by Mac Griswold
To Newport
Andy Fiske, who led me through the manor house in 1984, always kept marine charts handy, like every Shelter Island sailor. In unrolling them, he had also unrolled memories of summers on Peconic Bay, the Sound, out to Block Island, and beyond. “Once you leave the tip of Montauk behind, you are already in Rhode Island waters,” he used to say. (Andy died in 1992.) As the crow flies, it’s only about forty-eight miles from the manor harbor to Newport. By the time Grizzell arrived at her first home in the New World, Nathaniel Sylvester would already have known the place as a convenient port for West Indies traffic.
Driving across the pair of high bridges that connect Rhode Island’s mainland with Aquidneck Island, I glance down at Conanicut Island, where Francis Brinley and William Coddington had farms and pasturelands. The wrinkled waters of Narragansett Bay stretch out below me in all directions: a map will tell you that the real estate of Rhode Island is half water, fringed by the safe, desirable harbors and coves that extend from Point Judith all the way up to Providence on the west side of the bay and back down to Newport and Sakonnet on the east. Everyone—English or Indian—hopped into a boat as the easiest and fastest way to travel. The coastal lands of Rhode Island cradling the bay comprise some of New England’s finest soils. The climate is the mildest in the region. Thanks mostly to Roger Williams’s respectful cultivation of local Indian leaders, relations with the dominant Narragansett tribe on the west side of the bay and the Wampanoags to the east were fairly harmonious for decades. Both Massachusetts and Plymouth fought for possession of this territory in the 1650s. But Rhode Island survived the conflict intact and independent, fat with livestock and trade, proud of its traditions of “soul liberty” and the separation of church and state—and not yet stained by its ascendance as the colony with the biggest slave trade in North America.
As I swoop down from Newport Bridge, what I can see of Aquidneck Island, spotty with development, doesn’t look like “the garden of New England” that a Mr. Harris described in the 1670s. “Old Newport,” huddled at the tip of Aquidneck, is a collection of fine Georgian and Federal architecture. Somewhere here, close to the edge of the harbor that made Newport a magnet for settlement, I will find the site of William and Anne Coddington’s house (built in 1641), where Grizzell spent her first two years in America.
We last saw Nathaniel in 1646, aboard the Seerobbe, sailing from the African coast with a cargo of slaves. By 1653, Nathaniel and his partners had purchased Shelter Island and drawn up their contract as to how they would operate their island provisioning plantation. Who would set the place up, who would run it? For Nathaniel, the junior partner of the four and the only one who hadn’t rooted himself in a piece of land, this was his big chance.
He and his brother Giles left Barbados, perhaps with a shipment of sugar, rum, salt, and other Caribbean products, for Newport late in the winter of 1653. They sailed in the Swallow, a ship capable of carrying twenty-two guns and as many as seventy-six people. The same Stephen Goodyear who had sold Shelter Island to the partners had bought the Swallow in 1647 after the old vessel was decommissioned by the Dutch, and this venture from Barbados was probably the return trip of a routine trading voyage. As was almost always the case, the risk was shared with others, including the master of the vessel, Greenfield Larrabie of Saybrook, Connecticut. No passenger list or cargo manifest survives, only court depositions about the fate of a cabinet belonging to Nathaniel.
A merchant’s cabinet held his account book, copies of contracts, correspondence, and valuables such as jewelry and coins. Small enough to be portable, solidly impervious to theft, and often decoratively inlaid with rare woods, such cabinets often had drawers of various sizes and a secret compartment. For a traveler like Nathaniel, his cabinet was both his desk and proof of his fortune. They were at sea when, according to the testimony of Stephen Daniel (probably a crew member), Nathaniel, “perceiving his cabbinet to recive Some harme by Some wette it had taken caused the Said Cabbinet to be caried up into the Round hous where it did remaine till the day that the Ship was cast away.”
It was a late afternoon sometime in February or early March; the Swallow had sailed to within only a few hours of Newport. Suddenly, something—a gust of wind, the current, or a storm—rammed the ship sideways into the middle of the main harbor channel, where the current runs strongest, and then westward in a matter of seconds into the shoal waters of Conanicut Island. At that point, as Bernard Collins, an indentured servant of Nathaniel’s, and one of the two court witnesses, reported, “the Swallow was Driven near the Rock at Connanicott Iland … & in great danger to be cast away.” As soon as the Swallow hit the rocks, “Captain Nathiell Silvister with severall others & the Deponant” were “goieinge ashore of the afore said iland of Cannaniucott.” A dinghy was hastily put over the side, and Nathaniel courageously took off in the dark to fetch help, attempting to reach Newport, a two-mile stretch across the water.
Nathaniel returned in the morning with a “shallop with Horsers” to relieve Larrabie and his men “in gitting of [off] your ship ffrom the rocks.” (Horsers were flat bargelike boats used to transport livestock.) But help came too late—the Swallow had broken up in the darkness and freezing cold, timbers shrieking against the rocky coast. Larrabie, having presumably made what efforts he could to save her, floundered ashore with the rest of the crew and passengers, including Giles Sylvester and “the rest of Capt: Nathaniell Silvisters servants.” Larrabie’s next move broke the proverbial first law of salvage: to “return to the stream of commerce the goods of any owner, for the benefit of the owner, not the salvor.” Instead, Collins said, “Greenfeild Larrabie tould ye Deponant & the rest of Capt: Nathaniell Silvister’s servants yt now the ship was cast away, yt thay were all free men, & no longer servants under ther Master A [and?] Declaring yt what came out of the Reck ashore of Captaine Nathaniell Silvisters goods, was as much thars as thar Masters and as ffree for them to take as it was to the Master.” A looting free-for-all ensued.
Larrabie reportedly confessed later to Nathaniel that he had “Consented unto the opening of your cabinett.” The servant Collins recalled an outraged Nathaniel stating that his cabinet had been “broke open, and yt all his rings and other things of vallew yt was in it, whare stollen out.” And, Collins added, “ye severall writings which was in the cabinet, aftar being broken open ware thrown too & againe [to and fro against] the rocks where being torn in peeces & blown away by the violnt wind & further nott.” This after Nathaniel had asked Larrabie to take particular care of his cabinet in exchange for his risking his own life by rowing at night to Newport in treacherous currents and storm waves.
Worse yet, Collins testified, in Nathaniel’s absence Larrabie had turned to young Giles and said, “Now Mr. Giles Silvister now is the time for you to make your selfe of what Goods Comes ashore of your Brothers Capt. Nathaniell Silvister for now you are in a place wher I beleeve your Brother Capt Nathaniell Silvister will not assist you or look after you Any More.” After Nathaniel’s return, Larrabie began to regret his rash action and assured Nathaniel that what was stolen would be “restored againe.” Nathaniel filed suit against Larrabie, who was quickly found guilty in May by a New Haven Colony court and made liable for £125, a huge sum, and court costs. These proceedings burnished the wronged merchant’s stature as a man to be reckoned with—just in time to score points with Governor William Coddington, the guardian of the woman he might already have hoped would be his bride.
William Coddington was a power to reckon with: intelligent, outspoken, ruthless, persevering, and well schooled in the law. Deeply religious throughout his long life, he remembered the heat and light of the Puritans’ original desire for a mystical union with God. Yet in political matters he was out for all he could get. Born in 1601, Coddington was Nathaniel Sylvester’s superior both in age and social standing. He had a profound knowledge of what setting up a thriving plantation entailed. Although no correspondence between the two men who were to become brothers-in-law has b
een found, it is likely that Nathaniel would have depended on Coddington for advice in such matters. Everyone else did. By 1653, after the purchase of Shelter Island, Coddington would have taken stock of Nathaniel Sylvester as an up-and-coming young Puritan, a merchant with land, able partners, good political connections in England, and a brother, Constant, with sugar plantations on Barbados. Through Constant’s continued ties to Amsterdam, Nathaniel may also have had access to international credit markets. As for Nathaniel himself, in 1653, when he contracted to marry Grizzell, the auditor’s daughter, it surely mattered more to him that Coddington was to be his brother-in-law than that Thomas Brinley had been a royal servant to the late Charles I.
Grizzell’s Newport
The center of the nine-year-old community of Newport had already taken shape by 1650. A navigable river ran through the middle of town into the harbor, where wharves extended into “Nanhygonsett [Narragansett] Bay which is the largest and safest port in New England, nearest the sea and fittest for trade.” The houses of the “big men,” including Governor Coddington, faced one another, clustering around the town spring and mill. Widely and irregularly spaced, with barns, stables, enclosed fields, and gardens set between them, the frame houses had rambling extensions and steeply pitched roofs that gave them a brooding, medieval cast.
A muddy little sketch drawn shortly before the Coddington house was torn down in 1835 shows a three-story dwelling with a deep second-story overhang similar to those of the ancient London houses downhill from St. John’s Lane in Grizzell’s day. The huge exterior masonry chimney, embellished with Elizabethan-style fluting and pilasters, that makes up most of the gable wall contained flues for three or four fireplaces. The rooms they warmed—probably two up and two down, with an attic above—made this a mansion in a town of mostly one-room houses. The front door would have led directly into the hall or Great Room. Small casement windows with leaded panes and wooden shutters, often closed against the cold or Indian raids, let in a little daylight. Clear-burning beeswax tapers were saved for best; smoky tallow candles or guttering rushlights sufficed for everyday use. The furnishings of the low-ceilinged hall—tables, chairs, benches, and a large curtained bed—accommodated every family activity: cooking, eating, writing, praying, sleeping. It was also the room for making love, nursing infants, and dying, as well as public matters that a Rhode Island man of consequence like Coddington dealt with continually.
After her arrival in 1651, Grizzell lived for two years in a household where colonial leaders parleyed with Narragansett sachems and where English voices mingled with those of Algonquians—and of the Coddingtons’ multilingual slaves. Throughout the Atlantic World, the “charter generation” of slaves, as the historian Ira Berlin calls them, did not form a culturally cohesive group. Arriving in New England after crossing the Atlantic to the West Indies or Brazil, they thought of themselves not as Africans, but as Coromantee, Fanti, Oyo, Mandinga, or one of many other nationalities. Besides their native tongues, some also spoke enough of the language of their enslavers—Spanish or Portuguese, Dutch or French—to communicate with them. They also spoke variants of a common creole language—called fala de Guiné or fala de negro—that had evolved swiftly and dramatically since the earliest Iberian voyages to Africa, Brazil, and Central America. Some of the slaves in the Coddingtons’ house in the late summer of 1651 probably had enough life experience on both sides of the Atlantic to understand how crucial it was to study the structure of the society they had been forced to join in order to find ways to influence it to their benefit. So they probably watched this pale fifteen-year-old English girl with interest as she rocked her sister Anne’s baby boy to sleep or went about other chores. As for Grizzell, she found herself living with those she would only have glimpsed as outlandish strangers on the streets of London, or in stony effigy as a carved head on a tomb in her former parish church in Clerkenwell.
Matchmaking
I stroll to Ocean Coffee Roasters, around the corner from the Coddingtons’ old address. Inside, six men talk sailing while they eat their three-egg omelets. With a mix of fatalism and amusement, one of them pinpoints exactly where he ran aground in the harbor a few weeks ago—on Conanicut’s rocks. When I step outside, a skim of fog glides lightly across the blue-gray waters at the end of the street. Whitethroat sparrows on their way north are singing in the trees. It feels like spring, like the spring soon after the wreck when Grizzell and Nathaniel considered each other as partners for life.
Although we don’t know exactly how or when the marriage was agreed to, those green months of Grizzell and Nathaniel’s betrothal as the season ripened into summer were the appointed “time of longing,” a time for “the affections to settle in,” as Thomas Weld, the minister of Roxbury, Massachusetts, wrote in his commonplace book. Even an arranged match could include falling in love, and a Puritan match definitely presumed love as a primary duty of married life, although the common understanding was that love would follow marriage, not precede it. The man made the choice; the woman merely got the chance to agree or disagree. If a woman felt she could never love the man selected for her and spoke out decisively and promptly enough (not an easy move for females trained to silent obedience), she could refuse him. The Reverend Hugh Peter, Cromwell’s chaplain and the Puritans’ Puritan in England and New England, coldly warned his only daughter against choosing her own spouse, saying she should marry “in and for the Lord. The sensual part of that condition can never answer the encumbrances that attend it. Let Christ be your Husband, and He will provide you one to His own Liking.” However, from the vast amount of cautionary advice available, it’s clear that young women in New England did not always subordinate love (or lust) to the service of God in picking mates. In Grizzell’s case, I can only guess that the choice was made by Coddington, with approval from her parents.
What are the chances that Grizzell and Nathaniel slept together before their marriage? Now that we read “Puritan” to mean “puritanical,” there’s reason to consider the question. Carol Berkin, author of First Generations: Women in Colonial America, observes that “the official ‘prudishness’ that later generations would see as the core of ‘Puritanism’ was confounded by a steady record of sexual and moral offenses that suggests that the bawdiness of seventeenth-century English culture had survived the Atlantic voyage,” and that “traditions such as pre-bridal pregnancy and marital infidelity proceeded unabated,” if only because “the immediacy of sexuality and procreation in cramped spaces gave these behaviors a logic that the Puritan code of morality could not erase.” The historian Edmund Morgan writes, “Food, drink, sleep, sex, safety—as long as the ultimate end was the service of God, all lusts were necessary, but if [men or women] forgot God, they became lusts of the flesh.”
The general unspoken expectation was that couples like Grizzell and Nathaniel would probably desire each other “improperly,” although there are as many different accounts of how premarital sex was viewed in early New England as there are historians. Society cut engaged couples some slack: Edmund Morgan writes that if a betrothed pair “could not restrain their sexual impulses, they were forgiven more readily than couples who were not espoused (and the number of cases in which couples confessed to fornication during the period of their espousals suggests that Puritans possessed no more restraint than other human beings).”
Grizzell, although reared to be modest, may well have overheard gossip her father brought home from the libertine royal court. Would such talk have served as a cautionary tale for her regarding safeguarding her virginity? We don’t know. Young women were not always able to defend themselves sexually in a society that taught women to believe that they were innately more sinful than men, who were their superiors and must be obeyed.
Nathaniel was almost certainly sexually experienced before he met Grizzell, however. In Amsterdam, on his way home from the docks, he would have had trouble avoiding “the most impudent whores … who would if they saw a stranger … pull him by the coat and invite him
into their house.” On Barbados, planters made sex with female slaves readily available.
Once they had made the decision to marry, Grizzell could have done no better than to consult the Reverend Thomas Hooker (1586–1647) of Hartford, Connecticut, as to what she might hope for from Nathaniel as a husband in godly New England. An electric, optimistic preacher, Hooker was the author of the immensely popular The Poor Doubting Christian Drawn unto Christ (1629). A self-help book avant la lettre, it went through seventeen editions by 1700. “The man whose heart is endeared to the woman he loves,” Hooker wrote, “he dreams of her in the night, hath her in his eye and apprehension when he awakes, museth on her as he sets at table, walks with her when he travels and parlies with her in each place where he comes.” Such a husband cradled his wife’s head on his bosom, and “his heart trusts in her … the stream of his affection, like a mighty current, runs with ful Tide and strength.”
“The Shell of the Soul”
That spring, Grizzell was a desirable young English heiress whose handsome fortune (and the higher ratio of men to women in New England) made it unlikely that Nathaniel would have been her only suitor. Seventeen when she married, she was four or five years younger than most brides of her generation in New England. Nathaniel’s age that spring is conjectural. Because the Amsterdam Separatists’ baptismal records disappeared, his birth can only be pegged to his parents’ marriage in 1613. The genealogist Henry B. Hoff tentatively offers a date of 1620 for Nathaniel’s birth as the third child, which would mean he was thirty-three when the teenaged Grizzell first laid eyes on him, past his youth but not yet middle-aged.
Only a handful of portrait artists were working in seventeenth-century New England. No pictures or verbal descriptions remain of Nathaniel or Grizzell, if they ever existed. But a good idea of how they carried themselves, how they dressed, and how they behaved toward each other—or thought they should—can be pieced together from contemporary sources. In their world, costume and comportment not only spoke of social status; they also articulated a person’s inner spiritual state. As the royalist poet Francis Quarles wrote, “The Body is the Shell of the soul, Apparel is the Husk of that Shell, the Husk often tells you what the Kernel is.”