Biography
John Alden was among the original settlers of the Plymouth Colony. Although not himself a Pilgrim he had been hired to repair Mayflower while she lay off Southampton, England and decided to journey when she set sail, perhaps with the hope of being prosperous in the New World, or because he wished to follow Priscilla Mullins. John was not the only man who would fall for Priscilla. His friend, military Captain Miles Standish came to love the maiden throughout the long voyage of 1620. A love triangle ensued with the result of John ultimately winning Priscilla's hand. They married on May 12, 1622. That denouement plus Alden's engagement with rivaling Indians who plotted to kill newcomers is told elaborately in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem, The Courtship of Miles Standish.
From 1633 until 1675, he was assistant to the governor of the Plymouth Colony, frequently serving as acting governor and also on many juries, including one witch trial.
In 1634, Alden was jailed, in Boston, for a fight at Kenebeck in Maine between members of the Plymouth Colony and the Massachusetts Bay Colony. While Alden did not participate in the fight (which left one person dead) he was the highest-ranking member from Plymouth that the Massachusetts Bay colonists found to arrest. It was only through the intervention of Bradford that he was eventually released.
In later years, Alden became known for his intense dislike of Quakers and Baptists, who were settling on Cape Cod. A letter survives complaining that Alden was too harsh in his dealings with them.
Read more about this topic: John Alden
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The death of Irving, which at any other time would have attracted universal attention, having occurred while these things were transpiring, went almost unobserved. I shall have to read of it in the biography of authors.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.”
—André Maurois (1885–1967)