Martin Pring

Martin Pring (* 1580 in Bristol ; † 1626 ibid) was an English navigator, explorer and commander, who is particularly known for his expedition to New England in 1603.

Trip to New England

Martin Pring, born in Bristol in 1580 , was hired by a company of local entrepreneurs and Richard Hakluyt in 1603 to sail with the ships Speedwell and Explorer to the possessions known as Virginia . This expedition, in which 43 sailors took part, was planned as a pure expedition.

The first land contact occurred at the entrance to Penobscot Bay in what is now the state of Maine , from where the journey - following the coast - continued in a south-westerly direction. Mainly estuaries were explored to find anchorages for future expeditions. The mouths of the Saco River , Kennebunk River and York River were explored before an ideal anchorage was found in the estuary of the Piscataqua River on today's border with the state of New Hampshire. The search for residents led to a meeting with the Abenaki , which ended in armed conflict.

After exploring Great Bay, the ships sailed on to the mouth of the Pamet River on the Cape Cod peninsula , where they put up a depot near Cornhill , which the Pilgrim Fathers found on their arrival. Before returning to England at the end of July 1603, the participants of the expedition still harvested some of the numerous sassafras trees that were used in Europe at that time to make "elixirs of life".

Further life

In the following years Pring led further successful expeditions to Guinea , the Caribbean and Maine, where his exact mapping earned him great recognition and a job with the Dutch East India Company , in whose service quickly made a career. From 1619 he was in command of the company's fleet of ships. In 1621 he returned to England and became Freeman of the Virginia Company, endowed with 200 acres of land. In 1626 he died at the age of 46 in Bristol and was buried in St Stephen's Church there.

Richard Hakluyt received the collected travel reports of the 1603 expedition, but never published them. Only Samuel Purchas , who inherited the papers after Hakluyt's death, published the stories in 1625 in the fourth volume of his Pilgrimes series .

literature

• Charles W. Brewster: Rambles about Portsmouth. Series 1: Sketches of Persons, Localities, and Incidents of two Centuries. Principally from Tradition and unpublished Documents. 2nd edition. LW Brewster, Portsmouth NH 1873, ( digitized ).
• Martin Pring: A Voyage set out from the Citie of Bristoll, 1603. In: Henry S. Burrage (Ed.): Early English and French Voyages, Chiefly from Hakluyt, 1534-1608. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York NY 1906, pp. 343-352 .
• Richard F. Whalen: Truro. The Story of a Cape Cod Town. Xlibris, Philadelphia PA 2002, ISBN 1-4010-5146-4 .

Web links

• American Journeys - Martin Pring