%30.  The Beginnings of New England.%—­When the Dutch put up their trading posts where New York and Albany now stand, all the country east of New York, all of what is now New England, was a wilderness.  As early as 1607 an attempt was made to settle it and a colony was planted on the coast of Maine by two members of the Plymouth Company, Sir John Popham, Lord Chief Justice of England, and Sir Ferdinando Gorges, governor of Plymouth.  But the colonists were half starved and frozen, and in the spring of 1608 gladly went home to England.

Six years later John Smith, the hero of Virginia, explored and mapped the coast from the Penobscot to Cape Cod.  He called the country New England; one of the rivers, the Charles; and two of the promontories, Cape Elizabeth and Cape Ann.  Three times he attempted to lead out a colony; but that work was reserved for other men.

%31.  The Separatists.%—­The reign of Queen Elizabeth had witnessed in England the rise of a religious sect which insisted that certain changes should be made in the government and ceremonials of the Established or State Church of England.  This they called purifying the Church, and in consequence they were themselves called Puritans.[1] At first they did not intend to form a new sect; but in 1580 one of their ministers, named Robert Brown, urged them to separate from the Church of England, and soon gathered about him a great number of followers, who were called Separatists or Brownists.  They boldly asserted their right to worship as they pleased, and put their doctrines into practice.  So hot a persecution followed, that in 1608 a party, led by William Brewster and John Robinson, fled from Scrooby, a little village in northern England, to Amsterdam, in Holland; but soon went on to Leyden, where they dwelt eleven years.[2]

[Footnote 1:  Read Fiske’s Beginnings of New England, pp. 50-71.  The teacher may read “Rise and Development of Puritanism” in Eggleston’s Beginners of a Nation, pp. 98-140.]

[Footnote 2:  Read Eggleston’s Beginners of a Nation, pp. 141-157; Fiske’s Beginnings of New England, pp. 71-80; Doyle’s Puritan Colonies, Vol.  I., pp. 47-81; Palfrey’s New England, Vol.  I., pp. 176-232.]

%32.  Why the Separatists went to New England%.—­They had come to Holland as an organized community, practicing English manners and customs.  For a temporary residence this would do.  But if they and their children’s children after them were to remain and prosper, they must break up their organization, forget their native land, their native speech, their national traditions, and to all intents and purposes become Dutch.  This they could not bring themselves to do, and by 1617 they had fully determined to remove to some land where they might still continue to be Englishmen, and where they might lay the foundations of a Christian state.  But one such land could then be found, and that was America.  To America, therefore, they turned their attention, and after innumerable delays formed a company and obtained leave from the London Company to settle on the coast of what is now New Jersey.[1]