PART ONE 

 NEW ENGLAND 



CHAPTER I 

 THE FIRST COMERS 



I 



N" the list of passengers on the good ship Mayflower The May- 



flower, 1630 



I may be seen the names of a family called " MuUins," 

 consisting of father and mother and two children : a 

 son named Joseph and a daughter named Piiscilla. But 

 while the name William Mullins is thoroughly English, 

 Investigation proves that the man so called was not Eng- 

 lish at all. When the little ship Speedwell put out from 

 Delfthaven in Holland to meet the Mayflower at South- 

 ampton, among the Pilgrims there was a Huguenot family, 

 the father's name being Guillaume Molines. Already in xheMoUnes 

 the Old World, in that haven of Holland, the English and 

 French refugees, sufferers alike for their religion, had 

 clasped hands of kinship ; and in the first company that 

 made home in the New World the Huguenots were 

 represented, although the habit of corrupting names 

 tended to conceal the fact. In that first awful year of 

 starvation and suffering that followed the coming of the 

 Pilgrims to the Massachusetts coast, Guillaume Molines, 

 his wife, and the son perished. But Priscilla survived, 

 and by her marriage with John Alden became the ances- 

 tress of that celebrated New England family, the Aldens. prisciiia a 

 From this descent, too, was John Adams, second Presi- ^"euenot 

 dent of the United States. More than this, Longfellow's 

 poem has enshrined this French girl in the affections of 



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