encourage the younger ones by remembrance of the passage from England
to Holland, twelve years before, when they were searched most cruelly,
even deprived of their clothes and belongings by the ship's master at
Boston. Later they were abandoned by the Dutchman at Hull, to wait
for fourteen days of frightful storm while their husbands and
protectors were carried far away in a ship towards the coast of
Norway, "their little ones hanging about them and quaking with cold."
[Footnote: Bradford's History of Plymouth Plantation; ch. 2.]

There were women with frail bodies, like Rose Standish and Katherine
Carver, but there were strong physiques and dauntless hearts sustained
to great old age, matrons like Susanna White and Elizabeth Hopkins and
young women like Priscilla Mullins, Mary Chilton, Elizabeth Tilley and
Constance Hopkins. In our imaginations today, few women correspond to
the clinging, fainting figures portrayed by some of the painters of
"The Departure" or "The Landing of the Pilgrims." We may more readily
believe that most of the women were upright and alert, peering
anxiously but courageously into the future. Writing in 1910, John
Masefield said: [Footnote: Introduction to Chronicles of the Pilgrim
Fathers (Everyman's Library).] "A generation fond of pleasure,
disinclined towards serious thought, and shrinking from hardship, even
if it may be swiftly reached, will find it difficult to imagine the
temper, courage and manliness of the emigrants who made the first
Christian settlement of New England." Ten years ago it would have been
as difficult for women of our day to understand adequately the
womanliness of the Pilgrim matrons and girls. The anxieties and
self-denials experienced by women of all lands during the last five
years may help us to "imagine" better the dauntless spirit of these
women of New-Plymouth. During those critical months of 1621-1623 they
sustained their households and assisted the men in establishing an