Pilgrims for Freedom

From the time when he was a boy on his father's great country estate in the north of England, Miles Standish had been thrilled by the stories he had heard of the New World, lying across the Atlantic Ocean from Britain. They were adventurous enough tales to thrill any boy, especially one with a high spirit and great courage pent up in a very small body. "Miles in name, but inches in stature," was what they said of him.

On the yellowing charts in his father's library Miles could have pointed out the voyage across the Atlantic of the Great Sea, man, as English seafaring folk still called Sebastian Cabot, who had touched the mainland of the New World almost a century before.

"Here he started," Miles would say, indicating an English port on the map. "Then he sailed due north, toward the land whose islands Christopher Columbus discovered. He loved the sea more than anything else, and he braved fog and chilling winds and huge icebergs on this perilous voyage. Three months the Great Seaman was gone, and when he returned he brought tales of having touched the shores of a cold, bleak country with fields of ice and snow. Until he died Sebastian Cabot talked of the New World that he, sailing for England, had touched. I would have liked to take passage with him," Miles would finish.

An old serving man on the Standish estate was able to tell Miles a story of one Christmas over three score years before in the New World.

"England is fair and full of plenty," he would say, "but Cortes, the Spanish discoverer, found a fairer land. Fancy a city, lad, built of gold and silver and set on a wide blue lake with floating gardens on its waters! There were palaces in this southern kingdom in which dark skinned Aztec rulers lived who owned mines of precious stones and rich harvest fields, and were envied by other nations."

"Then, near Christmas in the year 1520?" Miles would ask.

"The ambitious Spaniard, Hernando Cortes, reached this Aztec city and marched through its streets with a band of soldiers," the old man continued. "The Aztecs had a tradition that, years before, they had been visited by a stranger from the East who had taught them all the arts of peace and war and had said that he would come again to demand the whole of their kingdom. They thought that Cortes was this conqueror."

"And so the Spaniard found the southern part of the New World," Miles would end the story as he looked wistfully across the quiet English pastures in the direction of the sea, and this land of wonders.

It was the reign of Queen Elizabeth in England, a time of merry feasting and tournaments, of pageants and velvet cloaks and jewels and fine lace. There was every chance for Miles Standish, grown to a youth, to sit at the feet of the Queen and obtain favor at the Elizabethan court, being well born and of a fiery, spirited kind of courage. But the walls of a palace seemed to him as limited as prison walls, and the shores of England were too narrow for him. He wanted a chance to voyage away from them as the Great Seaman had done so many years before. Suddenly his chance came. Spanish pirates attempted to take the Belgian coast town of Ostend, and the Hollanders made a stand to hold it against them. Queen Elizabeth decided to send troops to Flanders to help the Dutch.

Miles Standish remembered the story that had seemed so wonderful to him in his boyhood. Again he saw the conquering Spanish explorer marching on the feast day of peace to wrest their kingdom from the Aztecs in the New World. Here, at a port of the Old World, was an expedition of the same ambitious Spaniards. Miles Standish went to the Queen with a request for service.

"You would be a minstrel, a squire, a jester?" the Queen asked, looking down at the earnest youth. No wonder she asked it; only a scant five feet tall, a round face like a boy's but with large, dark blue eyes that flashed temper and strong determination and high courage like darts of lightning, that was Miles Standish. His answer proved his worth.

"I would like a sword, your Majesty."

A lieutenant at eighteen; that was a good beginning! Miles Standish went to Flanders and fought like the intrepid soldier he was for three years in the long siege of Ostend. The town surrendered at last and a truce was declared. Miles Standish was now a captain and engaged in garrison duty, first in one post and then in another, until he was sent at last to Leyden in Holland.

Here, away from his native England, Miles Standish heard again tales and rumors of the New World. The Hollanders had an odd geographical theory about it.

"That continent on the other side of the Atlantic is only a narrow strip of land," they said. "It is quite possible that there is a strait which leads through it."

It was a good guess, for no one really knew.

"If we could sail north of or through this strange land," the Dutch East India trading company said, "how it would shorten our route!" And with this idea in mind they had sent Henry Hudson on a voyage in 1609 to try and discover a quicker route to India. Miles Standish listened to the reports of Henry Hudson's trip. It was almost as exciting as Cabot's voyage had been.

Henry Hudson had sailed in the little Half Moon, a cold and stormy western voyage. His crew was close to mutiny, and he, himself, grew discouraged and heartsick. He encountered icebergs and chilling currents toward the north so he changed his course south. When the Half Moon, battered and with torn sails, was about to turn back, she had drifted quietly into a beautiful river. Wild roses grew so low on the shores that the tired seamen could pick them, and there were purple grapes and rosy apples and plenty of fish. On either side of this river, which they named the Hudson, were great green hills.

Close on these tales came others of an English settlement in the New World established by King James the First, who ruled England now in place of Queen Elizabeth. It was called Virginia, because the country was so new and so fair. The colonists were having struggles with wild savages, it was reported, but they had found food and raw materials unknown in their home country, and valuable; potatoes and wild turkeys, sassafras root, tobacco, great cedar posts and walnut timber, and iron ore.

It was all a part of dreams, and yet true.

Holland was a tidy, comfortable place in which to live. Captain Standish, when he was not on duty, walked up and down Leyden's clean, paved streets, saw the gardens bright with tulips and watched the trim housewives in their bright gowns and wooden shoes gossiping across one carved half door to another. All that the little kingdom of Holland asked was a chance to tend her gardens and keep house in the clean, bright way in which she had always done.

But one day Miles Standish noticed strangers in Leyden. A stern, sober Englishman in a long black cloak and tall hat hurried by. With him was a young girl, who might have been his daughter, her fair curls tucked smoothly into a tight muslin cap and a muslin kerchief folded demurely over the shoulders of her straight gray frock.

"Pilgrims," a friend told Captain Standish later. "Leyden is full of them. They left England because they want to be free to build their own church. They will not be held by the laws of the Church of England. Now they find that they are not free in Holland, either. They are restless and chafe under the peace and quiet here. Their children are growing up to speak the Dutch tongue and to forget English customs. These Pilgrims are rightly named, Captain; they have no abiding place. They are planning even," the man lowered his voice at the hazard of the scheme, "to make a voyage to the New World!"

Captain Standish listened and then made a sudden decision. Here was a great opportunity for him and for England, he believed. The spirit of all the valiant explorers who had gone before suddenly filled his heart. He fancied himself the Great Seaman, sailing an uncharted ocean to find a new land. He was the soldier who would wrest that fair Aztec kingdom from the oppression of Spain. He saw the green hills that bordered the Hudson River, and he could feel and touch the fruits and crops of Virginia. Here, in Leyden, were his followers, English folk like himself, and bound on the same pilgrimage as that of which he had dreamed.

"I will lead the Pilgrims to the New World," he said.

"But you are not of their belief; you are of the Church of England," his friend protested.

"That makes no difference at all," Miles Standish said. "They are pilgnms for freedom. This matter of building a church is the way the dream came to them."

And this proved to be true, for the Pilgrims accepted the leadership of Captain Miles Standish. They put themselves under his guidance for the perilous adventure upon which they at once embarked.

An ocean liner of today slips away from her dock with scarcely a throb of her engines. One lives aboard her for the days of the trip across the Atlantic Ocean much as one lives in a hotel in a great city; there are the same comfortable beds and baths, a great dining room, a library, musicians, and servants. One scarcely feels the waves and a storm is safely weathered.

There were no ocean liners in the seventeenth century. Miles Standish and the Pilgrims boarded a small sailing vessel, the Speedwell, and crossed to England where they were joined by another sailing vessel, only slightly larger, the Mayflower. She was crowded with other wayfarers who wanted to begin living anew in a new land. It was in August of the year 1620 that the two little ships started on their three thousand mile trip.

They had gone out a short distance only when water began to pour into the hold of the Speedwell and she barely returned to port without sinking. They stopped the leak and set sail again, but three hundred miles from land the vessel began to take water again. Then Captain Standish discovered that the Speedwell's captain was a coward, afraid to go on with the hazardous voyage, and he had disabled the ship. The Pilgrims abandoned the Speedwell and crowded into the Mayflower. There were over a hundred men, women and children. She was loaded with guns, and tools for farming and building, kettles, spinning wheels, crude furniture and kitchen utensils, only the needful things for beginning a new life, but they freighted the little bark so heavily that her deck almost touched the level of the sea. There was no refuge from storms as the sea washed over the deck, and the wind bent the frail masts and tossed the Mayflower like a boat sailed by a child in play.

Stout hearts and brave hands filled the Mayflower, though. The men bailed out the leaking holds and mended broken spars and never once gave up the ship for lost, even when she was blown about like a chip in the waters of a strange ocean. The women would have scorned to speak of their fears and the children did not murmur. Miles Standish was pilot and comforter and captain of hope all in one. He seemed a giant in stature, so great was his courage. Each one of the cold, bleak days of the two months that the Mayflower took her trackless way to the New World, Captain Standish had the same message of cheer for the Pilgrims.

"We are one day nearer our port. Some morning we will see the plentiful fields of Virginia."

But when land was first sighted from the Mayflower in November of the same year, 1620, it was a bleak, rocky coast. Bare oak trees and pointed pines made impenetrable forests. There was nothing growing; there were no shelters waiting for the Pilgrims, and it was almost winter. They had drifted in a northerly direction and had sighted the point of land that is now Cape Cod.

Captain Standish and a few men made a difficult landing and cut trails through the woods to try and locate a spot for a settlement. Sometimes they lost their way in the forests; very often an arrow, shot from an Indian's bow, would whiz past them. At last, late in December, they found a little open bay beyond which lay wooded hills and streams. It showed traces of English explorers and Captain John Smith, in charge of an English expedition to Virginia, had marked it Plymouth.

Wading through icy water, canying their children and their few utensils through the surf, the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth on December 21st, 1620. They stood with Miles Standish, a gallant little group, their feet on a bare rock, but their eyes fixed on the stars. The New World, America, was very different from the fair land of which they had dreamed, but it held everything for which they had dared the voyage, a chance to start at the very beginning of things, and to start free.