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Highlights for September 16
DEPARTS ENGLAND:
The Mayflower sails from Plymouth, England, bound for the New World with 102 passengers. The ship was headed for Virginia, where the colonists--half religious dissenters and half entrepreneurs--had been authorized to settle by the British crown. However, stormy weather and navigational errors forced the Mayflower off course, and on November 21 the "Pilgrims" reached Massachusetts, where they founded the first permanent European settlement in New England in late December.
Thirty-five of the Pilgrims were members of the radical English Separatist Church, who traveled to America to escape the jurisdiction of the Church of England, which they found corrupt. Ten years earlier, English persecution had led a group of Separatists to flee to Holland in search of religious freedom. However, many were dissatisfied with economic opportunities in the Netherlands, and under the direction of William Bradford they decided to immigrate to Virginia, where an English colony had been founded at Jamestown in 1607.
The Separatists won financial backing from a group of investors called the London Adventurers, who were promised a sizable share of the colony's profits. Three dozen church members made their way back to England, where they were joined by about 70 entrepreneurs--enlisted by the London stock company to ensure the success of the enterprise. In August 1620, the Mayflower left Southampton with a smaller vessel--the Speedwell--but the latter proved unseaworthy and twice was forced to return to port. On September 16, the Mayflower left for America alone from Plymouth.
In a difficult Atlantic crossing, the 90-foot Mayflower encountered rough seas and storms and was blown more than 500 miles off course. Along the way, the settlers formulated and signed the Mayflower Compact, an agreement that bound the signatories into a "civil body politic." Because it established constitutional law and the rule of the majority, the compact is regarded as an important precursor to American democracy. After a 66-day voyage, the ship landed on November 21 on the tip of Cape Cod at what is now Provincetown, Massachusetts.
After coming to anchor in Provincetown harbor, a party of armed men under the command of Captain Myles Standish was sent out to explore the area and find a location suitable for settlement. While they were gone, Susanna White gave birth to a son, Peregrine, aboard the Mayflower. He was the first English child born in New England. In mid-December, the explorers went ashore at a location across Cape Cod Bay where they found cleared fields and plentiful running water and named the site Plymouth.
The expedition returned to Provincetown, and on December 21 the Mayflower came to anchor in Plymouth harbor. Just after Christmas, the pilgrims began work on dwellings that would shelter them through their difficult first winter in America.
In the first year of settlement, half the colonists died of disease. In 1621, the health and economic condition of the colonists improved, and that autumn Governor William Bradford invited neighboring Indians to Plymouth to celebrate the bounty of that year's harvest season. Plymouth soon secured treaties with most local Indian tribes, and the economy steadily grew, and more colonists were attracted to the settlement. By the mid 1640s, Plymouth's population numbered 3,000 people, but by then the settlement had been overshadowed by the larger Massachusetts Bay Colony to the north, settled by Puritans in 1629.
The term "Pilgrim" was not used to describe the Plymouth colonists until the early 19th century and was derived from a manuscript in which Governor Bradford spoke of the "saints" who left Holland as "pilgrimes." The orator Daniel Webster spoke of "Pilgrim Fathers" at a bicentennial celebration of Plymouth's founding in 1820, and thereafter the term entered common usage.
Bacall was born Betty Joan Perske in the Bronx. Her parents divorced when she was six, and her mother, Natalie, adopted the last name Bacal, a variation of her Romanian maiden name. Betty, who later adopted the name Bacal and changed the spelling, went to private school in Manhattan. She studied dancing and acting and later worked as an usher in Broadway theaters. Eventually, she began winning small roles in Broadway plays.
It was her work as a model, however, that launched her film career. She appeared on the cover of Harper's Bazaar and caught the attention of director Howard Hawks' wife. A month later, Hawks signed Bacall. She became a star with her very first movie, To Have or Have Not (1944), opposite Humphrey Bogart.
During the film, the two fell in love. In 1945, they married. They continued to co-star in hit movies, including The Big Sleep (1946), Dark Passage (1947), and Key Largo (1948). But in the 1950s, Bacall felt she wasn't getting the roles she deserved from Warner Bros. The studio suspended her, and she later worked for other studios.
Bogart died of cancer in 1957. Bacall remarried several years later, to actor Jason Robards, but the couple eventually divorced. Bacall found herself landing fewer juicy film roles as she got older and returned to live theater in the 1970s. She won a Tony Award for her role in Applause in 1970. She scored another triumph in Woman of the Year in 1981. In 1996, she received her first Oscar nomination, playing the mother of Barbra Streisand's character in The Mirror Has Two Faces.
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