Chartered in 1629, the Massachusetts Bay Company was founded by a group of London merchants who hoped to further the Puritan cause and turn a profit through trade with the Indians. The first five ships sailed from England in 1629, and by 1642 some 21,000 Puritans had emigrated to Massachusetts. Long remembered as the Great Migration, this flow of population represented less than one-third of English emigration in the 1630s. Far more English settlers arrived in Ireland, the Chesapeake, and the Caribbean. After 1640, migration to New England virtually ceased, and in some years more colonists left the region than arrived. Nonetheless, the Great Migration established the basis for a stable and thriving society.
Samuel de Champlain’s 1605 sketch of Plymouth Harbor, made when he was exploring the coast of modern-day New England in search of a site for a French settlement, shows the area dotted with wigwams and fields of corn, squash, and beans. By the time the Pilgrims arrived in 1620, epidemics had destroyed this thriving Indian community.
QUESTIONS
1. What does Champlain’s sketch tell us about Native American life in New England before the advent of English settlement?
2. Why do you think many Europeans claimed that Indians did not live in settled communites?
Seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The Indian’s scanty attire suggests a lack of civilization. His statement “Come Over and Help Us,” based on an incident in the Bible, illustrates the English conviction that they were liberating the native population, rather than exploiting them as other empires had.
In many ways, the settling of New England was unique. Although servants represented about one-quarter of the Great Migration, most settlers arrived in Massachusetts in families. They came for many reasons, including the desire to escape religious persecution, anxiety about the future of England, and the prospect of economic betterment. Compared with colonists in Virginia and Maryland, they were older and more prosperous, and the number of men and women more equally balanced. Because of the even sex ratio and New England’s healthier climate, the population grew rapidly, doubling every twenty-seven years. Although the region received only a small fraction of the century’s migration, by 1700 New England’s white population of 91,000 outnumbered that of both the Chesapeake and the West Indies. Nearly all were descendants of those who crossed the Atlantic during the Great Migration.