Miles Standish

(1584?-1656), English colonist and soldier. Hired by the Pilgrims to accompany them on the Mayflower to the New World, Standish was the military leader of the new colony of Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1621, where he explored the territory, tended the sick, trained a militia, and fought Indians. He later served as assistant to the governor and as treasurer of Plymouth Colony. He helped establish the town of Duxbury in 1631. There is no factual basis for Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's account of Standish's wooing of Priscilla Mullens in his poem "The Courtship of Miles Standish" (1858). Henry W. Longfellow's The Courtship of Miles Standish and James R. Lowell's Interview with Miles Standish are wholly fictional.