6:5 The Golding Family of Bermuda
The Story of William “the Clergyman” Goulding of Eleuthera
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There were two men named William Goulding. The first was William Goulder, also known as Goulding who was born about 1613 in Ireland, although that was not the point of origin of his family and he was associated with Lady Deborah Moody and her community at Gravesend, New York. Lady Moody and her followers were Anabaptist. His family is well-documented in New York and he married Anna Kathryn (Smit) and died about 1672 in Gravesend. William “of Gravesend” Goulding was in Virginia before 1635 and went with Thomas Hall, George Holmes and others on the expedition sent by Governor West to take Dutch-held Fort Nassau in 1635. The expedition failed, and the participants were held for a while in New York but they ultimately returned to Virginia.
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There was also a man named William Goulding or Golding who was a Minister and his story likewise is very well documented. He was a Non-Conformist and he moved (presumably) from England first to Bermuda to establish a Church among the people who lived there. He left a will in 1648 and in it he said that he had only one son named John but also had a brother named Bartholomew and a living nephew named William. The names William, Thomas and John are common names in the branch of the Golding family of England, the branch connected by marriage to the Gosnolds and the founders of the Virginia Company and of the settlement at Jamestown.
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Rev. Patrick Copeland played a part in the lives of both William Goulding, the Congregationalist minister in Bermuda and Thomas Goulding, who immigrated to America on the George with Ellis Emerson in 1623, the year after the Indian massacre in Jamestown. In In 1622 he was appointed by The Virginia Company as the rector for an intended school for the Indians, a vision which never came to fruition. Nevertheless Mr. Emerson and Martin's Hundred's leader William Harwood continued to offer accommodation to the people who came to Virginia to establish the school. Thomas Goulding is listed as the 'servant" of Ellis Emerson in the 1624 census of Jamestown, but it is possible that he along with Elias Gale was an apprentice, brought to Virginia to help with the school. William Goulding was connected to Patrick Copeland in that he was one of the three ministers who “played an instrumental part in the establishment of a church separate from the Church of England in the colony and he was very closely connected with Richard Norwood, also with Rev. Patrick Copeland and Captain Nathaniel White.”
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The story of who William Goulding was and how he ended up on the Island of Eleuthera begins with Patrick Copeland. Patrick Copeland, the son of John Copland, a merchant of the city of Edinburgh, was educated at Aberdeen grammar school and Marischal College. After a stay in England he joined the East India Company in 1612 as a chaplain (on its tenth voyage). Copland had a deep-seated belief in the power of education as a process of civilization which remained his abiding passion throughout his life. His view of the budding British Empire was symbolized by the job he did on his return home, when he was given the responsibility of educating a Bengali boy brought to Britain, both in literacy and general education and also in Christianity, with a view to using him later to assist in the conversion of his own people to the same religion. Although his view that the British were "civilizing the natives", to look on this view as patronizing now is to ignore contemporary perspectives and deny Copland's unshakeable philanthropism.
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From the foundation of King's College, the Principal was required to teach theological subjects. The oldest separate Chair of Divinity was founded in Marischal College in 1616 (by Patrick Copeland) to be followed closely by a similar foundation in King's College in 1620; these Chairs are now assigned to Church History and Systematic Theology, respectively. From the year 1619, a settlement at Nansemond, near Norfolk, had prospered, and had been in relations of trade with New England.
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At about this same time Rev. Copeland was involved in trying to get the East India School started in Henrico County, Virginia. Those plans were brought to a halt after the 1622 Indian massacre which affected most of the English settlements along the James River. Thomas Goulding traveled with Ellis Emerson to Virginia in 1623 and Emerson was well acquainted with Copeland as well. In the Somers Islands, Copeland veered in the direction of Congregationalism, for which belief he received a short prison sentence. On his release he decided to set up a religious community on the island of Eleuthera (Greek word meaning freedom). Copeland had come to believe in the importance of every person having the freedom to practice his own religion according to his own conscience. "Captain Sayle, afterward Governor of Carolina, and the Venerable Patrick Copeland, in his youth the friend of Nicholas Ferrar, and a preacher before the London Company in 1622, of a sermon which was printed with the title "Virginia's God be Thanked", left Bermuda with a party of sympathizers, and sailed to Eleuthera, a small isle of the Bahamas group, to establish a colony, where each person was to be at perfect liberty to worship as he pleased, without molestation from the state. The ship in which they embarked, when near their destination, struck upon a reef, and they lost much of their supplies. As soon as possible Captain Sayle built the pinnacle, and with eight men steered for Virginia, and arrived there in nine days, and received succor from the Nansemond nonconformists". (Neill, 1867)
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John Oxenbridge, for us the most important of the Bermuda clergy, came into notice in England in the winter of 1633 or in the following spring, he then begin a tutor at Magdalen College, Oxford, when he was 26 years old. He took his bachelor's degree at Lincoln College in 1624 and had been for some years tutor at Magdalen, when it was discovered that he was binding to himself certain of his pupils..by an oath of obedience..it promises obedience to his government in hair and clothes, studies, performance of religious duties, company and recreations. It extended also to confessing to Oxenbridge at times of reading and private conference and telling him what the vower knew of his fellow pupils...". This attracted the consternation of his superiors so in 1635 Oxenbridge found himself on the list of passengers “to be transported to the Somer Islands”. He departed in the Truelove de London on June 10, 1635. Governor Lefroy’s account of Oxenbridge is chiefly derived from his correspondence with Richard Norwood in the Record Office in London and from William Prynne. The Governor submitted the following account:
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“(Oxenbridge) was one of the four ministers who left no stone unturned to set up the new order and new discipline, administered by themselves alone, which convulsed the little community. Richard Beake (another schoolmaster) refers to him as 'the first groundwork of this faction' which was afterwards headed by Nathaniel White.." Oxenbridge returned to England about 1641." (Transactions, Volume 12, 1911, p. 171)
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William Golding, who took an active part in establishing Independency in the Bermudas and was in correspondence with some of our leading men, gains entrance to Savage's Genealogical Dictionary only from his having stopped over in Boston on his way to England. He was here at the lecture November 5, 1646.
"Just when William Golding or Goulding went to Bermuda does not appear, and nothing seems to be known of him before. He had been appointed to his cure in Bermuda probably early in 1638, which was long before the establishment of Independency there. (Transactions, Volume 12, 1911, p. 171)
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Rev. William Goulding is introduced in several publications, including GENEALOGICAL AND FAMILY HISTORY OF THE STATE OF VERMONT (Genealogical and Family History of the State of Vermont, p. 367)
It reads;
“Of the Gouldings who appeared early in this country was Rev. William, minister of Bermuda, who attended the Thursday lecture in Boston, November 5, 1646.” It appears that he played an instrumental part in the establishment of a church separate from the Church of England in the colony and he was very closely connected with Richard Norwood, also with Rev. Patrick Copeland and Captain Nathaniel White.
Letters written by Patrick Copeland to John Winthrop are recorded in the Winthrop Papers. (The Winthrop Papers)
The existence of William "the clergyman" is documented and I cite his existence from a book that is available online on google books called BERMUDA SETTLERS OF THE 17TH CENTURY by Julia E. Mercer. It has an interesting notation on page 91. The passage reads: “ELIZABETH, daughter of GILBERT HILL, bapt. Jan 24, 1685. GILBERT HILL appears to have no sons. The HILL family in Bermuda began with JAMES HILL belonging to a family of Norfolk, England who settled in the colony before 1686. A letter to him from his brother RICHARD of this date written from Normanton, Yorkshire, speaks of an estate in Essex belonging to a nephew. JAMES HILL married a daughter of PERCIVAL GOULDING, schoolmaster, a son of REV. WILLIAM GOULDING. PERCIVAL GOULDING succeeded RICHARD NORWOOD as schoolmaster and JAMES HILL succeeded his father-in-law.”
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That connection is incorrect. James Hill did indeed marry a daughter of Percival Goulding the Schoolmaster but Percival was not the son of Rev. William Goulding. Louis Thorn Golding proved who Percival was in 1929. Percival was of the direct line of Arthur Golding the Translator, but Louis Golding stated in the same document that William, the Minister of Bermuda was ‘probably’ a cousin and belonged to the Suffolk branch of the Golding family, the branch that was related to the Gosnolds. This is substantiated in some of the information William the Clergyman put in his own 1648 will, in which he stated he had property in Pembroke, Suffolk (England) and Devonshire (Bermuda).
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Sampson Bond was the other man mentioned. He had been long settled as a minister in the Bermudas, was here in 1682 and for a time assisted James Allen at the First Church in Boston. He was forced to resign his position 'for preaching a sermon not composed by himself,' and returned to the West Indies.
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Congregationalism
The First Church in Boston was established in 1630 when the settlers arrived on the Arbella at the site of present day Charlestown, Massachusetts. In 1632 the church moved to a newly constructed meeting house across the Charles River near what is now State Street in Boston and John Wilson was installed as the minister there. In 1633 John Cotton arrived from England to be a teaching elder and he helped establish the foundation of the Congregational Church, which became the official state church of Massachusetts.
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There was another church in Boston called the Second Church and it came to be called the 'Church of the Mathers'. It was founded in 1649 when the population spread to the North End and a new church was needed to be located closer to the individual's homes. From 1664 to 1741 its clergy consisted of Increase Mather, Cotton Mather and Samuel Mather. (First Church in Boston) The resistance the three ministers got from people like Norwood was a direct result of what they were trying to do, and that was to replace the existing structure of the churches in Bermuda with Congregationalism, which is the tradition they adhered to in Boston. The precepts of Cotton Mather and John Cotton transported to the West Indies was not in accordance with what the Church of England wanted for the area. The Congregational tradition was brought to America by the Pilgrim who sought to replace the episcopal polity of the Church of England with another form of church government, that is for each congregation to elect its own officers and manage its own affairs. Congregationalists looked to the ministers of the First Church in Boston to set the example for their churches to follow. (Congregationalism in the United States)
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It was at about this same time that another faction began under Anne Hutchinson. The Antinomian Controversy, also known as the Free Grace Controversy was a religious and political conflict that was in the Massachusetts Bay Colony from 1636 to 1638. It pitted most of the colony's ministers and magistrates against followers of the Free Grace theology of John Cotton. (Antinomian Controversy)"The most notable Free Grace advocates, often called "Antinomians", were Anne Hutchinson, her brother-in-law Reverend John Wheelwright, and Massachusetts Bay Governor Henry Vane. The controversy was a theological debate concerning the "covenant of grace" and "covenant of works". Anne Hutchinson has historically been placed at the center of the controversy, a strong-minded woman who had grown up under the religious guidance of her father Francis Marbury, an Anglican clergyman and schoolteacher. In England, she embraced the religious views of dynamic Puritan minister John Cotton, who became her mentor; Cotton was forced to leave England and Hutchinson followed him to New England. In Boston, Hutchinson was influential among the settlement's women and hosted them at her house for discussions on the weekly sermons. Eventually, men were included in these gatherings, such as Governor Vane. During the meetings, Hutchinson criticized the colony's ministers, accusing them of preaching a covenant of works as opposed to the covenant of grace espoused by Reverend Cotton. The Colony's orthodox ministers held meetings with Cotton, Wheelwright, and Hutchinson in the fall of 1636. A consensus was not reached, and religious tensions mounted. To ease the situation, the leaders called for a day of fasting and repentance on 19 January 1637. However, Cotton invited Wheelwright to speak at the Boston church during services that day, and his sermon created a furor which deepened the growing division. In March 1637, the court accused Wheelwright of contempt and sedition, but he was not sentenced. His supporters circulated a petition on his behalf, mostly people from the Boston church.
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The religious controversy had immediate political ramifications. During the election of May 1637, the free grace advocates suffered two major setbacks when John Winthrop defeated Vane in the gubernatorial race, and some Boston magistrates were voted out of office for supporting Hutchinson and Wheelwright. Vane returned to England in August 1637. At the November 1637 court, Wheelwright was sentenced to banishment, and Hutchinson was brought to trial. She defended herself well against the prosecution, but she claimed on the second day of her hearing that she possessed direct personal revelation from God, and she prophesied ruin upon the colony. She was charged with contempt and sedition and banished from the colony, and her departure brought the controversy to a close. The events of 1636 to 1638 are regarded as crucial to an understanding of religion and society in the early colonial history of New England. The idea that Hutchinson played a central role in the controversy went largely unchallenged until 2002, when Michael Winship's account portrayed Cotton, Wheelwright, and Vane as complicit with her." (Antinomian Controversy)
John Oxenbridge, Nathaniel White and Patrick Copeland were active in Bermuda, intent on grounding Puritan ideas there. It is also worth noting that William “of Gravesend” Goulding became a follower of Lady Moody who was an Anabaptist, a Protestant sect who did not believe in infant baptism. When she arrived in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1639 she drew the attention of the Reverend Hugh Peter who opposed her. He had two years before that time already expelled another Anabaptist woman, Anne Hutchinson. That is not to imply that the two Williams knew each other but that they were both caught up in the changes that were sweeping over both the Church and the people in New England. One man went to Long Island, New York and the other went to Bermuda and eventually further on to Eleuthera.
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Rectors of Parishes in Bermuda (Catalogue of Plants Growing in Bermuda)
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St. George
1635-1641 John Oxenbridge
1643-1648 William Goulding
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Pembroke and Devonshire
1638 Nathaniel White
1663 Sampson Bond
1680-1690 Sampson Bond
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Paget and Warwick
1626-1647 Patrick Copeland
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Meanwhile on June 15, 1625 In Virginia Thomas Goulding was living at Martin’s Hundred in the household of Ellis Emerson.
"The Emersons had two servants, one of whom Thomas Goulding came with them on the George in 1623. On April 11, 1625, Ellis Emerson testified that he had put Elias Gail, a young male servant and one of the East India School's apprentices to work on the Rev. Patrick Copeland's behalf. On June 15, 1625 Mr. Emerson and Martin's Hundred's leader William Harwood offered accommodations to the people who came to Virginia to establish the East India School..."
Copeland wasn’t there; he just set things in motion. (McCartney, 2007, p. 279)
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Opposition by Norwood
What was the real motivation behind what the Congregationalist ministers in Bermuda were trying to do? It depends on who is telling the story. Norwood, who was a member of the Church of England naturally opposed them and saw the efforts of White, Copeland and Golding as ministers who were trying to seize control. He also complained that Governor Sayle who was thought to have been a Puritan but was later acused of Royalist sympathies was too influenced and guided by them, therefore Norwood made an appeal to the new Governor for protection in a letter of March, 1642-43 "Some say our Ministers are as supreme heads under Christ of their several small churches here, and not subordinate in these days Ecclesiastical to Parliament or any other power on earth whatsoever".
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The three ministers answered the challenge by renouncing their ties to the Church of England. On January 31, 1643-44, Mr. Oxenbridge not being present--
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'Master Nathaniel White, Master Patrick Copeland and Master William Golding did...at a fast day by them ordained and not commanded by any authority to be held, in the Pagetts Tribe in the Summer Islands in the afternoon of the said day draw themselves together in the body of the said Church and did then and there publicly manifest and declare, that they...did lay down renounce and relinquish their Office of the Ministry in the Church of England, acknowledging themselves to be but private men, yet so as they held themselves to be a church of themselves, and to that end had entered into a covenant among themselves and would be ready to receive into their covenant such as would submit thereunto.' (Transactions, Volume 12, 1911, p. 171)
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Shortly after that William Golding resolved to go to England and stopped at Boston on the way to attend the Boston lecture. He returned to Bermuda and the four ministers divided two against two, some taking sides for Independency and some for Presbyterianism. Norwood joined the Independent side. (Transactions, Volume 12, 1911, p. 172)
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A different account is told in a different book. It is not so harsh because it was not told from the perspective of a clergyman from the Church of England.
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"As also about this time, the Lord was pleased to gather a people together in the Isle of Bermudas, whose hearts being builded by the rule of the word, they gathered into a Church of Christ according to the rules of the Gospel, being provided with able persons, indued with gifts from the Lord to administer unto them the holy things of God, and after they began to be opposed, their reverend elder Mr. Goulding came into these parts, and from hence he went to England; but this little flock of Christ not long after being banished from thence, went to one of the Southern Islands, where they endured much hardship, and which the Churches of Christ in these parts understanding, about six or eight of them contributing toward their want, gathered about 800 pounds to supply their necessity, the which they shipped in a small vessel hired for that end.." (ed by Jameson, 1906, p. 267)
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The Eleuthurian Adventurers
In 1647 the expedition to Eleuthera was made necessary because of the political conditions on Bermuda. The Independent congregation led by William Goulding had been persecuted since it's establishment by the Church of England, so Governor Sayle secured with the help of the Earl of Warwick an Act of Parliament that promised religious liberty in Bermuda, but it was ineffective. He was then able to get permission to establish a plantation or colony in the Bahamas where they might start anew, free from the manipulations of the church back in England.
In 1644 an expedition to explore the islands set out but they failed in that one of their ships was lost and the other did not find a suitable island. Sayle, who was an experienced ship's captain then took some seventy people, including Rev. Goulding on a small 50-ton ship and a shallop so that they could establish "Eleuthera", a name which means 'freedom' in Greek. (Baker)
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They took two ships, with William Sayle and his assistant Captain Butler at the helm of the one that was called the William. At some point in the cruise Sayle and Butler got into an argument with each other on the subject of what religious freedom means and rather than find a rational solution to the dispute Sayle took the other ship with the settlers, left Captain Butler and went forward to reach the Bahamian Island. This proved to be a disastrous decision because when they encountered a storm and their ship ran aground on the rocks, later called the Devil’s Backbone located north of the Spanish Wells the adventurers found themselves in a position where they had to make their way onshore in whatever way they could. Once on the island they found refuge in what has come to be known as the “Preacher’s Cave”, but although they had found shelter all their provisions had been lost and they had no food.
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In an act of desperation, Sayle took eight men in a small boat and sailed to Virginia to seek help. There he got a ship and some supplies and went back to Eleuthera to help the others. (Eleutheran Adventurers)
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Eleuthera is actually closer to Florida than it is to Virginia, so Sayle and his group of eight had to travel a distance of about 800 miles to get help from the Nansemond Nonconformists.
The Nansemond Puritans
In 1642, two years before the Eleuthurian Adventurers under Sayle ran their ship aground on the reefs near the Preacher’s Cave on Eleuthera, Philip Bennett of Nansemond in Virginia visited Boston in this coating vessel and he bore with him a letter to the Boston Church. The letter was signed by seventy-four names and it stated the needs of their county that was without a pastor and offered a maintenance to three good ministers if they could be found. A little later William Durand, of the same county, wrote for himself and his neighbors to John Davenport of New Haven and essentially made the same request that Philip Bennet had made to the church in Boston. As a result of his efforts three learned and faithful ministers of New England went to Virginia and brought with them letters of commendation from Governor Winthrop. They found no welcome in Virginia for it had become by that time a royal colony and the newly arrived royal governor Sir William Berkeley was more a supporter of Bishop Laud than he was of Puritans. He forbade the teaching of the ministers but the Catholic governor of Maryland sent them an invitation to settle there, which one of them did along with some of the Virginia Puritans. The Nansemond group got a degree of satisfaction when Berkeley was eventually compelled to surrender his jurisdiction and Richard Bennett, one of the banished Puritans of Nansemond was chosen by the Assembly of Burgesses to be governor in his stead.
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It was this same group that Sayle sailed towards. The Virginians found that among Sayle’s party was the aged Patrick Copland, who twenty-one years earlier had interested himself in the passing of these very same emigrants. Mr. Copland listened to the complaints that were made to him of the persecution to which the people in Virginia were subjected by the malignant Governor Berkeley, and after they had been resupplied a free invitation was extended to the Nansemond church to go with their guests to the new settlement of Eleuthera, in which freedom of conscience and non-interference of the magistrate with the church were secured by charter.
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Life on Eleuthera proved difficult and the settlers barely got by during the first few years, being obliged to live by salvaging what they could from shipwrecks. The soil yielded little production and the settlers barely got by during their first years. Sayle, who later went on to become the governor of South Carolina was a very resourceful man, and secured a number of supplies from the mainland colonies but in spite of this the colony disintegrated and in the end only a few hardcore settlers from the original Eleutherans were left. William Sayle drew up the Articles of 1647 and if the settlement had been successful that document would have been the foundation of the ‘first democratic state in the New World’, established 130 years before the American Revolution.
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Copland returned to Bermuda and died a short time later in 1645. He died in abject poverty, a witness to the strength of his beliefs. (Grand Bahama History) Rev. William Goulding died not too long after Copeland in 1648 on Eleuthera and left a will in which he gave all of his possessions to his only son John, who was proved by Louis Thorn Golding to have been John "of Huntington" Golding and also said he had a nephew named William who was still living. (The Encyclopedia of Virginia)
References
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(n.d.). In e. b. Carleton (Ed.), Genealogical and Family History of the State of Vermont.
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(n.d.). Retrieved from The Winthrop Papers: http://books.google.com/books?
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(n.d.). Retrieved from The Encyclopedia of Virginia.
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(n.d.). Retrieved from Grand Bahama History: http://www.jabezcorner.com/Grand_Bahama/History.htm
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(1911). In Transactions, Volume 12. Colonial Society of Massachusetts. Retrieved from https://www.google.com/books/edition/Transactions/btbkAAAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=Patrick+Copeland+William+Goulding&pg=PA171&printsec=frontcover
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Antinomian Controversy. (n.d.). Retrieved from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antinomian_Controversy#Core_group
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Baker, J. (n.d.). The Eleuthurian Adventurers. Retrieved from Bahamian Fragments: Bits and Pieces from the History of the Bahamas: http://www.jabezcorner.com/Grand_Bahama/History.htm
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Catalogue of Plants Growing in Bermuda. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.google.com/books/edition/Catalogue_of_Plants_Growing_in_Bermuda_B/kZUYAAAAYAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=Patrick+Copeland+William+Goulding&pg=PA207&printsec=frontcover
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Congregationalism in the United States. (n.d.). Retrieved from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congregationalism_in_the_United_States
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ed by Jameson, J. F. (Ed.). (1906). Of Sions Savior in New England, Original Narratives of Early American History; Johnson's Wonder-working Providence. C. Scribner's Sons.
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Eleutheran Adventurers. (n.d.). Retrieved from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleutheran_Adventurers
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First Church in Boston. (n.d.). Retrieved from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Church_in_Boston
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McCartney, M. W. (2007). Virginia Immigrants and Adventurers 1607-1635.
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Neill, E. D. (1867). In History of Education in Virginia in the 17th Century.