Read Ebook: The Dark Frigate by Hawes Charles Boardman Fischer Anton Otto Illustrator

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 1483 lines and 73780 words, and 30 pages

The object of the present narrative is to give to the reader an account of the Mayflower Pilgrims that is concise and yet sufficiently comprehensive to embrace all essentials respecting the personality and pilgrimage of the Forefathers, whom the poet Whittier pictures to us in vivid verse as:

those brave men who brought To the ice and iron of our winter time A will as firm, a creed as stern, and wrought With one mailed hand and with the other fought.

FROM A PILGRIM CELL

THE PILGRIMS' CELLS, GUILDHALL, BOSTON, LINCOLNSHIRE.

This is written in a Pilgrim cell, one of those dark and narrow dungeons which the Pilgrim Fathers tenanted three hundred and four years ago, in the autumn of 1607, and behind the heavy iron bars of which men have for generations delighted to be locked in memory of their lives and deeds. The present-day gaoler, less terrible than his predecessor of Puritan times, has ushered me in and closed the rusty gate upon me, and left me alone, a willing prisoner for a space. I look around, but do not start and shrink in mortal dread as must once the hapless captives here immured.

'Tis a gloomy place as a rule; but just now some outer basement doors, flung open, admit the autumn sunlight, which floods the hall floor and penetrates to the cell where I am seated. To get here I have stooped and sidled through an opening a foot and a half wide and five feet deep, set in a whitewashed wall fourteen inches thick. I stand with arms outstretched, and find that the opposite walls may be pressed with the finger-tips of each hand. The cell extends back seven feet, and the height is the same between the bare stone floor and the roughly boarded roof. All is dingy, cobwebbed, musty, and silent as the grave. Like the neighbouring tenement it is cold, mean, melancholy, fit only to be shunned. Yet its associations are dear indeed. For this is holy ground, a hallowed spot, a Mecca of modern pilgrims. It has a history held sacred in two hemispheres, that of religious persecution, of loyal resolution, of physical fetters and spiritual freedom.

Such is the story inscribed upon these walls, a record which may be read in all their time-worn stones, on every inch of their rusted bolts and bars. For they are the cells of the Pilgrim Fathers. Here was the first rude break in their weary worldly progress, a journey which was to continue with affliction into Holland, thence back to Plymouth, and, after a last adieu there to English soil, on in the little Mayflower to New Plymouth and a New England.

Alone in a Pilgrim cell! What thoughts the situation kindles; how eagerly the imagination shapes and clothes them; what scenes this mouldy atmosphere unfolds. The very solitude is eloquent with pious reminiscence; the void is filled again, peopled with those spectres of an imperishable past; their prayers and praise fall on the listening ear, a soft appeal for grace and strength, the lulling notes of a rough psalmody; then answering dreams and visions of the night.

OLD WORLD HOMES AND PILGRIM SHRINES

OLD WORLD HOMES AND PILGRIM SHRINES

Lincolnshire stands pre-eminent among the English shires for inspiriting records of trials borne and conflicts waged for conscience' sake. The whole country, from the lazy Trent to the booming eastern sea, teems moreover with religious interest. To read what happened between the births of two famous Lincolnshire men--Archbishop Langton in the twelfth century; and Methodist John Wesley in the seventeenth--is like reading the history of English nonconformity. The age of miracles was long since past; yet Stephen Langton, Primate of England and Cardinal of Rome, was a champion of the national liberties. He aided, nay instigated, the wresting of Magna Charta from King John. That was not the result of his education; 'twas the Lincolnshire blood in his veins. For the outrage on the Romish traditions the Archbishop was suspended by the Pope. Probably he would have been hanged if they could have got at him.

But we can go back farther even than Langton's time. Not many miles from Gainsborough is the Danish settlement of Torksey, rich in ecclesiastical lore. Here Paulinus baptised the Lindissians on the sandy shore of the Trent, in the presence of Edwin, King of Northumbria. Hereabout, they say, King Alfred the Great was married to the daughter of Etheldred, and the old wives of Gainsborough used to recite tales of Wickliffe hiding on the spot where once stood the dwelling-place of Sweyn and of Canute.

Lincolnshire has always had the courage to bear religious stress, and strange things are read of it. It was near Louth that the insurrection known as "The Pilgrimage of Grace" began. Eighty-five years before the sailing of the Mayflower, and thirty years before William Brewster was born, the ecclesiastical commissioners for the suppression of monasteries went down to hold a visitation at Louth. But the excursion was not to their pleasure. As one of them rode into the town he heard the alarm bell pealing from the tower, and then he saw people swarming into the streets carrying bills and staves, "the stir and noise arising hideous." He fled into the church for sanctuary, but they hauled him out, and with a sword at his breast bade him swear to be true to the Commonwealth. He swore. That was the Examiner. When the Registrar came on the scene he was with scant ceremony dragged to the market cross, where his commission was read in derision and then torn up, and he barely escaped with his life. For the same cause there were risings at Caistor and Horncastle--two of the demurest of modern towns. The Bishop's Chancellor was murdered in the streets of Horncastle and the body stripped and the garments torn to rags; and at Lincoln the episcopal palace was plundered and partially demolished.

But Lincolnshire need rest no fame upon such merits as these. Greater honour belongs to the county, for it was Lincolnshire that made the most important of all contributions to the building of America when it sent forth the Pilgrim Fathers, and afterwards the Puritan leaders, who met for conference in the eventful days of the movement in Boston town, in Sempringham manor house, or in Tattershall Castle, to lay the foundations of the Massachusetts settlements. And, as Doyle in his "English in America," truly says, "In romance of circumstance and the charm of personal heroism the story of the Pilgrim Fathers is pre-eminent. They were the pioneers who made it easy for the rest of the host to follow." Their colony was the germ of the New England States.

Amid the quiet pastures threaded by the Ryton stream, where the counties of York and Lincoln and Nottingham meet, are two small villages, the homes of the only Pilgrim Fathers satisfactorily traced to English birthplaces. A simple, pathetic interest clings to these secluded spots. At Scrooby is the manor house wherein William Brewster, the great heart of the pilgrimage and foremost planter of New Plymouth, was born. Archbishops of York had found a home here for centuries; Wolsey, at the close of his strangely checkered career, lodged there and planted a mulberry tree in the garden; Bishop Bonner dated a letter thence to Thomas Cromwell. And when William Brewster became Elder Brewster, pensive Puritans often gathered there to worship, "and with great love he entertained them when they came, making provision for them to his great charge." His condition was prosperous and he could well afford to do it. A Cambridge man, Brewster early took his degree at Peterhouse; he next saw service at Court, and accompanied Secretary Davison to the Netherlands; afterwards succeeding his father and grandfather as post on the great North Road at Scrooby, a responsible and well-paid office, which he filled for nearly twenty years.

The parish church, "not big, but very well builded," as Leland said; the quaint old vicarage; the parish pound, and all that remains of the parish stocks: these stand witness to the antiquity of Scrooby. A little railway station and rushing Northern expresses are almost the only signs of twentieth century activity.

The Scrooby community was an off-shoot from that at Gainsborough, the first Separatist church formed in the North of England, of which the pastor was John Smyth, a graduate of Cambridge, an "eminent man in his time" and "well beloved of most men." Smyth preached at Gainsborough from 1602 to 1606, when he was driven into exile. The members of his church gathered from miles around to its services, crossing into Gainsborough by the ferry-boat on the Trent. This continued for two or three years, until at length "these people became two distinct bodies or churches, and in regard of distance did congregate severally; for they were of sundry towns and villages."

Richard Clyfton, once rector of Babworth near Retford--"a grave and reverend preacher"--was the first pastor at Scrooby; and with him as teacher was "that famous and worthy man Mr. John Robinson," another seceder from the English Church, who afterwards was pastor for many years "till the Lord took him away by death."

Next to Brewster, William Bradford was the most prominent of the lay preachers among the Scrooby fraternity. He became Governor Bradford of the Plymouth Colony--"the first American citizen of the English race who bore rule by the free choice of his brethren"--and the historian of the Plymouth Plantation. Bradford, a yeoman's son with comfortable home surroundings, lived at Austerfield, an ancient agricultural village about three miles from Scrooby on the Yorkshire side. The pretty cottage of his birth is still shown by the roadside near the Norman church, and the parish register bears the record of his baptism, on March 19, 1589. A youth of seventeen years, he walked across the fields to join the Scrooby brethren in their meetings. He and Brewster, the two men who were to impress their individuality so powerfully upon the religious life of the American people, became firm friends, and, says their later historian, that friendship, "formed amid the tranquil surroundings of the North Midlands of their native land, was to be deepened by common labours and aspirations, and by common hardships and sufferings endured side by side both in the Old World and the New."

But it was Robinson to whom they jointly owed much guidance. When, in Bradford's own words, "They could not long continue in any peaceable condition, but were hunted and persecuted on every side;" when "some were taken and clapt up in prison, and others had their houses beset and watched night and day, and hardly escaped their hands;" and when "the most were fain to fly and leave their homes and habitations and the means of their livelihood," it was John Robinson, the devout and learned pastor, who led them out of Nottinghamshire into Holland, and there inspired within them the vision of complete earthly freedom in the new country across the Atlantic.

Robinson was a Lincolnshire man. Gainsborough claims him, and on Gainsborough his first solid memorial has been raised. Many are familiar with Gainsborough who have never seen the town. Up the Trent sailed Sweyn, the sanguinary Dane, to conquest; and his son Canute--he that ordered back the rising tide, and got a wetting for his pains--was at Gainsborough when he succeeded him as King of England.

Gainsborough is the St. Ogg's of "The Mill on the Floss," and the Trent is the Floss, along which Tom and Maggie Tulliver "wandered with a sense of travel, to see the rushing spring-tide, the awful AEgir, come up like a hungry monster"--the inrush of the first wave of the tide, a phenomenon peculiar at that time to both the Trent and the Witham.

What George Eliot wrote of St. Ogg's describes old Gainsborough to-day--"A town which carries the trace of its long growth and history like a millennial tree, and has sprung up and developed in the same spot between the river and the low hill from the time when the Roman legion turned their backs on it from the camp on the hillside, and the long-haired sea-kings came up the river and looked with fierce eyes at the fatness of the land."

And in sketching the history of St. Ogg's the novelist remembered that time of ecclesiastical ferment now written about, when "Many honest citizens lost all their possessions for conscience' sake, and went forth beggared from their native town. Doubtless there are many houses standing now," she said, "on which those honest citizens turned their backs in sorrow, quaint gabled houses looking on the river, jammed between newer warehouses, and penetrated by surprising passages, which turn at sharp angles till they lead you out on a muddy strand over-flowed continually by the rushing tide." Did not Maggie Tulliver, in white muslin and simple, noble beauty, attend an "idiotic beggar" in the still existing Old Hall, where the Fathers worshipped and John Smyth taught--"a very quaint place, with broad, jaded stripes painted on the walls, and here and there a show of heraldic animals of a bristly, long-snouted character, the cherished emblems of a noble family once the seigniors of this now civic hall"?

In this Old Hall the Separatist church was founded in 1602, and here it had the friendly protection of the Hickman family, Protestants whose religious sympathies had brought them persecution and exile in the past.

But the "foreign-looking town" which George Eliot endowed with romance had, like the neighbouring estuary town of Boston, which her language might have served almost as well to paint, been the abode of hard, historic fact. We can imagine the Scrooby brethren crossing the ancient ferry to bid their friends at Gainsborough farewell. For in 1607 we read, this "groupe of earnest professors of religion and bold assertors of the principle of freedom and personal conviction in respect to the Christian faith and practice" had formed the resolution to seek in another country the liberty they found not at home. But it was as unlawful to flee from their native land as to remain in it without conforming, for the statute of 13 Richard II, still in force, made emigrating without authority a penal crime.

Not Gainsborough alone in the North and East appeals to the never-ending stream of reverent New World pilgrims to Old World shrines. On an autumn day of the year above named came Elder Brewster to the famed new borough of Boston. There he cautiously looked about him, and made a bargain with the captain of a Dutch vessel to receive his party on board "as privately as might be." But they were betrayed, arrested, stripped of their belongings and driven into the town, a spectacle for the gaping crowd, then haled before the justices at the Guildhall and "put into ward," there to await the pleasure of the Privy Council concerning them.

Boston is a unique old shrine--a place "familiar with forgotten years," as George Eliot says; a town, as already hinted, resembling Gainsborough in many outward features, but even wealthier in associations dear to the hearts of New World pilgrims. Boston and Gainsborough are regarded as the two most foreign-looking towns in England. Many of Boston's inhabitants still hold the brave spirit which enabled their ancestors to endure the religious stress of the seventeenth century. It has been a cradle of liberty since that idea first held men's thoughts and roused them to action.

The quaint buildings, the ancient towers of Hussey and of Kyme, the Guildhall, the Grammar School, the great church with its giant tower all crusted o'er with the dust of antiquity: these stood when Bradford and Brewster and their companions in search of freedom were arraigned before the magistrates for the high crime and misdemeanor of trying to leave their native land.

They must have had secret friends in the place; for some time after their Boston adventure the Government sent down Commissioners to make serious inquiry as to who had cut off the crosses from the tops of the maces carried before the Mayor to church "on Sundays and Thursdays and solemn times." John Cotton, the Puritan vicar, openly condemned the act. Suspicion fell upon churchwarden Atherton Hough. But he denied it, though "he confessed he did before that year break off the hand and arm of a picture of a Pope standing over a pillar of the outside of the steeple very high, which hand had the form of a church in it." The confession seems to have been safely made, and doubtless churchwarden Hough was proud of it. He might have been better employed at that moment; but if any be tempted to censure his Puritan zeal, let them remember the temper of the times in which he lived. There was something more than wanton mischief behind i Marsham nor I ever saw a Scot yet who would not share his supper with a poorer man than himself.

At the end of the day he bought food at a cottage where the wife did not scruple to charge him three times the worth of the meal, and that night he lay under a hedge; the day thereafter he chanced upon a shepherd with whom he passed the night on the hills, and the third day he came to an inn where the reckoning took all but a few pence of his silver. So as he set out upon his way in the morning, he knew not whence his supper was to come or what roof should cover his head.

It was a fine day, with white clouds blowing across a blue sky and all the colors as bright as in a painted picture, and there was much for a sailor to marvel at. The grass in the meadows waved in the great wind like running water. The river in the valley was so small and clear and still that, to a man bred at sea, it appeared to be no water at all but a toy laid between hills, with toy villages for children on its banks. Climbing with light quick steps a knoll from which there was a broader prospect, Phil came unawares upon a great thick adder, which lay sunning its tawny flanks and black-marked back but which slipped away into a thicket at the jar of footsteps. The reptile gave him a lively start, but it was soon gone, and from the knoll he saw the valley spread before him for miles.

It was a day to be alive and, though Philip Marsham was adrift in a strange world, with neither chart nor compass to show the way, his strength had at last come back to him and he had the blithe spirit that seasons a journey well. His purse was light but he was no lad to be stayed for lack of wind, and seeing now a man far ahead of him on the road, and perceiving an opportunity to get sailing directions for the future, he leaped down from the knoll and set off after the fellow as hard as he could post.

The man had gone another mile before Phil overhauled him and by then Phil was puffing so loudly that the fellow, who carried a huge book under his arm and bore himself very loftily, turned to see what manner of creature was at his heels. Although he had the air of a great man, his coat was now revealed as worn and spotted and his wristbands were dirty. He frowned, bent his head, and pursued his journey in silence.

"Good morrow to you!" Phil cried and fell into step beside him.

The man answered not a word but frowned and hugged his book and walked the faster.

At that Phil bustled up and laid hand on his dirk. "Good morrow, I say. Hast no tongue between thy teeth?"

The fellow hugged his book the tighter and frowned the darker and fiercely shook his head. "Never," he cried, "was a man assaulted with such diversity of thoughts! Yet here must come a lobcock lapwing and cry 'Good morrow!' I will have you know I am one to bite sooner than to bark."

Already he was striding at a furious gait, yet now, giving a hitch to his mighty book, he made shift to lengthen his stride and go yet faster.

Unhindered by any such load, Phil pressed at his heels.

"'A lobcock'? 'A lapwing'?" he cried. "Thou puddling quacksalver--"

Stopping short and giving him a look of dark resentment, the fellow sadly shook his head. "That was a secret and most venomous blow."

"I gave you good morrow and you returned me nought but ill words."

"The shoe must be made for the foot. I have no desire to go posting about the country with a roystering coxcomb but--well--as I say, I have no liking for thy company, which consorts ill with the pressure of many thoughts; but since you know what you know , like it or not, I must even keep thy company with such grace as may be. Yea, though thou clappest hand to thy weapon with such facility that I believe thee sunk to thy neck in the Devil's quagmire, bogged in thy sin, and thy hands red with blood."

With that, he set out again but at an ordinary pace, and Phil, wonderfully perplexed by his words, fell into his step.

Again the fellow shook his head very sadly. "A secret and most venomous blow! Th' art a Devon man?"

"Nay, I never saw Devon."

The fellow shot him a strange glance and shifted the book from one arm to the other.

"And have never seen Devon? Never laid foot in Bideford, I'll venture." There was a cunning look in his eyes and again he shifted the book.

"'Tis even so."

"A most venomous blow! This wonderfully poseth me." After a time he said in a very low voice, "There is only one other way. Either you have told me a most wicked lie or Jamie Barwick told you."

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet