oc < <.< < - ^:^ c ><■ <^ ■ * 5- 'f:/-J^ ccc c>< «r«.c o < <:^e c< <: ccc ccc rc^csTc rS^C c cec ccccccr. c: c ct«c= cc C c c : • c c <-<<;(<< <: c <•<■<' • Cc.- (C<. c c C CCCC'Ct. C C C <• C - cc «C ■- Cc C < C C C CC'C <; C C C'f c •'• Ce -C-v Cv, c c . C CCCC^c^C C C^f C-^ Ci". <.^ C^ 'C - ■ C C c,<(LC- 'c.C C C '( C C" C\- C<. ■ C ' C cc Ct^ ' cc C< C. Cif C- C^ V . <■ c, <^ cvr. t «-^ <.'" c . ci< <.■■ c\ f.^ c c c ctJ . c < c <- c Cc c cc ^ ■ : c c cC"CC C'< c c,ic ktc ( o C C ^ C C . re cc r CC -v ^!l^ <: t C «L "CC c c <^^^ . "^'^C^'CC" C'C^C dCCCCc «3«r- < c xr cc « (C cc « - KCC ^ ^ ' -.c etc? cr oC c C C« • J CCe t c;<« ^ c -( , . c c - c. a' cc c I. c c c c; c , . c C c C C c c cc c c <. r C CC C C c c c cc< c C ' c c cc C C c : c cc c c c c c c f c cc c < cc cc^^ c ■ (/~^ — v~-> — ^--w-,. y c\y^'^^^/^-i-iP ^J~Ty\—^y~'~*^ ■^ R E P H T DAY FOR C E I. E B K A T J N G LANDING OF THE PILCIRIMS, PLYMOUTH, 1620. ¥ REPORT EXPEDIENCY OF CELEBRATING IN FUTURE LANDING OF THE PILGRIMS, TWENTYFIRST DAY OF DECEMBER, INSTEAD OF THE TWENTY SECOND DAY OP THAT MONTH A COMMITTEE OF THE PILGRIM SOCIETY. BOSTON: A PRINTED BY VOTE OF THE SOCIETY Tuttle ife Dennett, Printers, 21 School Street. 1850. EXTRACT FROM THE RECORDS OF THE PILGRIM SOCIETY, PLYMOUTH, MASS. Saturday, December 15th, 1849. Voted, That a Committee be appointed, consisting of James Savage, Charles H. Warren, Nathaniel B. ShurtlelT, of Boston, and Timothy Gor- don and Abraham Jackson, of Plymouth, to consider the expediency of celebrating in future the Landing of the Pilgrims, on the twentyfirst day of December, instead of the twentysecond, and that said Committee report at the next regular meeting, on the last Monday of May next. Monday, May 27lh, 1850. At this meeting, the Committee appointed in December last, to consider the expediency of altering the day of celebrating, the Lauding of the Pil- grims, presented a full and able Report on the subject, which, after a general discussion of the same, was unanimously accepted, and ordered to be printed. Voted, That this Society will hereafter regard the tu'eittyfirst day of De- cember, as the true anniversary of the Landing of the Pilgrims. A true copy from the Records of the Pilgrim Society. William S. Russell, Recording Secretary. fi,'. f^' /-/;/^/ REPORT. The Committee of the Pilgrim Society, appointed, at the meeting in December last, " to consider the expediency of celebrating in future the Landing of the Pilgrims, on the twenlyfirst day of December, instead of the twentysecond," having duly considered the subject, submit the following as their Report : — That the happy Monday, on which our fathers came, for the first time, on shore at Plymouth from the shallop, wherein they had " circulated the Bay" between Cape Cod and this harbor, and, having on Friday preceding got to anchor under the lee of Clark's Island, had there quietly spent the Sunday, after return of thanks to God on Saturday for deliverance in their great peril from breakmg the rudder and the mast, and losing the sail — this Monday when they "marched into the land, saw the corn fields, and running brooks, judged the place fit for habitation, and returned to the ship," as Brad- ford, who Avas of the exploring party, assures us, " with the discovery to their great comfort," is the very day that all of us desire to honor as the birth day of Christian freedom and true civihzation in New England. Reverence for progenitors, as Avell as self-respect, forbids us to permit any mixture of fiction with the great truths of their story. By any such artifice it can never be brightened ; as it will not be darkened, we are confident, either by disrepu- table facts or evil surmises. When paying our ancestors the debt of gratitude, we should rather exclude, than encourage, such doubtful traditions, as tho ignorant are wont to heap on important events. Who first landed on the rock ? was once an idle inquiry, thought to be met by the claims of Mary Chilton, till an equal competitor was found in John Alden ; — as if each pretence were not childish ; — as if we did not know, that Alden was not one of the twelve that first came in the shallop, that no Avoman was within many miles of this spot for several days, and that Mary Chilton, especially, was occu- pied in attendance on her dying father, who lived but two days after the little expedition left Cape Cod harbor. Every incident of the doing and suffering of our fathers near that time should be fresh in our memories, as if it had occurred last week ; and to preserve exactness of date, most agreeable is the coincidence of this happy landing Avith the recurrence, almost to an hour precisely, of the Winter solstice. That memorable Monday was 21st December, according to the Almanacs then used by the larger part of the Christian world, to which the residue of us, except adherents to the Greek platform of the church, have since conformed ; but in the Almanac of our fathers, or old style, that day Avas the 11th December, 1620. HoAvever there can be no doubt about an identical day, let nominal dales be ever so diverse, because the Aveek days Avill be the same, Avhether old or new style be employed. Truth spread sloAvly in this direction. Since the church of Rome reformed the Calendar, on advice of the ablest mathematicians of Europe, forty years had not run to the coming of the Pilgrims ; and the prejudice, not the wis- dom, of our King, Lords and Commons in Parliament assem- bled, continued to reject the improvement one hundred and thirty years longer. Yet it was not ignorance, but more blame- worthy cause, that made the numbering of days in the month so different, between England and other nations. The practise of inoculation for the small pox we borrowed from the Turks, many years before our repugnance to the Cathohc church would receive from its supporters needful correction of an arithmetical falsehood in our Almanac. A simple illustration may be agreeable to those who have not either leisure to follow a brief demonstration, or memory to preserve naked numbers. Capt. Allerlon, when he went home to England in the Autumn of 1626, Ave may suppose, crossed the channel in December, to meet the Huguenot brethren in France. This was the first year since his landing at Plymouth, in which the days of the month and days of the week coincided with those of 1620 ; and on Saturday, 9th, by his English reckoning, he must have remembered the an- chorage under Clark's Island ; — the sacred rest of Sunday, the 10th ; — and the glad bounding upon land of Monday, the 11th. Did he not require his brethren in the faith to rejoice with him on the anniversary of religious freedom, established at Plymouth, for the first time beneath the sun, six years before ? Did he ask them to mark the day in their Almanacs for observation in years to come ? Did they not forthwith agree, that this day, the 21st, in theirs, but 11th in Allerton's count, must forever be honored ? Their Calendar being already reformed, the third INIonday of December, 1620, or 1626, being the 21st day of the month, that number in the line of this month would ijidicate the exact day in suc- 1^ ceeding years of the same or any following century, 1720, 1820, or 1920 ; while the unreformed style, counting, as the Huguenots did not, 1700 for a leap year, and so twentynine days in February, the just equivalent of 11th December, 1699, by which it should be shown, that a year was gone, must of course be the 10th instead of ,11th. The very year's day is the one we would reverence. It is not the gathering crowds of 22d of December, 1769, the earliest public observ- ance, that we would exemplify ; but only show our admira- tion for the landing upon Plymouth rock of the blessed few, at the "Winter solstice of 1620, on the day which in the reform- ed Almanac at that time, and since September, 1752, in those of England and of us, who claim all the rights and more than the benefits of Englishmen, has been, and for many thousand years to come will be, truly noted as the twenty- first day of December. The necessity of adding ten, eleven, or twelve, or more days to the number of the day of the month, in old style, de- pends not on the time when we inquire about the event to which this addition shall be applied, but to the century when that event occurred. In the sixth century the ruiming of erroneous computation had made only one day's devia- tion ; but this uniform mistake in reckoning of a few minutes and seconds in the length of a year had swelled, in the seven- teenth century, when Plymouth was settled by om* fathers, to ten days. Had this been a century later, the 11th of Decem- ber, 1720, it would require eleven days for making our old style, then the legal one, concur with the reformed style, be- cause 1700 was counted a leap year by us, but not by the most of the Christians who had before got upon the right track. In this nineteenth century twelve days must be add- ed, yet, of course, only to occurrences of this century. By the Calendar of the Greek church, the day of the battle of Waterloo is marked on 6th of June, which in 1815 Avas a Sunday ; and that Sunday of slaughter is, in all the West of Europe, noted as the 18th of that month. In the first half of the last century, before the change of supputation was made by law, memorable events, as the birth of Franklin, of Washington, of King George III., of the capture of Louisburg, may have been observed by parties more or less numerous ; but this observation, we may, on a moment's reflection, be sure, was in each case held, or should have been, on a day nominally eleven days later, after the 2d of September, 1752, — because between the second and four- teenth of that month there was no day in the Almanac. The MONTH HAD BUT NINETEEN DAYS. A date of 3d, or 4th, or 5th of September, 1751, at the end of one year from it, was to be found only as fourteenth, fifteenth, or sixteenth, severally. Statute provision was simple enough, relative to rents, interest and such things ; but common sense was left to regTilate less important matters. The last day of old style, under our law, being Wednesday, 2d of September, the next day would be Thursday, whether the law was obeyed, requiring it to be called 14th — or perverse fanaticism called it the 3d. We know, that a person born on the 14th of September, 1752, will be ninetyeight years old on 14th of September next. Why then shall one born one day earlier be called ninety eight, (because his birth-day was Wednesday 2d Septem- ber 1752,) eleven days before the just fulfilment of his last year ? Between one year and its successor, settlement of this difference is easy enough to the humblest capacity. The matter is determined by the exact, natural day, week, or 8 year. Our common year consists of fiftytwo weeks and one day ; a leap year, of fiftytwo weeks and two days. A child born on Monday, 31st August, 1752, could not be a year old on 31st August, 1753, because he had lived only fifty weeks and four days ; for another, born the next Monday, 18th September was his birthday, inasmuch as there was no 7th in that month, eleven days being suppressed, or cancelled. On 13th September, 1753, the child must be reckoned only one year old, if born on 2d September of the former year ; but one born 2d September, 1652, would fill his one hundred and one years on 12th September, 1753, because (since the century when he was born was only ten, not eleven, days be- hind true reckoning) he was really one hundred years old on 1st September, 1752. He did not wait for the eighteenth century to demand eleven days, for ten was enough, of addi- dition to his date ; but paid the difference of fare, one day, so to speak, in passing through the gate of 1700, which was reckoned a leap year in old style, but not in the new, and better, comjmtation of these venerable divisions of time. But, though the quantity of correction must vary with the length of time in which the error has been grooving, ^vhen the correction is once applied, it is done forever. Had our style been changed in the eighth century, three days would have been sufficient to add ; while eleven were found neces- sary by our law-makers in the last; and in the present, our Russian correspondents are twelve days behind us. We make no more addition since September, 1752 ; nor did the continental arithmeticians to their less contribution, having earlier adjusted their reckoning. Yet it is sometimes heed- lessly spoken of as proper to add twelve days, which is indeed renewing the mistake, and consecrating the ignorance by which the chronology was corrupted before. 9 In the celebration eighty years ago, this error of one day is easily accounted for. We may well presume, that one or more of our genial Old Colony club, who honored forefa- thers' day with pubhc celebration, for the first time, in 1769, had served in the memorable expedition of 1745, against Cape Breton, and had for several previous years glorified, in succession, the 16th of June, as the day of surrender of Louisburg; To that numeral in the Almanac they adhered, of course, for seven years ; but they had for the next seven- teen years been compelled to denote the exact day of any in- teresting occurrence in that century by addition of eleven days to its prior standing, and of course reached the 27th of June as their true anniversary. Such enumeration was inad- vertently 'applied, instead of the scrupulously exact one, to the blessed day of the landing, though that event was one hundred and fortynine years before the celebration, and so much nearer to the starting place of the perversity. Of these glorious mile-stones of memory the consecrations have, in our day, been numerous ; yet the false assumption of a day for that ceremony has been too frequent. In honor of the landing of Endicot, at Salem, on 6th September, 1628, the Essex Historical Society took in 1825 the same nominal 6th as the equivalent, — an error to be explained, if not justi- fied, by fondness felt for the mere number, yet which would have been avoided, if any had inquired what day was observ- ed in 1752, when the Statute of 24 George II., 1751, said, there should be no 6th. For the solemn pomp of the obser- vation of the two hundredth anniversary of the same happy occurrence, three years later, a wrong day was again assum- ed. Instead of 16th, as it ought to have been, unhappily they took the 18th, which appears, in one sense, a worse error 10 than the former, inasmuch as it must be more blamable to outrun the truth than to fall behind it. Confident we may be, at least, that when September, 1928 comes, the citizens of Salem will not feel bound to celebrate the 19th day of the month. Of this mistake the cause may, then, be recollected. Being asked, a few days before the festival, what is the differ- ence between old and new style, the greatest mathematician of our country gave answer, according to the truth, in the open street, without more conference, in his prompt manner, iioelve days; — yet Dr. Bowditch afterwards said, when it was too late, the question should have been, — Avhat icas the difference two hundred years ago ? At the celebration in Charlestown, of the landing of Gov. Winthrop, in 1630, 17th June, part of the Salem error was followed, and the 28th of June, 1830, stood for its represen- tative. By this repetition of mistake, within so brief space, attention to the subject was attracted ; and when the two hundred years from the naming of Boston were elapsed, the late Judge Davis, and others, took much interest in showing that the 7th of September, 1630, found its true equivalent hi the day, 17th September, 1830 selected for its solemn com- memoration. If Ave feel, that we have gone long enough iu the wrong path, we may see by this illustration, that it is not too late to get upon the right. Another occasion for scrutiny into exact concurrence of days, after so many revolutions in the sky, is recollected but a short time since. When the Massachusetts Historical Society resolved to honor the second centennial of the confederation of the four New England Colonies, and appointed the late John Quincy Adams to de- liver an Address upon the importance of that act of 19th of May, 1643, his first thought, perhaps from association with 11 long residence in Russia, was of the necessity for twelve days required by transference of that date into our computation. But by looking forward on the line of procession of the Greek church, in which the error increases by regular lapse of time, he soon perceived that the same cause of departure from the truth having been at work since the vernal equinox of A. D. 325, shortly before the Council of Nice met, and having worked equally, would show different lengths of devi- ation in different times ; and felt that the path behind could be made straight by the same rule which alone must bring to our standard the vexatious chronology of the Eastern patri- arch. In that foreign land every letter-writer, as he uses the Old style, prays for its correction, not so much because our 13th of April is their All-fool's day at St. Petersburg, as be- cause the perpetuity of their reckoning in every four hundred years three days short will, in the year of grace 12000, carry the seasons one quarter round, and so the spring will be Avell advanced on 21st of December. Let the perversity be con- tinued,^ another equal term, and the Almanac of the Czar shall dignify as the Winter solstice, the same day that his neighbors of Sweden and Denmark celebrate as having the longest sunlight of the year. In the present question, it may seem, that no important consequences will come of our following the right counting, when we have so long been accustomed to a different one ; yet surely we ought not to be censured for feeling too proud to go wrong, when we know the path is wrong. As the ex- act equivalent of that 11th of December, 1620, in our English Almanac was the 21st of December in that of France, and we have since admitted our error, and the correctness of the other reckoning, by solemn act of legislation, wliy should we 13 celebrate a day later for that of our fathers' landing ? The truth should be good enough for us ; and that is the only rea- son for preference of one to another. When by habit the right day has become the day of reverence, it will be won- dered, why the wrong Avas so often observed. Next year, indeed, the true anniversary falling on Sunday, it may be more conformable to New England principles, to celebrate the following, or 22d day of the month ; but we presume no- body would desire a further carrying forAvard of the festival to the 23d though our elder brothers of the Old Colony club, before the Revolution, once did to the 24th. Your Committee conclude their Report, which may, in- deed, seem tiresome from its repetition of the matter with so slight variations as this popular form made unavoidable, by reccommendation to the Society of the folloAving Order :— That the celebration in future of the Landing of the Pil- grims at Plymouth be held on the twentyfirst day of Decem- ber ; but when that day falls on Sunday, then to be held on the twentysecond. Respectfully submitted. JAS. SAVAGE, C. H. WARREN, NATHL. B. SHURTLEFF, ABRAHAM JACKSON, TIMOTHY GORDON. r - t ' C'C c . •«. C c « »c c <»'<<■ < <. '' «3C«' f <: C t '^<«!C C f f . «tl ' ■. CC . c C < -,<< cc r CC cc-Cv^-C: Cc'.C <'C *^.:-< < <. c CO< ccC c ^c*- C- ccccj:.c.<^.<:<;: ^<^-'lC<:CCC .«■_ • «c .. <: • 11 '^ < -^rg- 'cc -< c <_« «: <: i «■ c < <. C '«^ < > C «r C . 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