The fort was the first institution that was founded here, and it is amusing to read in Champlain how assiduously they worked at it... almost from the first day of settlement. The founders of the colony thought this an excellent site for a wall,--and no doubt it was a better site, in some respects, for a wall than for a city,--but it chanced that a city got behind it. It chanced too, that a Lower Town got before it, and clung like an oyster to the outside of the crags, as you may see at low tide. It is as if you were to come to a country village surrounded by palisades in the old Indian fashion,--interesting only as a relic of antiquity and barbarism.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It must be confessed that the Pilgrims possessed but few of the qualities of the modern pioneer. They were not the ancestors of th...e American backwoodsmen. They did not go at once into the woods with their axes. They were a family and church, and were more anxious to keep together, though it were on the sand, than to colonize a New World.... It is true they were busy at first about their building, and were hindered in that by much foul weather; but a party of emigrants to California or Oregon, with no less work on their hands,--and more hostile Indians,--would do as much exploring the first afternoon, and the Sieur de Champlain would have sought an interview with the savages, and examined the country as far as the Connecticut, and made a map of it, before Billington had climbed his tree.... Nevertheless, the Pilgrims were pioneers, and the ancestors of pioneers, in a far grander enterprise.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
While the very inhabitants of New England were thus fabling about the country a hundred miles inland, which was a terra incognita ...to them,... Champlain, the first Governor of Canada,... had already gone to war against the Iroquois in their forest forts, and penetrated to the Great Lakes and wintered there, before a Pilgrim had heard of New England.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »