Even while they waited for their husbands to find a place of settlement,
one of their number, wife of William Bradford--a man later to be their
governor--fell overboard and was drowned. When they did at last land
they had to face, not only the terrors of a North American winter, but
sickness brought on by the hard work and poor food following the effects
of overcrowding on the voyage.
Soon the death-rate in this small village amounted to as much as two to
three persons a day. Wolves howled at night, Indians crept out to spy
from behind trees, cruel winds shook their frail wooden houses and froze
the dwellers in them, but the courage of the women pioneers of New
England never faltered, and when, one by one, they died, worn out by
hardship, they had done their noble part in building an altar to Him
whom, in their own land, they had not been permitted to serve as they
would.
For many years the task of helping to found settlements was the only
work done by women in the way of opening up new territory. In the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries most of our discoveries were still
those of the mariner, who could scarcely take his wife to sea. But in
the nineteenth came the rise of foreign missions, as well as the
acknowledgment of the need of inland exploration, and in this work the
explorer's wife often shared in the risks and adventures of her husband.
When Robert Moffat began his missionary labours in South Africa in 1816,
he had not only to preach the gospel to what were often bloodthirsty
savages, but he had to plunge into the unknown.
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