USA > Massachusetts > The planters of the Commonwealth : a study of the emigrants and emigration in colonial times: to which are added lists of passengers to Boston and to the Bay Colony ; the ships which brought them, 1620-1640 > Part 2
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Itm for a cabbin bought in the ship because I had not con- venience in the ship according to agreement for myselfe & family.
For this he entered the sum of £I: 10:0 as the cost of this special privilege, and we may accept this as the proximate charge for cabin space on these merchant ships.2
It may be left to speculation how the sanitary needs of the passengers were provided for in ordinary weather with smooth seas. The imagination is beggared to know how the requirements of nature were met in prolonged storms in these small boats when men, women, and children were kept under the hatches for safety. This may be mentioned as an inevi- table accompaniment of emigration in its beginning.
In
I Journal, 1, 4.
2 Lechford: Note Book, 180.
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In the first half of the seventeenth century there had not been developed a system of public advertising and the method by which shipping available for intending Arranging emigrants must have been broadcast by oral for the voyage means. Bristol was the first maritime port which undertook the exploitation of the American continent, and the Channel ports came next - Falmouth, Plymouth, Dartmouth, and Southampton. The Popham Colony of 1606/7 sailed from Falmouth in Cornwall and the Mayflower from Southampton in 1620, while the Dorchester Colony of 1630 went from Ply- mouth. London did not become associated with this traffic until the East Anglians started the Great Emigration under Winthrop. The metropolis, situated on the Thames, near the eastern coast of England, required a sail of about a hundred miles due east to The Downs before the ships could head west to their destination, and was thus at a distinct geo- graphical disadvantage. As a result, vessels from London usually made the Isle of Wight their final point of departure, where they could obtain fresh water and other perishable supplies. Nevertheless, with this handicap London became after 1630 the chief port of embarkation for emigrants, with Ipswich, Great Yarmouth, and Sandwich competing for this patronage.
One may assume that information of ships ready to under- take the Atlantic voyage was in some way made available by carriers and town criers in various sections, and to those who had decided to emigrate it meant a journey to London, Bristol, or Southampton to negotiate for their passage to New England.' It must be understood in considering the begin- nings of this traffic that it began with ships built as freight carriers with no thought of service as passenger vessels. Englishmen leaving their 'tight little isle' for foreign travel had
I Chancery Affidavits, XI, 82.
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had to meet no inconveniences in crossing the Channel to France, or even to Holland, as the voyage rarely exceeded a few hours to Calais or Boulogne and never more than a day under favorable winds to the Texel. The question of comfort did not enter into the problem. Longer passages to the ports of Spain, Portugal, and the Mediterranean were rarely under- taken except by factors and supercargoes, who could occupy rooms in the high stern superstructure shown in vessels of the period. It can be said with truth that until 1606 no large body of Englishmen had ever left their native land as emigrants to live as colonists on our New England coast. The Mayflower of 1620 with its hundred souls was the largest group of emigrants of English birth destined for New England. From these ini- tial adventurers began the attempt of owners of merchant ships to supply the demand for passage to the New World. The experiment had no traditions. It began with the raw ma- terial, at the foundations. The master of the commercial freighter had to take into account the needs of his human cargo on a long and perilous voyage instead of casks of Port, Madeira, and Xeres with a cooper to aid in their safe trans- portation to London Town.
In the lists of passengers and ships that follow in Part II of this volume, there will be found the names of about thirty-
General eight hundred emigrants, while Drake and Hotten sources of have printed lists but slightly in excess of two emigration thousand (2049). The larger number which ap- pears in this compilation is not of so much importance as the question of their English origins and antecedents. The names of the emigrants who settled the first towns of this Common- wealth can be recovered through a study of the oldest local records, but we should still be lacking the desired knowledge as to who they were and whence they came. To supply this important
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important information, as far as possible, has been the object of the author. To know whence the emigrant started on his long ocean journey, to identify his companions and neighbors, and perhaps the leading spirits of his group, is to find help in the solution of the motive which led him to this fateful deci- sion. We shall never satisfactorily answer the question of the reasons that actuated this great emigration until we have de- veloped the personal factors behind it. The origins of the Pilgrims and their English homes have already been the sub- ject of a special study by the author and need not be consid- ered here.' They were a limited group of religious zealots and separatists who had abandoned their homes in England in 1610 to obtain freedom of worship in Holland, and found it there. In 1620 they again deserted this sanctuary for a speci- fic motive, to preserve their national identity for themselves and their posterity. They had no other motive, as they were still welcome in Leyden, and their flight adds nothing to the discussion of the motives of the adventurous Englishmen who formed the Great Emigration a decade later.
The several settlements of the early emigrants in this Com- monwealth have been more intensively studied than any other part of the original coastwise population, but no de- tailed study of the English origins of the pioneer groups has been undertaken. The local historians have generally drawn the line of their investigation at the water's edge. The scat- tered searches of family genealogists in England have located the equally scattered homes of their ancestors, but these have only pointed the way by scratching the surface. Few of the emigrants brought with them any recorded references to their English homes, and in only a negligible percentage of them has there survived any dependable tradition of their family connections.
I Charles Edward Banks: The English Ancestry and Homes of the Pilgrim Fathers. (New York, 1929. Published by the Grafton Press.)
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connections. In Bradford's 'History of Plymouth Planta- tion,' where he gives a detailed list of the passengers of the Mayflower, there is not one reference to the family origin or home parish of any one of the Pilgrims. Winthrop's 'Journal' has a few casual references to the residences of emigrants, but nowhere does he make an allusion to the definite area whence were drawn the hundreds who came with him in 1630 in the great fleet to plant this Commonwealth. The inference is in- evitable that they were not interested in preserving this information, which we now have to seek out at the cost of so much labor and money for the coming generations.
The earliest contemporary statement relating to the num- bers who came to Massachusetts was published by Capt. Edward Johnson at the end of Chapter XIV of his "Wonder- Working Providence." He wrote:
For fifteen yeares space to the year 1643 ... the number of ships that transported passengers in this space of time as is supposed is 298. Men, women and children passing over this wide ocean, as near as at present can be gathered, is also supposed to be 21,200 or thereabouts.
This seems to be sufficiently detailed to give it the color of careful investigation by the writer, and it has been, undoubt- edly, the basis for the usual claim that the number of settlers of this territory before 1650 was less than twenty-five thou- sand, of whom about six thousand were original male pro- genitors of families, the rest being women, children, and servants.
The problem envisaged in this section of our study of the emigrants is to apply certain ascertained factors in determin- ing the local sources of origin of these six thousand potential males, progenitors of families who came to the Massachusetts Bay Colony before 1650, when the Civil War and domestic conditions in England terminated emigration hither in ship- loads.
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loads. From that time forward the migration assumed an in- dividual character until the beginning of the next century, when it again developed into wholesale proportions. The statements which follow covering the topographical features of the emigrations of 1620-50 are based on investigations of the origin of 2646 emigrants who arrived in Massachusetts, and include those whose home and family connections are positively known, or about whom enough has been ascer- tained to establish a satisfactory clue to their origin.
By arranging the results of these researches into the comital divisions of England, then and now having the same lines of demarcation, we shall obtain a macroscopic view of the general emigration situation as it existed for our fore- fathers. The forty counties of England furnished an extremely diverse contribution, numerically considered, to the settle- ment of the New England Colonies, varying from twenty-five per cent to zero, and a reference to the accompanying maps will show that the greatest number of emigrants are to be found in the counties bordering on the North Sea and the English Channel with London as the center of the movement. It will be noted that the extreme northern counties of England made no contribution, worth classifying in statistics, to this epochal period in our history. Of these 2646 emigrants the City of London supplied 172, as much as half a dozen of the smaller counties. The next largest city - Bristol - gave us only 28 emigrants. The causes of this wide variation in num- bers involve many factors, religious, economic, and political, somewhat intricate for accurate analysis, but this phase of it will be taken up in the following section.
These figures do not answer the personal-interest question which naturally will arise at this time when the Tercentenary of the settlement of the great Massachusetts Bay Colony will stimulate the descendants to know something more of the or- igin
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igin of their ancestors than that they simply emigrated hither; nor does it do more than tabulate the county origins of over twenty-six hundred particular individuals. It would require double this number of emigrants to reach a final conclusion as to the relative county contribution to the statistics of emigra- tion. The most it can show is the prevailing areas. Roughly analyzed, the region known as East Anglia (Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex) gave 670 emigrants, or 21.5 per cent. London, Middlesex, Sussex, and Kent gave 530 emigrants, or 20 per cent, and the West Country (Dorset, Devon, Somerset, and Cornwall) gave 424 or 16 per cent, making a total of 57 per cent derived from the counties bordering on the North Sea and the English Channel from The Wash round to the Bristol Channel. The remaining considerable sources of county emi- gration can be credited to the so-called 'Home Counties' (Bedford, Berks, Bucks, Herts, and Surrey) surrounding London which gave 295 emigrants or II per cent, and the 'Midlands' (Leicester, Notts, Northants, Worcester, War- wick, and Derby) gave 250 emigrants, or 9 per cent. Four fifths of all the English emigrants to New England resided southward of a line drawn from the Bristol Channel to The Wash.
List of Counties in England in the order of the heaviest emigration
Suffolk
266
York.
70
Essex
244
Gloucester .
68
Kent.
188
Hampshire. 67
London
I71
Northants
67
Devon.
161
Lincoln
63
Norfolk
160
Warwick.
58
Somerset
I34
Bedford
49
Dorset .
119
Surrey
47
Wiltshire.
97
Leicester
42
Herts
96
Lancashire
39
Bucks
75
Derby 33
Middlesex
73
Sussex
31
Cambridge
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Cambridge.
29
Cheshire .
I2
Nottingham .
28
Cornwall
IO
Berks.
28
Rutland
9
Oxford
27
Huntingdon
8
Worcester.
22
Hereford.
7
Northumberland .
Durham.
2
Stafford.
I4
Cumberland .
I
Shropshire.
I4
Westmoreland
.
List of Counties in England in alphabetical order, showing number of emigrants from each county
Bedford .
49
Lincoln
63
Berkshire.
28
London
I71
Buckingham
75
Middlesex
73
Cambridge.
29
Norfolk
160
Cheshire
12
Northampton.
67
Cornwall.
IO
Northumberland
17
Cumberland.
I
Nottingham
28
Derby
33
Oxford
27
Devon
161
Rutland.
9
Dorset .
119
Shropshire 14
Durham
2
Somerset .
I34
Essex .
244
Stafford
14
Gloucester .
68
Suffolk.
266
Hampshire.
67
Surrey
47
Hereford
7
Sussex
31
Hertford ..
96
Warwick.
58
Huntingdon
8
Westmoreland
O
Kent.
188
Wiltshire.
97
Lancashire.
39
Worcester.
22
Leicester
42
York.
70
.
17
O
.
The deductions to be drawn from these tables are two in number: first, that East Anglia and the West Country fur- nished nearly half the emigration to New England, Differences but the destination of these two groups was quite in emigrants different. The East Anglian group settled almost from East exclusively in Massachusetts in the beginning and England trekked into Connecticut later. The West Coun- and West of try group generally selected the Provinces of Maine and New Hampshire
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Hampshire as their future home, doubtless influenced by the paramount interest of Sir Ferdinando Gorges in this region, who was himself a West-Countryman. The objects of the two groups were entirely different. The East Anglians came, as they alleged, to find an outlet for their repressed religious liberty. They were the 'scofflaws' of their day, often flouting contumaciously the statutes of the Kingdom. From them we doubtless inherit our indifference to precedent, disregard for authority, and the tendency to individualism. The West- Countrymen came to carry on trade in the fisheries - 'an honest calling,' quoth King James, 'for it was the trade of the Apostles.' The East Anglian came with his Bible in hand and made it the chief guide of his life. The West-Countryman came to continue the normal life of 'Merrie England' in his new home, giving religion its natural place in his life. This has given the casual historian an excuse to confer an odor of sanctity on Massachusetts and Connecticut and a blanket of wickedness on Maine and New Hampshire. The right of the West-Countryman to the territory of New England was al- most by eminent domain. It was the 'sea-dogs' of Devon, Somerset, and Bristol who roused this continent from its centuries of slumber. They made the original voyages hither, laid the foundations for the first settlements, and made its possibilities known to the English world. They did not come here to convert the heathen, reform their own church, or inter- fere with the method and drapery of worship of others. To this pioneer work East Anglia contributed nothing. They were like the well-known birds who preempt the nests pre- pared by others, and coming in swarms soon overran the country and absorbed all the territory wrenched from the savages by the daring compatriots of Ralegh, Drake, Pop- ham, Gilbert, Weymouth, and Pring.
A further differentiation existed between these two large groups.
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groups. The East Anglians emigrated to plant a Biblical Commonwealth according to their newly developed ideas of theology. The West-Countrymen were largely influenced by the opportunity to acquire land, which was promised to emi- grants in lots of one hundred acres each - almost a king's ransom in their estimation - of which he could be owner in fee simple. They were land hungry after centuries of vassal- age to lords of the manors, leading a hopeless tenant's life without prospect of acquiring independence of their grinding economic conditions. The West-Countryman remained, gen- erally speaking, loyal to his Church. Winthrop sent mission- aries into Maine as early as 1640 to convert these "heathen" sea-dogs to his new theology. They came back with an empty game bag. 'There is no hope of gathering a church, for they continue in their superstitious ways,' wrote one of the disap- pointed proselytizers. Translating this religious jargon: 'the gathering of a church' was a phrase used to express the or- ganization of a Puritan congregation. To the West-Country- man his Church did not need any gathering, as it was already established, and his 'superstitious ways,' in the Puritan con- notation, were adhesion to the ritual and vestments of the Established Church. From them we may be said to inherit our respect for law and authority, valuation of precedence, and whatever of conservatism we may be said to possess as a people.
Some curious and interesting local incidents connected with the Great Emigration have been observed. The largest exodus from one locality naturally belongs to Influence of London, from which 17I are known to have come, Puritan drawn from nearly every parish in the Metro- clergy in emigration polis; and yet from the small parish of Hingham in Norfolk, with a population of a few hundred, thirty-five families
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families emigrated to found the present town of Hingham in this State. It must have nearly depopulated this English town. It is difficult to account for this wholesale hegira from one little place unless the movement began under the leader- ship of Edmond Hobart in 1633, who preceded by two years his son, the Reverend Peter Hobart, who became the pastor of the first church in our Hingham. Bristol, the second larg- est seaport in the Kingdom, has only twenty-two known families to its credit as emigrants to our shores; but it may be noted that Bristol was more intimately connected in the first years of emigration with the development of New England than London and, not being affected by the Puritan move- ment to any extent, its citizens had no urge to leave a con- tented community. It is known that many of the recalcitrant and suspended clergy turned their eyes to the newly settled Colony of the Massachusetts Bay and looked upon it as a new arena where they could exercise their flair for theological jousting. Numbers of them came alone and others brought with them sympathizers with their rebellious leanings. Most of these clergymen were graduates of the University of Cam- bridge, which was then known as a nursery of Puritan doc- trines. Instances of the local influence of clergymen suspected of Separatist doctrines, or of those who had already felt the heavy hand of Episcopal restraint, may be cited. The Rever- end John Wilson and the Reverend George Phillips, who came with Winthrop, were indeed the first ministers to settle in the Bay Colony, but they had acquired no notoriety in ec- clesiastical circles as sectaries and they were simply a part of, and not leaders of, the company that came with Winthrop. By far the greatest intellectual and clerical leader who influ- enced emigration hither was the Reverend Thomas Hooker, a commanding figure in New England history, who was preaching and teaching in and around Chelmsford, Essex, having
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having as coadjutors before 1630 Hugh Peter and John Eliot. His influence was almost county-wide, and he had been early marked by Laud, then Bishop of London (with jurisdiction over Essex), for unfrocking. His assistant, Eliot, of Nazing, came over in the Lyon in 1631, arriving in November, as the leader of a number of adherents from that parish who settled in Roxbury. Hooker had already assembled a group of fol- lowers residing in Braintree, Essex, and adjacent parishes, ready to leave for the Bay at the first opportunity. This Braintree contingent arrived in the early summer of 1632 and Winthrop called them 'Mr. Hooker's company.' They were the pioneers of Cambridge, later to remove to Hartford to lay the foundations of the Connecticut Colony. The pursuivants of his Diocesan prevented Hooker from joining them and he fled to Holland, coming over the next year in disguise.I
The second great character in local influence in England was the Reverend John Cotton, then vicar of the magnificent Church of St. Botolph in Boston, Lincolnshire. He was re- sponsible for the early and important group of emigrants from his flock in Boston as well as from many surrounding parishes. For one devoted follower, Mrs. Anne Hutchinson, who set the Massachusetts Colony by the ears, Cotton is chiefly responsi- ble and she came near converting him to her cause. The Reverend John Lothrop, who had been vicar at Edgerton, Kent, and later in London conducting Separatist services sur- reptitiously, was undoubtedly the inspiration for the emigra- tion of a large contingent from the Weald of Kent who settled in Scituate. The Reverend Stephen Bachiler, an aged clergy- man who had been silenced at Wherwell in Hampshire, emi- grated to New England in 1632 and was followed by a con- siderable number of his former parishioners and supporters from near-by parishes. Rowley, a small parish in Yorkshire in
1 Winthrop: Journal, 1, 105-06.
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in the Vale of Bradford, sent thirteen families, most of whom settled in our Rowley, and these can be attributed to the in- fluence of the Reverend Ezekiel Rogers, shepherd of the flock which followed him in his migration. Another famous clergy- man, who was practically in hiding at Heddon in Northum- berland, brought another group from this part of England and they became his parishioners in his new charge at Cambridge. The progenitor of the famous Mather family, the Reverend Richard, then preaching near Liverpool, brought a group of Lancashire men to settle with him in Dorchester. From the borders of Wales and Gloucestershire the Reverend Richard Blinman came hither in 1640 to settle at Marshfield with a small body of his followers. A dozen families from the little parish of Bishops Stortford, Hertfordshire, is a conspicuous example of the influence of another famous clergyman direct- ing the emigration to New England of his sympathizers. These are typical examples of the spiritual magnets which drew along with them, to begin a new religious life in the wilderness, a considerable portion of their English parish- ioners.
Another phase in the psychology of emigration is found in what might be called group emigration. Itisnot probable that they were in any way influenced by religious motives. In scores of small parishes, not known to be in any way con- nected with prominent clerical emigrants, it is found that there will be from five to ten persons coming from a single hamlet. These groups constituted the great majority of the migration to Massachusetts and they were undoubtedly motivated by economic reasons. They belonged to the copy- hold class which for generations had been paying rents to manorial lords and being amerced by fines for trivial viola- tions of the customs of the manor by the stewards. They were coming over to be free men, and scarcely a moiety of them
were
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were ready to place themselves in bondage to the clerical oli- garchy which was then beginning to fasten itself upon the body politic.
The underlying motives which determined their decision to emigrate were undoubtedly economic in the last analysis. It is impossible to accept seriously the idea that Land hunger the large majority of them were willing to aban- not religion, the cause of don everything they owned merely to be rid of emigration the formalism of the church ritual which they of majority were supposed to detest. If so, they did not hasten to join the Church here to become 'freemen' in the new Colony nor did they bother much about the restrictions placed on them here by the clerical oligarchy that grew up to challenge their former masters in the English Church in the vigor of their prosecutions for 'heresy.' The average emigrant was gen- erally indifferent to the kind of theological hair-splitting which enabled the learned clergy here to decide that Anne Hutchinson was guilty of eighty errors of doctrine and that one so bulging with untruths would surely rock the founda- tions of the Colony. Winthrop himself admitted that he emigrated for financial reasons. He had no religious troubles at home that he ever mentioned. That the Puritan leaders came to enjoy unrestricted privileges in church affiliations is probably true but they were a minority in control, both civil and clerical.
A more acute and pressing cause was behind it all. It has been shown clearly by special investigations of a student of acknowledged historical ability, detached from local obses- sions, that economic and agrarian distress was acutest in that part of England whence came the greatest numbers during the period of the Great Emigration.' This was a widespread situation superimposed on the dead hand of the manorial system
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