The Pilgrims and emerging New Englanders made an additional contribution to the formation of the American ethos that is worth expanding upon, however: the daring, intrepid, and risk-taking qualities of those who settled in the northeast coast of what would become the United States. The resolve to pull up stakes and strike out into the perilous unknown — and the faith and fortitude to follow through on it — is an inspirational cultural debt we owe to the first early Pilgrims and New England settlers.

If instead of religious, freedom-seeking, young family units, arrivals on the northern shores of the future American coast had been the unwed, flighty, gold-seeking ruffians of the Jamestown variety, the America that followed would have been remarkably different.