The Mayflower

by Rebecca Fraser

  As a fine educated gentleman with elegant clothes, grand tastes and illustrious connections in England, Josiah considered himself above the Indians. Huge technological advances underlined that difference. Josiah was highly conscious of the rapidly expanding body of scientific knowledge in England and Europe which had practical applications. Merchants were importing manufactures of an extraordinary quality into New England. The inventions of the seventeenth century – the telescope, pocket watch, stocking frame, barometer, air pump – arrived at Boston and Salem just as the great continent seemed to be yielding to men of vision. Josiah could not but be impressed by medical instruments and the precision-made farm tools.

  Josiah resented anything that smacked of familiarity on the part of the Indians, which in the past had been an attractive feature of relations between Plymouth and the Wampanoags. He had told John Winthrop junior in a letter in 1660 that he keenly felt ‘the insolencies and affronts done to any of yours (as if to ourselves) and do the more clearly see their pride and malignity, in that they strike not only at more obscure persons, but have been injurious to some of the most eminent amongst you’. Such was ‘the lowness and baseness’ of the Indian mentality that our ‘clemency and gentleness is but abused and condemned by them’.

  It was a very different attitude from that of the first generation, including his father, who had been so attracted by what he saw as the Indians’ natural nobility. Commentators such as William Wood thirty years before had praised the Indians’ loyalty and bravery: ‘Such is their love to one another, that they cannot endure to see their Countrymen wronged, but will stand stiffly in their defence.’ But that was no longer a reason for admiration. Although their fortitude was still remarked on, it was no longer of interest, now that it was part of a disobedient mentality.

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  Perhaps dealing with the West Indies, where African slaves were used as labour in the manufacture of sugar products, hardened Josiah and made him more callous. Like many New Englanders since the Pequot War, something harsh had entered into him when it came to dealing with the native population. Indians as servants who had as few rights as slaves had become fairly commonplace. In 1638 the first recorded evidence of African slaves from Barbados was noted by John Winthrop in his diary. They came on a ship called the Desire.

  Edward and Susanna had an Indian servant, a man named Hope. In 1648 Hope was ‘put off and sold’ to a Mr John Mainford, a Barbados merchant. Although Hope’s term of servitude was limited to ten years, he was in effect a slave. Edward’s brother John had a slave, ‘my negro girl Jane’, whom he freed (albeit rather grudgingly in his will) ‘after she hath served twenty years from the date hereof … and that she shall service my wife during her life and after my wife’s decease she shall be disposed of according to the discretion of my overseers’.

  Edward and the other first colonisers had been more interested in the Indians’ magicians and powwows than disturbed by them. Josiah was not a bad man but he did not have his father’s intellectual curiosity. Lacking the early settlers’ sense of wonder at the New World, he simply wanted to organise it. From a young age his family’s position and his crisp logical mind meant he was revered at Plymouth. He had the same kind of determination as his father. All who knew Josiah described him in admiring terms. It seems that he had much of Edward’s charisma and warmth as well as leadership qualities. Then as now that was perceived as the habit of command. The reverse of that coin was a certain kind of arrogance. Josiah lacked the appealing earnestness of his father, who at his age had a more open mind. Josiah was succumbing to the spirit of the age. But there were others, notably a Plymouth farmer named Benjamin Church who was about ten years younger than Josiah, who retained a warmth towards the Indians and sense of the need for justice which Josiah forgot.

  If Josiah had lived in England he might have been an excellent magistrate. He was kindly, responsible and public-spirited. He was a loving husband, a devoted son, a good father, but he lacked a larger sense of connection and sensitivity.

  Like so many Josiah feared creolisation – degeneration to a more primitive level through living far from English civilisation. The empathy with the Indians which made Plymouth so unusual was completely absent in him. Roger Williams had insisted that Indians and English alike were all descended from Adam; but history had moved on. The English no longer tried to see the Indians’ point of view, and their lives no longer depended on the Indians’ help. They were simply alarmed by them. The mode was less religious, more scientific. With the old generation dying out, even Plymouth had forgotten how much they owed to the Indians who had saved the first colonists from starvation. The Indians remained mysterious but they had lost the cachet of earlier times. The ‘Lost Tribes’ theory evaporated when the Restoration punctured millennial ideas. Puritans no longer thought they were living in the last age of history.

  The commonsensical, sharp Josiah believed in progress. Amongst the circles of Boston’s most influential merchants – in which Josiah now moved – land speculation was the new buzz activity. They wanted to expand the New England economy, to get their hands on the acres of fertile country surrounding them. Boston was full of energetic entrepreneurs who devoured information such as the new scientific kind of farming being practised in England, including the draining of the Fens.

  By the early 1660s Josiah was one of many named in an English government report as an associate of the Atherton Company who made such a fortune out of the Narragansetts. Josiah saw nothing wrong with wanting to be part of the ferociously rapid infant American capitalism. Those directing its process had no time to think about anything that got in the way, especially Indians. Josiah had become close friends with George Curwen, the fabulously wealthy New England merchant who arrived at Salem in 1638 and who was one of the most innovative businessmen of his day. Josiah’s sister Elizabeth’s marriage to him in 1669 marked the fact that the Winslow family were a significant cog in the transatlantic businesses expanding so dramatically. The last inventory of her uncle’s goods in 1674 mentions money received from Curwen. Curwen had the advantage of having remained in New England during the Civil War and Interregnum. He was on friendly terms with Sir William Peake, an important figure in the City of London who visited New England in 1664.

  Kinship networks in seventeenth-century New England were as far-flung as any of today’s international corporations. As Josiah knew well, a New England merchant could write a bill of exchange in Boston and his cousin or father or brother-in-law could honour it in London. Since the English Civil Wars, when goldsmiths acted as banks issuing promissory notes for gold on deposit, there had been a tradition of paper cheques on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1691, three years before the Bank of England was founded, Massachusetts created an official paper currency. This made trade far easier in New England, where specie had always posed a major problem.

  After the Restoration, trade resuscitated even though most of the New Englanders had been outright Parliamentarians. Vast fortunes were being made. The early settlers’ Puritan fears about importing corruption to a purer New England had vanished. Merchants such as George Curwen and Josiah used the old country for credit to expand their businesses in a pragmatic fashion.

  The New England colonies were a secure, stable financial destination which could be trusted. The original settlers were educated and commercial contracts were enforced thanks to a rigorously observed rule of law. All was orderly. The Indian threat was played down by new settlements needing workers.

  Because its members were often abroad, the merchant community not only had to stand surety for one another, but also help out in frequent crises. Josiah’s uncle John, for example, testified he had stood in as loco parentis in a court case taken on behalf of a merchant friend’s orphaned son suing for a missing sugar cargo. Merchants were manufacturers and moneylenders. George Curwen was a polymath. He came from Worksop, and his family were gentry in Cumberland, but he was an entrepreneur, not a man to look backwards. He revolutionised the fishi
ng industry which saved the New England economy as the beaver population declined. Initially a shipbuilder, he was soon running an international business penetrating the cod markets in Spain and the West Indies. He also relied on close client relations, weaving local farmers and fishermen into a complex web. The fishermen’s problem had been organisation. Hard men doing tough physical jobs, taking the nets out early, often away for days at a time, they were too busy to plan ahead and were sometimes in debt for years. Curwen lent them the capital for boats on generous terms. They owed him everything and he extended a long line of credit to them, so long as they purchased food, tools, waterproof material and lines from his shop – and sold him their fish. He had something like seventy fishermen in his debt at any one time.

  He stored fish in his warehouses in Boston and Salem, so the air in Elizabeth’s new home must have needed her pomanders. Salem had begun to flourish as a port because it was so near the cod banks providing fish for much of Catholic Europe. Curwen’s genius was to be like a friendly bank manager who never said no to extending the overdraft.

  After their marriage, Elizabeth moved into his vast and imposing house in Salem, said to have had a front of 150 feet. The Curwen mansion also functioned as a shop and huge warehouse which received agricultural produce from all the local farmers within a radius of fifteen miles. Peas, pork and wheat were all brought to Curwen. He sold them on to fishermen or merchants or town-dwellers like himself. The new Mrs Curwen differed from her equivalents in London in that she would have taken her turn in the shop. A lady of Elizabeth’s status in England would not have served in a shop, but in Boston and Salem hard work could not be avoided. Consisting of dry goods and hardware, the shop was a sort of Aladdin’s Cave, while the warehouse was full of foodstuffs and the goods George Curwen imported from England: a ‘silver case and doctor’s instruments, costing five pounds’, watches, barber’s scissors, spring locks, 3,000 needles, beads, salt cellars, bridles, striped linen, silks, broadcloth, ‘flowered ribbon’, sheets, Scotch cloth (presumably tartan), silver-topped canes, silver hat bands, silver cases – and cash, some of it Elizabeth’s. Her husband allowed her money to make her own ventures in his ships.

  In a tough world where trickery was a constant anxiety Elizabeth had married the sharpest man in Salem. Her fortunes were transformed. There were 1,500 acres in farmland; in Salem harbour were not only the boats he financed but the ketches and ocean-going vessels he built for himself, including the Swallow and George, as well as warehouses and a wharf. Meanwhile, his wharf in Boston made sure he was at the heart of business there.

  The gathered wealth in Elizabeth’s new home was irresistible to some of the many Curwen servants. In March 1683 a combined gang of a servant named Elizabeth Godsoe, her husband, a baker called Collier and others climbed into the house with the aid of a dark lantern. Godsoe claimed to have a key to Curwen’s counting house. Curwen was supposed to keep a parcel of Spanish silver pieces of eight ‘hidden in a cask in the warehouse cellar’ covered with carrots and sand. Elizabeth’s daughter Pen had said that there was £3,000 in gold buried underground. The thieves were caught and the Godsoes sentenced to be branded in the face, whipped and fined. Their accomplices had lesser punishments. Collier was soon released from prison on the grounds that ‘his wits were distracted’, i.e. he was mad.

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  By 1650 the Bay area was home to over 15,000 people. Jutting out into the ocean, Boston was a place where all deep-water ships could swing easily at anchor. Compared to London, the population of which was 350,000, Boston with its 4,000 people was tiny, but it was full of luxuries demanded by newly wealthy inhabitants. New Englanders disapproved of Charles II for many different reasons, but they were not immune to the subtle vagaries of fashion. The climate of social extravagance generated by the Restoration drifted over to New England. A well-to-do woman’s dressing table became crowded with expensive objects – bud vases, portraits in silver frames, silver-backed hairbrushes.

  There is a famous portrait of George Curwen in which he is dressed as extravagantly as a royal courtier. His brocaded coat with silver gilt lace and satin waistcoat embroidered with gold proclaim he was much more than a mere shopkeeper, which was not only correct, but also of course the impression he wanted to convey. Curwen was probably painted by the accomplished artist Thomas Smith, who began a Boston school modelled on English painters such as Sir Peter Lely and Sir Godfrey Kneller. Previously portraits tended to be made by sign painters or local craftsmen who painted their friends and relations who were often important officials.

  Josiah also had an appetite for grand clothing that would not have been out of place at court. He owned several showy buckles for his shoes, and spurs – a calculated indication of gentlemanly rank.

  There is an eighteenth-century portrait of Josiah’s much younger cousin, the silversmith Edward Winslow junior, made by the visiting fashionable British painter John Smibert. Nothing about his calm expression and his exquisite linen suggests an ancestry of spiritual agony – his grandmother was Anne Hutchinson. His forebears would have frowned at the silver chalices he produced for New England churches.

  In Boston, there was a ‘small but pleasant common where the gallants a little before sunset walk with their madams as we do in Moorfields’. At nine o’clock in the evening a bell rang to send them home and ‘constables walk their rounds to see good order kept and to take up loose people’. New England was beginning to have the security to be a more easeful, cultured and literate society. The air was breezy and invigorating but always with a slightly astringent tang to it, like its inhabitants’ speech today. Tradesmen and gentry, the movers and shakers of Boston, lived near one another with their similar shops, and the wharves and docks facing onto the Atlantic.

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  In 1663 the English visitor to New England John Josselyn wrote one of the last seventeenth-century paeans to the Indians. He described ‘bold Barbarians’ whizzing down waterfalls ‘with desperate speed but with excellent dexterity, guiding his Canoe that seldom or never it shoots under water, or overturns, if it do they can swim naturally, striking their paws under their throat like a dog, and not spreading their Arms as we do; they turn their Canoe again and go into it in the water’. Their boats and bravery reminded Josselyn of ‘vessels the Ancient Britons used’. Josselyn furnishes one of the last descriptions of Philip walking confidently through the streets of Boston. He was adorned with so much wampum Josselyn calculated the beads on his coat and buskins were worth £20, the year’s salary of a workman.

  By the end of the decade the colonists were no longer interested in the Indian monarchical system, or the way the wampum was so cunningly made that no one other than an Indian could fashion it. Dishes made of bark and coats of woven turkey feathers no longer had the power to charm. The next time Philip was written about, he was dead, described as ‘a doleful, great, naked, dirty beast’.

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  The Marshfield house built in 1636 by Susanna and Edward eventually disintegrated. All that remains now is a commemorative stone. Archaeologists have found signs that in the 1650s and 1660s Penelope and Josiah built a brand-new house beside the old one. It possessed two stone cellars full of glassware and earthenware of a kind that suggests Penelope made her own medicines. There was an extra room of ten feet by fourteen feet which may have been a separate kitchen.

  Josiah had been looking after his mother since 1646, and possibly decided it was time to build a separate dwelling now he was married. In general Plymouth houses had an idiosyncratic style because local carpenters had their own building methods, and things were not as sophisticated as they were in Boston and the north shore. Nevertheless Penelope had been brought up in the imposing Bellingham house on Tremont Street in Boston. The combination of Elizabeth Curwen’s new establishment and Penelope’s memories of her own childhood may have meant Penelope demanded a dwelling more in keeping with her position. It is believed Josiah built his new house abutting his mother’s in a more gracious fashion,
with many gables and chimneys like houses in Boston. It probably had an overhanging porch jetty two storeys high, which was very unusual at the time for Plymouth.

  Many Plymouth houses continued to have halls which were both meeting places and sleeping areas. But life at Careswell was more formal. The upper floors were for private life and the ground floor for public functions. There was a parlour not just a hall, a parlour chamber, a porch chamber, middle chamber, closet, middle kitchen, garret and cellar.

  Josiah was a more stately being than his father, and his governorship was marked by lordly ceremonial. Four halberdiers had to attend the governor and magistrates at the annual elections, and two during the session of a court. Such pomp was unlike the usually simple ways of the old colony.

  Despite their elegant way of life Penelope and Josiah lived with a certain level of determination and willed bravery. Their failure to start a family cast a shadow at a time when most New England families had upwards of eight children. An infant daughter died at two days about seven years into their marriage. Not for another six years did Penelope fall pregnant again. A daughter, Elizabeth, was born on 8 April 1664. A son, Edward, was born on 14 May 1667 but did not survive. Isaac arrived in 1671. ‘Isaac’ was a Winslow family name but its choice here probably reflects the story in Genesis of Isaac, son of the patriarch Abraham, whose wife Sarah was past childbearing age. The birth of Isaac Winslow was viewed as a semi-miraculous – and much prayed for – event by parents who were already middle-aged.

  With such delicate children Penelope and Josiah may have been relieved that their pastor, Reverend William Witherell, had a commonsensical approach to baptism. He just wet the head. Pastor Chauncy, whom Edward had supported, believed in total immersion. New England writers nearer Josiah and Penelope’s era, remembering their own experience of the New England winters, were horrified to think total immersion could be practised on small babies in freezing churches. Each winter brought a ton of snow to wooden roofs which never dried out. Ice frequently had to be broken in the christening bowl. Babies had deeply hooded cradles carved for them, much like curtains round four-poster beds, to keep out the freezing draughts.