Page:The Rise of American Civilization (Volume 1).djvu/60

 accident in navigation that carried them to land outside the borders of Virginia.

Tangible circumstances, rather than a difference in the motives of the London merchants who advanced capital for colonial enterprises, accounted for the contrast between Virginia and Plymouth. The climate and soil of the northern coast, besides being unfit for plantations, afforded no single staple upon which a fortune could be swiftly built; and the bulk of the emigrants for the New England colony was drawn from sources other than those exploited by the Virginia Company. Most of the Pilgrims who settled Plymouth were petty farmers, laborers, and artisans, rather than gentlemen, yeomen, and merchants with pounds to risk in importing servants and slaves.

Even those who came by way of Holland to Cape Cod had seen toilsome days and nights in their alien home. When, as Separatists, they collided with the Church of England and fled across the Channel, they were compelled to learn various trades in their new abode by which to eke out a living. Hence with their sobriety and profound religious faith, the Pilgrims combined a knowledge of agriculture and handicrafts. Moreover, they were accustomed to the severest hardships. As the Dutch craft guilds excluded them from the most remunerative trades, they were able to earn a living while in Holland only by the heaviest manual labor for twelve or fifteen hours a day. Bradford, historian of the little band, recorded that no "newfangledness or other such like giddie humor" inclined them to move to some other land.

In enumerating the "sundrie weightie and solid reasons" for migration, he declared that the Pilgrims found by experience "the hardnes of the place and countrie to be such as few in comparison would come to them and fewer still would bide it out and continew with them. For many that came to them and many more that desired to be with them