My name is Mary, and I am setting down all these things about our people here in this new world, hoping some day to send to my dear friend, Hannah, who lives in Scrooby, England, what may really come to be a story, even though the writer of it is only sixteen years old. I have lived in Plymouth since the day our company landed in the Mayflower in 1620, more than eleven years ago.

If Hannah ever really sees this as I have written it, she will, I know, be amused. It is set down on pieces of birch bark and some leaves cut from the book of accounts which Edward Winslow brought with him from the old home.

Hannah will ask why I did not use fair, white paper, and if I am standing by when she does so, I shall tell her that fair, white paper is far too precious in this new world of ours to be used for the pleasure of children.

In the last ship, which came from England, were large packages of white paper for the settlers at Salem, who came over to this wild land eight years after we landed. When I asked my father to buy for me three sheets that I might make a little book, he told me the price would be more for the three sheets than he paid for the two deer skins with which to make me a winter coat.

Of course, I put from my mind all hope of having paper to write on; but these sheets of bark take very well the ink made from elderberries which Mother and I brewed the second winter after our new home was built. The pen is a quill taken from the wing of a wild goose shot by Captain Standish.

The Leaking Speedwell

Hannah's father must have told her how much trouble we had in getting here. When the first vessel in which we set sail, named the Speedwell, put back to Plymouth in England because of leaking so badly, her master could not have failed to tell the people of Scrooby how all the hundred and two of us, men, women and children, were crowded into the Mayflower.

From the sixth day of September until the eleventh day of November, which is over sixty long, dreary days, we were on the ocean, and then our vessel came into what Captain John Smith had named Cape Cod Bay.

Mother believed, as did the other women, and even we children, that we would go on shore as soon as the Mayflower had come near to the land. However, before many hours were passed, after the anchor had been dropped into the sea, even the youngest of us knew that it could not be.

We were weary with having been on board the vessel so long and had made ourselves believe that as soon as we were arrived in the new world, food in plenty, with good, comfortable homes, would be ours.

Master Brewster, as well as the other men, said that houses must be built before we could leave the ship, and we only needed to go on deck and look about us, to know why this was so. Everywhere, except on the water, were snow and trees. It was a real forest as far as I could see in either direction, and everywhere the cold, white snow was piled in drifts, or blowing like feathers when the wind was high.

So deeply was the land covered that we, who watched the men when they went ashore for the first time to seek out some place whereon to make a village, thought that they had fallen into a hole while stepping off the rocks, because we lost sight of them so soon. Instead of its being an accident, however, we could see that they were floundering in the snow; Master Bradford, whose legs are the shortest, being nearly lost to view.

We waited as patiently as possible for them to come back, though I must confess that Sarah, a girl of about my own age who came aboard the Mayflower at Plymouth when we put back because of the Speedwell's leaking so badly, and I could not keep in check our eagerness to hear from those people in Virginia, who it was said were living in comfort.

Not for many days did we come to realize that the settlers in Virginia were very far away from where we were to land, and to see them we should be forced to take another long voyage in a ship. We . . .