The English: They Weren’t us! That’s for sure. In this video, historian Stan Svec takes a look at the situation at the start of English colonization in the new world. We find a Europe wracked by centuries of wars, famine and diseases, torn by religious strife, and rotting under outdated monarchical governments. Click here for his 12-minute video posted on May 25, 2025 on Fishing Historic Places.

Stan begins sitting below a series of cataracts on the mighty Westfield River, which is now damned in Woronoco, but was a great gathering place for the native people. Even a whale carcass might keep them busy if they got lucky enough to find one along the Atlantic coast.

The English, the French, and the Dutch aren’t us today. They’re a people that have been through a series of hundreds of years of wars and famines that they have through, including the beheading of King Charles I in 1649 followed by the ascendancy of Oliver Cromwell, who died at age 59 on September 3, 1658 but was also subjected to a posthumous execution two years later.

According to Svec, this is why the New World was so outrageously wonderful to Europeans when they discovered it. The idea that they could found a religiously centered colony in Plymouth, where they could live by their own lights and worship in their own way, was extraordinary. However, the world of the Puritans was strict and strongly religious, and they were not tolerant of Quakers or anyone that had different opinions of religion, who would be banished or executed, like Quaker Mary Dyer, who is pictured above being led to her execution about a mile south of Boston Common on Boston Neck in 1659.