A Harvest of Hampshires

You know the scene well: A bunch of cold, seasick and half-starved dark-clad English folk wade ashore in November, 1620 ultimately to found "Plimouth Plantation", with only about half the colonists surviving that first winter, to be saved the following year by crucial aid from the local Massasoit Indians (of the Algonquin Wompanoag Confederation) -- from whom Massachusetts Bay colony eventually took its name. The result for the English colonists was salvation while we Americans got Thanksgiving out of the deal. The Massasoit -- well, they got screwed.

The story of the Plymouth Pilgrims is etched into American history and legend. The hardships they suffered, that first horrible winter, their utter reliance on the Massasoit for survival that first year. What a bunch of whiners! Just three years later in 1623, another bunch of Englishmen set ashore at the mouth of the Piscataqua River some 80 miles north of Plymouth, MA and quickly set about founding Pannaway Plantation on the site of what is today Rye, New Hampshire. Having the good sense to arrive in the summer instead of November, the settlers -- with minimal fuss -- set about establishing a fishing and farming community, and within a few years were already exporting colonists further inland up the Piscataqua River to found more settlements. No dramatic stories here.

OK, maybe I shouldn't knock the poor Pilgrims of Plymouth Plantation too much; although only a minority of the settlers were actually Puritans, they were driven by a schedule which was dictated by political and economic factors beyond their control -- i.e., Royal bureaucracy and the desire to get out of England before the king changed his mind and summoned some hangmen. The Pilgrims showed up completely unprepared at the beginning of winter season in New England, a winter which was far harsher than any in England itself. The settlers who eventually founded New Hampshire, on the other hand, were not fugitives, but rather part of a business venture and had the leisure of being able to plan things a bit.

Although New Hampshire was ultimately a Royal Charter colony, it was started and financed by a wealthy English fisherman and merchant, Captain John Mason, who by the way named the colony at first "New Virginia" after the successful English colony started by John Smith down South in 1608. English King James I apparently thought it a bit saucy to name a colony after another American colony, however, so he renamed it "New England". Somewhere along the line, though, New England came to be applied to all of the northern English settlements east of the Hudson River, and Mason's colony took on the name of his home county, Hampshire. By the way, poor Mason financed New Hampshire and its expanding settlements for a decade but died just as he was preparing to visit them for the first time... Hampshire is on the southern coast of England and actually resembles its "New" namesake quite a bit in terms of its economy being very sea-focused, with a fairly rural inland. Its biggest city, a seaport, is Southampton but its second largest city, also an important English seaport, is called....wait for it.... Portsmouth. I suppose there's no need to explain why then New Hampshire's largest coastal city and one-time capital is also called Portsmouth. (Nice webcam of Portsmouth Harbor on the Piscataqua here, BTW.) Indeed, pictures from one city resemble the other to a startling degree, with their common histories of being fishing towns and major ports. (The picture above is from Portsmouth, NH.)

But even the Pilgrims of Plymouth Plantation have something in common with the Hampshires; the Puritans had fled from England to the Netherlands and though they were well-received and allowed to establish their own communities, the Puritans found the Dutch too...tolerant. They lobbied London to be allowed to set up a colony of their own in the New World -- John Winthrop's "City on a Hill" -- and when their royal charter came through, they had to sail back to England to collect it before heading to Massachusetts. This means that they sailed out of Southampton in Hampshire County, England in September, 1620 on their way to their new home.