The Pilgrim Fathers
British emigration to eastern North America in the 1600s and 1700s is recorded in the numerous duplicated place names, e.g. Birmingham, Boston, Plymouth and ‘New’ York. The Pilgrim Fathers, so named 200 years after their voyage, sailed from Plymouth in 1620 and founded its counterpart in Massachusetts. They were seeking a place to indulge in their own style of Puritanism, initially trying the Netherlands before 102 passengers and 30 crew headed off across the Atlantic.
Their ship, the Mayflower, arrived in new territory due to storms, and before setting foot on land the Pilgrim Fathers wrote a short though long-standing constitution for self-government, since they were out of jurisdiction.
From north to south, the thirteen American colonies and their dates of establishment were:-
- New Hampshire – 1629, 1679
- New York – 1664
- Massachusetts – 1620, 1691
- Rhode Island – 1636
- Connecticut – 1630s
- Pennsylvania -1681
- New Jersey – taken over from the Dutch in 1664
- Delaware – ditto
- Maryland – 1634
- Virginia – 1607
- N.Carolina – 1670
- S.Carolina – 1670, the Carolinas were split in 1729
- Georgia – 1733
The Pilgrim Fathers were thus preceded by the Jamestown settlement in Virginia in 1607. Two equally spaced milestones are that 169 years after this first foothold, independence was gained from Britain in 1776 and after a further 169 years, the much-expanded and developed United States of America dropped the atomic bomb that ended WW2 in 1945.
(Image: picryl.com / Public domain)