by Sarah Vowell
The vow of obedience and that thing about vehement suspicions doesn’t exactly make the democratic idealist in me want to hum the trombone part from “Stars and Stripes Forever.” Still, got to start somewhere. So it’s worth celebrating, a little, that within two years of the Massachusetts Bay Company’s arrival on these shores, a hundred white male religious fanatics get to pick their own dictator in a show of hands. Winthrop will be that dictator on and off until he dies.
Winthrop and the other assistants get their authoritari anism from the same place they derive all their other beliefs—the Bible. Winthrop railed, “If we should change from a mixed aristocracy to mere democracy, first we should have no warrant in Scripture for it for there was no such government in Israel.” He continues, calling democracy “the meanest and worst of all forms of government . . . a manifest breach of the Fifth Commandment.”
The Fifth Commandment is honor your father and mother. To these people, “father and mother” are not merely biological parents. Martin Luther wrote the best explanation of how the Fifth Commandment extends beyond the nuclear family and into public life:
In this commandment belongs a further statement regarding all kinds of obedience to persons in authority who have to command and govern. For all authority flows and is propagated from the authority of parents. . . . They are all called fathers in the Scriptures, as those who in their government perform the functions of a father, and should have a paternal heart toward their subordinates.
That explanation goes a long way toward explaining Winthrop’s seemingly schizophrenic behavior. By setting limits on dissent, Winthrop’s government is facing a question asked of and by every government. But according to the Puritans’ interpretation of the Fifth Commandment, a governor is also a patriarch. This requires tough love, but love nonetheless. How the Fifth Commandment informs Winthrop’s conduct is best explained in the person of Philip Ratcliffe, he of the sliced-off ears.
Recall that Winthrop was one of the magistrates who convicted Ratcliffe of “scandalous invectives against our churches and government.” Which is to say Ratcliffe broke the Fifth Commandment twice over by failing to honor both his church fathers and his legislative/judicial fathers of the General Court. His punishment, besides the ear lopping and a whipping, is banishment.
Earlier, I mentioned in passing that throughout his tenure as governor, the townspeople accused Winthrop of leniency. The example I gave was the Bostonians’ disgust that Winthrop allowed a couple of men who had been banished to loiter in Boston. Winthrop’s reasoning was that “being in the winter, they must otherwise have perished” if they were forced to hike into the icy wilderness right away.
Well, Ratcliffe was one of those men Winthrop refused to kick out into the cold. And I think it’s because Winthrop takes the Fifth Commandment seriously. He sees himself as a father and the other colonists as his children. Is this condescending? Absolutely. Does it explain his contradictory words and deeds, the disconnect between the ideal of the colonists being “members of the same body” and chopping off a loudmouth’s ears? I think it does. A father sometimes plays the doting dad who buys his son a Popsicle, or he can be the furious punisher of the phrase “wait until your father gets home.” By banishing Ratcliffe, Winthrop was disowning him; by letting Ratcliffe stay in Boston until the weather warmed up, Winthrop was looking out for his safety. Winthrop was one of those parents who never wants to see his kid again but drives him to the bus station to make sure he leaves town warm and dry.
A settler named Thomas Wiggin described Winthrop as “ruling with much mildness” toward the law-abiding. As for troublemakers, Wiggin claimed Winthrop was “strict in execution of Justice . . . to the terror of offenders.”
If the Fifth Commandment accounts for Winthrop and his fellow magistrates’ style of governing, I think it also explains their conciliatory attitudes toward the monarchy and the Church of England—why they are not Separatists like their neighbors in Plymouth. Remember the “Humble Request,” the open letter the colonists sent to King Charles and the Church before their departure? It was addressed to “Reverend Fathers.” It called the Church of England “our dear mother,” proclaiming that their hope for salvation “we have received in her bosom and sucked it from her breasts.”
Also recall the Charter’s description of King James as “our most dear and royal father.”
This paternal and maternal language is not mere empty words to these Puritans. They believe the Fifth Commandment requires them to obey the parental authority of king and church. Or at least appear to.
At the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston, I visit the reading room. It’s like a cartoon of East Coast finery: dark wood paneling, oil paintings on the wall of illustrious, staring Bostonians whose eyes accuse visitors who went to state schools west of the Mississippi, “You’re not from around here, are you?”
I was there to read John Winthrop’s journal. The actual thing. It’s hard not to look at the water stains and imagine they came from Atlantic sea spray during the crossing. I don’t think Winthrop was any more nervous leaving England than I was leafing through such a brittle, wrinkly, nearly four-hundred-year-old book.
The library assistant, who was helpful and diligent, bordering on liturgical, handed me the first volume, then the third, wincing that the second volume “burned up in a fire.” Which happened nearly two hundred years ago, but this true-blue young archivist is still in mourning.
Winthrop’s handwriting was so dreadful I could only make out a handful of words, from “Arbella” on the first page to a “godly” here and a “temptations” there. There is an autograph, “Your loving son, John Winthrop,” pasted in at the end of the third volume by a Winthrop heir who found the signature from Winthrop Jr. to his father and didn’t want it to get lost. For some reason that made them both seem so alive and so odd—to follow an endearment like “your loving son” with a last name, being simultaneously heartfelt and formal—much like Winthrop himself. (The younger Winthrop’s hand is also represented in the first volume’s endpapers, where he drew plans for houses and forts for his father.)
I found myself fixated on the third volume’s sad, blank pages when the diary stops cold in 1649. That’s when Winthrop died. I stared at all that yellowing emptiness and remembered seeing the globe in Will Rogers’s office when I toured his house in Santa Monica; there are pencil marks all over it that Rogers, an avid aviator, made when he was planning his flights around the world, and it’s just so poignant to see those lines, since he died in a plane crash, but it’s even more poignant to think about a kid from Oklahoma who par-layed a few jokes and rope tricks into seeing the world. Just as it is touching to look at Winthrop’s drawings in his diary of the coastlines of Maine and Massachusetts, sketched from the deck of the Arbella, and marvel at how far he had come and wonder if he was concentrating on the contours of the shoreline to take his mind off his fear of actually stepping onto the strange new continent before him and commencing his strange new life.
Luckily, the Massachusetts Historical Society has published the entirety of Winthrop’s journals, including the unfortunate second volume, which had already been transcribed before the blaze.
The first journal’s endpapers, where Winthrop jotted down odds and ends of information in preparing for the Atlantic crossing in 1630, document the extremes of what he had on his mind before leaving home.
Winthrop writes down instructions for making gunpowder, putting up a chimney, and building a small boat. He makes lists of the provisions for the voyage, including thirty bushels of oatmeal, forty bushels of peas, two wooden bowls, two barrels of cider, the equivalent of ten thousand gallons of beer, 138 wooden spoons, and “11 Ferkins of Butter,” a ferkin (or firkin) being a “unit of capacity,” according to my dictionary, “equal to half a kilderkin.” (That clears that up.)
But Winthrop also jots down a list of Bible verses having to do with charity and generosity that he will refer to when he writes “A Model of Christian Chari
ty.” These passages include “Give to him that asketh thee” from the Sermon on the Mount; and Isaiah 58, which touts that for those who give their bread to the hungry and clothe the naked, “thine health shall spring forth speedily; and 2 Corinthians 9:7, in which “God loveth a cheerful giver.”
In other words, after Winthrop has acquired all his butter firkins, food stirrers, and beer, along with six dozen candles, twenty thousand biscuits, and twenty-nine sides of beef, he goes through the Bible and writes down a bunch of verses commanding him to be willing to cheerfully give all that stuff away. My firkin is your firkin being one of Christianity’s primary creeds. He is simultaneously imagining an idealistic city on a hill, and making sure that city has nine hundred pounds of cheese.
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”?
During 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, i
ncluding 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.”
