Free Final Voyage by Peter Nichols Page B

“turbulently” when brought before the court in Plymouth as a Quaker, saying to the governor, “Thy clamorous tongue I regard no more than the dust under my feet and thou art like a scolding woman.”This got him fined and whipped, but it would have been worse for him north of Plymouth’s border.
    Another fractious Quaker was Arthur Howland, who had been born in Fenstanton, in Huntingdonshire, England. Arthur and his younger brothers, Henry and John, were among the Puritan separatists, also including William Brewster and William Bradford, who had worshipped in secret in Scrooby, Nottinghamshire, on before relocating to Leiden, in Holland, from where some eventually sailed to America on the Mayflower in 1620. John Howland, the first of the brothers to reach the New World, achieved a small measure of lasting fame by sailing with this group as an indentured servant. Plymouth’s governor, William Bradford, described John as a “lusty younge man,” referring to his strength and staying power. He had been washed overboard from the Mayflower ’s deck during a storm at sea—a near-certain death sentence—yet managed to grab and retain a tenacious grip on a rope as the ship lurched and plunged in the icy Atlantic until he was pulled aboard. He proved as indomitable during their first winter ashore, when a number of “Saints,” as the Pilgrims called themselves, and their hired crew died of cold and disease. Howland was indentured to John Carver, a deacon who had been elected the colony’s first governor. Both Carver and his wife, Katherine, died in the spring after the colony’s first winter, and John Howland is thought to have inherited much of their property and land. Clearly, he was made for the New World, and he must have sent word of the opportunities there back to his two brothers, Arthur and Henry, for they both followed him to Plymouth in either 1621 or 1623.
    John Howland was and remained a Presbyterian Puritan, but Arthur and Henry had, at some point before leaving England, become staunch Quakers. Soon after joining their brother in Plymouth, they found themselves uncomfortable with the religious persecution there. Arthur moved to Marshfield, ten miles to the north, where his house became a headquarters for Quakers and his relationship with the authorities remained difficult for the remainder of his life. There he “entertayned the forraigne Quakers who were goeing too & frow . . . producing great desturbance.” He was repeatedly fined and jailed for holding Quaker services, or Meetings, in his house, and for “resisting the constable of Marshfield in the execution of his office and abusing him in words by threatening speeches.”
    Henry, the youngest Howland brother, also an intractable Quaker, was repeatedly brought before the court and fined, but eventually he decided to move farther from Plymouth’s gaze and influence. In November 1652, Henry Howland, along with Ralph Russell from Ponty pool, Monmouthshire, who had worked as an ironsmith in the Plymouth settlements of Taunton and Raynham, were among a group of settlers of various religious groups—Quakers, Baptists, and Puritans who hoped for more tolerance for all Christian persuasions—who purchased from the Wampanoag Indian sachem Massasoit and his son, Wamsutta, a 219-square-mile tract of land in the extreme south of Plymouth Colony, close to Rhode Island—southern Massachusetts today. This parcel stretched inland on both sides of the Cusenagg River (as the Indians called it), where it met the coast of Buzzards Bay—named for the bustard cranes that roosted on its shores. This is a gentle coast, protected from the open sea by Cape Cod to the east and the pretty Elizabeth Islands to the south. The winters along this shoreline are the mildest in New England, and in the summers it is “fanned by breezes salt and cool.”
    The land was gently sloped. In its dense woods were trees of a size to produce wide boards, in varieties handy for every kind