red emigrants won their freedom, the situation also created a need for work force, which came in the form of a burgeoning slave trade. Unlike the fertile, lush Virginia landscape, New England was made up of thin, stony soil with a lack of level land for farming, and cold, harsh winters. New England colonists quickly turned to other pursuits for survival. The sea became a source of great wealth. Shipbuilding and trade along the harbor regions flourished, and New Englanders soon learned that rum and slaves were commodities in demand in the early colonies (Davies). As historian Norman Davies explains, "One of the most enterprising--if unsavorytrading practices of the time was the so-called triangular trade. Merchants and shippers would purchase slaves off the coast of Africa for New England rum, then sell the slaves in the West Indies where they would buy molasses to bring home for sale to local rum producers" (Colonial History of Jamestown). A number of emigrants called Puritans, who had unsuccessfully sought to reform the established Church of England, arrived on the ship The Mayflower at Plymouth Rock in New England in 1620. Though nearly half of the colonists died of exposure and disease, native Wampanoag Indians provided vital information to the settlers on how to grow maize and survive. Crops flourished and colonists learned to support themselves through trade in furs and lumber. In 1630, armed with a grant from the British king for colonial authority, a large wave of Puritan emigrants arrived on the shores of the Massachusetts Bay and established the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The colony's charter established a rigid orthodoxy for both church and government affairs. Likewise, bitter persecution of Quakers, who were extreme dissenters of the Church of England, helped to settle the British Middle Colonies in Pennsylvania and Delaware. Bringing personal libraries with them from England, both the Puritans a...
