to stande for ye southward (ye wind and weather being faire) to finde some place aboute Hudsons river for their habitation. But after they had sailed yt course aboute halfe ye day, they fell amongst dangerous shoulds and roring breakers, and they were so farr intangled ther with as they conceived them selves in great danger; & ye wind shrinking upon them withall they resolved to bear up again for the Cape."[1]
Thus Plymouth Rock became the intellectual
door-stone of the New World, and the
banks of the Hudson inherited one of the sad
"might-have-beens" of history. However,
Douglas Campbell, in his trenchant and disturbing
book, The Puritan in Holland, England and America, has told us that the distinctive
principles of our American social and political
life show, on critical inspection, the Dutch
hall-mark.
The America of 1621 was much more of a "dark continent" than the Africa of fifty years ago. The adjective applies both to the skin of the autochthons and the mind of the explorers. In the commercial circles of Amsterdam, Nieu Nederlandt was supposed to be a
- ↑ See page 93, Bradford's History of Plimoth Plantation. From the original manuscript. Boston, 1898. This original MS. in the above year was transferred with appropriate ceremonies from the library of the Archiepiscopal Palace at Fulham to the archives of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
