Page:David Alden's Daughter.djvu/16

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vi
PREFACE.

who, after vainly inquiring for "the documents in the case" of William Bradford, remarked:—

"You have no right to defraud people by pretending to have what you have not."

The reproof bore fruit, as righteous reproofs always should, and in later and more extended narratives of the same events nothing is set down as fact that has not been carefully determined to be such.

In this connection it seems well to notice a somewhat sturdy popular error, supported as it is by what should be important evidence. The error is that Governor Carver left children, and that one of them, named Elizabeth, became the wife of John Rowland, the Mayflower Pilgrim.

The important but most erroneous evidence is a stone upon Burying Hill in Plymouth, erected some forty years ago to the memory of the Pilgrim, whereon it is stated that his wife was daughter of Governor Carver, a statement resting upon tradition, both printed and oral. But this, like many another tradition, was slain at the root in 1855 when the long-lost journal of Governor William Bradford, taken by the British soldiers from the steeple of the Old South Church in Boston, during the Revolution, was rediscovered in the library of the Bishop of London, and by the cour-