1960 Migration

In 1628, a grouping of Puritans controlled by John Winthrop and Thomas Dudley convinced Britain’s King Charles I to put aside an area of land in what’s now the state of Massachusetts. Two years on, in 1630, 10 ships set out for the New World and opened the way for the establishment of the US of America a little over 100 years after.

Colonization of the New World by the French and Spanish was way below way when the Puritans suggested their venture. King Charles had seen the massive wealth that was pouring into the treasuries of those dominions from their Yankee colonies and positively saw a chance to extend English influence in the new lands.

Charles also noticed that colonies in the New World might provide the raw materials that Britain had been compelled to produce from infrequently antagonistic rivals. And inversely, the North American colonies represented a captive market for English products. A further bonus for Charles was the idea a Puritan immigration to the New World presented a break for him to split the Puritans from their enemies in Britain.

The colonists, plenty of whom were bankrupted, saw immigration as a chance to build a new life and maybe to gain the wealth denied to them in both Britain and Holland. They’d heard the lands in the New World were rich enough to farm successfully, and great forests might be exploited by setting up lumber mills. They also believed that God had selected them to hold his message into the badlands of the New World. They accepted that they’d well die either on the excursion or after they had arrived in the new land, but they felt the potential rewards justified the chance.

The first Massachusetts Bay Company’s colonists set sail in 2 different groups in 1630. The 1st, which sailed in Apr, consisted of 4 ships, followed in May by another small fleet of seven ships, including the famous Mayflower.

John Winthrop ascertained that seven hundred folks left Southhampton on the first 4 ships, and though more than 2 hundred died in the first year after landing in the New World, enough colonists survived to form a practicable population in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Their achievement caused a massive emigration of Puritans who were raring to create themselves in a spot where they could practice their own sort of faith free from interference from other non secular establishments of the time.

The Great Migration is regarded to have lasted from 1630 to around about 1640. It’s been surmised that almost twenty thousand Puritans migrated to New England alone between 1630 and 1640, with another group of roughly five thousand settling in the Chesapeake Colonies to the south, and another twenty thousand landing in the West Indies. Other guesstimates place the total of immigrants at more than seventy thousand. Nobody realized it at the time, but the Great Migration marked the start of the tide of immigration that continues to this day as folks around the planet seek out the opportunities that were originally imagined by a little group of non secular rebels and a king who accepted the seriousness of expanding Britain’s influence into the New World. And for bad, lots of the moral and non secular principles of those early colonists remain with us today.

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