Page:Columbus and other heroes of American discovery; (IA columbusotherher00bell).pdf/107

 *land, quickly converted their desolate shores into flourishing colonies. In 1630, too, we find our old friend, Richard Vines, rewarded at last for his long years of work among the Indians by a grant of land on the Saco, while an estate of similar extent on the other side of the river was given to his comrade, John Oldham. From these two concessions sprung the towns of Biddeford and Saco; and looking round upon the results obtained at various points by different members of the Plymouth Company, under the energetic superintendence of Sir Ferdinando Gorges, before the expiration of its patent in 1635, we find English communities growing up throughout the length and breadth of Maine. It is round the little band of Puritans, however, who settled, by sufferance as it were, on the rocky shores of Cape Cod, in the neighboring province of Massachusetts, that the most absorbing interest gathers; and their history—as that of men who founded religious and political liberty in the future United States, and who are proudly claimed as ancestors by the noblest of our American cousins—must be given in some detail here.

To account for the presence of English Puritans on American shores, it is necessary to go back a few years, to the beginning of the reign of James I., when the brief respite from persecution, enjoyed during the closing years of Elizabeth's life by the aspirants after a purer ritual than that sanctioned by the State, was succeeded by yet greater oppression than any hitherto endured.

At the little village of Scrooby, in the midland counties of England, a small body of separatists, under the ministry of William Brewster, were in the habit of meeting regularly for worship, and by their zeal and good works were winning to their own persuasion large numbers of the common people, when their elder and two of their chief members were summoned before the Ecclesiastical Commission of York for heresy, and condemned to pay a fine of £20 each. This was but the beginning of evils; fines were succeeded by imprisonment and indignities of every kind; and warned by previous experience—some of their co-religionists had fled to Holland a few years before—the Scrooby separatists resolved, like them, to seek a refuge in the Protestant Republic. To the number of 200, the Puritans, most of them well-to-do men, disposed as quietly as they could of their lands and houses, and agreeing to meet at Boston, in Lincolnshire, stealthily made their way from the homes they were willing to forsake rather than abjure their belief.