The coming hither of the Pilgrim three centuries ago shaped the destinies of this Continent, and therefore profoundly affected the destiny of the whole world.

THEODORE ROOSEVELT, at the laying of the corner stone of the Pilgrim Memorial Monument at Provincetown, Massachusetts, April 20, 1907.

New occasions teach new duties; Time makes ancient good uncouth;

They must upward still and onward, who would keep abreast of Truth:

Lo, before us gleam her camp-fires! We ourselves must Pilgrims be, Launch our Mayflower, and steer boldly through the desperate

winter sea.

Nor attempt the Future's portal with the Past's blood-rusted key. -J. R. LOWELL, in "The Present Crisis", 1844.

If a man says that he does not care to know where his grandfather lived, what he did, and what were that grandfather's politics and religious creed, it can merely mean that he is incapable of taking interest in one of the most interesting forms of human knowledge – the knowledge of the details of the Past.

FOREWORD

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AT a time when the words "Pilgrim" and "Pilgrim Fathers" are on everybody's lips, it is worth while to point out that these terms, as used in American history, were unknown till the closing years of the eighteenth century. The pioneers who settled at Plymouth never thought of themselves or spoke of themselves as Pilgrims, in that instance where Bradford, using the word in a figurative and Scriptural sense, says of his companions as they are about to migrate from Leyden, "so they lefte that goodly & pleasante citie, which had been ther resting place near 12. years; but they knew they were pilgrimes & looked not much on those things, but lift up their eyes to the heavens, their dearest cuntrie and quieted their spirits." As applied specifically to the early settlers at Plymouth, the word "Pilgrim", we are told by Albert Matthews, authority on early American history, -first appeared in 1798, and "Pilgrim Fathers" in 1799. Oddly enough, it was Thomas Paine who (in an account printed in the Columbian Centinel of the 177th Anniversary of the landing at Plymouth Rock)