................................................ 3
Physician................................................. 1
Printers and publishers................................... 2
Seamen.................................................... 4
Servants (adult).......................................... 10
Smith..................................................... 1
Soldier................................................... 1
Tailor.................................................... 1
Tradesmen................................................. 2
Wool-carders.............................................. 2
Allowing for the addition of Wilder and the two sailors, Trevore and Ely,
who did not sign it, the number of those who signed the Compact tallies
exactly with the adult males. Besides these occupations, it is known
that several of the individuals representing them were skilled in other
callings, and were at some time teachers, accountants, linguists,
writers, etc., while some had formerly practised certain handicrafts;
Dr. Fuller, e.g. having formerly been a "silk-worker," Brad ford (on the
authority of Belknap), a "silk-dyer," and others "fustian-workers."
Hopkins had apparently sometime before dropped his character of
"lay-reader," and was a pretty efficient man of affairs, but his
vocation at the time of the exodus is not known.
The former occupations of fourteen of the adult colonists, Browne,
Billington, Britteridge, Cooke, Chilton, Clarke, Crackstone, Goodman,
Gardiner, Rogers, Rigdale, Turner, Warren, and Williams are not certainly
known. There is evidence suggesting that Browne was a mechanic;
Billington and Cooke had been trained to husbandry; that Chilton had been
a small tradesman; that Edward Tilley had been, like his brother, a
silk-worker; that Turner was a tradesman, and Warren a farmer; while it
is certain that Cooke, Rogers, and Warren had been men of some means.
Of the above list of fourteen men whose last occupations before joining
the colonists are unknown, only five, viz. Browne, Billington, Cooke,
Gardiner, and Warren lived beyond the spring of 1621. Of these, Warren
died early, Gardiner left the colony and "became a seaman;" the other
three, Billington, Browne, and Cooke, became "planters." Thomas Morton,
of "Merry Mount," in his "New Eng land's Canaan" (p. 217), gives
Billington the sobriquet "Ould Woodman."
The early deaths of the others make their former handicrafts--except as
so much
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