It’s a part of both the history and folklore of America: the sailing of the Mayflower. September 15, 1620, the famous vessel containing 102 pilgrims departs from Plymouth England for its legendary voyage to America. Originally, the Speedwell was a second vessel that the English separatist had bought in Holland but it leaked so badly it was abandoned and all the puritans boarded the Mayflower for the New World.
The expedition was backed by both businesses and the scant monetary supplies of the puritan church and its followers. Many of the records of the passengers have been lost to time but a few journals and suggestions from former Jamestown colonist, John Smith, provide historians with an idea of the cargo and supplies. They brought with them the bare necessities of food, a little weaponry and several hunting dogs.
It took 66 days to reach the New England coast. They had hoped to land at Virginia and start a colony similar to Jamestown. Instead, they veered 600 miles off course and came ashore at Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Eerie repeats of the trouble at Jamestown occurred. The words “died during the first winter” or “died during the first sickness” punctuate the list of Mayflower passenger records. Several children and infants lost their lives as their parents searched for a better place to raise them.
Born the son of a minister in Suffolk, England around 1620, Matthew Hopkins was a lawyer by trade, though an unsuccessful one. Unable to make a living in the city center, he moved to the small village of Manningtree and soon found a new line of work: witch hunting.
In March 1644, he announced publicly that there were witches practicing black magic in the forest near his home and that he had seen them with his own eyes. After naming an elderly, one-legged woman by the name of Elizabeth Clark as his first suspect, she arrested and strip searched, whereupon the discovery of a third nipple was deemed to be a devil’s mark – scarified evidence of copulation with Satan himself.
Hopkins obtained a confession from Clarke in short order, then went about rousting out and arresting thirty-two more women from in and around Manningtree. Though four died during their internment, the remaining twenty-eight were put on trial before a specially convened tribunal in the neighboring hamlet of Chelmsford. Of those tried, fourteen were hanged and eight remained in jail and officially under investigation. Though Hopkins himself was the chief witness at the trials, he often did not wait to hear the verdicts—word of his skill at locating witches had spread and put his services at great demand throughout England.
Over the next year, Hopkins, now calling himself by the unofficial title of Witch-Finder General, and his four assistants traveled to towns such as Essex, Aldeburgh and Stowmarket — sometimes at the behest of the village elders and sometimes just to see what would turn up. In but one year, Hopkins’s investigations would lead several hundred men and women to the gallows on charges of death by enchantment and collusion with evil spirits. And Hopkins was paid for each and every one of them: in 1645 alone, he is said have earned the then-extravagant sum of £1000 for his work.
His fortunes changed in April of 1646, however, when a clergyman named John Gaule circulated a widely read pamphlet, Select Cases of Conscience, that denounced Hopkins’s methods as torture. Though the physical torment of witches was explicitly banned under English law, Hopkins routinely employed methods such as sleep deprivation and “swimming” – the notorious practice of casting suspected witches into water, the logic goes, where only the guilty float and the innocent sink – in his interrogations.
After two years of notoriety, Hopkins found himself the subject of a public backlash. One apocryphal account even tells an armed mob subjecting him to the “swimming” test, as if to prove a point. Nonetheless, Hopkins withdrew from witch hunting and retired to Manningtree, where he died of tuberculosis the following the summer.
The Reverend Montague Summers, re-examining Hopkins’s legacy centuries later, wrote that the self-proclaimed Witch-Finder General’s insincerity “made his name stink in men’s nostrils…as the foulest of foul parasites, an obscene bird of prey of the tribe of Judas and Cain.”
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As the Spanish and Portuguese empire expanded in Central and South America, The British established a tenuous presence in North America in 1607 with settlements that stretched along the east coast from Florida to Newfoundland. By 1733, the British Empire had carved out an empire as formidable as their Spanish counterparts. Originally, the entire coast was named “Virginia” after Queen Elizabeth I the “Virgin Queen”, who in the 1580s enlisted the explorer Sir Walter Raleigh to discover new lands for the British Empire. Though Raleigh’s initial attempts to establish a colony in Roanoke Island in 1584 failed, his experience would later pave the way for the successful colonies that followed. The defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 signaled the dawn of British naval dominance and permitted Great Britain to continue its exploration of the New World virtually unchallenged.
St. John’s and Newfoundland were early colonies as was the Roanoke Colony, founded in 1585 and the Jamestown Settlement, founded in 1607. The Plymouth Colony, originally intended for Virginia, was actually established in Massachusetts in 1620. A flow of colonies followed these original ones along the northeast coast of North America, including the Massachusetts Bay Colony, founded in 1630. In the decades that followed, the British formed the original thirteen colonies that supplied the crown with spices and other commodities at great economic cost to the colonies. The British imposed heavy taxation policies that eventually led to an increasingly hostile political climate between the colonies and the Royal government. The original thirteen British colonies were Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. 
The British would eventually take control over most of the originally settled lands through either hostile campaigns or commercial ventures, as they did in 1664 when they took the Dutch colony of New Netherland including the New Amsterdam settlement. Parts of Delaware and Pennsylvania had also been colonized by the Dutch prior to British dominance. In 1713 England acquired the French colony of Acadia as well as the rest of New France and, in 1763, the Spanish colony of Florida. In 1776, the thirteen original colonies rebelled against the British crown over representation, local laws and tax issues which by that point had become intolerable to the colonial population, this rebellion or revolution eventually led to the creation of the United States of America.
