Hunters for access

"They came for religious freedom." Right. Yes. Some of them. Partly. Read the actual letters they sent back home. Not the ones that got turned into school textbooks. The ones written in the first winter, by people who'd survived the crossing and were now looking at a landscape so alien and so abundant that they didn't have the vocabulary for it. They wrote about the meat. Passenger pigeon flocks so vast that early settlers described the sky turning dark at midday. Not briefly. For three days. One flock. Continuous. The sound compared to thunder that refused to stop. Estimated population: three to five billion birds. A single hunter in a single afternoon could kill five hundred. No licence. No lord. No penalty. Just birds, endlessly, for the taking. Deer walking into camp. Salmon running so thick in the Pacific Northwest rivers that witnesses said the water appeared to boil. Bison herds that took four hours to cross a ford. Oysters the size of dinner plates, piled in reefs along the Atlantic coast that you could harvest by reaching over the side of a boat. Now understand what these people had come from. England under the Forest Laws. Norman law. The forests, a third of England, legally defined as the king's personal hunting ground: where killing a deer carried the death penalty, and maiming one carried blinding and castration. Where a peasant could live on the edge of a wood teeming with game and starve legally while watching the lord's gamekeeper patrol past. The Enclosure Acts were already beginning. Common land, the land that ordinary people had grazed animals on for generations, being fenced off and handed to private landlords one parliamentary act at a time. Six million acres would go this way eventually, and with it went the pig in the back garden, the cow on the common, the ability to keep yourself in protein without paying someone's rent for the privilege. In the meantime: pottage. Bread. Turnips when you were lucky. A bit of lard if the week had gone well. Meat on feast days if the harvest hadn't failed and the price hadn't climbed and your teeth were still functional enough to manage it. These were not people who had decided, in a detached philosophical way, that liberty was preferable to tyranny. These were people who were hungry. Specifically for meat. Who had heard from sailors and merchants and adventurers that there was a place across the water where the game belonged to no one, where the forests had no keeper, where you could shoot a deer because you wanted to eat it and face no consequence beyond the satisfaction of having eaten it. The New World wasn't a political idea to the average emigrant. It was a place where you could eat like a lord without owing a lord anything. They crossed an ocean for a steak that didn't require someone else's permission. And they ate it. And not one of them, in all the letters, ever suggested they'd made the wrong call.