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Colonial America Was a Wild and Difficult Place to Be

Khalid Elhassan October 27, 2021 35 min

The seizure and destruction of tea in colonial Boston. Encyclopedia Britannica

Pilgrims leaving the Netherlands for a colonial future across the Atlantic. Scholastic

The Virginia Pilgrims?

The Pilgrims were the core of a congregation of about 400 English Protestants who splintered from the Puritans, and decided to live in exile in Leiden, Holland. Unhappy with the Church of England and what they viewed as its departure from the true path, they chose to live as Separatists in exile rather than do what other Puritans did, and stay in England to try and reform its church from within. Life in Holland eventually grew too onerous, so they decided to sail to the New World.

There, on the far side of the Atlantic, the Pilgrims hoped to establish a colonial religious theocracy, where they could live in accordance with the tenets of their faith. Eventually, they landed and settled in Plymouth, about forty miles south of modern Boston, at roughly latitude 42° North. However, that had not been their intended destination. When they set sail, the Pilgrims had planned to arrive in the Virginia Colony, hundreds of miles from Plymouth, at about latitude 40° North.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.