by Sarah Vowell
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
MOST USEFUL PRIMARY SOURCES
NOTE ON LANGUAGE
Acknowledgements
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALSO BY SARAH VOWELL
Assassination Vacation
The Partly Cloudy Patriot
Take the Cannoli
Radio On
RIVERHEAD BOOKS
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Copyright © 2008 by Sarah Vowell
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Vowell, Sarah, date.
The wordy shipmates / Sarah Vowell.
p. cm.
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For Scott Seeley, Ted Thompson, and Joan Kim
But oh! shipmates! on the starboard hand of every woe, there is a sure delight. . . . Delight is to him whose strong arms yet support him, when the ship of this base treacherous world has gone down beneath him. Delight is to him, who gives no quarter in the truth, and kills, burns, and destroys all sin though he pluck it out from under the robes of Senators and Judges. Delight,—top-gallant delight is to him, who acknowledges no law or lord, but the Lord his God, and is only a patriot to heaven.
—HERMAN MELVILLE, Moby-Dick
The only thing more dangerous than an idea is a belief. And by dangerous I don’t mean thought-provoking. I mean: might get people killed.
Take the Reverend John Cotton. In 1630, he goes down to the port of Southampton to preach a farewell sermon to the seven hundred or so colonists of the Massachusetts Bay Company. Led by Governor John Winthrop, a gentleman farmer and lawyer, these mostly Puritan dissenters are about to sail from England to New England on the flagship Arbella and ten other vessels in the Winthrop fleet.
By the time Cotton says amen, he has fought Mexico for Texas, bought Alaska from the Russians, and dropped napalm on Vietnam. Then he lays a wreath on Custer’s grave and revs past Wounded Knee. Then he claps when the Marquis de Lafayette tells Congress that “someday America will save the world.” Then he smiles when Abraham Lincoln calls the United States “the last best hope of earth.” Then he frees Cuba, which would be news to Cuba. Then he signs the lease on Guantánamo Bay.
Cotton’s sermon is titled “God’s Promise to His Plantation.” He begins with one of the loveliest passages from the book of Second Samuel, an otherwise R-rated chronicle of King David’s serial-killer years. Chapter 7, verse 10: “I will appoint a place for my people Israel, and I will plant them, that they may dwell in a place of their own, and move no more.” Sounds so homey, like that column in the real estate section of the New York Times about how people found their apartments. Until I remember that talk like this is the match still lighting the fuses of a thousand car bombs.
What Cotton is telling these about-to-be-Americans is that they are God’s new chosen people. This they like to hear. In fact, they have been telling themselves just that. The Old Testament Israelites are to the Puritans what the blues was to the Rolling Stones—a source of inspiration, a renewable resource of riffs. What Cotton is telling them is that, like the Old Testament Jews, they are men of destiny. And, like the Old Testament Jews, God has given them a new home, a promised land. And, like the Old Testament Jews, God has printed eviction notices for them to tack up on the homes of the nothing-special, just-folks folks who are squatting there.
It’s fine, according to Cotton, to move into “a country not altogether void of inhabitants” if said country is really big. After all, he continues, “Abraham and Isaac, when they sojourned amongst the Philistines, they did not buy that land to feed their cattle, because they said ‘ There is room enough.’ ”
This is God’s plantation, remember? Cotton says, “If God be the gardener, who shall pluck up what he sets down?” Hear that, Indians? No weeding of the white people allowed. Unless they’re Catholic. Or one of those Satan-worshipping Virginians.
John Cotton is forty-six years old. He is the most respected, famous, and beloved Puritan minister in England. Getting him to bless the send-off of these relatively unimportant castaways would be like scoring Nelson Mandela to deliver the commencement address at the neighbor kid’s eighth-grade graduation. In fact, once the colonists arrive in Massachusetts they will name their settlement Boston, in honor of Cotton’s hometown.
These people listening to this man are scared. There’s a boat in the harbor that just might sail them to their deaths. They may never see their friends again until heaven (or hell, depending on how this dumb plan goes). For years they’ve grumbled that England is a cesspool governed by an immoral king under the spell of the Whore of Babylon, which is their cute nickname for the pope. But now that it’s time to light out, their dear old mother country seems so cozy, all warm beds and warm beer and days of auld lang syne.
Yet here is the smartest man in England, maybe the smartest man in the world, telling them, little old them, that they have been picked by God. They are Israelites is what they are. They are fleeing Egypt. Good riddance! Next stop, land of milk/honey.
Now they know. They can do this. They can vomit their way across the sea. They can spend ten years digging up tree stumps to plow frozen fields. They can even learn to love corn. For the first time in months, they can breathe.
Then Cotton quotes Luke 12:48. “To whom much is given, of him God will require the more.” Of course there’s a catch, Spider-Man. When God is the landlord, Cotton says, “defraud him not of his rent.” The price? Obedience. Break God’s laws and suffer ye His wrath. The Israelites, Cotton warns, “might wrong themselves by trespassing against God, and so expose themselves to affliction. . . . If Israel will destroy themselves; the fault is in themselves.” Great. All this special treatment might get them nothing more than special punishment from a creator who sure is creative when it comes to retribution—the prophet swallowed by the whale, the wife turned into salt.
Thank goodness f
or bees. Cotton points out that when “the hive is too full, they seek abroad for new dwellings.” Keep in mind that most of the colonists fear more than a watery grave, or the dark forest ahead, or even hell. They question their leaving. What if their sinful birthplace needs them? But Cotton reassures them that England has more than its fair share of Englishmen. He remarks that “when the hive of the Commonwealth is so full, that tradesmen cannot live one by another, but eat up one another in this case it is lawful to remove.”
Here we arrive at the reason why this here tale of American Puritans is more concerned with the ones shipping off from Southampton for Massachusetts in the Arbella in 1630 than with the Pilgrims who sailed from Southampton toward Plymouth on the Mayflower in 1620: because the Plymouth colonists were Separatists and the Massachusetts Bay colonists were not.
Before I explain that, I will say that the theological differences between the Puritans on the Mayflower and the Puritans on the Arbella are beyond small. Try negligible to the point of nitpicky. I will also say that readers who squirm at microscopic theological differences might be unsuited to read a book about seventeenth-century Christians. Or, for that matter, a newspaper. Secular readers who marvel every morning at the death toll in the Middle East ticking ever higher due to, say, the seemingly trifling Sunni-versus-Shia rift in Islam, might look deep into their own hearts and identify their own semantic lines in the sand. For instance, a devotion to The Godfather Part II and equally intense disdain for The Godfather Part III. Someday they might find themselves at a bar and realize they are friends with a woman who can’t tell any of the Godfather movies apart and asks if Part II was the one that had “that guy in the boat.” Them’s fightin’ words, right?
Anyway, England, 1630. Question: Why is the aforementioned John Cotton standing in front of the aforementioned John Winthrop and his shipmates, watering the seeds of American exceptionalism that will, in the twenty-first century, blossom into preemptive war in the name of spreading democracy in the Middle East that temporarily unites even some factions of the aforementioned Sunni and Shia Mus lims, who hate each other’s guts but agree they hate the bully America more? Answer: Because Henry VIII had a crush on a woman who was not his wife.
In order to divorce his wife, Catherine of Aragon, and marry Anne Boleyn, Henry had to divorce England from Rome. When the pope, for some reason, refused to annul the marriage vows Henry made to Catherine more than two decades earlier, Henry rebelled and established himself as the head of the Church of England in 1534. This was seventeen years after Martin Luther nailed Rome’s abuses by nailing his “95 theses” to a church door in Germany, thereby welcoming in the Protestant Reformation.
Luther was outraged when the pope sent emissaries up north to raise money for St. Peter’s Basilica by selling “indul gences,” essentially coupons a buyer could use to pay off the pope to erase sins from the Judgment Day ledger. Luther’s point was that, according to Scripture, salvation is not a bake sale: “They preach only human doctrines who say that as soon as the money clinks into the money chest, the soul flies out of purgatory.” His larger message became the core ethos of Protestantism: the Bible, not any earthly pope, is the highest authority.
The word of God, not a man of God, is The Man. For that reason, Luther translated the Bible into German so Germans could read it for themselves. Which inspired various international Protestants to do the same in their own native tongues. And, in one of history’s great collisions, this sixteenth-century fad for vernacular Bible translations comes about not long after Luther’s countryman Johan Gutenberg had invented movable type in Europe, making it possible to print said translations on the cheap and in a hurry.
So an English subject of Henry VIII who already had a soft spot for the innovations of Luther rejoiced at the king’s break with Rome (while trying not to picture Henry and Anne Boleyn doing it in every room of every castle). That is, until the Protestant sympathizer went to church and noticed that the Church of England was just the same old Catholic Church with a king in pope’s clothing. Same old hierarchy of archbishop on down. Same old Latin-speaking middlemen standing between parishioners and the Bible, between parishioners and God. Same old ornamental gewgaws. Organ music! Vestments! (It is difficult to understate the Puritan abhorrence of something as seemingly trivial as a vicar’s scarf.) Same old easily achieved, come-as-you-are salvation. Here’s what one had to do to join the Church of England: be English. But we want getting into heaven to be hard! said the Puritans. And not for everybody!
So the English Protestants protest. One of their heroes was William Tyndale, who had exiled himself to Germany in 1524 in order to commit the crime of translating the Bible into English. Captured at Henry’s request, Tyndale was strangled, then burned at the stake in 1536; his reported last words were, “Lord, open the King of England’s eyes!” This prayer was answered two years later when Henry commissioned the so-called Great Bible, the first official Bible in English—based largely on the translations of, guess who, William Tyndale.
In the near century between Henry’s breakup with Rome and the Massachusetts Bay colonists’ departure, members of the Church of England, which is to say the English, quar reled constantly about how Protestant to become or how Catholic to remain. No surprise that the monarchs and the clergy, at the top of the cultural hierarchy, tended to be in favor of cultural hierarchy and skewed Catholic. For instance, the late King James, son of the famously Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots, threatened to “harry” the Puritans out of England.
So in Southampton, when Cotton promises the colonists that where they are going “the sons of wickedness shall afflict them no more,” they know he is referring to James’s son, King Charles I, and his Anglican henchmen, including the Puritans’ nemesis, the Bishop of London, William Laud.
One reason Winthrop and his shipmates are hitting the road in 1630 is that Charles had dissolved the Parliament, the one check on his power, the year before. The Protestant-leaning House of Commons had passed incendiary resolutions limiting the king’s powers of taxation and proclaiming the practices of “popery and Arminianism” a capital offense. Arminianism, the dogma that a believer’s salvation depends merely on faith, is at odds with the Puritans’ insistence that salvation is predetermined by God. Laud, a portly and haughty gentleman in a puffy robe in his National Portrait Gallery likeness, is pretty much Mr. Arminianism. It’s worth remembering that, while Laud is the bogeyman in Puritan history, his more open-minded and openhearted view of how Christians get to heaven won out in Protestantism worldwide. Which is not to deny the fact that Laud was both a ruthless ogre toward the Puritans and a suck-up to Charles, delivering sermons on the divine right of kings.
(The subtext of Cotton’s sermon to the voyagers is the question “Can I come, too?” Laud becomes more and more powerful and thus more threatening to Puritans. It is no coincidence that 1633, the year Laud becomes Archbishop of Canterbury, is also the year Cotton finally emigrates to Massachusetts, where he becomes Winthrop’s own minister.)
Believers who wanted to “purify” the Church of England of its Catholic tendencies came to be known by the put-down “puritan.” They mostly called themselves “nonconformists,” or the “godly.” Or, occasionally, “hot Protestants.”
The more radical Puritans who severed ties to the Church of England came to be known as Separatists; they shook off all allegiance to grandiose national religion and concentrated on their own congregations, worshipping in plain, little meet inghouses. Hence the Separatists who hightailed it to Holland and then Cape Cod on the Mayflower. Puritans who wanted to reform the Church of England from the inside came to be known as Nonseparatists, which is to say they came to be simply unhappy. Hence, the simultaneously hopeful and guilt-ridden men and women listening to John Cotton before boarding the Arbella, wondering if it is right to be abandoning England at all.
I admire the Mayflower Pilgrims’ uncompromising resolve to make a clean break, and their fortitude, so fundamental to the American national ch
aracter that Sinclair Lewis called one of our core ideals “Plymouth Rock in a sleet-storm.”
Still, I find the Arbella passengers’ qualms messier and more endearing. They were leaving for the same reasons the Pilgrims left, but they had either the modesty to feel bad about it or the charitable hypocrisy to at least pretend to. Maybe it’s because I live in a world crawling with separatists that I find religious zealots with a tiny bit of wishy-washy, pussy-footing compromise in them deeply attractive. Plus, half the entertainment value of watching Massachusetts Bay come to life is witnessing all the tiptoeing and deference—frequently just a pretense of deference—to the crown. Winthrop will spend most of his time as magistrate tripping all over himself to make sure King Charles doesn’t get wind of any of the colony’s many treasonous infractions. Because, unlike the Plymouth Separatists, the nonseparating Bostonians left England pledging to remain as English as behead ings and clotted cream.
In fact, Winthrop and six of the highest-ranking officers of the Massachusetts Bay Company sent an open letter to the king and the Church of England before their departure in 1630 titled “ The Humble Request.” They beseeched His Majesty and their countrymen for “their prayers, and the removal of suspicions, and misconstructions of their intentions.” The Church of England is especially cajoled as “our dear mother,” whom they bid adieu with “much sadness of heart and many tears in our eyes, ever acknowledging that such hope and part as we have obtained in the common salvation we have received in her bosom, and sucked it from her breasts.” (Cotton will pick up on this mammary metaphor in his farewell sermon, reminding the colonists not to forget England, “the breast that gave them suck.”)
“ The Humble Request” is so servile it boils down to this panicky appeal: Nothing uppity about us, Your Majesty, we’re just hobos in the woods! To hammer home the image of themselves as unthreatening and pitiable, they remind the king and his bishops that “we shall be in our poor cottages in the wilderness.”
