The pre-history of the Puritan presence in New England

The Puritans were neither the American Continent's first settlers nor were they the first European colonists. As you know, the exploration of voyages that started with the Italian sailor Cristoforo Columbo, better known as Christopher Columbus, in 1491 found its way, by mistake or intention, to the shores of what was later called America. Such journeys lasted more than a century, but until the 1580s, none of them, or so the documents say, had been carried out by Englishmen. The British had been completely immersed in their internal conflicts during those decades. By the end of 1584, Sir Walter Raleigh had sent a ship from England to examine whether other lands could be colonized. Another attempt took off in 1606, and in this instance, the enthusiastic intruders decided to establish a settlement named after their Virgin Queen in Jamestown, Virginia. Nevertheless, the settlement suffered a terrible disaster.

European Exploration in America

The first settlers in America faced many diseases such as homesickness, epidemic, death. The Powhatan, the leader of the Chesapeake--the Red Indians of this region, resented the arrival of outsiders and flared his people and tried to stop the outside arrival. They thought that the British did not organize any agricultural activities on the English lands but exploited their resources and labor unnecessarily and soon the clashes started. However, the British were highly dependent on these people, whom they despised and therefore tried every possible way to have complete control over them. The English were especially savage in their assault. In order to punish a haughty tribe, the English would resort to a mass massacre of its members. Many Englishmen chose to wander off to live with, or trade with, the relatively wealthy Indians, with their organized and plentiful supplies of food. The Jamestown authorities burned, drove, and killed their own people. Due to this, thousands of settlers died due to hunger and disease.


The Virginia Company, which was the sponsor of this settlement, recognized their mistake and had offered the settlers free hand in what they were doing. Those who worked hard to raise food for the company through small annual rents were allowed to take up large areas of land to farm themselves. Gradually starvation began to fade, and the hardship period expired. Then, in 1619, a legislative body allowed Virginia's inhabitants to turn themselves, by cultivating land, from insignificant servants of one country to important people of a new country.
In the meantime, northward towards the east coast of the American continent, the first Puritan fleet, bearing its four hundred devoted men, sailed around Cape Cod and eventually anchored itself at the Plymouth harbor in Massachusetts Bay. In this way, the first settlers who had thus come to Massachusetts in 1620 to establish a dedicated community were the Pilgrims. Fleeing from the hardened depravity of the Old World to the New World, they set up their homes in an obscure area near Plymouth. Ten years later, the Great Puritan migration came from England, followed by an astonishingly numerous exploration bringing thousands of settlers, the largest single expedition in England.

European settlement and Indian lives in America in 1650

At the end of the century, New England, as the entire region was called, was a thriving new colony within the English empire. The New England way of life was sharply divided as well as similar materialistically inspired immigrants against the way of life of the Virginians. Virginians aspired to own the land, either as a tobacco farm or as a cotton plantation, and they had to hire indentured servants and chattel slaves to gain aristocracy trappings. On the opposite, New Englanders worked at the realization of an ideal. There was no choice for them except to escape from their old England which Satan took over. They considered themselves to be the special emissaries of God on a "mission into the wilderness" seeking to establish "a renewed Jerusalem."This, in essence, was the Puritan project in America.

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