Page:The works of Anne Bradstreet in prose and verse.djvu/38

 XXX INTRODUCTION.

them. John Endicott had been sent over by the Patentees of the Massachusetts territory. He reached Salem in Sep- tember, 1628, where he estabhshed a post, his own men and those whom he found there making, in all, a company of not much more than fifty or sixty persons.* The Rev. Mr. Higginson follow^ed the next year with two hundred more colonists, finding w^ith Endicott then about one hundred. Of these, two hundred settled at Salem, and the rest established themselves at Charlestown with the intention of founding a town there. | Dudle}', in his letter to the Countess of Lincoln, says "We found the Colony in a sad and unexpected condition, above eight}^ of them being dead the winter before ; and many of those alive weak and sick ; all the corn and bread amongst them all hardly suflficient to feed them a fortnight, insomuch that the re- mainder of a hundred and eighty servants we had the two years before sent over, coming to us for victuals to sustain them, we found ourselves wholly unable to feed them, by reason that the provisions shipped for them were taken out of the ship they W'ere put in, and they who were trusted to ship them in another failed us and left them behind ; whereupon necessity enforced us, to our extreme loss, to give them all liberty, who had cost us about £16 or £20 a person, furnishing and sending over." :j:

As Salem was not to their taste, after exploring the Charles and Mystic Rivers, they unshipped their goods at Salem into other vessels, and brought them in July to Charlestown. They made a settlement there to the number of fifteen hundred people, § Dudley and Bradstreet, per-


 * Young's Chronicles of Massachusetts, p. 13.

t Ibid., p. 259. X Ibid., p. 311-12. § Ibid., p. 37S.

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