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The Early Emigrants. No Pleasure Cruise As the Mayflower people found out earlier, so the Puritans also learned that crossing the ocean was not a pleasure cruise, and establishing a new colony in the wilderness was not a painless matter.Bay Colony Deputy Gov. Thomas Dudley wrote to his erstwhile patroness, the Countess of Lincoln, on 28 March 1631: "The next year, 1629, we sent divers ships over, with about three hundred people.…Our four ships which set out in April [1630] arrived here in June and July, where we found the Colony in a sad and unexpected condition, above eighty of them being dead the winter before; and many of those alive weak and sick…the remainder of a hundred and eighty servants we had the two years before sent over coming to us for victuals to sustain them, we found ourselves wholly unable to feed them…many died weekly, yea, almost daily…not much less than a hundred, (some think many more) partly out of dislike of our government,…returned back again [to England].…Others also, afterwards hearing of men of their own disposition, which were planted at Pascataway, went from us to them.…And of the people who came over with us, from the time of their setting sail from England in April, 1630, until December following, there died by estimation about two hundred at the least.…I should also have remembered, how the half of our cows and almost all our mares and goats, sent us out of England, died at sea in their passage hither.…It may be said of us almost as of the Egyptians, that there is not a house where there is not one dead, and in some houses many." |
