68 Singing Valleys 



from England, failed, either by lateness of the season or weak- 

 ness of the seed after the long voyage and bad winter storage. 

 Still, as Bradford tells, when September came, 



. . . and the wellcome time of harvest in which all had their 

 hungrie bellies filled . . . they had all things in good plenty, and 

 besides water foule there was a great store of wild Turkies, of which 

 they took many, besides venison, etc. Besides, they had aboute a 

 peck of meale to a person, or now, since harvest, Indian corne to 

 that proportion which made many afterwards write so largely of 

 their plenty hear to their friends in England which were not faned, 

 but true reports. . . . 



The Plymouth colonists had no chartered company in Lon- 

 don to send them relays of supplies. Their only friends in the 

 old country were congregations of Separatists who were neither 

 rich, powerful nor in political favor with the Stuarts. From the 

 outset, the colonists were dependent on the crops of their own 

 raising. In Virginia, not once, but half a dozen times, romantic 

 chance intervened to save the settlers from extinction. Help 

 came over the horizon from England, from Bermuda, or, as 

 had happened when Drake saved the Roanoke survivors, from 

 Peru and the Spanish Main. The men of New England had 

 no such inspiriting hope. They looked at their heap of golden 

 corn and knew that this was their mainstay. 



Too, they entertained no ideas of America as a temporary 

 residence only; a stepping stone to a manor in Kent and a 

 baronetcy. They had come to stay. Accordingly they began in 

 their first year to adapt their ways of living to new patterns 

 imposed by the climate, the soil, the loneliness, the sea at 

 their backs and the savages surrounding them. They were ad- 

 vantaged in this by the fact that they had their women and 

 children with them from the start. They lived in families; not, 

 as the Jamestown settlers had lived for two years and more, 

 like "single men in barracks," a disorderly and disruptive form 

 of existence. 



In that first summer the Plymouth colonists built separate 

 houses within the palisade. The center of each house was its 



