and large supplies of provisions, tools, and arms. But that was as nothing to a great fleet which
set out in 1630, with 700 settlers aboard. This was the first of a great series of convoys,
numbering 200 ships in all, which throughout the 1630s transported 20,000 Englishmen and
women to New England. Thus in 1634 William Whiteway noted in his Dorchester diary: This summer there went over to [New England] at least 20 sail of ships and in them 2,000 planters, from the ports of Weymouth and Plymouth alone.' It was the greatest outward movement, so far, in English history. The most important of these early convoys, as setting a new pattern, was the one in 1630 under the leadership of John Winthrop. He was the outstanding figure of the Puritan voyages, the first great American. Son of a Suffolk squire, and neighbor and friend of Warwick, he was tall and powerful, with a long, lugubrious, stern, impressive face, penetrating eyes, prominent nose, and high brow. He was another Cambridge man, trained as a lawyer in Gray's Inn, sat as a justice of the peace, and took up a job in the Court of Wards but lost it because of his uncompromising Puritan views. He was a sad but exalted man, who had buried two beloved wives and reasoned to himself thatThe life which is most exercised with tryalls and temptations is the sweetest and
may prove the safest.' He came to the conclusion that overcrowded, irreligious, ill-governed
England was a lost cause, and New England the solution, setting his views down fiercely in his
General Observations for the Plantation o f New England:
All other Churches of Europe are brought to desolation and it cannot be but that the like judgement
is coming upon us ... This land grows weary of its Inhabitants, so as man, who is the most precious
of all Creatures, is heere more vile and base than the earth they tread upon ... We are grown to the
height of intemperance in all excess of Ryot, as no mans estate almost will suffice to keep sayle
with his equals ... The fountains of Learning and Religion are corrupted ... Most children, even the
best wittes and fayrest hopes, are perverted, corrupted and utterly overthrowne by the multitude of
evil examples and the licensious government of those seminaries.
Previous colonies had failed, Winthrop argued, because they were carnall not religious'. Only an enterprise governed in the name of the reformed religion stood a chance. Winthrop joined the new company at the end of July 1619, when it was decided that the proposed new colony should be self-governing and not answerable to the backers in England. Under their charter they had power to meet four times annually in General Courts, to pass laws, elect new freemen or members, elect officers, including a governor, deputy governor, and eighteenassistants,' make ordinances, settle 'formes and Ceremonies of Government and
Magistracy,' and correct, punish, pardon and rule' all inhabitants of the plantation, so long as nothing was donecontrary to English. lawe.' The decision to make the colony self-governing
persuaded Winthrop to sell up his estate at Groton, realizing £5,760, and put all his assets into
the venture. He impressed everyone connected with the venture by his determination and
efficiency, and in October he was elected governor, probably because other major shareholders
said they would not go except under his leadership.
Winthrop proved extremely successful in getting people and ships together over the winter,
thus forming the largest and best-equipped English expedition yet. As the fleet set off, on Easter
Monday 1630, Winthrop was in a mood of exaltation, seeing himself and his companions taking
part in what seemed a Biblical episode-a new flight from Egypt into the Promised Land. To
record it he began to keep a diary, just as he imagined Moses had made notes of the Exodus.
These early diaries and letters, which are plentiful, and the fact that most important documents
about the early American colonies have been preserved, mean that the United States is the first
nation in human history whose most distant origins are fully recorded. For America, we have no