The Wordy Shipmates

by Sarah Vowell

  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.”

  How could she not be, though? In September, Winthrop would write Margaret a letter announcing, “Lady Arbella is dead. . . . Thus the Lord is pleased still to humble us. . . . He is our God, and may dispose of us as he sees good.” Dispose—what an encouraging word to use around the poor woman he is trying to coax into making a transatlantic death trip. She’ll go all that way only to be thrown away like Jehovah’s trash.

  Within a month, Winthrop records in his journal that Lady Arbella’s husband, Isaac Johnson, also “died in sweet peace.” Thus the two Massachusetts settlers of the most noble birth were gone by autumn.

  In the first year of settlement, the letters home were frequently grim epistles. Deputy Governor Thomas Dudley wrote to the Countess of Lincoln (the late Lady Arbella’s mother), “We yet enjoy little to be envied, but endure much to be pitied in the sickness and mortality of our people. . . . There is not [one] house where there is not one dead.” As for reinforcements from England, only the well-off need apply. Dudley, perhaps thinking sarcastically of the optimistic Massachusetts seal, writes, “If there be any endowed with grace and furnished with means to feed themselves and theirs for eighteen months, and to build and plant, let them come over into our Macedonia and help us.”

  The September 30 entry of Winthrop’s journal is historic if not exactly illustrious. Winthrop mentions Boston for the very first time, noting that a goat died there.

  Winthrop himself is mum on when or why he and his cronies decamped Charlestown for good and made Boston their new home. Edward Johnson, a woodworker who would go on to be one of the founders of the town of Woburn, later recalled that the reason Winthrop and his shipmates traded in Charlestown for Boston “was the want of fresh water.” Charlestown had “but one spring,” accessible only “when the tide was down.”

  Go to 276 Washington Street in Boston and see how Winthrop’s luck would change by moving there. At that address, on the side of the Winthrop Building, the aforementioned first skyscraper in Boston, there are two plaques. One brags that it was the former “site of the home of the city’s first colonial governor, John Winthrop.” The other reads, “Here was the Great Spring which for more than two centuries gave water to the people of Boston.” Thus did the governor, having learned from his Charlestown mistake, build his house next to the best spring in town.

  The original white settler of Boston, then called Shamut, was Englishman William Blaxton (or Blackstone). He invited Winthrop and friends to join him across the Charles River. He had attended Cambridge University with Isaac Johnson and moved to land that is now Boston Common and Beacon Hill in 1625 after he jumped ship from an expedition. He built his little hermit cabin in what is now Louisburg Square, one of the fanciest addresses in town. (Louisa May Alcott lived and died there, and Senator John Kerry, a Winthrop descendant, lives there now.) So Blaxton welcomed the Puritans to join him. Apparently, he enjoyed their company so much that he soon moved to Rhode Island.

  John
Winthrop writes his wife his first letter marked “Boston in Massachusetts” on November 29, 1630. In it, he cautions her to “provide well for the sea.” Goodly portions of the letters he sends Margaret and his son John Jr. before they join him in Massachusetts consist of the same sort of grocery lists Winthrop made before he left. Bring axes, linen, and “a large frying pan,” he commands Margaret in one letter. He harangues John Jr. to amass peas and oatmeal (“as much as you can”), “sugar and fruit, pepper and ginger,” goats, sheep, garlic, and onions. Winthrop advises him to pack these things in good barrels. After all, he sighs, “We have lost much by bad casks.”

  Winthrop’s last journal entry for 1630 tells the harrowing story of Richard Garrett, a Boston shoemaker he knows from church. Garrett, his daughter, and five others went to Plymouth in a small boat “against the advice of his friends.” A windstorm blew them out to sea. Finally, they saw land and made their way to shore. But the wind had splashed so much water into their boat that “some had their legs frozen into the ice, so as they were forced to be cut out.” They tried to build a fire, but “having no hatchet, they could get little wood, and were forced to lie in the open air all night, being extremely cold.” (Seriously, Margaret, don’t forget that ax.) Come morning, two who could walk set out for Plymouth and met a couple of Indian women who had their husbands bring the pair of Bostonians “back to their wigwam, and entertained them kindly.” The Indians then guided the two to Plymouth, where the authorities there sent out the seventeenth-century equivalent of a team of first responders, who tried to rescue the freezing others. Still, Garrett died two days later, “the ground being so frozen . . . they could not dig his grave.” One of the Indians covered “the corpse” with “a great heap of wood to keep it from the wolves.” Three more of them died, including one, wrote Thomas Dudley, who “rotted from the feet upwards where the frost had gotten most hold.”

  That first winter, living in a town where goats and people die, one of them by rotting “from the feet upwards,” Winthrop’s sermon about how the colonists would build some fancy city on a hill must have seemed, in retrospect, a tad laughable.

  For six glorious weeks in 1999, CBS aired a sitcom with that very premise, in which an idealistic Puritan family called the Winthrops suffered through their grim first winter in colonial Massachusetts. It was called Thanks. As in Thanksgiving. As in thanks a lot. The show was quickly canceled, but I cannot overstate how excited I was about it. I felt the way an avid stamp collector might if she found out CBS was about to debut its new series, CSI: Philately.

  As the pilot begins, it’s morning. Mrs. Winthrop yells at the children to get out of bed because their “boiling water’s ready.” Replies her son, “Water! Can I lick the spoon?”

  The show’s ongoing gag was how miserable all the settlers were—how hungry, how cold, how cramped. The Winthrop daughter, Abigail, was a typical sitcom teenage bombshell daughter. After a disagreement with her parents about boys, she lets loose the sort of routine girl outburst that’s been seen on prime time since the dawn of Gidget. “I hate my life!” she yells. But where a modern TV teenager would run upstairs and slam the door to her room, the seventeenth-century teenager, living in a tiny one-room cabin, can only run about a foot and a half before she throws herself face first onto a bed right next to the table where everyone would eat, if there was any food.

  The main character, here named James Winthrop, though he’s clearly modeled after John, is the lone dreamer in a town full of whiners. He welcomes in the spring, saying, “What a beautiful day it is. The snow is melting. Everyone out and about airing out their clothes, lugging out their dead.”

  On Thanks, the optimism behind the image of the city on a hill was literally a joke. Says the Winthrop stand-in, “We’re not the kind of people who are easily discouraged by a few snow flurries, a couple of head colds, the fifty-percent mortality rate.” No, he says, they’re “strong-willed people who never give up.”

  John Winthrop’s first journal entry in January 1631 notes that “a house at Dorchester was burnt down.” The next entry, in February, states that a Mr. Freeman’s house in Watertown burned down but “being in the daytime, his goods were saved.” It speaks of the grind of ongoing misery that Winthrop sees a daytime blaze as a sign that things are looking up. Of course he was unaware that he would spend the next few years trying to put out fires of a different sort.

  Enter Roger Williams. On February 5, 1631, Winthrop’s journal notes the arrival of the ship Lyon. “She brought Mr. Williams, (a godly minister), with his wife.”

  Williams was probably twenty-seven years old. A London-raised, Cambridge-educated theologian, he had most recently worked in Essex as a private chaplain to the family of one of Oliver Cromwell’s cousins.

  When Williams next appears in Winthrop’s journal, two months later, the governor is all riled up. He says that the Boston court (which he runs) wrote a letter to John Endecott, asking him to explain why the Salem church just offered to hire Williams as its teacher.

  The bigger Puritan churches employ two equally important clergymen, a pastor and a teacher. Influenced by John Calvin’s notion of a fourfold division of church offices (ordained pastor and teacher, lay elders and deacons), the Cambridge Platform of 1648, a sort of manifesto about church organization written by a committee of New England divines, described the difference between the job descriptions: “ The pastor’s special work is to attend to exhortation, and therein to administer a word of wisdom; the teacher is to attend to doctrine and therein to administer a word of knowledge.” The two work side by side, the teacher delivering brainy lectures about Scripture, the pastor giving earthier, encouraging talks about living a devout daily life. (For instance, Cotton Mather described Samuel Newman, the pastor at Dorchester and Weymouth, as “a very lively preacher, and a very preaching liver.”) If the pastor is the church’s heart, the teacher is its brain. John Cotton, the future teacher at Boston, sounds like a fervent researcher when he describes his own “love to the truth, which is to be searched after more than hidden treasure.” It makes sense that Williams would be offered the job of teacher—he cares more about searching for the truth than making friends, his ideas outnumbering his social skills.

  Both teacher and pastor are elected positions. The members of each congregation choose their own clergy. There is no difference between Puritan clergymen and Anglican priests in terms of authority and the respect and obedience worshippers are supposed to have for that authority. A Puritan teacher or pastor, like a priest, is supposed to guide the worshippers in spiritual life and study. The difference between Puritan clergy and Anglican priests is how they are chosen—a priest from the top down (the top being the Archbishop of Canterbury) and a teacher from the bottom up (that being the congregation). Each congregation in New England is to be its own autonomous authority.

  When Winthrop and the other Boston settlers formed their church the previous August, they had chosen John Wilson as their teacher. Wilson, however, was sailing back to England on the Lyon’s return trip to retrieve his wife. This is a setback for the Boston church. Winthrop admires Wilson, calling him “a very sincere, holy man.” Winthrop writes approvingly in his journal that Wilson confessed that before coming to Massachusetts, he dreamed “that he saw a church arise out of the earth, which grew up and became a marvelous goodly church.” It’s clear Winthrop wants to make sure Wilson’s dream comes true. With Wilson’s leave of absence upon them, Winthrop pens a sad little entry about holding a prayer meeting in his home at which Wilson encourages Winthrop and Dudley to preach lay sermons while he’s gone.

  The fact that Williams, a minister, came in on the very ship that was to sail away with Boston’s minister must have seemed pretty much perfect, as if heaven’s Human Resources Department had sent Williams their way. However, they would soon suspect that Roger Williams was the preacher from hell.

  Winthrop notes that in the letter the Boston court sent to Endecott in Salem, “Mr. Williams had refused to join with
the congregation at Boston, because they would not make a public declaration of their repentance for having communion with the churches of England, while they lived there.” In other words, the congregation of Boston, people whose faith led them to Massachusetts, people who had somehow survived that first, grim winter with all its hardships and loss, are being told by some upstart new guy that they haven’t done enough for their God, that they are damned until the entire congregation publicly apologizes for having ever worshipped in Church of England churches back in England. These Nonseparatists still consider themselves to be members of the Church of England, reformers trying to set a new example and fix the church from within. In fact, when the Bostonians chose Wilson as their teacher the previous summer, Winthrop writes in his journal as if the Archbishop of Canterbury is looking over his shoulder, confirming that the teacher’s election does not mean that “Mr. Wilson should renounce his ministry he received in England.”

  To Williams, the Bay colonists’ way of walking the Separatist walk while refusing to talk the Separatist talk was hypocrisy. But besides being a survival tactic meant to keep them in the good graces of King Charles, Boston’s insistence on maintaining its ties and affection for their brethren back in England is also compassionate. Giles Firmin, a onetime deacon of the Boston church, in his 1652 tract Separatism Examined, explained, “When I raise a house new from the ground, I may then do as I please, but if I be mending an old house, I must do as well as I can, repair by degrees.”

  So after the Boston church is kind enough to extend an offer to Roger Williams to fill one of the roughly two paying church job openings in all of New England, Williams would later recall, “I conscientiously refused . . . because I durst not officiate to an unseparated people, as, upon examination and conference, I found them to be.”

  If Roger Williams had any ambition at all, he would have accepted the Bostonians’ offer on the spot with, if not hugs and giggles, then whatever modicum of humble joy a Puritan is allowed. The position of teacher in Boston is the most plum appointment in seventeenth-century New England theology. When the already famous go-getter John Cotton arrives in Boston two years later, he will assume that position until his death and in doing so he goes down in history as the most important and influential clergyman of the era.