They sailed across the Atlantic Ocean.   Thirty-five dedicated Puritans joined sixty-six other travelers on a crowded ninety-foot ship designed to carry fifty.   They said goodbye to religious oppression, poverty and all they knew, in exchange for the new European dream of utopia.   The place was Southampton, England, the year was 1620 and the ship was the Mayflower.

If they thought their problems would be left behind with their disappointing expatriation in Holland, they could not have imagined the hardships yet to be faced.   After nearly a century of Reformation struggles under the Tudor and Stuart monarchs, Catholic uprisings in the Essex Rebellion and the Gunpowder Plot, they packed up their allegiances and set out for the New World in search of open space, wealth and the promise of religious tolerance.   What they found there did not quite live up to their expectations.

In August, the Puritans left Holland. After applying to the Virginia Company for a land grant, they returned to England to sail on the Speedwell in a convoy with the Mayflower and its sixty-six passengers.   The Speedwell, however, proved unseaworthy, and the entire company crammed into the single ship for the voyage.   Tensions between the Puritans and the others escalated after they were blown off course, pushing their arrival further into the autumn and leaving them far north of Virginia, at Cape Cod.   But six weeks after embarking from Southampton, they set foot on the shore of their savage new home.   That is, most of them did.

Some were not so fortunate.   They suffered the ravages of disease in the stifled, overcrowded conditions of the ship and a few of the settlers did not survive the journey.   One woman, Dorothy Bradford, fell overboard and drowned as the ship neared the harbor.

James Chilton, the oldest of the Mayflower passengers (with the possible exception of the Elder William Brewster,) may have been among those who went to Holland and applied for the Virgina Company land grant, but he was never to stand on American soil. He died within sight of land in the Cape Cod harbor, only days before the Mayflower colonists left the ship.

Born during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, about 1563 in Kent County England, Chilton was listed as a freeman of Canterbury in 1583.   He married Susanna Furner, the daughter of his mother’s second husband.   Only two of Chilton's ten children, the oldest and youngest daughters, have traceable descendants.   The youngest, Mary was baptized in 1607 at St. Peter’s, where James may have met Moses Fletcher and other future Mayflower passengers who would go to Holland with the Puritans.   Although no records place Chilton in Holland, two of his daughters were married there, Isabella, the eldest, in 1615 and Ingle in 1622, after the sailing.   His wife, Suzanna died in 1621 in Plymouth, Massachussets.

Whether Susanna succumbed at the age of fifty-seven from the severity of that first winter, disease or worse is not known, but her companions were left to survive in a land of hostility and uncertain means.   Forty of them drew up the Mayflower Compact to provide the colony with a rule of law after many demonstrated their unwillingness to abide by the laws of England.   They also enlisted Miles Standish, who had served in the Dutch Army, to be their military captain.   Native American war parties, some of which presented an ongoing threat, had attacked the settlers in the weeks after they landed.   Standish was more than equal to the task and he garnered a reputation for being invincible against his Indian adversaries.

But not all the Indians were interested in defeating the pilgrims.   They taught them how to raise corn and tobacco and helped them to endure the harsh climate.   In the autumn of 1621, after half the colony had perished in the first year, the grateful survivors harvested their crops and celebrated the first Thanksgiving with the tribes who had made it possible.

Sources for this article:

Britannia Internet Magazine Article: The Pilgrim Fathers

LDS Ancestral File Internet

Jim Stevens' Genealogy Website Gedcom File

Mayflower Families through Five Generations: Descendants of the Pilgrims Who Landed at Plymouth, Mass., December 1620, Vol. 2
(James Chilton Family on pp. 3-4)

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In the twenty years following the Mayflower landing at Plymouth, other ships set out from England for Cape Cod, carrying hundreds of settlers. One ship was the Speedwell, which by 1630 at least, had been restored and made seaworthy.

Between 1630 and 1640, John Winthrop brought many companies of colonists over from England. The twelve ships in his main expedition arrived near what is now Salem, Massachussets on April 1, 1630 after a voyage of seventy-six days, carrying nearly eight-hundred settlers.

In 1635, John Winthrop organized another group of English Puritans. They gathered from Middlesex, Essex and Kent and made the well-travelled voyage, landing near Boston where the original Plymouth settlement was thriving. One of the new settlers was Edward Colver, a wheelwright, probably of Middlesex, who at the age of twenty-five helped to found the Massachussets Bay Colony. In later years, his sons would defend their new land in several wars through military and other public service, and their descendants would carry his name accross the American continent through the centuries and up to the present day. It has been said that every Culver/Colver/Coulver in America can trace his/her ancestry to that one, Edward Colver of Middlesex, England. That may nearly be true.

But, in the summer of 1635, his concern would have been considerably more focused than that.

Valerie Dyer Giorgi describes the expectations of the colonists in her book, "Colver-Culver Family Genealogy."

In 1630, the Winthrop colonists removed to Charlestown and later that year, they settled what is now Boston, Massachussets. By 1635, Edward Colver and 123 others decided to push farther up Charles River into the wilderness of Massachussets. There, they formed a new settlement. They called it Contentment.

Early life in Contentment was spent clearing and surveying the allotments of land, one to each member with rights to subdivide as he wished, building log cabin homes and tilling and planting in hopes of a harvest that would sustain them through the first hard winter.

On September 10, 1636, the founders of Contentment met to sign a covenant, which among other things, renamed the town to Dedham, after Dedham, Essex County, England. Edward Colver signed his name sixty-eighth on the list of the original Dedham Covenant signatories.

In 1637, Edward Colver served with 70 other men in the Pequot War, the first organized conflict with the Indians in New England. An unknown source describes his involvement.

Shortly afterwards, the couple moved with John Winthrop and others, first to Pequot (now New London,) Connecticut, then to Saybrook, where Edward helped the Winthrops build a water powered grist mill at the mouth of the Connecticut River. See Photo

After moving from there to Mystic, and finally back to Pequot, they settled and the first Colver son was born in 1641. At least one of their nine children died in infancy, but remaining Colver children grew and prospered under the leadership of John Winthrop, who had by then become Governor of Connecticut.

Another excerpt from the source cited above mentions the service of Colver and his sons in King Philip's War.

From these descriptions, it is clear that the place called Contentment was far from what the name implied. Indeed, the entire New England Colony had a long way to go before anyplace in it could be rightly called by that name.

Sources for this article:

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