Mistress Bradstreet

by Charlotte Gordon

  In something of a panic, Dudley and Winthrop sent a ship back to England for more supplies, hoping it would return in time for winter. They bought as much corn as they could from the Indians, but still the fragile settlement in Charlestown was beginning to look as though it might fail. The central problem was dehydration. The English distrusted water in general, relying largely on cider and beer to quench their thirst. If no ale was available, then they would drink water only when they could see its source. Thus, although Charlestown had plenty of wells and ponds, it had only one spring, and this sole trickle was not enough to supply the needs of more than one hundred thirsty, dirty men and women.

  Had it not been for the miraculous appearance of the eccentric William Blackstone, a pious dissenter who had come to New England in 1623, the settlers might never have survived. Blackstone was thirty-five and lived across the Charles River on a hilly peninsula named Shawmut, or Tri-mountain. When Dudley and Winthrop visited his house, they were astonished to find a large, roomy manor rather than a rudimentary pioneer structure. Unlike the other planters’ homes they had visited, Blackstone’s had even attained some degree of elegance. He had imported an impressive library of 186 books and had planted a thriving apple orchard, having meticulously saved the seeds from each of the English apples he had brought with him. Generously, he offered to share his resources with the Puritan settlers, although he must have known that the peace of his pristine hermitage would be ruined once he opened his doors.7

  But Blackstone was a man of integrity and put the good of his fellow human beings before his own comfort. Believing the clear water that flowed abundantly in Shawmut would cure their ills, he soon convinced Winthrop that the group should move. Undoubtedly, the governor also liked the fact that Shawmut had three steep slopes, a symbol, perhaps, for the “city on a hill” that he had visualized in his sermon on Christian charity.

  Dudley, however, balked. He did not think Charlestown should be their permanent home, but he would not budge simply because Winthrop wanted him to. He had settled in Charlestown and that was that. In the two months that his family had lived there, his servants had made substantial progress in constructing a house, and he saw no reason to start over again. At any rate, he believed that the further dispersal of the colonists was a bad idea; Simon, of course, sided with his father-in-law.

  Winthrop ignored Dudley’s protests, and by the beginning of September, all of the governor’s supplies had been ferried across the Charles River. He was joined by many followers, including the group’s minister, John Wilson. Having sworn their congregational oath to participate in the congregation’s worship services, the Dudleys and Bradstreets would have to cross the Charles using Samuel Maverick’s ferry service, which was not inexpensive. As a further blow, Winthrop and his friends decided to name their new settlement Boston in honor of Cotton and St. Botolph’s. To a man of Dudley’s temperament, it must have seemed like further effrontery on Winthrop’s part to claim this name for his settlement. “Boston” had always felt like Dudley’s town, and Botolph’s had been his church, not Winthrop’s.

  Anne was not surprised by either her father’s stubbornness or his resentment of Winthrop; she had been long aware of his simmering disagreements with the governor. Still, the squalor, disease, shortage of food, and lack of privacy in Charlestown made the settlement at Boston look increasingly appealing, although no one was having an easy time across the river either. Arbella’s widower, Isaac Johnson, who had probably moved to be near Winthrop, had sickened. By the end of September, Dudley and his family received the bad news that he, too, had died.8 As one of the leaders of the expedition, Johnson left behind a group of distraught settlers who felt rudderless without his guidance. One of the “yeomen” wrote to his father, “God hath taken away the cheifest stud in the land, Mr Johnson & the Lady Arabella his wife which was the cheiffeste man of estate in the land & one that would have done most good.”9

  As the fall days lengthened, conditions grew steadily worse. The poorer people suffered most, as their bark wigwams and cloth tents proved to be woefully inadequate against the frost. On Christmas Eve, a severe drop in temperature terrified everyone. Anne and her family were fortunate to have a fireplace in their “great house,” and they huddled around it, praying for the weather to relent.

  Although the daily “injuries” from “cold and wet” and hunger dominated everyone’s thinking, there was another concern that prevented anyone from feeling, even momentarily, any sort of peace. Reports had come that the French were planning an attack on the tiny settlements.10 Resentful of the English claims to New England, they had already allied themselves with a few of the neighboring Indian tribes and had issued warnings about the spread of English settlers. These threats deepened the Puritans’ sense of being vulnerable. Both Dudley and Winthrop felt that they should be building a fort to which all of the colonists could retreat.11 But such an ambitious goal was impossible owing to the weakened condition of the community. Instead the settlers would have to pray for deliverance not only from their physical privations but also from their foes.

  During this first winter, even Dudley began to lose some of his optimism. He was ready to leave Charlestown and find a new place to live. Not that he ever would have considered giving up or returning to England, but life in Massachusetts was proving to be far more arduous than he had anticipated. Later he would complain that he had chosen to expose his family to the dangers of America because the advance party (Endecott, Higginson, and crew) had sent “too large commendations of the Country and the commodities thereof.”12

  For Anne it was something of a mixed blessing to witness her father’s discouragement. On the one hand it might at last be possible for him to empathize with her unhappiness. On the other hand, without his sense of certainty, life in America must have felt even more desperate. Despite her summertime vow, she may have secretly desired to follow the coward’s path back to England, since much of her early writing is saturated with her nostalgia for the Old World.

  Anne was not alone in longing for England. More than two hundred members of their original group fled home that winter. Although they faced financial ruin upon return and, for some, religious persecution, anything must have appeared better than staying on in America, which seemed like a death warrant. As one desperate son wrote his father, “I think that in the end if I live it must be by my leaving, for we do not know how long this plantation will stand.”13

  Anne’s father loudly sneered at those who had left. To the Puritans the fact that the voyage back to England was often more dangerous than the trip over proved that God was on their side and was intent on punishing deserters. Pirates attacked the Charles, the Success, and the Whale; the Ambrose was almost demolished in the same battle. A few years later, the Mary and Jane sank before she reached England. Winthrop took care to record that “of those that went back in the ships . . . many died by the way and after they were landed, and others fell very sick and low.”14

  Dudley helped institute hard measures to suit the hard times. Fearing that the mission was in danger, he resorted to his fail-proof method for survival: hunting out sinners and exacting retribution for any wrongdoings. He commanded people to report the misdeeds of their neighbors to the authorities, simultaneously urging Winthrop and the other leading men to take fast and cruel action against these culprits. In many ways this severity worked to hold the colony together. If you spoke against the authorities, you could face expulsion from the “plantations”—a punishment that could mean death by wolves, wild boars, Indians, starvation, or bitter storms. One hired servant named Ratcliffe was beaten and sent out into the wilderness for “foul, scandalous invectives against our church and government.”15 Needless to say, most people thought twice before they criticized their leaders.

  There were not, however, many instances of this kind of harsh penalty during that first winter. Instead, criminals were locked into “cages” for their neighbors to gawk at; others were whipped, forced into hastily constructed
stocks, or made to wear signs advertising their malfeasance. Exile was largely a last resort and still figured more as a threat than an actuality.

  But even vigilant enforcement of the laws could not seem to stop the Puritans’ God from hurling one storm after another onto the colony’s crouching huts and wigwams. To a population already suffering from poor nutrition, the governor issued an order for “fasts.” Perhaps a demonstration of heartfelt penance would appease the wrath of the Lord; it would also conserve their scarce food.

  In the midst of these difficult times, while everyone battled hunger, cold, and the bleakness of the landscape, Anne wept over a hidden sorrow.16 Despite the fact that she and Simon were at last able to share a bed again and could seek comfort from each other, she was not pregnant.

  To Anne the thought that she might not bear a baby was more grievous than the prospect of starvation, illness, or being swept into the sea by a January storm. The inability to conceive or, for that matter, to produce a healthy child was to the Puritan mind a sure sign of God’s displeasure. No matter how hard she had prayed or how strenuously she had scoured her conscience and tried to mend her ways, Anne had remained barren for two full years. Anne’s lack of a baby brought shame to Simon as well. Neighbors might whisper that he was unable to perform his husbandly duties. In 1639, one childless woman would complain that a strange man “offered to put his hands under her coats [clothes] & sayd . . . because her husband was not able to give her a great belly he would help him.”17

  That Anne was undernourished, weak, and exhausted (and that many others were dying) didn’t seem legitimate reasons for her lack of fertility. An empty womb could only be divine condemnation of her spiritual failings. Undoubtedly she eagerly entered into the frequent penitential fasts her father and Winthrop called for. Perhaps if she could degrade herself satisfactorily, God’s wrath would melt away and she would find herself with child. Yet, by the end of January it was clear that Anne and all the other settlers were on the verge of collapse. As Dudley remarked, “The Lord would not yet be depricated,” or satisfied.18 Certainly Anne showed no sign of conceiving. She was barely alive.

  BY JANUARY OF 1631 illness, deprivation, and exhaustion had taken their toll on the settlers. At least two hundred people had died, Dudley exclaimed, “so low hath the Lord brought us!” And yet, in the midst of this kind of horror, where each death felt like a blow to the colony’s chances of survival, when Dudley felt that they had “endur[d] much [and should] be pitied in the sickness and mortality of our people,” still he rallied and declared that

  they who survived were not discouraged, but bearing God’s corrections with humility and trusting in his mercies, and considering how after a greater ebb he had raised up our neighbors at Plymouth, we began again in December to consult about a fit place to build a town upon.

  They referred to this as-yet imaginary settlement (“a mile East from Watertown, near Charles River”) as New Towne, although later it would be renamed Cambridge.19 During the hour of their anguish, it was inspiring to dream of a fresh start.

  At the same time that he promoted the idea of a halcyon future, Dudley continued to tally problems, including a careful accounting of the financial losses of the “undertakers,” the men who, like himself, had helped sponsor the emigration to America. Fortunately, Puritanism offered comfort here—fiscal disaster for the sake of the cause was a testimony to faith and courage.20

  Weakened as they might feel by their sufferings, Dudley and his friends were rarely seen as such by their neighbors, whose transgressions they continued to monitor vigilantly. Indeed, one prominent disturber of the peace, Thomas Morton, a gunrunning fur trader, soon discovered how fierce they could be.

  Morton had lived along the shores of New England for more than five years. He had built his home south of Shawmut, or Boston, midway between the Pilgrims and the newly arrived Puritans. Shockingly, he declared that he had come to America to get rich and have fun. He had no interest in the religious solemnities of his neighbors and found the country beautiful—a kind of playground for adventurous English gentlemen. He rejoiced in the “dainty fine round rising hillocks, delicate fair large plaines, sweet crystal fountains, and clear running streams.” All in all, Morton declared, “the land to me seems paradise.”21

  Naturally, anyone who was unhappy with the strictness of either Puritan or Pilgrim rule raced to Morton’s home on “Merry mount.” At Morton’s outrageous parties, young men, Indians, and truant servants—men and women—mingled happily together, drinking mug after mug of free ale and wine, shouting, dancing, copulating, and mocking the stiffness of their sober fellows to the north and south.

  Long before Winthrop and Dudley had arrived, the Pilgrims had been horrified at what was going on so near the sanctity of their little settlement. Captain Miles Standish and a band of the faithful had set forth for Merry Mount with all the wrath of an advancing army. When they arrived, they found Morton and his comrades carousing half-naked in the grass and singing a little ditty: “Drink and be merry, merry, merry boys; / Let all your delight be in the Hymen’s joys.” After hearing a few lines of this chorus, Standish and his fellow Pilgrims could bear it no longer. They “stood at defiance” and waved their firearms, shouting that they would render Morton’s home “a woeful mount and not a merry mount.”22

  This was exactly the sort of tumult that Morton relished, and when the Pilgrims mounted a charge, a rollicking slapstick affair ensued. Morton and his men were too drunk to put up much of a fight and staggered around as though their guns were too heavy to lift. The Pilgrims’ historian, Governor Bradford, wrote that Captain Standish and his men “could get nothing but scoffs and scorns from [Morton]” although he did threaten Standish (whom Morton had nicknamed “Shrimp,” for his short stature) with his carbine.23

  Morton’s devil-may-care attitude, however, could not protect him from the Pilgrims’ determination to ship him out of America. They dumped him onto the next vessel back to England. Undaunted, he cropped up again the very next spring and in 1628 moved back into Merry Mount to renew his “mirthful” activities. Within months of his return, he had begun to sell guns to the Indians, alienating all the other settlers, Pilgrims or no, and then infuriating the Indians themselves by regularly cheating them.

  Dudley and Winthrop could not tolerate such a character so near their settlements. Morton was “a proud insolent man,” Dudley said, who had committed “injuries” against both the English and the Indians.24 Clearly his immoral and chaotic behavior was corroding the purity they had hoped to achieve in America; maybe he was the reason God was dealing them a harsh winter. Far more determined than the Pilgrims, the Puritan leaders made sure to punish Morton within sight of both the offended Indians and the settlers, binding his hands, burning his house down, and “set[ting] his feet in bilboes [chains].” After they were through, they sent him back, once again, to the Old World, and this time he stayed put for ten years.25

  The man’s spirit was broken for good. When Morton did return to America, he was a feeble, half-mad old man. Ruthless to the end, Winthrop and Dudley did not relent; they threw him immediately into prison and showed no compunction when Morton complained that he was “laid in irons to the decaying of his limbs.” When at last they released him, it was only after seizing all of his valuables and property. Morton retreated to Maine, where he died two years later, “poor and despised,” according to a still-angry Winthrop.26

  Their victory over Morton marked a turning point for the leaders of Massachusetts Bay. They had succeeded where the Pilgrims had failed and were now the most powerful governing force in New England. With Arbella dead, Anne and her mother were clearly the principal women in the land, and they had to endure all the pressure and scrutiny that came with this position. While in England there had always been countesses and duchesses, queens and baronesses, now there was no buffer at all. The Dudleys, Bradstreets, and Winthrops were at the top of the social ladder.

  Accordingly, they had to learn quickly ho
w to become a ruling class: how to make the decisions, set examples, provide for the poor, and inspire hope when almost everyone else despaired. Whatever hardship or grief she might feel, Anne still had to help support the other colonists whenever they faced setbacks.

  Despite the importance of her position, Anne was in no danger of becoming arrogant; since she could not become pregnant, it seemed clear she was a wretched sinner. But like the other settlers who survived, she was also discovering an untapped ore of courage. They would later name this first winter “the starving time,” calling those who did not die the “seasoned” ones. As with the sea voyage, these months of hardship became a rite of passage and a bond among those who had made it through.

  That February the cold weather finally relented and the ship that Winthrop and Dudley had sent back to England, the Lyon, sailed into the harbor laden with fresh supplies from Bristol. Immediately, Anne’s father regained his optimistic vigor. “If any godly men, out of religious ends, will come over to help us in the good work we are about,” he crowed, “I think they cannot dispose of themselves nor of their estates more to God’s glory, and the furtherance of their own reckoning.”27 Their supplies would last until the next harvest. It was time to turn their attention toward building New Towne.

  New Towne’s inland location was attractive to men like Dudley because of the Puritans’ fear of European attack. Great capitals (and this is what they hoped New Towne was going to become) were always built along navigable rivers, well away from the ocean. Rome, Paris, London, and Antwerp were all good examples, and the Virginia colonists had followed the same logic in their choice of Jamestown. Accordingly, most people thought that Charlestown and Boston could only be “frontier towns.” Better to dwell “further among the Indians” than be exposed to “the fury of malignant adversaries, who might pursue them” from across the Atlantic.