The How and Why Library/Geography/Section II

by Eleanor Stackhouse Atkinson

II. THE LITTLE PALE FACES WHO CAME OVER THE SEA

Six year old Faithful was knitting a stocking. Her home was a pretty stone cottage with a thick roof of straw. It was in a village, in England. Roses grew around the open door. Through the door she could see the square, gray tower of a stone church. Ivy climbed the tower. The bell in the tower rang sweet chimes. The church had pointed windows of many-colored glass. The fences between the cottages were thick green hedges. A mill stood beside a dancing river. The mill-wheel churned the water to foam. On a hill top stood a castle in miles of green park, with a stone wall around it. Lords and ladies lived there. Sometimes they drove to the church in a gay coach, or they went away to the King's court in London. They wore silks and laces and plumes and jewels. Little Faithful's English home was as pretty as a fairy story. But her father often talked of going away to the New World of America, that Columbus had found, to live. They were all safe and comfortable in England, but they were not happy. They dressed and lived more soberly than their neighbors. They liked to go to a plain meeting-house, instead of to the King's stone church. For this they were punished. Unkind people mocked them, and called them Puritans. But they were proud of that name because they tried to live pure lives.

Faithful wore a long, plain gown of dark wool. A square of white lawn was folded around her neck. On her head was a stiff white linen cap almost like a sunbonnet. Her little face was rosy and dimpled; her loving eyes as blue as violets. Her yellow hair just would curl, and that was a trouble. A little Puritan girl had to keep her hair smooth. She wore a white apron, with a pocket to hold her thimble and thread. The Puritans thought it wicked for even a little girl to be idle. Her brother Myles wore a wide-brimmed pointed hat, knee breeches and a tightly buttoned coat. He wore a wide, square-cornered white linen collar. Both of these children had big brass or silver buckles on their stout, low shoes.

One day their father said they must get ready to go to America. Other Puritan families were going with them in a sailing vessel. They had to take ever so many things with them, for they could not

SCENES IN THE PILGRIM STORY
PROTECTED BY A GRANITE CANOPY AND BY BARS TO KEEP RELIC HUNTERS FROM CHIPPING IT AWAY, THE ROCK ON WHICH		PILGRIMS LANDED STILL LIES AT THE WATER'S EDGE AT PLYMOUTH WITH THE DATE OF THE LANDING CARVED UPON IT.
The Mayflower has just arrived and its passengers are landing on the "bleak New England shores."
The Pilgrims sadly watching the Mayflower as it sails back toward the comfortable homes in old England which they have given up for "freedom to worship God."
Even when they went to church the Pilgrims were obliged to go armed to protect themselves against attacks by the Indians.

buy even a paper of pins in America. They packed big chests with clothing and blankets and feather beds and table linen. Cooking pots and pewter dishes and candle sticks were put into barrels. The mother did not forget the spinning wheel and loom for weaving. The father thought of tools and seeds and guns and knives and fish nets. He put in a box of books, too. He did not take money. To trade with the Indians for furs, he took red blankets and calico and beads.

^[1]One hundred Pilgrims stood on the deck of the Mayflower and said goodby to the green shores of England. Every one of them could do something useful. There were carpenters and shoemakers and blacksmiths and farmers. There was a soldier to lead them if they had to fight the Indians. A minister went with them, and a wise man to govern them. Puritan mothers could do nearly everything to make people comfortable. The little girls could knit and sew and mind the baby. The smallest boy could whittle wooden shoe pegs.

It was a long journey, in cold winter weather, over the sea. The Atlantic ocean is three thousand miles wide. Today we cross this ocean in steam-ships, in five days. But the Pilgrims came over three hundred years ago, in a little sailing vessel. The voyage took six weeks. Big waves beat the sides of the ship and rolled it almost over. The snow fell thick amd ice covered the deck. Fogs shut them in, so they could not see where they were going. Icebergs as big as hills floated in the water, and they saw whales. By and by they saw sea gulls. They were near land.

The land was not green and pleasant like England. All they saw was black rocks, bare forests and great fields of snow. The Pilgrims got into little boats and rowed over foamy breakers to this land. They knelt on the rocks and prayed and sang hymns. And they named the bleak coast New England, after their old home.

How the trees fell in that forest! Twenty men with sharp axes chopped all day long. Soon the Pilgrims had warm log houses, with chimneys of clay and sticks. Doors of axe-hewn boards were hung on wooden hinges. Thick oiled paper covered the small holes left for windows, but there was plenty of light from the big fire of logs. The straightest logs were split and laid for floors. The carpenters made tables and stools and bedsteads. The blacksmith swung long iron bars in the chimney to hang cooking pots over the fire. Everything was carried from the ship into the houses. Then the Mayflower sailed away home. The little pale faces were alone in the wide, wide, New World of America, with the red children of the forest.

They had a great deal to show each other. The Indians brought corn and told the white people how to make mush and hominy. They brought maple sugar to make syrup. They had very small grains of corn that burst into flowers when they got hot. Wasn't pop-corn a surprise? Faithful and her brother got fur hoods and mittens. They coasted on hillsides and ran on snow-shoes. They had baked Indian beans and pumpkin pudding to eat, and wild turkey with cranberries. In the summer they found wild grapes, plums and crabapples, strawberries, blackberries and blueberries. In the fall there were nuts of many kinds. They gathered wax bayberries to make sweet smelling candles. The carpenters made boats to fish for big cod. The children dug clams from the sand on the beach.

How cosy it was, in the log home in the evening! Half a tree could be put into the fireplace. The children ate their supper of hominy and syrup and deer meat from Indian bowls of wood. But they had white linen cloths and napkins. They brought their manners and their prayers and their school books to America. A woman taught them to read and write and spell and "cipher," in one of the cabins. To "cipher" is to do arithmetic sums by hard rules. They learned their letters from a horn book. The horn book was more like a slate than a book. Their only reader was the Bible. Faithful read the Bible through three times, before she was twelve years old. Besides she helped her mother. In America she had to learn to sweep a room clean with an Indian birch broom, and to brush the hearth with a turkey wing. She spun flax and wove cloth. She made soap by boiling lye water, dripped through wood ashes, and animal fat together. This made strong, brown soft soap.

Her brother went into the woods with his father to cut down trees. The forest land had to be cleared for fields, to grow corn and wheat and flax. Around every cabin was a little garden to grow peas and cabbages and flowers. Oh, how the children watched the first green sprouts come up. And how they clapped their hands when they saw the first English daisy or pink rose. The flowers made America seem more like a real home. In the fields and woods were violets and buttercups, as in England. One tiny, sweet-smelling flower that pushed its pink, waxy clusters and glossy leaves right through the snow, in the pine woods, was strange to them. This they called the Mayflower, after their dear little sailing ship. Once in many months a sailing vessel came and brought them things from England. When it sailed away it took the furs of bears and beavers and foxes to sell in London.

Sometimes the Puritans and the Indians had dreadful battles. The red man wanted the forests for hunting, and the white man wanted the land for farms and towns. Every little settlement of white people had one big cabin that was both a meeting house and a fort. The men carried their guns and knives to church. They carried them when they went to the fields to plow. Sometimes they built high walls of pointed stakes around the village. After many years the Indians went deeper into the woods and left the country near the sea to the white people. The Puritans learned to love their home in New England. No one ever thought of going back to Old England. They had many little towns around a sea-port city called Boston.

Other English people who were different from the Puritans came to America, but Faithful and Myles never saw the little drab-gowned, soft-spoken, Quaker children who lived near the town of Philadelphia. Neither did they see the English children who lived in big houses by the wide rivers of Virginia. America was so big that the towns were hundreds of miles apart. Little Dutch children came to America to live, too, and French children and Spanish children, but they all lived so far from each other that they could not pay visits. We can go to see them today. Do you know how?

In the fairy story, when the Little Lame Prince, who was shut up in a tower, wanted to go to the land of Far Away or Long Ago he sat down on a magic carpet. Whisk! He sailed through the air as easily as a bird.

1. This first company who landed at Plymouth Rock, were called Pilgrims: those who came later and settled at Boston were known as Puritans.