He States, Without Qualification Or Reservation,
That "Among The Passengers In The SPEEDWELL Were Several Of The
French Who Had Decided To Cast In Their Lot With These English
Brethren.
William Molines and his daughter Priscilla, afterwards
the wife of John Alden and Philip Delanoy, born in Leyden of French
parents, were of the number." One stands confounded by such a
combination of unwarranted errors.
Not only is it not true that
there "were several of the French among the passengers in the
SPEEDWELL," but there is no evidence whatever that there was even
one. Those specifically named as there, certainly were not, and
there is not the remotest proof or reason to believe, that William
Mullens (or Molines) and his daughter Priscilla (to say nothing of
the wife and son who accompanied him to America, whom Baird forgets)
ever even saw Leyden or Delfshaven. Their home had been at Dorking
in Surrey, just across the river from London, whence the MAY-FLOWER
sailed for New England, and nothing could be more absurd than to
assume that they were passengers on the SPEEDWELL from Delfshaven to
Southampton.
So far from Philip Delanoy (De La Noye or Delano) being a passenger
on the SPEEDWELL, he was not even one of the Pilgrim company, did
not go to New England till the following year (in the FORTUNE), and
of course had no relation to the SPEEDWELL. Neither does Edward
Winslow - the only authority for the parentage of "Delanoy" - state
that "he was born in Leyden," as Baird alleges, but only that "he
was born of French parents . . . and came to us from Leyden to
New Plymouth," - an essential variance in several important
particulars. Scores and perhaps hundreds of people have been led to
believe Priscilla Mullens a French Protestant of the Leyden
congregation, and themselves - as her descendants - "of Huguenot
stock," because of these absolutely groundless assertions of Dr.
Baird. They lent themselves readily to Mrs. Austin's fertile
imagination and facile pen, and as "welcome lies" acquired a hold on
the public mind, from which even the demonstrated truth will never
wholly dislodge them. The comment of the intelligent writer in the
"Historic-Genealogical Register" referred to is proof of this. So
fast-rooted had these assertions become in her thought as the truth,
that, confronted with the evidence that Master Mullens and his
family were from Dorking in England, it does not occur to her to
doubt the correctness of the impression which the recklessness of
Baird had created, - that they were of Leyden, - and she hence
amusingly suggests that "they must have moved from Leyden to
Dorking." These careless utterances of one who is especially bound
by his position, both as a writer and as a teacher of morals, to be
jealous for the truth, might be partly condoned as attributable to
mistake or haste, except for the facts that they seem to have been
the fountain-head of an ever-widening stream of serious error, and
that they are preceded on the very page that bears them by others as
to the Pilgrim exodus equally unhappy.
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