31.8 America: a.d. 1601 to 1700  (Page 4/16)

New england colonies

This designation included colonies of New Hampshire, Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island and Connecticut. By 1700 there were 130,000 people in this geographical area, with 7,000 in Boston and 2,600 in Newport. These settlers all belonged to the more independent classes and possessed a great mass of intelligence, which was to greatly influence the government and commerce of America for generations to come. (Ref. 217 ) The first Englishman to explore the New England area was Bartholomew Gosnold, who sailed from the Azores in 1602 to go along the coast from Maine to Cape Cod. He built a house on Cuttyhunk, traded with Indians and left smallpox on the new continent. He was followed by Thomas Hunt, taking Indians as slaves in 1615 and perhaps again introducing smallpox. By 1617 an epidemic of this disease reduced the Indian population by over a thousand, some say as much as 10,000. (Ref. 222 )

New hampshire

Two small proprietary colonies were set up - one in New Hampshire and one in Maine. The latter belonged to Sir Ferdinando Gorges, whose heirs soon sold out to Massachusetts, but small settlements at Portsmouth and Exeter, N.H., which began as personal estates of Captain John Mason, persisted even af ter being sold to the crown. New Hampshire was not truly a separate province from Massachusetts until after 1691. In 1690 the first man-of-war built for the British navy in America, the "Falkland", was completed at Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

Massachusetts bay

Some Puritan separatists, who had seceded from the Church of England to the Netherlands, under William Brewster and accompanied by William Bradford, founded the new Plymouth colony in 1620. They immediately set up their own self government under the Mayflower compact. The Mayflower expedition was subsidized by a loan of 7,000 pounds and it had 149 people, including about 40 "separatists" (i.e. separating from the English Church), chiefly from Leyden where they had previously gone. In the first winter in the new land over 1/2 died of scurvy or general debility. They had tried to hit northern Virginia, but missed their target. After the first few seasons, William Bradford became their governor. These Pilgrims deserve to be famous for two things; first, they survived and secondly they proclaimed the Mayflower compact, a bold assertion of their right to self -government. Following the Mayflower was the great Puritan migration of the 1630s. The promoters of the Massachusetts Bay Colony put up 200,000 pounds. The group was led by John Winthrop, a Puritan (different from the "Separatists"), who only wanted to "purify" the Church of England. They first sailed in March, 1630 with 500 men, women and children. On arrival, they raised cattle, Indian corn and vegetables and soon developed both a fur trade and cod fishing. Winthrop was very concerned about the saintliness of his colony, but not his customers, as he sold cod and later ships to Roman Catholics and to slave-holding Virginian planters alike. This colony was at once a theocracy and an oligarchy, yet it adopted trial by jury, freedom from self-incrimination, and levied no taxes on those who could not vote. But there was no religious tolerance. Baptists and Quakers-were the Devil's agents and the Quakers were the worst. By the penal law of the colony any Catholic priest, who reappeared there after having once been driven out, was subject to death. (Ref. 217 ) Witchcraft was persecuted, but chiefly after Winthrop's death. (Ref. 39 ) The Puritan migrations continued until 1637 when the English Puritans decided to stay and contest their fate in England, itself, as its Civil War started. That war kept Charles I from suppressing the Bay Colony and its government became a model for the other colonies. In 1634 Massachusetts joined with her neighboring Puritan colonies to form the New England Confederation. This was a loose union formed to settle boundary disputes and give mutual protection from Indians, French and Dutch. Free, public education was soon established, a printing press appeared in Cambridge in 1639 and Harvard University was established in the same city in 1650.