stepped as they came ashore, December 21, 1620.  To this harbor the Mayflower was brought, and the work of founding Plymouth was begun.  The winter was a dreadful one, and before spring fifty-one of the colonists had died.[1] But the Pilgrims stood fast, and in 1621 obtained a grant of land[2] from the Council for New England, which had just succeeded the Plymouth Company, under a charter giving it control between latitudes 40 deg. and 48 deg., from sea to sea.[3] It was from the same Council that for fifteen years to come all other settlers in New England obtained their rights to the soil.

[Footnote 1:  In the trying times which followed, William Bradford was chosen governor and many times reelected.  He wrote the so-called “Log of the Mayflower,”—­really a manuscript History of the Plymouth Plantation from 1602 to 1647,—­a fragment of which is reproduced on the opposite page.]

[Footnote 2:  This grant had no boundary.  Each settler might have 100 acres.  Fifteen hundred acres were set aside for public buildings.]

[Footnote 3:  Fiske’s Beginnings of New England, pp. 80-87; Palfrey’s New England, Vol.  I, pp. 176-232; Thatcher’s History of the Town of Plymouth.]

[Illustration:  Fragment of History of the Plymouth Plantation.]

%35.  A Puritan Colony proposed.%—­Among those who obtained such rights was a company of Dorchester merchants who planted a town on Cape Ann.  The enterprise failed, and the colonists went off and settled at a place they called Naumkeag.  But there was one man in Dorchester who was not discouraged by failure.  He was John White, a Puritan rector.  What had been done by the Separatists in a small way might be done, it seemed to White, on a great scale by an association of wealthy and influential Puritans.  The matter was discussed by them in London, and in 1628 an association was formed, and a tract of land was bought from the Council for New England.

%36.  The “Sea to Sea” Grant%.—­Concerning the interior of our continent absolutely nothing was known.  Nobody supposed it was more than half as wide as it really is.  The grant to the association, therefore, stretched from three miles north of the Merrimac River to three miles south of the Charles River, along these rivers to their sources, and then westward across the continent from sea to sea.[1]

[Footnote 1:  You will notice that when this grant was made in 1628 the Dutch had discovered the Hudson, and had begun to settle Albany.  To this region (the Hudson and Mohawk valleys) the English had no just claim.]

As soon as the grant was obtained, John Endicott came out with a company of sixty persons, and took up his abode at Naumkeag, which, being an Indian and therefore a pagan name, he changed to Salem, the Hebrew word for “peace.”

%37.  The Massachusetts Charter, 1629%.—­The next step was to obtain the right of self-government, which was secured by a royal charter creating a corporation known as the Governor and Company of Massachusetts Bay in New England.  Over the affairs of the company were to preside a governor, deputy governor, and a council of eighteen to be elected annually by the members of the company.[2]