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Once Upon a Time in Connecticut by Caroline Clifford Newton
page 31 of 125 (24%)
deck and bestirred themselves were presently well again,
therefore our captain set our children and young men to some
harmless exercises, in which the seamen were very active and did
our people much good, though they would sometimes play the wags
with them." When at last the Hector dropped anchor in Boston
Harbor, and "there came a smell off the shore like the smell of a
garden," her passengers must have been glad that the long voyage
was over.

The two leaders of the company were Theophilus Eaton, a
successful shipping merchant of London, a man of affairs and of
great personal dignity and kindliness, and his friend, Reverend
John Davenport, a London clergyman, who, like many other Puritan
ministers of those days, had been obliged to leave England on
account of his religious opinions. These two men had been
schoolboys together in the town of Coventry, they had been
associated later in London, they came together to America, and
they remained friends to the end of their lives.

As many of their party were merchants, and not farmers like a
large number of the settlers on the Connecticut River at
Hartford, it was important to select a place for their colony
which would be convenient for trade and where there was a good
harbor for the commerce they hoped to establish. For this reason
the report of Quinnipiac interested them, and in September
several members of the company went to Quinnipiac and liked it so
well that seven men were left there through the winter to prepare
for the coming of the rest in the spring. In April the whole
number removed there from Boston.

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