Then, more soberly, as an experienced leader of his community, Bradford
speculated on the very nature of the Puritan philosophy:
that it may be in this case as it is with waters when their streams are
stopped or dammed up. When they get passage they flow with more vio-
lence and make more noise and disturbance than when they are suffered
to run quietly in their own channels; so wickedness being here more
stopped by strict laws, and the same more nearly looked unto so as it can-
not run in a common road of liberty as it would and is inclined, it
searches everywhere and at last breaks out where it gets vent.”The same pressures manifested themselves politically. From the small,
compact, unworldly community they had set out to become, the Pilgrims
flew apart from one another. Ironically, even their move toward representa-
tive government was an indication that they could no longer assemble in
one place. And soon they scattered throughout New England.
Toward the end of the first generation of Pilgrims in the New World,
another group of Puritans decided to come. They felt they had little choice
because under Charles I, Archbishop Laud began in 1628 to purge the
churches and schools of England. As tension mounted, virtually the whole
Puritan community determined to emigrate. Unable to protect themselves,
a group of merchants, led by John White, calling themselves “the New
England Company” sent an initial group of forty settlers under John
Endecott to establish a foothold at the Algonquian settlement of Naumkeag,
which they renamed Salem. Meanwhile, they lobbied, as we would say, to
obtain a royal charter as the Massachusetts Bay Company. When they suc-
cessfully concluded their negotiations, they sent a well-equipped party of an
additional 400 of their members across the ocean in April 1629. At the next
stage, in 1630, they sent a whole flotilla of eleven ships with some 700 pas-
sengers, a storehouse of equipment, and livestock.
Themselves owning the company, rather than being its lessees as the
Virginians were to the London Company; being its serfs as the Marylanders
were to Lord Baltimore; or having no clear legal standing, as happened to the
Pilgrims at Plymouth, they felt themselves to be in control of their destiny.
That sense of destiny was underpinned by religious unity and sense of mis-
124 THE BIRTH OF AMERICA