However, in a comparatively short time the colonists who had been brought over in the Anne and the Little James--those who stayed, for some did return at once--adjusted themselves to the new life. Many married--both Myles Standish and Governor Bradford found wives among them; and now the Plymouth Colony may be said to have fairly started.
Just as a trail which is first a mere thread leading to some out-of-the-way cabin becomes a path and then a road, and in due time a wide thoroughfare, so the way across the Atlantic from Old England to New became more charted--more traveled. At first there was only one boat and one net for fishing. In five years there was a fleet of fifty fishing vessels. Ten years later we have note of ten foreign vessels in the harbor in a single week. And to-day, if the Pilgrim man and maid whom we joined at the beginning of our reminiscences could gaze out over the harbor, they would see it as full of masts as a cornfield is of stalks. Every kind of boat finds its way in and out; and not only pleasure craft: Plymouth Harbor is second only to Boston among the Massachusetts ports of entry, receiving annual foreign imports valued at over $7,000,000. Into the harbor, where once a single shallop was the only visible sign of man's dominion over the water, now sail great vessels from Yucatan and the Philippines, bringing sisal and manila for the largest cordage company in the whole country--a company with an employees' list of two thousand names, and an annual output of $10,000,000. Furthermore, the flats in the harbor are planted with clams, which (through the utilization of shells for poultry feeding, and by means of canning for bouillon) yield a profit of from five hundred to eight hundred dollars an acre.
No, our Pilgrim man and maid would not recognize, in this Plymouth of factories and industries, the place where once stood the row of log cabins, with oiled-paper windows. And yet, after all, it is not the prosperous town of to-day, but the rude settlement of yesterday, which chiefly lives in the hearts of the American people. And it lives, not because of its economic importance, but because of its unique sentimental value. As John Fiske so admirably states: "Historically their enterprise [that of the Pilgrims at Plymouth] is interesting not so much for what it achieved as for what it suggested. Of itself the Plymouth Colony could hardly have become a wealthy and powerful state. Its growth was extremely slow. After ten years its numbers were but three hundred. In 1643, when the exodus had come to an end and the New England Confederacy was formed, the population of Plymouth was but three thousand. In an established community, indeed, such a rate of increase would be rapid, but was not sufficient to raise in New England a power which could overcome Indians and Dutchmen and Frenchmen and assert its will in opposition to the Crown. It is when we view the founding of Plymouth in relation to what came afterward, that it assumes the importance which belongs to the beginning of a new era."