Massachusetts Bay Colony Contained Germans.—The first Germans in New England arrived, as far as we know, with the founding of Massachusetts Bay Colony in1630. The proof of this fact, as well as the influence of this first small group, is found in one of the most important pamphlets published in connection with New England colonization, “The Planter’s Plea” (1630). This tract, published in London shortly after the departure of Winthrop’s Puritan fleet, and supposed to have been written by John White, the “patriarch of Dorchester,” and the “father of Massachusetts Bay Colony,” contains the following statement: “It is not improbable that partly for their sakes, and partly for respect to some Germans that are gone over with them, and more that intend to follow after, even those which otherwise would not much desire innovation, of themselves yet for maintaining of peace and unity (the only solder of a weak, unsettled body) will be won to consent to some variations from the forms and customs of our church.”

Some of the early New England Germans reached there via New Amsterdam; we find them in Connecticut, Rhode Island, Boston, etc. In 1661 the ship surgeon, Felix Christian Spoeri, of Switzerland, paid a visit to Rhode Island. His narrative of New England (“Amerikanische Reisebeschreibung Nach den Caribes Inseln und Neu Engelland”) is one of the few of German pen on early American colonial times still extant—(From “First Germans in North America and the German Element of New Netherland,” by Otto Lohr, G.E. Stechert & Co., New York,1912.)