93 



PART III. 



UNITED states; 



PLYMOUTH COLONY, 



From 1620 ■until the union with Massachusetts by the charter of William 



and Mary, 1692. 



After long and patient inquiry, I am convinced that the whole truth 

 as to the motives vsrhicb induced the Pilgrirns to remove from Holland 

 to America has not been told by our historians. 



The sweet poetess asks, "What sought they thus afar?" and herself 

 replies, not "the wealjh of seas," but "a faith's pure shrine." She 

 has expressed the sentiments of all. But is it so certain that they 

 " sought" not both? Of the men of their time, were they alone exempt 

 from the influence of the fishing mania which prevailed throughoat 

 maritime Europe? Weary, stricken, homeless exiles, could they have 

 lived unmoved by the spirit around them, when the Dutch fisheries* 

 were at the highest point of prosperity, and when every one's thoughts 

 in their own country were turned to the planting of fishing colonies at 

 Newfoundland and on the shores of New England? Our continent was 

 discovered in 1497, by Cabot; and from the moment that the chron- 

 icler of his voyage made known to the people of England that our 

 waters teemed with fish — ^that here " were great seals, and those which 

 we commonly call salmons ; and also soles above a yard in length, but 

 especially there is a great abundance of that kinde which the sauages 

 call baccalos or codfish"— rdown to the year 1620, as we have seen in 

 the first and second parts of this report, the intercourse of the French 

 and English with the northerly seas of America was constant; and ot 

 all this were not the Puritans as well informed as others? Were they 

 ignorant ot what transpired in the New World in the ten years immedi- 

 ately preceding their flight from England, and during the ten years of 



* It is said, by writers of authority, that in the year 1560 the Dutch employed one thou- 

 sand vessels in their herring fishery; that the number in 1610 was fifteen hundred; and that, 

 at the time the Pilgrims embarked for America, it was quite two thousand. These estimates 

 are extravagant enough, surely. What shall be" thought of Sir Walter Ealeigh, who set the 

 T&lue of this fishery annually at £10,000,000, (or nearly fifty miUions of dollars;) or of De 

 Witt, who said that every fifth person in Holland earned Ms subsistence by it ? Yet such 

 statements were believed at the time, and their truth is contended for now. 



Nor was this the only fishing excitement of the Pilgrims' day. In 1612, the Dutch sent 

 whale-ships to the Greenland seas, but the British considered them interlopers^ and compelled 

 them to retire. The year after, French, Dutch, and Spanish ships at Spitzbergen were folr- 

 bidden to fish, by the same "lords of the seas." British whalers, as is stated, went armed at 

 this period. In 1613, the British Bussia Company received a monopoly of the whale fishery, 

 and the year following a company in Holland obtained the same exclusive right. In 1618, the 

 controversy between the British and Dutch, on the subject of the fisheries, terminated in a 

 genJBral war. 



