New Villages

While I have been setting down all these things that you might know how we lived here in the wilderness, other villages have been built around us until we can no longer say we are alone, or that our only neighbors are those Englishmen in Virginia, which place is so far away that we should need make a voyage in a ship in order to come at it.

First I will speak of that village of Merry Mount, wherein dwell those people who, led by Thomas Morton, are a reproach to those who walk in the straight path.

Then, so we have heard, there are white men living on the river called Saco; at the mouth of the river Piscataqua and higher up the stream is, so Squanto declares, a village called Cochecho.

At Pemaquid, and on the nearby island of Monhegan, are settlements whose dwellers are nearly all fishermen, and who send their catch to England.

One Captain Wollaston, with between thirty and forty men, began to make a village on the seashore not above fifty miles from here; but he soon tired of battling with the wilderness, and set sail with all his people for Virginia.

Master John Oldham, who came to Plymouth with Master Lyford, having had hot words with Governor Bradford, set off for a place called Nantasket, where, in company with four other discontented ones of our village, he aims to make a town.

Near by Plymouth, if one makes the journey by boat, is a town called Salem, lately set up with Master Endicott as the governor, wherein live more than two hundred people, and within a few weeks it has been said that another company are making homes on Massachusetts Bay, calling the place Charlestown.

Therefore you can see how fast this new world is being covered with villages and towns, and we who were the first to gain a foothold in the wilderness, are surrounded by neighbors until it seems as if the land were really thronged with people.