they had hunted. The settlers and the Wompanoag made a treaty, the Wampanoag happy to have allies to help defend against hostile neighbors. And on November 25, 1621, the Wompanoag chieftain, Massasoit, and more than ninety of his warriors feasted with the Pilgrims. The Pilgrims were thankful, and the day was to be celebrated in the United States as Thanksgiving.

More Puritans arrived around Plymouth. A small settlement was established at Wollaston, and a few Plymouth families crossed the bay to settle at Duxbury. In 1622, sixty people from England settled around 25 miles north of Plymouth at Weymouth. There a food shortage developed, and some of the settlers stole corn that Massachuset Indians had stored. The Indians were angered and decided to cut themselves off from trading with the settlers. The settlers threatened violence, and from Plymouth a military leader, Miles Standish, went to the rescue of the Weymouth colony. He led a raid against the Indians, defeating a group and its leader, Wituwamet, killing eight. And Standish resorted to the European tradition by displaying Wituwamet's head on a wooden fort wall, and the local Indians began calling the settlers wotowquenange -- cut throats.

In 1623, 120 more Puritans -- men and women -- landed at Weymouth, and that year the settlement at Weymouth abandoned land sharing. Men laboring in the fields had been disgruntled by the sharing, believing they were doing more than some others, and married men disliked seeing their wives cooking for bachelors. Each family was given its own plot of land, and dissension among the settlers declined.