[Illustration: The Rhode Island Settlement.]
When the heroic young minister heard of this, he hastily said good-by to his wife and two children--one of whom was a little girl two years old and the other a baby--and looked for safety in the home of his old friend Massasoit, living near Mount Hope, seventy or eighty miles away.
The outlook was dreary enough. It was midwinter (January, 1636), and the snow was lying deep upon the ground. As there was no road cut through the forest, Roger Williams had to depend upon his compass for a guide. To keep himself from freezing, he carried with him a hatchet to chop kindling wood, and a flint and steel to kindle it into flame. Thus fitted out, he started, though still weak from his recent illness, with a staff in his hand and a pack on his back, to look for his dusky friend, Massasoit. This long journey in the bitter weather of a New England winter was indeed a trying experience to the lonely traveller. He wrote long afterward, "Steering my course, in winter snow, I was sorely tossed for one fourteen weeks in a bitter winter season, not knowing what bed or bread did mean." Having found Massasoit, he spent much of the winter in the wigwam kindly furnished him by the Indian chief.
In the spring he began to erect buildings at Seekonk on land given him by the Indians. But his friend, Governor Winthrop, having secretly sent him word that Seekonk was in the territory belonging to the Massachusetts colony, he decided to go elsewhere.
Accordingly, he and five of his friends rowed down the river and, landing at a place pointed out by the Indians as having a spring of good water, made a settlement, which they called Providence, in token of God's watchful care over them. This was the beginning of Rhode Island, a colony where all men, whatever their religious belief might be, were welcome. Men who had been persecuted elsewhere on account of their religion were glad to go to Rhode Island, where they were allowed to worship as they pleased. And thus it soon grew to be a prosperous settlement.
Roger Williams was a man of pure and noble soul. He did not seem to bear any grudge against the people of Massachusetts. For when, in 1637, the Pequots tried to get the Narragansett Indians to join them in a general uprising against the whites, and especially against those living in Massachusetts, he did all he could to frustrate their plans. At this time he set out one stormy day in his canoe to visit Canonicus, chief of the Narragansetts, and succeeded, at the risk of his life, in preventing the union of the two tribes against the whites.