[Illustration: THE AMERICAN COLONIES in 1640.]

[Sidenote: The Pilgrim Fathers.]

Only a few years after the settlement of Smith in Virginia, the church
of Brownist or Independent refugees, whom we saw driven in Elizabeth's
reign to Amsterdam, resolved to quit Holland and find a home in the
wilds of the New World. They were little disheartened by the tidings of
suffering which came from the Virginian settlement. "We are well
weaned," wrote their minister, John Robinson, "from the delicate milk of
the mother-country, and inured to the difficulties of a strange land:
the people are industrious and frugal. We are knit together as a body in
a most sacred covenant of the Lord, of the violation whereof we make
great conscience, and by virtue whereof we hold ourselves strictly tied
to all care of each other's good and of the whole. It is not with us as
with men whom small things can discourage." Returning from Holland to
Southampton, they started in two small vessels for the new land: but one
of these soon put back, and only its companion, the _Mayflower_, a bark
of a hundred and eighty tons, with forty-one emigrants and their
families on board, persisted in prosecuting its voyage. In 1620 the
little company of the "Pilgrim Fathers," as after-times loved to call
them, landed on the barren coast of Massachusetts at a spot to which
they gave the name of Plymouth, in memory of the last English port at
which they touched. They had soon to face the long hard winter of the
north, to bear sickness and famine: even when these years of toil and
suffering had passed there was a time when "they knew not at night where
to have a bit in the morning." Resolute and industrious as they were,
their progress was very slow; and at the end of ten years they numbered
only three hundred souls. But small as it was, the colony was now firmly
established and the struggle for mere existence was over. "Let it not be
grievous unto you," some of their brethren had written from England to
the poor emigrants in the midst of their sufferings, "that you have been
instrumental to break the ice for others. The honour shall be yours to
the world's end."

[Sidenote: The Puritan migration.]

From the moment of their establishment the eyes of the English Puritans
were fixed on this little Puritan settlement in North America. Through
the early years of Charles projects were being canvassed for the
establishment of a new settlement beside the little Plymouth; a