The Quaker Colonies | Page 8

fires, ate their roasted corn, and when to amuse
him they showed him some of their sports and games he renewed his
college days by joining them in a jumping match.
Then he started on journeys. He traveled through the woods to New
York, which then belonged to the Duke of York, who had given him
Delaware; he visited the Long Island Quakers; and on his return he
went to Maryland to meet with much pomp and ceremony Lord

Baltimore and there discuss with him the disputed boundary. He even
crossed to the eastern shore of the Chesapeake to visit a Quaker
meeting on the Choptank before winter set in, and he describes the
immense migration of wild pigeons at that season, and the ducks which
flew so low and were so tame that the colonists knocked them down
with sticks.
Most of the winter he spent at Chester and wrote to England in high
spirits of his journeys, the wonders of the country, the abundance of
game and provisions, and the twenty-three ships which had arrived so
swiftly that few had taken longer than six weeks, and only three had
been infected with the smallpox. "Oh how sweet," he says, "is the quiet
of these parts, freed from the anxious and troublesome solicitations,
hurries and perplexities of woful Europe."
As the weeks and months passed, ships kept arriving with more
Quakers, far exceeding the migration to the Jerseys. By summer, Penn
reported that 50 sail had arrived within the past year, 80 houses had
been built in Philadelphia, and about 300 farms had been laid out round
the town. It is supposed that about 8000 immigrants had arrived. This
was a more rapid development than was usual in the colonies of
America. Massachusetts and Virginia had been established slowly and
with much privation and suffering. But the settlement of Philadelphia
was like a summer outing. There were no dangers, the hardships were
trifling, and there was no sickness or famine. There was such an
abundance of game close at hand that hunger and famine were in
nowise to be feared. The climate was good and the Indians, kindly
treated, remained friendly for seventy years.
It is interesting to note that in that same year, 1682, in which Penn and
his friends with such ease and comfort founded their great colony on
the Delaware, the French explorers and voyageurs from Canada, after
years of incredible hardships, had traversed the northern region of the
Great Lakes with their canoes and had passed down the Mississippi to
its mouth, giving to the whole of the Great West the name of Louisiana,
and claiming it for France. Already La Salle had taken his fleet of
canoes down the Mississippi River and had placed the arms of France
on a post at its mouth in April, 1682, only a few months before Penn
reached his newly acquired colony. Thus in the same year in which the
Quakers established in Pennsylvania their reign of liberty and of peace

with the red men, La Salle was laying the foundation of the western
empire of despotic France, which seventy years afterwards was to hurl
the savages upon the English colonies, to wreck the Quaker policy of
peace, but to fail in the end to maintain itself against the free colonies
of England.
While they were building houses in Philadelphia, the settlers lived in
bark huts or in caves dug in the river bank, as the early settlers in New
Jersey across the river had lived. Pastorius, a learned German Quaker,
who had come out with the, English, placed over the door of his cave
the motto, "Parva domus, sed amica bonis, procul este profani," which
much amused Penn when he saw it. A certain Mrs. Morris was much
exercised one day as to how she could provide supper in the cave for
her husband who was working on the construction of their house. But
on returning to her cave she found that her cat had just brought in a fine
rabbit. In their later prosperous years they had a picture of the cat and
the rabbit made on a box which has descended as a family heirloom.
Doubtless there were preserved many other interesting reminiscences
of the brief camp life. These Quakers were all of the thrifty, industrious
type which had gone to West Jersey a few years before. Men of means,
indeed, among the Quakers were the first to seek refuge from the fines
and confiscations imposed upon them in England. They brought with
them excellent supplies of everything. Many of the ships carried the
frames of houses ready to put together. But substantial people of this
sort demanded for the most part houses of brick, with stone cellars.
Fortunately both brick clay and stone were readily obtainable