The persecuted turned persecutors, and a precise history unknown of the early Pilgrims in the New World!

In September of the year 1620, the Mayflower, a small (by today’s standard) wooden sailing ship, sailed from Southampton, England to the Americas.  It was carrying 102 Dutch, and English hardcore Puritans, and their private mercenaries seeking a better life, by escaping from Europe’s tyrannical religious persecution.  To be free to practice their religion in the New World.  However, they must have been brave souls to travel that late in the year, reaching the Americas in late December 1620?  When winter had already started, snow and gales were there to greet them, as well a cold rough sea, with channels to navigate within Plymouth Bay.  There is no precise history of when they landed at Plymouth, Massachusetts, as we know it today.  In the day, it was known as the Plymouth colony/council.  What we know of the Plymouth Rock, is probably a myth, on the same lines as George Washington chopping his father’s cherry tree myth.  In fact, the rock went unidentified for 121 years. It wasn’t until 1741, when a wharf was to be built over it, that 94-year-old Thomas Faunce, a town record keeper and the son of a pilgrim who arrived in Plymouth in 1623, reported the rock’s significance. Ever since, Plymouth Rock has been an object of reverence, as a symbol of the founding of a new nation.https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/the-true-story-behind-plymouth-rock-639690/.

The Puritans were led by William Bradford (1590-1657), who governed the colony for thirty years.   Of the 102 colonists, 35 were members of the English Separatist Church (a radical faction of Puritanism) who had years earlier fled to Leiden, the Netherlands, to escape persecution at home. Seeking a more abundant life along with religious freedom, the Separatists negotiated with a London stock company to finance a pilgrimage to America. Approximately two-thirds of those making the trip aboard the Mayflower were non-Separatists, hired to protect the company’s interests; these included John Alden and Myles Standish, the military leader of the colony.

Who said Protestantism was not the same as Catholicism?  Catholicism has a history of banning books, persecuting other religions, etc., which Protestantism did to other sects in the Americas, as well as Europe!

Those seeking religious freedom, one would think, would be passive, and not stop others seeking freedom to do whatever they wanted.  In today’s world, Morton would be seen as a progressive, or even an entrepreneur.  Well, the Plymouth Puritans did not like the goings-on in the other colony known as Merry Mount, led by Thomas Morton (1575/9–1647).  Who was a contrarian, and nonconformist extrovert businessman and an early British settler in colonial America.

Morton arrived in Massachusetts in 1624 as one of the owners of the Wollaston Company, which established a settlement at the site of modern Quincy. In 1626, when Wollaston and most of the settlers moved to Virginia, he stayed on and took charge of the colony and named it Merry Mount (originally Ma-re-Mount or Mount Mar-re and also known as Merrymount). Inevitably, this free-living, prospering, sharp-tongued Anglican conflicted with his pious neighbours. Morton erected a maypole, encouraged conviviality and merriment, wrote bawdy verse, poked fun at his saintly neighbours, conducted religious services using the Book of Common Prayer, monopolized the beaver trade, and sold firearms to Native Americans. The Pilgrims cut down the maypole in 1627, arrested Morton, and exiled him to the Isle of Shoals, whence he escaped to England. He returned within two years and was soon taken into custody again (1630) and his property confiscated.  https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Morton

Morton was one thing, the Puritans then focused their attention on the Quakers, Anabaptists, and other minority religions, so in the Americas we see the so-called persecuted turning to the persecutors.  What do you say?

Jeanne, J. E. pp. Jero Jones.

Approved ~ FS