For all details, therefore, we are forced to depend on the journal
kept by Governor Winthrop, who busied himself not only with this,
making the first entry on that Easter Monday which found them
riding at anchor at Cowes, but with another quite as characteristic
piece of work. A crowded storm-tossed ship, is hardly a point to
which one looks for any sustained or fine literary composition,
but the little treatise, "A Model of Christian Charity," the fruit
of long and silent musing on the new life awaiting them, holds
the highest thought of the best among them, and was undoubtedly
read with the profoundest feeling and admiration, as it took shape
in the author's hands. There were indications even in the first
fervor of the embarkation, that even here some among them
thought "every man upon his own," while greater need of
unselfishness and self-renunciation had never been before
a people. "Only by mutual love and help," and "a grand, patient,
self-denial," was there the slightest hope of meeting the demands
bound up with the new conditions, and Winthrop wrote--"We must be
knit together in this work as one man. We must entertain each
other in brotherly affection. We must be willing to abridge
ourselves of our superfluities for the supply of others'
necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together, in all
meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality. We must delight in
each other; make others' conditions our own; rejoice together,
mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before
our eyes, our commission and community in the work as members of
the same body."

A portion of this body were as closely united as if forming but
one family. The lady Arbella, in compliment to whom the ship,
which had been first known as The Eagle, had been re-christened,