A School History of the United States. John Bach McMaster
settled along the Hudson and on the banks of the Delaware (1631), where they founded a town near Lewes. The settlements on the Delaware River were short-lived. The settlers quarreled with the Indians, who in revenge massacred them and drove off the garrison at Fort Nassau; whereupon the patroons sold their rights to the Dutch West India Company.[2]
[Footnote 1: The patroon bound himself to (1) transport the fifty settlers to New Netherland at his own expense; (2) provide each of them with a farm stocked with horses, cattle, and farming implements, and charge a low rent; (3) employ a schoolmaster and a minister of the Gospel. In return for this the emigrant bound himself (1) to stay and cultivate the land of the patroon for ten years; (2) to bring his grain to the patroon's mill and pay for grinding; (3) to use no cloth not made in Holland; (4) to sell no grain or produce till the patroon had been given a chance to buy it.]
[Footnote 2: Lodge's English Colonies, pp. 295–311; Winsor's Narrative and Critical History, Vol. III., pp. 385–411; Bancroft's History of the United States, Vol. I., pp. 501–508.]
%29. The Struggle for the Delaware; the Swedes on the Delaware.%—And now began a bitter contest for the ownership of the country bordering the Delaware. A few leading officials of the Dutch Company, disgusted at the way its affairs were managed, formed a new company under the lead of William Usselinx. As they could not get a charter from Holland, for she would not create a rival to the Dutch Company, they sought and obtained one from Sweden as the South Company, and (1638) sent out a colony to settle on the Delaware River.[1] The spot chosen was on the site of Wilmington. The country was named New Sweden, though it belonged to Maryland. The Dutch West India Company protested and rebuilt Fort Nassau. The Swedes, in retaliation, went farther up the river and fortified an island near the mouth of the Schuylkill. Had they stopped here, all would have gone well. But, made bold by the inaction of the Dutch, they began to annoy the New Netherlanders, till (1655) Peter Stuyvesant, the governor of New Netherland, unable to stand it any longer, came over from New Amsterdam with a few hundred men, overawed the Swedes, and annexed their territory west of the Delaware. New Sweden then became part of New Netherland.[2]
[Footnote 1: Sweden had no right to make such a settlement. She had no claim to any territory in North America.]
[Footnote 2: Lodge's English Colonies, pp. 205–210; Bancroft's History of the United States, Vol. I., pp. 509, 510; Hildreth's History of the United States, Vol. I., pp. 413–442.]
SUMMARY
1. After the discovery of the North American coast by the Cabots, England made no attempt to settle it for nearly eighty years; and even then the colonies planted by Gilbert and Ralegh were failures.
2. Successful settlement by the English began under the London Company in 1607.
3. In 1609 the London Company obtained a grant of land from sea to sea, and extending 400 miles along the Atlantic; but in 1624 its charter was annulled, and in 1632 the King carved the proprietary colony of Maryland out of Virginia.
4. Meantime Henry Hudson, in the employ of the Dutch, discovered the
Delaware and Hudson rivers (1609), and the Dutch, ignoring the claims of
England, planted colonies on these rivers and called the country New
Netherland.
5. Then a Swedish company began to colonize the Delaware Bay and River coast of Virginia, which they called New Sweden.
6. Conflicts between the Dutch and the Swedes followed, and in 1655 New Sweden was made a part of New Netherland.
CHAPTER IV
THE PLANTING OF NEW ENGLAND
%30. The Beginnings of New England.%—When the Dutch put up their trading posts where New York and Albany now stand, all the country east of New York, all of what is now New England, was a wilderness. As early as 1607 an attempt was made to settle it and a colony was planted on the coast of Maine by two members of the Plymouth Company, Sir John Popham, Lord Chief Justice of England, and Sir Ferdinando Gorges, governor of Plymouth. But the colonists were half starved and frozen, and in the spring of 1608 gladly went home to England.
Six years later John Smith, the hero of Virginia, explored and mapped the coast from the Penobscot to Cape Cod. He called the country New England; one of the rivers, the Charles; and two of the promontories, Cape Elizabeth and Cape Ann. Three times he attempted to lead out a colony; but that work was reserved for other men.
%31. The Separatists.%—The reign of Queen Elizabeth had witnessed in England the rise of a religious sect which insisted that certain changes should be made in the government and ceremonials of the Established or State Church of England. This they called purifying the Church, and in consequence they were themselves called Puritans.[1] At first they did not intend to form a new sect; but in 1580 one of their ministers, named Robert Brown, urged them to separate from the Church of England, and soon gathered about him a great number of followers, who were called Separatists or Brownists. They boldly asserted their right to worship as they pleased, and put their doctrines into practice. So hot a persecution followed, that in 1608 a party, led by William Brewster and John Robinson, fled from Scrooby, a little village in northern England, to Amsterdam, in Holland; but soon went on to Leyden, where they dwelt eleven years.[2]
[Footnote 1: Read Fiske's Beginnings of New England, pp. 50–71. The teacher may read "Rise and Development of Puritanism" in Eggleston's Beginners of a Nation, pp. 98–140.]
[Footnote 2: Read Eggleston's Beginners of a Nation, pp. 141–157; Fiske's Beginnings of New England, pp. 71–80; Doyle's Puritan Colonies, Vol. I., pp. 47–81; Palfrey's New England, Vol. I., pp. 176–232.]
%32. Why the Separatists went to New England%.—They had come to Holland as an organized community, practicing English manners and customs. For a temporary residence this would do. But if they and their children's children after them were to remain and prosper, they must break up their organization, forget their native land, their native speech, their national traditions, and to all intents and purposes become Dutch. This they could not bring themselves to do, and by 1617 they had fully determined to remove to some land where they might still continue to be Englishmen, and where they might lay the foundations of a Christian state. But one such land could then be found, and that was America. To America, therefore, they turned their attention, and after innumerable delays formed a company and obtained leave from the London Company to settle on the coast of what is now New Jersey.[1]
[Footnote 1: Eggleston's Beginners of a Nation, pp. 159–176.]
This done, Brewster and Bradford and Miles Standish, with a little band, sent out as an advance guard, set sail from the Dutch port of Delft Haven in July, 1620, in the ship Speedwell. The first run was to Southampton, England, where some friends from London joined them in the Mayflower, and whence, August 5, they sailed for America. But the Speedwell proved so unseaworthy that the two ships put back to Plymouth, where twenty people gave up the voyage. September 6, 1620, such as remained steadfast, just 102 in number, reëmbarked on the Mayflower and began the most memorable of voyages. The weather was so foul, and the wind and sea so boisterous, that nine weeks passed before they beheld the sandy shores of Cape Cod. Having no right to settle there, as the cape lay far to the northward of the lands owned by the London Company, they turned their ship southward and attempted to go on. But head winds drove them back and forced them to seek shelter in Provincetown harbor, at the end of Cape Cod.
[Illustration: The Mayflower[1]]
[Footnote 1: From the model in the National Museum, Washington.]
[Illustration: THE MASSACHUSETTS COAST (map)]
%33. The Mayflower Compact%.—Since it was then the 11th of November, the Pilgrims, as they are now called, decided to get permission