by John Updike
A town begins by being anyplace and ends as the Only Place. Ipswich has long been alive for us with people we know, people who, my impression is, distinctly lack the personal smallness associated with small towns. Perhaps the great Puritan beginning, or the proximity to that master ironist the sea keeps them alert and open and kind. Big enough to be yourself in, yet so small political enemies must link hands in a Greek dance line, Ipswich has subdued its once bitter ethnic rivalries to a town identity all feel is threatened. The dilemma is typical, widespread, perhaps perennial; everything flows. Population crushes what it would love. Yet for a time longer the marshes will serenely mirror the seasons; the old houses, having survived centuries of being taken for granted, will ride easy in the harbor of antiquarianism; and the newcomers to the town will be grateful for the space, never dreaming how much it has shrunk.
Three Texts from Early Ipswich
This pageant was commissioned by the town of Ipswich, Massachusetts, for performance on Seventeenth Century Day, August 3, 1968. It is composed of texts taken from Ipswich in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Volume I, by Thomas Franklin Waters (Ipswich Historical Society, 1905); History of Ipswich, Essex, and Hamilton, by Joseph B. Felt (Charles Folson, 1834); The Simple Cobler of Aggawamm, in America, by Nathaniel Ward, edited by T. F. Waters (Ipswich Historical Society, 1906); and Anne Bradstreet’s poems as printed in The American Puritans: Their Prose and Poetry, by Perry Miller (Doubleday, 1956). “Only the connecting thread of narration, the modernization of spelling, and the utterances of Masconnomet are mine,” Updike wrote in a note to the performance text, which was designed and printed, as a saddle-stitched booklet, by Lovell Thompson for the Seventeenth Century Day Committee in the summer of 1968. The present, slightly revised version appeared in Audience magazine, in 1972.
The performance, directed by Bradford Lucas, was staged at South Parish Church (Congregational), on the Ipswich Meetinghouse Green. The Reverend Edward French read the part of the Narrator; Ben Collins played Masconnomet; John Pechilis, John Winthrop, Jr.; and Homer White, the Reverend Nathaniel Ward. Meredith (Mrs. Roger) Burke read the poems of Anne Bradstreet. Other actors were Hollie Bucklin, Jean Bucklin, Robert McGarty, Hiram Sibley, and Robert Weatherall.
STAGE: The rocks of Meetinghouse Green. Stockade fencing, lecterns, pulpits, microphones. Chairs for congregation.
NARRATOR: The Puritans. We have all heard of them; but who were they? They are around us in the shape of half our houses; the marks of their axes can still be touched on the great summer beams they hewed from the forests of oak and pine. On our older streets, our automobiles obey the curves their footsteps determined. We honor by use the names they bestowed: Jeffreys Neck, Turkey Shore, Labor-in-Vain, Castle Hill, so called three centuries before there was a castle to adorn it.
Their voices, their faces, have vanished; but they left us, on scattered and fragile bits of paper, records, texts in which, if we listen closely, we may hear the breath of their lives, lives far removed from our own, but perhaps not as different as we have supposed.
(WINTHROP, MASCONNOMET, WARD, SALTONSTALL, SMITH, other Indians, and other Puritans enter. These last will also serve as the congregation for Ward’s sermon and as dancers to Bradstreet’s poem.)
NARRATOR: Our first text is a legal document, a deed. Its date is the 28th of June, 1638; its author, or principal indictor, John Winthrop, Jr., Governor Winthrop’s eldest son. (WINTHROP steps forward.) Five years earlier he had led a band of twelve men, in March of 1633, by boat from Boston to this region, then called Agawam, to make a settlement. Big-nosed in his portrait, and rather sad-eyed, he was a student at Trinity College, Dublin, and a barrister at law, and a soldier serving with the British fleet under the Duke of Buckingham. His special passion was scientific experimentation. Winthrop’s personal competence and magnetism soon established Ipswich as a center of enlightenment, and the town of the colony second in importance to Boston. When, a year before our deed is signed, the governor was reported to be recalling his son to Boston, three Ipswich citizens drew up a petition of remonstrance to the governor:
SALTONSTALL: It was for his sake that many of us came to this place, and without him we should not have come. His abode with us hath made our abode here much more comfortable than otherwise it would have been. Mr. Dudley’s leaving us hath made us much more desolate and weak than we were, and if we should lose another magistrate it would be too great a grief to us and breach upon us, and not a magistrate only but our Lieutenant Colonel so beloved of our Soldiers and military men that this remote corner would be left destitute and desolate. We find his affections great and constant to our town, and we hope ours shall never fail towards him and his. We therefore humbly beseech you that we may still enjoy him. The distance we are set in hath made us earnest for the company of able men, and as loath to lose them when we have obtained them.
NARRATOR: The signer of this document, this deed, was an Indian, Masconnomet, the Sagamore of Agawam.
MASCONNOMET (steps forward, reads): I, Masconnomet, Sagamore of Agawam, do by these presents acknowledge to have received of Mr. John Winthrop the sum of twenty pounds, in full satisfaction of all the right, property, and claim I have, or ought to have, unto all the land, lying and being in the Bay of Agawam, alias Ipswich, being so called now by the English.…
NARRATOR: In 1614, Captain John Smith landed in Agawam, and wrote:
SMITH (a bearded voyager, gaudy in his armor): This place might content a right curious judgment; but there are many sands at the entrance of the Harbor, and the worst is, it is embayed too far from the deep sea. Here are many rising hills, and on their tops and descends are many corn fields, and delightful groves.
MASCONNOMET: My people burned the underbrush each November, allowing the hunter to pass through easily, and the great trees to grow; we cleared the hilltops and planted them with corn: that is what brought the English to us. To steal our fields.
SMITH (continuing): On the East is an Isle of two or three leagues in length; the one half plain marsh ground, fit for pasture or salt ponds, with many fair high groves of mulberry trees and gardens. There is also Oaks, Pines, Walnuts, and other wood to make this place excellent habitation, being a good and sage harbor.
MASCONNOMET: We called it Agawam, which means: Place Where the Fish Run.
NARRATOR: As early as 1620, the Pilgrims at Plymouth had heard of Agawam—“a place,” it was written, “which they heard to be an excellent harbor for ships, better ground and better fishing.” Traders and fishermen came first, and squatter farmers like William Jeffreys; Great Neck was called Jeffreys Neck years before Winthrop’s party landed.
MASCONNOMET: A terrible plague carried off nine out of ten of my people; the Tarratine tribe from the North made war upon the few that remained. That is why we had to bargain with the English.
WINTHROP (comes up and prompts, reading): I hereby relinquish…
MASCONNOMET: I hereby relinquish…
WINTHROP:…all the right and interest I have…
MASCONNOMET:…all the right and interest I have…
WINTHROP (his voice clear, cold):…unto all the havens, rivers, creeks, islands, huntings, and fishings, with all the woods, swamps, timber, and whatever else is, or may be, in or upon the said ground to me belonging…
MASCONNOMET:…to me belonging…
WINTHROP:…and I do hereby acknowledge to have received full satisfaction from the said John Winthrop for all former agreements, touching the premises and parts of them; and I do hereby bind myself to make good the aforesaid bargain and sale unto the said John Winthrop, his heirs and assigns, forever…
MASCONNOMET:…forever…
WINTHROP:…and to secure him against the title and claim of all other Indians and natives whatsoever. Witness my hand. (Passes over twenty pounds.)
(Four men step forward, saying:)
FIRST: Thomas Coytmore, Witness.
SECOND: James Downing, Witness.
THIRD: Robert Harding, Witness.
WINTHROP (indicating): Masconnomet, his mark.
MASCONNOMET makes with difficulty his squiggle and hangs his head.
NARRATOR: In 1644, Masconnomet agreed to place himself and the remnants of his tribe under the protection of the government of Massachusetts, and to be instructed in the Christian religion. Some of their catechism survives:
WARD: Will you worship only true God, who made heaven and earth, and not blaspheme?
MASCONNOMET: We do desire to reverence the God of the English and to speak well of Him, because we see He doth better to the English than other gods do to others.
WARD: Will you cease from swearing falsely?
MASCONNOMET: We know not what swearing is.
WARD: Will you refrain from working on the Sabbath, especially within the bounds of Christian towns?
MASCONNOMET: It is easy to us—we have not much to do any day, and we can rest on that day.
NARRATOR (as MASCONNOMET, SMITH, and WINTHROP slowly leave): Masconnomet, the last of the chiefs of the Agawam, lived to see his people almost extinct. In 1658, the records tell us, his widow was granted a parcel of land, and that “idle curiosity, wanton sacrilegious sport, prompted an individual to dig up the remains of this chief and carry his skull on a pole through Ipswich streets.” John Winthrop the Younger, after service in many towns of New England, and repeated terms as governor of Connecticut, died in Boston in 1676, and was laid beside his father in King’s Chapel graveyard. Historians, though praising his virtue and intelligence, deny him the heroic stature of his father; his heart belonged to science, and throughout his career he corresponded voluminously with the Royal Society for Improving Natural Knowledge about such matters as tides, waterspouts, caterpillars, comets, minerals, sea-dredging, corn blight, the effects of lightning, and the fifth satellite of Jupiter, whose existence was not confirmed until this century.
(Bells toll.)
Church. At first, a meetinghouse of logs and thatch, surrounded by a stone fort. Men attended carrying muskets. (As Puritans file in.) As early as 1640, there was a bell to summon the farmers of Ipswich to worship. They came afoot; by law no house could be built more than a half-mile from the meetinghouse, which, “commanding a good prospect to a great part of the Town,” probably from the first was located on this site. The interior was bare, furnished only with the Bible and the Psalm Book and the hourglass, to render visible the length of the sermon. The order of seating was rigid; on one side of the aisle sat the magistrates of Ipswich, Winthrop and Richard Saltonstall and sometimes Governor Thomas Dudley, and the Bradstreets and the Appletons. Behind them sat the lesser gentry and substantial yeomen, and behind them the servants and the poor. Across the aisle sat the wives, arranged also by order of station. Before them, in the pulpit, clad in black Geneva gown and skullcap, stood the pastor, on this Sabbath the great Nathaniel Ward. In England a lawyer by profession, Ward at the age of forty entered the ministry; his Puritanism was uncompromising. Asked to conform to the canon of the Church instituted by Archbishop Laud, Ward commented:
WARD: The Church of England was ready to ring changes in religion, and the Gospel stood a tip-toe, ready to be gone to America.
NARRATOR: Ward was excommunicated in 1633. The same year, his wife died. Sixty-four years of age, he came to the New World, and with his motherless children he spent the winter of 1634 in Ipswich, in Winthrop’s own house, and took charge of the newly founded church. Life in the wilderness was not easy for an old man; in his letters to Winthrop he wrote:
WARD: I entreat you to reserve some meal and malt, till our river be open. I am very destitute; I have not above six bushels of corn left. I acknowledge I am tender and more unfit for solitariness and hardship than some other, especially at this time, through many colds and seeds of the bay sickness I brought from thence.
NARRATOR: In a few years, his health compelled him to resign the active ministry. But his great accomplishments, the two foundations of his fame, lay ahead of him. In 1638, he was invited, as the most legally learned man in the colony, to draw up a code of laws; after three years of labor, he produced a code of one hundred laws, the so-called Body of Liberties, of which the scholar F. W. Poole has written—Mr. Poole.
POOLE (a man in modern clothes, fussily adjusting his glasses): The sublime declaration standing at the head of the first Code of Laws in New England was the production of no common intellect. It has the movement and the dignity of a mind like John Milton’s or Algernon Sidney’s, and its theory of government was far in advance of the age. A bold avowal of the rights of man, and a plea for popular freedom, it contains the germs of the memorable declaration of (consults notes) July 4th, 1776. Ah, furthermore—
NARRATOR: Thank you, sir. The congregation has prayed and is anxious for the sermon to begin. No Ipswich sermons from the seventeenth century have survived, but Ward’s second claim to fame is a book, The Simple Cobbler of Agawam, composed around 1645, and published in London the following year, when Ward had returned to England. The Simple Cobbler is a strange and somewhat repellent work, extravagant in its language and ferocious in its political views. Its latter half is addressed chiefly to the problems of the Cromwellian revolution, then in progress. His proposed treatment of the Irish does not strike modern ears as Christian:
WARD (thumping pulpit): Cursed be he that maketh not his sword stark drunk with Irish blood, that doth not recompense them double for their hellish treachery to the English, that maketh them not heaps upon heaps, and their country a dwelling place for Dragons, an astonishment to Nations. Let not that eye look for pity, nor that hand to be spared, that pities or spares them, and let him be accursed that curseth not them bitterly.
NARRATOR: Nor are his views of women very charitable. One famous couplet runs:
WARD:
The world is full of care, much like unto a bubble;
Women and care, and care and women, and women and care and trouble.
NARRATOR: The opening pages of The Simple Cobbler, however, set forth the cosmic and general framework of his discourse. They are sufficiently theological to suggest what a sermon of that time must have been like. So let us imagine ourselves in church, near this very spot, in Ipswich in the first decade of its settlement, listening, while the hourglass runs, to Nathaniel Ward preach on the subject of religious toleration:
WARD1: Either I am in an apoplexy, or that man is in a lethargy who does not now sensibly feel God shaking the heavens over his head, and the earth under his feet. The heavens so, as the sun begins to turn into darkness, the moon into blood, the stars to fall down to the ground, so that little light of comfort or counsel is left to the sons of men; the earth so, as the foundations are failing, the righteous scarce know where to find rest, the inhabitants stagger like drunken men. And no marvel, for they have defiled it by transgressing the laws, changing the ordinances, and breaking the everlasting Covenant.
The truths of God are the pillars of the world, whereon states and churches may stand quiet if they will; if they will not, He can easily shake them off into delusions and distractions enough.
Satan is now in his passions; he feels his passion approaching; he loves to fish in roiled waters. Though that dragon cannot sting the vitals of the Elect mortally, yet that Beelzebub can fly-blow their intellectuals miserably. The finer religion grows, the finer he spins his cobwebs; he will hold pace with Christ so long as his wits will serve him. He sees himself beaten out of gross idolatries, heresies, ceremonies, where the Light breaks forth with power; he will, therefore, bestir him to prevaricate Evangelical truths and ordinances, that if they will needs be walking, appointing for his engineers men well complexioned for honesty, for such are fittest to mountebank his chemistry into sick churches and weak judgments.
Nor shall he need to stretch his strength overmuch in this work. Too many men, having not laid their foundation sure, nor ballasted their spirits deep with humility and fear, are pressed enough of themselves to evaporate their own a
pprehensions. Those that are acquainted with Story know it has ever been so in new editions of churches: such as are least able, are most busy to pudder in the rubbish, and to raise dust in the eyes of more steady repairers. Change of air discovers corrupt bodies; reformation of religion, unsound minds. The devil desires no better sport than to see light heads handle their heels, and fetch their careers in a time, when the roof of Liberty stands open.
The next perplexed question, with pious and ponderous men, will be: What should be done for the healing of these comfortless exulcerations? I am the unablest adviser of a thousand, the unworthiest of ten thousand; yet I hope I may presume to assert what follows without just offense.
First, such as have given or taken any unfriendly reports of us New English, should do well to recollect themselves. We have been reputed a colluvies of wild opinionists, swarmed into a remote wilderness to find elbow-room for our fanatic doctrines and practices. I trust our diligence past, and constant sedulity against such persons and courses, will plead better things for us. I dare take upon me, to be the herald of New England so far, as to proclaim to the world, in the name of our colony, that all Familists, Antinomians, Anabaptists, and other enthusiasts shall have free liberty to keep away from us, and such as will come to be gone as fast as they can, the sooner the better.
(Noises of approval from congregation.)
Second, I dare aver, that God does nowhere in His Word tolerate Christian states, to give tolerations to such adversaries of His truth, if they have power in their hands to suppress them.
