The Wordy Shipmates (10 page)

Winthrop’s journal proper begins on March 29, 1630, “near the Isle of Wight, in the
Arbella,
a ship of three hundred and fifty tons.” Named for one of Winthrop’s shipmates, the highfalutin Lady Arbella Johnson, the
Arbella
and the other vessels in the fleet will not reach open sea for nearly two weeks, working their way past Yarmouth and Plymouth and the Isles of Scilly off England’s southwest coast. Before then, Winthrop will witness a Dutch ship get stuck on a rock. He will have breakfast with the caretaker of Yarmouth Castle, an “old sea captain in Queen Elizabeth’s time.” He will bemoan that his son Henry, who had gone ashore for cows, was unable to rejoin the
Arbella
because of high winds—his only hope being that Henry can hitch a ride with one of the other New England-bound vessels. (He does.) And if that’s not enough to worry about, with eight possibly Spanish ships approaching, Winthrop almost goes to war. The Lady Arbella and the other women and children are sent belowdecks. The men get out their weapons, which is to say they fetched their muskets and “went to prayer upon the upper deck.” In the end, they were not enemy ships, “and so,” writes Winthrop, “(God be praised) our fear and danger was turned into mirth and friendly entertainment.”

His notes on the Atlantic crossing are so detailed in terms of position and wind direction—N by NW, S by SW, etc.—that one could probably re-create the
Arbella
’s route fairly accurately. And by “one” I do not mean me. I get seasick on the ferry to Weehawken. I think I would have preferred being burned at the stake in England to sailing to America because the best thing about death by fire is that it tends to be so nice and dry. I’ve always loved the story of the founding of New England for the same reason I have a thing for surfing movies and
Moby-Dick
—I’m afraid of water, so the only thing I’ll dive into is a narrative account.

To see a ship similar to the
Arbella,
you can go to Plymouth, Mass., and climb aboard the replica
Mayflower II,
which to me is a claustrophobic floating vomitorium I couldn’t stand to be on for more than nine minutes, much less nine weeks. (A replica
Arbella
was built for Massachusetts’ 300th anniversary in 1930; but, according to Francis Bremer, it ended up beached at Salem’s Pioneer Village and the city of Salem tore the thing down after it “became a haunt for youths indulging in various questionable activities.” Winthrop would surely approve of this crackdown, having mused in his journal during the Atlantic crossing that a servant girl got drunk because it is “a common fault in our young people, that they gave themselves to drink hot waters very immoderately.”)

In terms of historical tourism, the Pilgrims of 1620 get all the glory. Families, my own included, plan vacations around visiting Plymouth’s
Mayflower II
and “Plimoth Plantation,” the re-created colonial English and Wampanoag village on the outskirts of town. My sister Amy, my then-seven-year-old nephew Owen, and I visited it one summer. It is peopled by actors who will not, under any circumstances, break character—not even when Owen suggested they could really spruce up their cramped little houses by shopping at Home Depot or maybe Lowe’s because Lowe’s offers “everyday low prices.” We strolled around the dusty paths among men and women in colorful seventeenth-century garb. (When Owen asked a woman in a blue skirt why she wasn’t wearing black like Pilgrims are supposed to, she said that only rich people wear black, and then sneered at me and my ripped black T-shirt as if I were Marie Antoi nette.) We then made the acquaintance of one Englishman Amy dubbed the “Pilgrim Archie Bunker.” We had just ambled through the Wampanoag village and watched a woman cooking with a clay pot, so Owen had indigenous people on his mind. He told Archie about his collection of Hopi and Navajo kachina dolls he started the previous summer when we went to the Grand Canyon. After an annoying back-and-forth in which Archie determined we apparently came from New Spain and were therefore suspected of Catholicism, we returned to the subject of kachinas. Archie backed away from Owen and asked him if they’re poppets. No, Owen said, “Not puppets—wood carvings.” I told him a poppet is a doll used in witchcraft. “You know, like when Scooby-Doo goes to Salem.” Owen shook his head at Archie and said, “Kachinas are gods, Hopi and Navajo gods.” Archie pointed his finger at Owen’s chest and raised his voice, “Not the true God Jesus Christ!” Then he told Owen he’s never shot an Indian personally but he wouldn’t lose any sleep over it if he did, and that he would trade with the Indians, though he would never give them anything of value, perhaps “a pot that was full of holes.” Then my sister grabbed Owen by the arm and said, “Come on, Owen. Let’s get out of here before Mama punches a Pilgrim.”

I used to feel a little sorry for the Massachusetts Bay colonists of 1630, whose story is told, if at all, in negligible plaques and statues no Bostonian notices on the way to work. Plymouth has Plymouth Rock, and Boston has, in a glass case at the State House, “one of the oldest upholstered chairs made in New England”—an item that doesn’t lend itself to cries of “Honey, pack up the car.” One reason for that is that the Boston founders were more successful city builders. Which stands to reason, since they weren’t just building a city. They were building a city on a hill. Unlike Plymouth, which is beholden to the Pilgrims to this day for its livelihood because nothing much happened in that town after its original settlers died. Which is why the Plymouth Colony was actually absorbed into the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1691. Boston, with its fine harbor, kept moving and growing and building right on top of the Winthrop fleet’s foundations. Literally: the office building that was Boston’s first steel-frame “skyscraper” was built in 1893 on top of the site of Winthrop’s Boston house.

Plus, having been to Plymouth, I now feel confident that Winthrop and his shipmates would appreciate being spared the indignity of fame. I am thinking specifically of the
Mayflower
replica with a waterslide jutting from its deck in the Pilgrim Cove Pool at Plymouth’s John Carver Inn.

Would William Bradford, who wrote of the
Mayflower
’s voyage that “many were afflicted with seasickness,” ever stop throwing up if he spent an afternoon watching my nephew come shooting out of the ship’s slide, giggling, over and over again, each time making a loud, highly chlorinated splash? Would Bradford point out that half the
Mayflower
passengers died their first year in Plymouth so maybe it’s disrespectful to turn the vessel into a cannonball-launcher next to a hot tub? Or that he and the other Pilgrims came over on the real
Mayflower
to follow rules more profound than “Do Not Slide Head First”?

 

 

 

D
uring Winthrop’s two months on the Atlantic, he writes of the cold and the fog. There are tempests. There are days when the sea is “beating us back as much as the wind put us forward.” He sees a whale. The slovenly crew keeps the gun deck in “beastly” disorder, so Winthrop and the other officers organize a cleaning schedule. Some sick children are made to hold on to a rope in the sunshine to air them out. June 7 was a day of extreme emotional non sequi turs, in which Winthrop notes the passengers caught twenty-six cod, “so we all feasted with fish this day. A woman was delivered of a child in our ship, stillborn.”

Then, the next day, land ho. They could see Mount Desert Island off the coast of Maine. “And there came a smell off the shore like the smell of a garden,” Winthrop wrote.

For four days, they followed the coastline down. At four o’clock in the morning, on Saturday, June 12, they reached Cape Ann. Some Salem men, including John Endecott, came out in boats to fetch them. Endecott was the Massachusetts Bay Company’s advance man. He had led a small group of pioneers to America two years earlier to prepare the way for large-scale settlement. So that evening, Endecott and his fellows fed Winthrop supper in Salem, “a good venison pasty and good beer.”

Compare that reception to William Bradford’s description of the
Mayflower
’s landfall at Cape Cod ten years earlier. The Pilgrims were overjoyed that they had finally made it for, oh, two minutes, until they realized that “they had no friends to welcome them nor inns to entertain or refresh their weatherbeaten bodies; no houses or much less towns to repair to, to seek for succor.”

Then again, John Endecott is Winthrop’s Welcome Wagon rep. Endecott does not go down in history for his warmth. Nathaniel Hawthorne describes him as “the Puritan of Puritans,” a man “so stern” that he “seemed wrought of iron.” Later on, Endecott will send Governor Winthrop a letter complaining about how it’s frowned upon for a justice of the peace to hit someone. Because Endecott, a justice of the peace, has just punched a defendant—in court. “If you had seen the manner of his carriage,” continues Endecott, “with such daring of me, with his arms akimbo, it would have provoked a very patient man.” He says that if it were suddenly legal for a judge to go around clocking people, “you should not hear me complain.”

So besides being cranky and pugilistic, Endecott has been the man in charge in Massachusetts Bay up until the moment Winthrop gets there with the Charter and usurps him. On Boston Common there is a relief sculpture called the Founders Memorial that pictures the two men shaking hands on the shore, with the
Arbella
in the harbor behind them. In it, some of the men and women who have just disembarked from the ship, as well as a pair of Indians off to the side, witness this significant occasion as if all is well and good. But Endecott can’t have been entirely thrilled with his sudden demotion.

Back at the Massachusetts State Archives, Michael Comeau had shown me the copy of the Massachusetts Charter given to Endecott. It is marked “dupl,” indicating it is a duplicate, place-holder charter. But still, said Comeau, “Legend has it Endecott would wield it like a scepter.”

Endecott would remain the mullah of Salem, which might have something to do with that town’s touchy religious climate throughout the seventeenth century. The passengers of the Winthrop fleet did not stick around. Deputy Governor Thomas Dudley later wrote, “Salem, where we landed, pleased us not.”

So the colonists dispersed south, breaking off into various settlements such as Roxbury and Dorchester, Boston neighborhoods that would become famous in the twentieth century for race riots and the boy band New Kids on the Block.

Winthrop moved to Charlestown, just across the Charles River from what would become Boston, living in a structure that was part bachelor pad, part town hall, and that everyone called the Great House, probably because there wasn’t a lot of competition in the architectural excellence department.

The New England Puritans are not remembered for their sweetness, and yet there was much sweetness in them. This is especially true of Winthrop. For instance, he sailed to Massachusetts alone to get settled. Until he could send for his wife, Margaret, he wrote her a letter proposing that they think of each other at a specific time twice a week, a sort of steady date on the astral plane. He promised, “Mondays and Fridays, at five of the clock at night, we shall meet in spirit till we meet in person.” But Winthrop is so busy his first few months in Massachusetts he sends Margaret a letter confessing he’s been standing her up on their mental dates. “I own with sorrow that much business hath made me too often forget Mondays and Fridays,” he wrote.

His earliest American journal entries are understandably brief. “Monday we kept a court,” reads one. “My son, Henry Winthrop, was drowned at Salem,” says another.

I read somewhere that remnants of the postholes from the Great House are visible in Charlestown. Turns out that’s only true if it isn’t snowing. Just across the Charlestown Bridge from Boston, the postholes, along with stones from the Three Cranes Tavern built on the site after the Great House was dismantled, are on view in lovely little City Square Park. The British burned down the tavern during the Battle of Bunker Hill in 1775. I can almost make out the intertwined foundations of the two buildings outlined on the ground.

So much history had already happened on this one patch of grass before the Declaration of Independence was even written. Coming from the West, where history, like everything else, is so spread out, and even then it’s mostly grubby Indian wars and greedy copper barons with a little Lewis and Clark in between, I never get sick of the way every inch of Boston seems so jam-packed with the important past, how I’ll just be walking down the street and see Sam Adams’s grave right next to the sidewalk. On the cab ride to see Winthrop’s postholes, past the North End with its Old North Church of “One if by land, and two if by sea” fame, my driver told me about the neighborhood’s Great Molasses Flood of 1919, when a colossal tank of molasses broke apart and sent a sweet and gooey wave more than ten feet high cresting through town. “People drowned,” he said, adding, “That neighborhood still has a lot of rats.”

At City Square Park, I use my shoes as snow scrapers so I can read the snowy plaques saying where Winthrop’s front door or his wine cellar or kitchen had been. Unfortunately, my shoes are the dumbest possible ballet flats. Uncovering the “Timber Remains from Great House” marker soaks my socks.

This was where Winthrop wrote a letter to his wife on July 16, 1630. He tells her that he’s too busy to write but wants her to know that “yet I live.” Still, he opens up to her, allowing himself more sorrow over his son’s death than that single sentence in his journal records. “We have met with many sad and discomfortable things . . . and the Lord’s hand hath been heavy upon myself,” he grumbles. Then this: “My son Henry! my son Henry! ah! Poor child!”

Remembering that outburst of pain, I look down at my soggy socks and over at the postholes of Winthrop’s house. Then I just stare at Interstate 93 for a while, wondering how someone whose child had died could still believe in God, much less describe Him as “merciful” and “good.”

Winthrop actually praises God for his misfortune. He reassures Margaret he doesn’t regret coming, tells her not to worry about her impending voyage the following summer. “My most sweet wife,” he coos, “be not disheartened.”