From this bias I judge that the historian was a Boston man. It takes a
Bostonian to think in that way. They do it still.
From my school history I gathered the idea that although Sir Walter
Raleigh and Captain John Smith were so foolish as to dally more or less
in the remote fastnesses of Virginia, and although there was a little
ineffectual settlement at Jamestown, all the important colonizing of
this country occurred in New England. I read about Peregrine White, but
not about Virginia Dare; I read much of Miles Standish, but nothing of
Christopher Newport; I read a great deal of the _Mayflower_, but not a
word of the _Susan Constant_.
Yet Virginia Dare, if she lived, must have been nearing young ladyhood
when Peregrine White was born; Captain Christopher Newport passed the
Virginia capes when Miles Standish was hardly more than a youth, in
Lancashire; and the _Susan Constant_ landed the Jamestown settlers more
than a dozen years before the _Mayflower_ landed her shipload of eminent
furniture owners at Plymouth. Even Plymouth itself had been visited
years before by John Smith, and it was he, not the Pilgrims, who named
the place.
I find that some boys, to-day, know these things. But though that fact
is encouraging, I am not writing for boys, but for their comparatively
ignorant parents.
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