Some have observed that since the year 1640, more persons have removed out of New England, than have gone thither …

The stories of those who went over to New England but did not stay are at odds with the onward march of American history. They have largely been overlooked. Yet the newly-built Harvard College saw almost half its graduates sail away to England before 1660. Of the godly preachers who left England in the ‘Great Migration’ of the 1630s – inspiring members of their congregations to emigrate too – around a third abandoned their flocks after 1640 and returned home. Among the population at large, perhaps as many as a quarter of New England's earliest settlers sailed back across the Atlantic: not only the Harvard graduates and ministers (for whom the hardest evidence survives), but also magistrates, merchants, religious and political dissidents, widows and children, servants, apprentices, military men, surgeons, shoemakers and shopkeepers. Some set a course for home within weeks or months; many more packed their bags after ten or twenty years. Their life-stories undermine the traditional understanding of the Great Migration as a one-way ticket across the Atlantic.