Miles StandishA Pilgrim Leader
Early in the seventeenth century, James I. was king of England. He was a very self-willed man and was unwilling for his subjects to differ from him in religious or political matters. Naturally, all men were not willing to accept his opinions. Some were so unwilling to be dictated to by the king that they preferred to leave their homes in England and go where they could worship according to their own preferences. Some of these men, called Separatists because they had separated themselves from the established church of England, went in 1607 to Holland.
There they had full liberty in religious matters, but after a time they became dissatisfied.
The Dutch people were not strict enough in the observanceof Sunday to please them, and their children were learning Dutch language and customs and would grow up to be Dutch men and women instead of English. These Separatists loved their native land and wanted their children to grow up English, but with their own religious views. Moreover, fighting between Spain and Holland was beginning again after ten years of peace and the Englishmen did not wish to become involved in this war.
So they resolved to go to the New World and establish a settlement there. They discussed many places before they decided where to go. They thought of Guiana which Raleigh had described as being fertile of soil and mild of climate, but they remembered his fights with the Spaniards and wished to avoid so troublesome a neighbor. There was the same objection to Florida, where a French colony had been destroyed by the Spaniards. They did not care to go to the English settlement at Jamestown, where the people were devoted to the Established Church of England and observed its forms even more strictly than people in England. They did not wish to go to the far north, for some Englishmen had already tried to settle in Maine and had come home with pitiful tales of their suffering during the severe winters. The Pilgrims, as these English religionists began to be called, from traveling about so much, at last decided to settle between Jamestown and Maine, about the coast of whatis now New Jersey. They obtained a charter from the “North Virginia Company,” the Plymouth branch of the Virginia Company, which controlled from 41 to 45 degrees, giving them permission to settle in the southern part of North Virginia.
One hundred and two Pilgrims sailed in the Mayflower from Plymouth, England, in September, 1620. One of the men on board the Mayflower was Miles Standish, who was to be the soldier-savior of the northern English colony as John Smith was of the southern one.
Miles Standish was born about 1584 in England; he is said to have been the heir of a noble English family who was deprived of his rights. He entered the army and was sent by Queen Elizabeth to help the Dutch in their war against Spain. He was probably about nineteen or twenty then, and he seems to have remained in Holland after peace was made, and there he met the Pilgrims. His portraits represent him as a small man clad in leathern jacket and high boots, wearing a cartridge belt across his shoulder. He did not adopt the Pilgrims’ faith or ever become a member of their church, but he was a brave and faithful comrade.
The voyage was a long and stormy one. During it one member of the party died and was consigned to an ocean grave. Two months after leaving England, land was sighted, November 20, 1620. This land was apoint marked Cape James on Captain Smith’s map; the name Cape Cod was given it later on account of the quantity of codfish caught there by Gosnold’s men in the expedition of 1602. Cape Cod was farther north than the Pilgrims had intended to go, and they sailed southward but were turned back by “dangerous shoals and roaring breakers” and unfavorable winds.
The men met in the cabin of the Mayflower to discuss the situation. The shore they were approaching was not the land granted by their charter and therefore its laws did not apply there. They decided to establish their colony on the coast and they signed an agreement to obey such laws as they should make for their guidance. John Carver was chosen governor.
The Pilgrims made several trips ashore to get wood and water and to explore the country. Captain Standish led his party of sixteen soldiers, in warlike array, armed with muskets and swords; they had no need to use their weapons, as the only Indians they saw fled at their approach. The chief event of the expedition was finding some corn in a mound; they carried it to the ship and later, when they were informed to whom it belonged, they paid the owners for it.
Other expeditions were made along the coast and up the streams in a shallop, or small boat. Often the spray froze on their clothes and “made them many times like coats of iron.”
While the Pilgrims tarried on the coast a child was born, son of William White and they called him Peregrine from a Latin word meaning “pilgrim.”
After exploring the country for several weeks, the Pilgrims determined to settle at a place called on Captain Smith’s map Plymouth, which was the name of the city from which they had sailed. On December 21, 1620, the men landed on the great boulder known as Plymouth Rock. Their first work was to build a “Common House”; January 31, 1621, this was completed and the women and children landed. The Pilgrims were not molested by Indians, but cold and famine were enemies that almost destroyed them. During the winter most of the colonists were ill and more than half of the hundred died; of eighteen women, only four survived the winter. One of those who died was Captain Standish’s wife.
At one time only seven men—one of whom was Captain Standish—were able to work. These seven, says Bradford their historian, tended the sick, cooked, washed, and did all the work indoors and outdoors. Rude houses were built of logs, with thatched roofs and windows of oiled paper. A church was erected which had cannon on top of it, so that at need it might serve as a fort.
To keep the Indians from suspecting their weakness, the Pilgrims leveled the graves and in the spring planted corn over them. On the whole, the Indians werefriendly. One day an Indian approached the settlement and “saluted us in English and bade us ‘welcome.’” This was Samoset, “a tall straight man, the hair of his head black, long behind and short before and no beard. He was naked except for a strip of leather about his waist, which had a fringe a span long or more. He had a bow and two arrows, the one bended the other not.” Samoset had learned broken English from fishermen who came to the coast of Maine. With him came later Squanto, the only survivor of the tribe which had lived near Plymouth and which had been destroyed by plague. Squanto showed the English how to plant corn and to enrich the soil with fish. Another of the visitors was Massasoit, an Indian chief, who made a “treaty of friendship” which was kept fifty years.
In April the Mayflower returned to England, but despite the hardships and sufferings of that terrible winter, not one of the Pilgrims went back. They were busy making cabins, cultivating gardens and fields, getting fish and game for food, building up a home in the wilderness. They traded with the Indians for beaver skins, collected sassafras, and sent furs and lumber back to England, laboring to repay the money borrowed to defray their expenses. At first and for several years the Pilgrims, like the Jamestown settlers, labored together; they prospered more after the land was divided and each man worked for himself.
They had a prosperous season and good crops and in the fall they celebrated their harvest and the end of their first year in the new land by a feast,—the first Thanksgiving. Fish and wild fowl and game were cooked in the big fireplaces or on wood fires out of doors. Massasoit came with about ninety men, bringing five deer as his contribution to the feast. There was a military drill and a shooting match, and three days were spent in merry-making. Year after year the Pilgrims observed this festival, and it came at last to be a national holiday.
The Narragansett Indians were unfriendly and the Pilgrims had to be on their guard against them. At one time Canonicus, their chief, sent the settlers a rattlesnake skin filled with arrows as a declaration of war; it was sent back filled with powder and balls, in token that the white men were ready to defend themselves. A strong fence, or palisade, was built around the settlement. In many ways the Pilgrims lived like soldiers on duty. Sunday morning at beat of drum, people marched to church. Each man had his weapon near in case of Indian attack.
More than once Indians tried to kill Miles Standish, the brave and prudent little captain. One gigantic Indian, Pecksuot, ridiculed him because he was small; in a fight soon after Pecksuot was killed. “I see you are big enough to lay him on the ground,” said one of the Indians.
About 1623 Captain Standish married a second time, his wife being an English woman, the sister of his first wife. In “The Courtship of Miles Standish” Longfellow tells a romance—for so far as we know it had no foundation in fact—about the fiery little Captain’s unsuccessful wooing by proxy of a maiden named Priscilla Mullins. The poem gives a vivid picture of Captain Standish and of life in the New England colony.
In 1625 Captain Standish made a voyage to England on business for the colony, but he returned in a few months. He subdued the English settlers at Merrymount who were selling arms to the Indians, and were living idle, drunken lives.
In eight years the Plymouth colony had grown so that Elder Brewster, John Alden, and Miles Standish went one summer to Duxbury on the north side of the bay; Standish made his home there on a high hill called Captain’s Hill. His sword and musket were now laid aside and he was busy plowing and tending his farm, settling sites for mills, practicing his skill in medicine, and serving the public welfare in peaceful ways. The brave, honorable, helpful man died October 3, 1656, and was buried at his home on Captain’s Hill. For forty years he had been the leading spirit in every undertaking requiring courage and military skill.
“For Standish no work was too difficult or dangerous, none too humble or disagreeable. As captain andmagistrate, as engineer and explorer, as interpreter and merchant, as a tender nurse in pestilence, a physician at all times, and as the Cincinnatus of his colony, he showed a wonderful versatility of talent and the highest nobility of character.”