That’s what I wanted to know. I’ve been to San Andres (it’s part of the same Colombian department), and most people speak English, but that’s because a lot Jamaicans came to the island. At first I thought the puritans might have had something to do with it.
Just to be pedantic, (but also to avoid issues of confusion in your further research), the term Pilgrims was assigned to the group of Separatists (who chose to separate from both the Church of England and the Puritan reformers) who happened to wind up in Plymouth in what first became the Bay Colony (when the Puritans arrived later and imposed their rule) and later Massachusetts.
Both of the groups whom we have discussed in this thread–on Providence Island and in the Bahamas–appear to have been Puritan groups, not Separatists and, thus, not Pilgrims.
Aside from the bit of a power play they engineered in the creation of the Mayflower Compact, the Pilgrims/Separatists behaved themselves moderately well in their new home. As long as Bradford was their governor, they treated peacefully and justly with the indigenous peoples among whom they found themselves and they treated the non-Separatists who lived among them rather fairly (for the times). It was only as the Puritans began to migrate to the Bay Colony that that group began to impose harsh codes on those who lived among them and began picking fights with and taking land from the Indians.
My family was in Virginia in the 1600s. I seem to recall from my brother’s research that they were shipped to the Caribbean (Bahamas? Bermuda? Barbados?) as indentured servants from Scotland before that. Since my adopted son is the descendent of Afro-Caribbean slaves, I like to think we might be related way back. But then, after arriving in Virginia my family became involved in tobacco farming and got quite rich from exporting to England. And they owned a bunch (boat load, I was gonna say) of slaves, so I guess I could be related to my son’s family from those days, too…
Yes and no. Plymouth probably did treat both the Natives and non-Seperatists better than Massachussetts Bay did their Natives and religious dissidents, but Plymouth did persecute Quakers, and did participate in King Phillip’s war.
That duck won’t quack.
And,
Had it been Penguins of the Caribbean, their exploits would have been recounted 300 years later in a childrens book that would have been banned by certain school districts. Oh god, why won’t someone think about the penguins?
Cartooniverse
By the time (1671) of King Philip’s War, Bradford had been dead for 14 years and the Plymouth Colony had been pretty thoroughly dominated by Massachusetts for most of that period (although the official merger did not take place until 1691).
With the death of William Brewster in 1644, the Plymouth Colony began to rely on church leaders trained among the Puritans of Massachusetts (Harvard was founded in 1636) and the Separatist views began to shift more toward Puritanism.
Similarly, the Quakers only arrived in the Plymouth/Massachusetts region in the year of Bradford’s death. (Which is not to claim that he would not have joined in their persecution, but whatever moderating influence he might have exercised was clearly lost.)
I was not trying to portray the Pilgrims as purely virtuous people, only pointing out that there is a general confusion between the Pilgrims and Puritans and that some of the behavior attributed to Pilgrims are more accurately attributed to the Puritans.