About noon the tide serving, the four-and-thirty adventurers, divided between the ship's long-boat and their own pinnace, took the sea in teeth of a freezing northeasterly gale, and under low-lying clouds whose gray bosoms teemed with snow and sleet.
Thomas English, a mariner engaged as master of the shallop, held the helm, while as many willing hands as could grasp the oars pulled lustily in the direction of what is now called the Pamet River, a stream discovered some days previously by a foot expedition under charge of Standish, and considered as a possible seat for their colony. The crowded state of the boats and the head wind rendered the sails useless, and oars proved inefficient to propel so large a boat as the pinnace, while the sea, rapidly rising with the rising wind, broke so dangerously over the quarter that English refused to proceed, and it was hastily resolved to run into what is now called East Harbor, land the passengers, and allow the long-boat to return to the ship, while the pinnace lay to until the gale moderated. This was done, but owing to the shoals, the men were obliged to wade knee-deep to reach land, and the cold was now so intense that their clothes froze upon them as they resumed their journey on foot. Well may we believe what William Bradford later said: "Some of our people who are dead took the original of their death on that day."
Marching six or seven miles on foot, the party encamped, building a barricade, or as they called it a "randevous," of pine boughs to protect them from savage beasts or men, and within it kindling a fire beside which they sat down to eat such provisions as they had brought, and to solace themselves with modest draughts of the strong waters they used but not abused.
The next day the exploration was continued both by sea and land, the hardy adventurers marching through snow six inches deep, or upon the loose sands of the beach where the wind flogged them with lashes of icy spray and stinging shards. In passing through a belt of woods traces of human presence were to be seen, especially certain young trees bent down and their tops made fast to the earth. Stepping aside to examine one of these, William Bradford suddenly found his leg inclosed in a noose, while the tree, released and springing upward, would have carried him ignominiously with it had not he seized the trunk of another sapling, and lustily shouted for help. His comrades came running back, and not without laughter and some grim pleasantries released him. Stephen Hopkins alone understood the trap, and cutting from it a piece of smooth fine cord twisted of wood fibres handed it to Bradford, saying,--