ve land. The
winter was fortunately mild, but they had to endure cruel hardships.
Their stores were scanty; they had no fishing tackle, and game was not
abundant. Fortunately spring came early; but forty-four of the little
company succumbed to want and cold, and those who retained their health
were hardly equal to the task of nursing the sick and burying the dead.
Had the savages been numerous and hostile they could have swept the
little settlement out of existence with but small effort; but the country
had been wasted not long before by a deadly pestilence and the native
tribes were too weak and too much in fear of more powerful enemies of
their own race, to make an attack on the strangers. Instead of injuring
the newcomers the Indians helped them, brought them game and fish, and
taught them how to cultivate corn. In 1623 the colony had, with new
arrivals, about one hundred and fifty inhabitants. The first division of
land was made this year, and a large crop of corn was harvested. Twelve
years after the foundation the people of Plymouth hardly numbered five
hundred, and they were soon overshadowed by the large Puritan immigration
to Salem and Boston. The poor and struggling settlers of Plymouth did not
even have the satisfaction of knowing that the fruits of their toils and
sufferings would be their own. They were still bound to the London
merchants who had supplied them with the means for emigration, and these
partners in the enterprise were impatient of the lack of returns. As the
Pilgrims gradually grew better off they were the more anxious to remove
the yoke which interfered with their independence, and some members of
the community who were richer than the others agreed, in exchange for a
monopoly of the Indian trade and the surrender of the accumulated wealth
of the colony, to pay its debt to the English shareholders. The colony
thus achieved its freedom, and its members were able to proceed in
building their settlement according to their own ideas of religion and
civil government without restraint from partners who had sought only for
worldly profit.

One of the most interesting incidents connected with the early history of
the Plymouth Colony was the romantic marriage of Priscilla and John
Alden, immortalized in the verse of Longfellow. Captain Miles Standish
was a redoubtable soldier, small in person, but of great activity and
courage. He came over in the Mayflower, and his wife Rose Standish fell a
victim to