Pilgrims at Plymouth, is so devoid
of a printed career. As soon as the Pilgrims had explored the spot, they
put themselves on record as having "a great liking to plant in it"
instead of in Plymouth. But they decided against it because it lay too
far from their fishing and was "so encompassed with woods," that they
feared danger from the savages. It was very soon settled, however, and
remained as the north end of Plymouth for a hundred and six years, until
1726. Governor Bradford writes, in regard to its colonization:

"Y^e people of y^e plantation begane to grow in their outward estate ...
and as their stocks increased and y^e increase vendible, ther was no
longer any holding them togeather, but now they must of necessitoe goe
to their great lots: they could not otherwise keep catle; and having
oxen grown they must have land for plowing and tillage. And no man now
thought he could live except he had catle and a great deal of ground to
keep them: all striving to increase their stocks. By which means they
were scattered all over y^e bay, quickly, and y^e towne, in which they
had lived compactly till now [1632] was left very thine, and in a short
time almost desolate."

Governor Bradford seems to deplore this moving out of Plymouth, but as a
matter of fact he was among the first to go, and his estate on Jones
River comprised such a goodly portion of what is now Kingston that when
he died he was the richest man in the Colony! A boulder marks the place
which he, with that unerring eye for a fine view which distinguished the
early settlers, chose for his estate. From here one catches a glimpse of
water, open fields, trees, the Myles Standish Monument to the left, the
sound of the passing automobiles behind. The distant smokestacks would
be unfamiliar to Governor Bradford's eye, but the fragrant Kingston air
which permeates it all would greet him as sweetly to-day as it did
three hundred years ago.

Governor Bradford, who was Governor for thirty-seven years, was a man of
remarkable erudition. Cotton Mather says of him: "The Dutch tongue was
become almost as vernacular to him as the English; the French tongue he
could also manage; the Latin and the Greek he had mastered; but the
Hebrew he most of all studied." Therefore if the curious spelling of his
history strikes us as unscholarly, we must remember that at that time
there was no fixed standard for English orthography. Queen Elizabeth
employed seven different spellings for