was dying of a fever. Lady Arbella, who had accompanied her husband, Isaac
Johnson, had been ailing on the voyage, and lingered here but a little
while before finding a grave. In a few months two hundred persons
perished. It was no place for weaklings--or for evil-doers either; among
the earliest of the established institutions were the stocks and the
whipping-post, and they were not allowed to stand idle.

Winthrop and most of the others soon moved on down the coast toward
Boston. It had been the original intention to keep the emigrants in one
body, but that was found impracticable; they were forced to divide up into
small parties, who settled where they best could, over an area of fifty or
a hundred miles. Nantasket, Watertown, Charlestown, Saugus, Lynn, Maiden,
Roxbury, all had their handfuls of inhabitants. It was exile within exile;
for miles meant something in these times. More than a hundred of the
emigrants, cowed by the prospect, deserted the cause and returned to
England. Yet Winthrop and the other leaders did not lose heart, and their
courage and tranquillity strengthened the others. It is evidence of the
indomitable spirit of these people that one of their first acts was to
observe a day of fasting and prayer; a few days later the members of the
congregation met and chose their pastor, John Wilson, and organized the
first Church of Boston. They did not wait to build the house of God, but
met beneath the trees, or gathered round a rock which might serve the
preacher as a pulpit. There was simplicity enough to satisfy the most
conscientious. "We here enjoy God and Jesus Christ," wrote Winthrop: "I do
not repent my coming: I never had more content of mind."

After a year there were but a thousand settlers in Massachusetts. Among
them was Roger Williams, a man so pure and true as of himself to hallow
the colony; but it is illustrative of the intolerance which was from the
first inseparable from Puritanism, that he was driven away because he held