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THE TAVERN 4 Through such loving lines, it is clear from Keats’s sweet and yearning homage to the Mermaid that he would have given much to have been able to travel back and spend an evening of drink and merriment in the pres- ence of his literary forebears in their dedicated house of mirth. ALCOHOL ARRIVES IN THE NEW WORLD Around the same time that the Mermaid’s evenings were being filled with libations and cheer, the first English colonists were establishing colonies in North America. With the establishment of Jamestown in 1607 and Plymouth Colony in 1620, English settlers fought to carve out a world in which they could first survive and ultimately thrive, and not long after arriving in this hostile environment, they established taverns at the same time they erected other social institutions, such as churches. Despite this, taverns had played a part in motivating the Pilgrims, the first Puritans in North America, to leave the relative comfort of their adopted home of Leiden, Holland, to risk their lives in the arduous voyage across the Atlan- tic. These former residents of Scrooby, located in the East Midlands of England, relocated to Leiden in 1608 in order to find relief from persecu- tion in their mother country and to practice Christianity as they saw fit. They found refuge in Holland in part because the Dutch were fairly toler- ant of diverse Christian beliefs. However, once the Pilgrims settled in the cosmopolitan city of Leiden, they discovered that Dutch religious toler- ance extended to include a social atmosphere in which carousing in taverns played a large role. We can get a glimpse of this world from Dutch artists such as Jan Steen and Dirck Hals, who portrayed tavern life in paintings that captured the essence of the often rowdy, licentious, and freewheeling atmosphere of Dutch drinking establishments. Puritan elders soon came to realize that such an atmosphere was a threat to a community that was more focused on the rewards in the next life than the pleasures of this one. They worried about the effect such an environment was having on their young people, who might come to enjoy the city’s free atmosphere, posing a threat to their eternal souls and the sanctity of their community. Pilgrim leader William Bradford observed that their children, due to the “great licentiousness of youth,” found “manifold temptations of the place, were drawne away by evill examples into extravagante & dangerous courses” (Bradford 1856, 24). This threat, alongside other issues, ultimately became too much for the band of the faithful, so they decided that God’s kingdom on earth would certainly not be created in Leiden. Instead, they elected to stake their fates and their faith on the months-long journey across the forbidding Atlantic.