Captain Myles Standish (c. 1584 - October 3, 1656) was one of the passengers aboard the Mayflower, arriving in Plymouth Colony in the late fall of 1620. Little is known of his early life and career, but he was most likely raised in Lancashire, England, and is believed to have served in the English military in Holland during the early 1600s in aid of the Dutch in their Eighty Years' War against Spain. While living in Holland, he came in contact with the English Protestant dissenters known as Separatists in Leiden, and although he was not a follower of their religion, he was hired to accompany these Pilgrims on their journey to the New World and act as their military advisor. He and his wife Rose were aboard the Mayflower during its harrowing two-month-long voyage across the Atlantic. Once in Plymouth, Standish played a leading role in the defense and administration of the colony, organizing its defenses, becoming the first commander of the militia, serving on the Governor’s Council of Assistants, and acting as the colony's treasurer. In 1627, Standish and his second wife, Barbara, after the death of his first wife in January 1621, received a land grant of 120 acres not far from the burying ground and helped establish the town of Duxbury, commonly believed to be named for a Standish family manor, Duxbury Hall, in Chorley, Lancashire, England. Standish was a courageous yet sometimes brutal military commander who led expeditions against the native population as well as against the French and other English settlers. The military side of Standish was later overshadowed by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s romantic narrative poem The Courtship of Myles Standish (1858), whose popularity elevated Standish and fellow Pilgrim John Alden and Priscilla Mullins to American folk heroes and was partially responsible for late 19th-century efforts to find Standish's grave. When he died in 1656, he was buried in the burying ground, and his grave, like most at the time, did not receive a carved headstone. Oral tradition held that his resting place was marked instead with two pyramid-shaped field stones. In 1889, as the burying ground was being reclaimed and cleared, two stones matching that description were discovered, and a dig to verify Standish’s burial location began, though the initial findings were inconclusive. In 1891, a larger dig uncovered the skeleton of a man with red and gray hair remaining on the skull, buried between two women. The skull was considered consistent with Standish, and the positions of the two female skeletons matched his request to be buried between his daughter Lora and daughter-in-law Mary (Dingly) Standish. The remains of two boys were also found nearby, possibly his sons Charles and John Standish. This evidence convinced those participating in the exhumation, including several descendants, that they had found Myles Standish. In 1930, his remains were exhumed one final time, placed in a copper box, hermetically sealed, and reinterred.