company.  Longfellow’s delightful poem, “The Courtship of Miles
     Standish,” has given him and his bride, Priscilla Mullens,
     world-wide celebrity, though it is to be feared that its historical
     accuracy would hardly stand criticism.  Why young Alden should have
     been “hired for a cooper at Southampton,” with liberty to “go or
     stay” in the colony, as Bradford says he was (clearly indicating
     that he went to perform some specific work and return, if he liked,
     with the ship), has mystified many.  The matter is clear, however,
     when it is known, as Griffis shows, that part of a Parliamentary Act
     of 1543 reads:  “Whosoever shall carry Beer beyond Sea, shall find
     Sureties to the Customers (?) of that Port, to bring in Clapboard
     [staves] meet [sufficient] to make so much Vessel [barrel or
     “kilderkin”] as he shall carry forth.”  As a considerable quantity of
     beer was part of the may-FLOWER’S lading, and her consignors stood
     bound to make good in quantity the stave-stock she carried away,
     it was essential, in going to a wild country where it could not be
     bought, but must be “got out” from the growing timber, to take along
     a “cooper and cleaver” for that purpose.  Moreover, the great demand
     for beer-barrel stock made “clapboard” good and profitable return
     lading.  It constituted a large part of the fortune’s return freight
     (doubtless “gotten out” by Alden), as it would have undoubtedly of
     the may-FLOWER’S, had the hardship of the colony’s condition
     permitted.

Peter Browne we know little concerning.  That he was a man of early
     middle age is inferable from the fact that he married the widow
     Martha Ford, who came in the Fortune in 1621.  As she then was the
     mother of three children, it is improbable that she would have
     married a very young man.  He appears, from certain collateral
     evidence, to have been a mechanic of some kind, but it is not clear
     what his handicraft was or whence he came.

John Billington (Bradford sometimes spells it Billinton) and his family,
     Bradford tells us, “were from London.”  They were evidently an
     ill-conditioned lot, and unfit for the company of the planters, and
     Bradford says, “I know not by what friend shuffled into their
     Company.”  As he had a wife and two children, the elder of whom must
     have been about sixteen years old, he was apparently over
     thirty-five years of age.  There is a tradition that he was a
     countryman bred, which certain facts seem to confirm. (See land
     allotments for data as to age of boys, 1632.) He was the only one
     of the original colonists to suffer the “death penalty” for crime.