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Boston - cover

 

Book Proposal

by Errol Lincoln Uys

 

 

 

BOSTON - BOOK ONE

 

The Beaver

 
 
 I

1623 - 1638

 

 

In September 1623, on the final leg of a voyage from England, the one hundred and forty ton Katherine is battered by storms off the coast of Massachusetts, its crew in a life and death struggle to keep the ship off the rocks of Nahant.

Aboard are two men who hail from Horncastle, a town in the Lincolnshire wolds equidistant from Lincoln and Boston. Besides a common birthplace, the pair couldn’t be more different.

William Blaxton, son of Horncastle’s minister, was born in 1595 and attended grammar school before going to Emmanuel College on a scholarship granted by the Earl of Lincoln. He earned the degree of Bachelor of Arts and in 1619 was made a deacon and priest. A pale, rather tall young man, Reverend Blaxton is always in canonical black, seldom smiling, his brow deeply furrowed.

Adam Trane’s roots go back to the thirteenth century when the first Trane crept out of the Wildmore Fens and infested Horncastle. For centuries, the Tranes have been in the horse business never far from the stables or farrier’s yard, oftentimes just a trot away from the gallows.

Eighteen-year-old Adam has a large head, straight back and large feet inherited from his Trane ancestors. His figure is small and robust, not unlike the Wildmore ponies bred for the Nottinghamshire coal pits. When not working with horses, Adam was in the fens poaching wildfowl and pilfering fodder on the Earl of Lincoln’s property. Twice in his eighteen years Adam has come perilously close to sharing the fate of Nick Trane and Ned Trane, two uncles hanged for stealing sheep.

Trane is Reverend Blaxton’s indentured servant. He has already proved a poor bargain for his master, brawling with sailors and “attempting uncleanes” with a female servant, for which Katherine’s captain called for ten strokes with a cat-o’-nine tails. Mr. Blaxton agreed with the punishment but took no pleasure in seeing his servant thrashed. The young woman coupled freely with others, including the bo’sun who wielded the cat. She was to be ducked, the block reeved and ready, but the reverend begged mercy for this Magdalene, a cheery creature going by the name of RECOMPENSE WEST.

As the Katharine struggles to make land in the heavy weather, one passenger braves the storm on deck casting his eyes on a familiar shore he thought he would never see again.

WAPIKICHO, White Crane is one of twin sons of TASAWIN, Feather-Walker, a sachem of the Massachusett, “People at the Hill of Arrowhead Stone.” A tall, well-formed young man with intense black eyes, WAPIKICHO has been known to play the jester, a merry joker even in the worst of times; his brother WITAWAMET, White Eagle, was always by nature quiet and sober. Every female in the clan looked up to their mother, CHITANAWOO, Strong and Bold, a woman of parts and character.

The twins have a sister, PEMOLINI, Ever-Beloved, three years older and plump as a partridge, married to a Frenchman, CHIKAWANKA JACK, Porcupine Jack.  – Or so they were when Wapikicho last saw them, for it’s been ten years since he was taken from these shores and has no knowledge of the family he left behind.

 

****

Ten years past, in the summer of 1613 Tasawin and his band of three hundred left their winter camp on the Charles River and headed for the coast and a site at Sha-um-ut, “Near the Little Neck,” a wooded peninsula dominated by a mountain with three rising hills. The clan camped on a shelf of land overlooking a canoe landing where in the far distant future other inhabitants will throng, raucous, bustling Scollay Square.

The summer Feast of Green Corn, where the first kernels are offered to Cantantowwit, Great Spirit, climaxed with a ball game played between rival bands, the goals a mile apart on sands swept even as a board. Wapikicho and Witawamet were champions of the Shawmut, their strongest challenge from the band of Nanepashemet, “New Moon.”

One player in Nanepashemet’s squad excited special interest: Jacques le Havre, one of five men who survived a shipwreck at Cape Cod. Captured by the Wampanoag, they were passed along to other tribes and bartered for as curiosities. Two died in the hands of their captors. Twenty-seven-year-old Jacques, a ship’s gunner, found a kind master in Nanepashemet.

At the Feast of Green Corn, Chikawanka-Jack, “Porcupine Jack,” so named for the spiky bristles on his chin, leapt to his feet for a dance with plump Pemoleni. To the castaway’s delight, Tasawin saw his daughter’s joy and bought the Frenchman from Nanepashemet for a fat beaver tail and a brass farthing found on a beach.

In September 1614, Tasawin and Wapikicho went to trade for wampum with the Narragansett. On the journey back to Shawmut, they halted at Wampanoag village of Patuxet, where they found an English ship lying offshore.

Captain Thomas Hunt sailed from England the previous April with Captain John Smith, exploring the coast of “New England,” as Smith called these lands finding nowhere more favored than “the country of the Massachusett, which is the paradise of all these parts . . .The seacoast shows you all along large cornfields and great troops of well-proportioned people.”

At Patuxet, Hunt lured twenty-seven of his well-proportioned hosts aboard his ship for the slave market of Malaga, Spain, Tasawin and Wapikicho among the kidnapped Indians. Father and son were separated at Malaga. Tasawin was sold to a knight of Malta; Wapikicho went to a monastery in Seville. A month later word came that the Maltese ship was lost at sea.

Wapikicho’s life as a slave began gently enough with the Franciscans. Then he passed into the hands of Dom Duarte Oviedo, an Oporto wine merchant who owned “pieces” from Africa and Brazil and wanted to add an exotic New England specimen to his pens. Wapikicho, jester of his family, did little that pleased Dom Duarte and was frequently beaten or locked up in the triple stocks. One night he escaped aboard a vessel that cleared the Duoro thinking he was bound for Massachusetts Bay. Instead, he landed in the heart of London, half-naked and drunk from a cask of port he broached.

Wapikicho stumbled into the arms of Master Thomas Tucker, a bibulous devotee of street theater who decked him out in paint and feathers and presented him to the mob of London. Master Tucker brought two American princesses to the show, in reality wild Irish girls with bronzed faces initially terrified by Wapikicho. His dancing partners soon found much to admire in the lost savage and took turns to make him feel at home in the city, letting him roger them night after night.

Spotted by the London agent of Sir Ferdinando Gorges who paid Master Tucker handsomely for his star performer, Wapikicho was finally given a chance to return home: “You speak our language. When we go to the Massachusett, you will talk for us.”

Aboard the Katharine, Wapikicho’s excitement is tempered by fear. At Sir Ferdinando’s house, he’d heard a man who returned from New England speak of a Great Sickness: “Such a mortal stroke, the savages died like rotten sheep . . . There are but a small number living, so that the place is made so much more fit for the English nation to inhabit.”

 

****

The Katharine carries settlers for a new plantation led by Captain Robert Gorges, Ferdinando’s son. The ship’s course is set for Shawmut, but crosswinds force the vessel to the bottom of the bay. They finally land at Wessagusset, site of a former settlement by a London adventurer, Thomas Weston. Abandoned six months before, Wessagusset’s rude log houses provide shelter for the newcomers.

Wapikicho is impatient to find his family, but only when the landing is complete will Captain Gorges allow him to leave with an escort. Other natives returned to these shores have tricked their sponsors and run away for good. Wapikicho’s escort is made up of three armed men, plus Reverend Blaxton and his servant.

The boy from the wild fens of Lincolnshire is unsure of his footing in New England’s “howling wilderness.” Adam carries a rusty dirk and a stout piece of timber, as they march toward Blue Hills and the Indian village of Massachusetts Field.

Reverend Blaxton shows untrammeled delight in the “New Eden,” his tunic flying as he races along behind Wapikicho. To Adam, the Indians are “Tartars,” and just as dangerous.

The Englishmen get a chill reception from Chickataubut, great sachem of the Massachusett. The sachem won’t forgive the English for desecrating his mother’s grave: Settlers from New Plymouth stole the bearskins that covered the sepulcher and trampled on offerings left for the Manitou.

Wapikicho’s joy at finding the wigwam of his mother, Chitanawoo, is short-lived when he learns that what he feared is true: the Great Sickness carried away most of the Shawmut clan.

His brother Witawamet died only six months before, though Chitanawoo is vague about the circumstances of her son’s death. “Ask the Wotawenagee,” is all she tells Wapikicho. The English settlers take this Massachusett word to be “Good Men,” until they learn its true meaning: “Cut-Throats.”

 

****

Chitanawoo refuses to talk about Witawamet but tells Wapikicho how the end came at Shawmut. The first blow was not from disease but the Abnaki (known also as Tarratines.) Late summer 1615, Abnaki war parties penetrated Massachusetts Bay and cut a bloody swath across the islands toward Shawmut. In the absence of Tasawin, Chitanawoo led the defense of the peninsula, no ally braver than her son-in-law Chikawanka Jack. Jacques held a barricade at the Little Neck against a horde of Abnaki successfully beating off the attack.

The following year, the raiders returned with devastating force. Jacques was slain and Witawamet taken captive. He escaped from an Abnaki village in mid-winter and was lost in the Lakes of the Clouds, the White Mountains. He crawled into the cave of Oshuam, half-dog, half-wolf. The pair made a truce and stayed together through winter, surviving on roots and tubers and small animals trapped by Witawamet. When spring came, Witawamet started for Shawmut, Old Dog at his side.

Witawamet’s spirit soared at the sight of the three hills of his home. He found a canoe on the banks of the Charles, beckoned Old Dog climb in and paddled toward the landing place.

Not a single plume of smoke from his people’s fires. Had the Abnaki raids begun early this year? Did something else delay his people’s trek from their winter camp?

At the muddy cove, Witawamet and Old Dog discovered the truth. Wherever they looked, they saw the dead. Not the bloody work of Abnaki but the plague brought by men from Europe.

Witawamet found Pemoleni’s body in his mother’s wigwam but no sign of the others. He climbed frantically up the mountain and searched to the horizon, observing not a single canoe, not a soul on the islands. He climbed down and was near the spring on the western slope when he heard frantic barking.

Old Dog had found the only survivors of the Great Sickness: Chitanawoo and Jacques Petit, the child of Pemolini and Porcupine Jack.

 

****

In November 1623, Adam Trane causes a catastrophe that almost reduces the settlement of Governor William Bradford and his Plymouth brethren to ashes.

Adam and his master are in Robert Gorges’s party when he goes to Plymouth to hold a council with the Separatist leaders. Bradford reluctantly acknowledges the lieutenant governor’s authority while privately considering Gorges “a rash young man whose folly and distemper will bring trouble on himself and ourselves too.”

Wapikicho makes a gruesome discovery at Plymouth. Impaled on a pole is the bloody head of his brother, Witawamet, severed by Cut-Throats at Wessagusset.

Reverend Blaxton considers the Indians “poor silly lambs” he is called by God’s providence to redeem. He confronts Miles Standish, mercenary commander of Plymouth, “a man of very small stature, yet of a very hot and angry temper.”

Rumors of an uprising sent Standish and eight men to Thomas Weston’s plantation six months earlier. They invited the war chiefs Witawamet and Pecksuot, a third warrior and a seventeen-year-old boy to dine with them in a settler’s cabin. Standish and his men stabbed the three warriors to death. The boy they hanged in sight of his friends.

Standish doesn’t deny the massacre and boasts about an indescribable number of wounds Witawamet received before he succumbed. “The bloodthirsty creatures are devoted vassals of the devil,” Standish roars at Blaxton. “I will raise the Lord’s terrible swift sword to strike them or any other enemy who threatens our peace.”

When the Gorges party heads back to Wessagusset, they march off without Adam Trane, a sore disappointment to his master who believes his servant has run away.

Adam is aboard the Katharine anchored off Plymouth and bound for Virginia. He is below decks locked in the embrace of his earlier love. – Recompense West’s owner is shipping her to Jamestown where planters will pay a pretty penny for a hard-working girl. – When the November nights turn frigid, Adam and Recompense go ashore with members of Katharine’s crew and bed down in the house of a fisherman, an old sinner marooned among the saints.

On November 5, Guy Fawkes Day, the roistering seamen make a great fire in the fisherman’s house. Adam and his Eve bed down next to the warm hearth. Adam throws on more and more fuel, hotter and hotter, until the fire breaks out of the chimney and ignites the thatch. The blaze consumes four houses and threatens the brethren’s common store before it is extinguished.

Adam slinks out of Plymouth taking the path back to Wessagusset with an Indian who carries messages to Gorges. Recompense West is rescued from the inferno by one of the saints, Brother Garrick Stone, who buys her indentures for seven years, beginning a long and terrible ordeal for the godly covenanter.

 

****

A brutal winter sees the Wessagusset settlers battling sickness and boredom, Robert Gorges is in failing health, his gentlemen companions stricken with ennui.

In spring 1624, Gorges and his friends return to England, leaving the settlement in the care of Reverend William Morrell and his assistant, Blaxton. Morrell shares his fellow cleric’s delight in the natural wonders of New England but has few good words for the inhabitants:

                  “They’re wondrous cruel, strangely base and vile

                   Quickly displeased and hardly reconciled.

                   Themselves they warm, their ungirt limbes they rest

                   In straw, and houses, like to sties.”

 

Morrell sails back to England in 1625 leaving Blaxton at Wessagusset as Gorges’ agent and minister of the dwindling colonists.

The reverend’s incorrigible servant adapts to the wild fens of New England, proving himself useful to his master in decoying ducks and geese in the marshes and tramping up-country with a wild bunch of young Indian hunters. He is even friendlier with their sisters who find “Hopokan” – “Strong Pipe” – a free and eager lover.

Nineteen-year-old Wapilanee, a forest beauty with noble features, long hair and black eyes shows no interest in Hopokan. Wapilanee’s family perished in the Great Sickness. She lives with her aunt, sachem Chitanawoo, and nine-year-old Jacques Petit, a gangly long-boned fellow with all the makings of the boisterous Frenchman who fathered him. The little ‘Tartar’ attaches himself to Adam instinctively smelling out a fellow rabble-rouser.

When Blaxton visits Massachusetts Fields, no one is more attentive to the gentle Englishman than this dark-eyed doe. William writes poetry for the nymph and crafts laurel wreaths for her sweet head, but the only longing he feels is to see Wapilanee crowned as the first convert in New England. In letters to Sir Ferdinando, Blaxton decries the Separatists’ failure to Christianize a single native as a grave neglect of a sacred duty.

Wapilanee takes William on an expedition from Blue Hills across the narrow neck of land to the abandoned Shawmut peninsula. – The early English settlers adopt the French name for the peninsula, Trimontaine, later Tremont. – William discovers the copious freshwater spring on the western slope of the highest hill and delights in a location with cool breezes, blueberry and blackberry bushes and champion meadow just beyond.

 

****

In summer 1625, a new group of planters and forty servants settle three miles north of Wessagusset at Mount Wollaston, as they call the plantation in honor of their captain, Richard Wollaston.

The real leader is Thomas Morton, born a sportsman, bred a lawyer, ingrained an adventurer. Morton first came to New England in 1622, a member of the earlier Wessagusset settlement. His three-month stay left an indelible impression: “In mine eye ’twas Nature’s Masterpiece – her chiefest magazine of all. If this land be not rich, then is the whole world poor!”

He found the Massachusett Indians “more full of humanity than the Christians. The more savages the better quarter, the more Christians the worser quarter I had.”

In spring 1626, Wollaston left for Virginia with fifteen servants. He sold their indentures and ordered his second-in-command, Rasdall, to bring fifteen more. With only ten servants remaining and the plantation threatened with extinction, Thomas Morton strikes the first blow for freedom in New England.

“Will you be transported to Virginia to be sold like slaves or will you stay at Mar-re-Mount, my lads? Lusty, brave and free as the air you breathe?”

A great huzzah seals Morton’s declaration of independence and the birth of Mar-re-Mount, as he re-christens Mt. Wollaston.

Adam is at the meeting, his huzzahs loudest of all. He is twenty-one now, still a servant in name to Blaxton though has long gone his own way while hunting and trading furs for his master.

In the winters, William taught him to read and write but Adam far prefers the chatter in the wigwams to the mysteries of Homer and Pliny.

Trane becomes one of Mar-re-Mount’s liveliest adventurers, his craft as woodsman making him Morton’s trusted lieutenant.

Mar-re-Mount prospers. Its Indian allies serve as hunters and guides in the quest for beaver. Indian women gather sassafras and sarsaparilla. At one time, five ships crowd the small bay off Squantum Head coming to trade with Morton.

The Plymouth brethren grow beside themselves with envy heavily indebted as they are to their London investors. The Separatists also see Mar-re-Mount as a mecca for non-believers, with a Lord of Misrule who maintains a School of Atheism.

In April 1627, Morton and his acolytes prepare their wildest spree yet. They fell the tallest pine in a nearby forest and haul it to the summit of Mar-re-Mount. Garlanded with spring flowers, the eighty-foot spar is topped with a pair of antler horns and raised aloft for the ancient revels of May.

“Mine Host of Merry Mount” composes a drinking song for his guests:

               Give to the nymph that’s free from scorn

               No Irish stuff nor Scotch over-worn.

               Lasses in beaver coats, come away,

              You’ll be welcome to us night and day.

 

Reverend Blaxton is at the festival, the ancient gods holding no fears for the classical scholar. Morton is a regular guest at Wessagusset often staying overnight with the reverend, who is the only other educated man in those parts.

Chickataubut and his people come to the Maypole from Massachusetts Fields. Morton’s friendship has gone a long way toward dispelling the notion that all Englishmen are Cut-Throats.

In the middle of the revels, a heinous crime shatters the peace and threatens a bloodbath.

Thrush, a pockmarked brute with a cropped ear, the scum of London’s Rotherhithe Wharf, is with a party of sailors from the Prophet Daniel. He sees Wapilanee and Jacques Petit go to fetch lobsters impounded in a rock pool and follows the pair. Little Jacques fights desperately to save the girl but is smashed to the ground.

Thrush rapes Wapilanee on the beach below Squantum Head. When he goes to assault the girl a second time, she breaks free and flees toward the end of the promontory. Wapilanee, loveliest of the lasses in beaver coats, leaps to her death.

There’s an uproar at Mar-re-Mount. Adam Trane diffuses the crisis, swiftly mustering his warrior friends and plunging into the wilderness after Thrush.

They catch him on the long, narrow neck to Shawmut and summarily execute him. His right hand and mutilated ear are taken to Chickataubut as proof that the deed is done.

William Blaxton is shattered. For days, he sits alone at the spot known to this day as Chapel Rock where he mourns a flower lost forever. Adam tries to comfort his master but the reverend is inconsolable.

In May 1627, William asks Adam to perform one last service for him. Together, they pack up the reverend’s books and take cuttings from apple trees in his orchard. They load his belongings aboard a shallop and sail to the landing place at Sha-um-ut. William settles down alone next to the sparkling spring where his nymph danced for him.

 

****

Morton’s enemies find a pretext to destroy him with accusations of gunrunning through arming his Indian hunters. Arrested by Miles Standish, Morton watches soberly as “Captain Shrimp” and his men celebrate their victory. When they lie drunk, the Lord of Misrule escapes to his plantation.

Adam is the only stalwart at Morton’s side in the defense of Mar-re-Mount. The pair load four falconets and ready enough powder and shot to pepper Captain Shrimp’s men like geese on the wing.

While they wait, they fortify themselves with mugs of Amontillado. Adam is reeling when the attack comes, spills out of the doorway and runs into the sword of a Separatist slicing open his nose. It’s the only blood spilled in the Battle of Mar-re-Mount. Morton surrenders and is transported to England to face charges of selling guns to the Indians.

Adam witnesses the final blow against “Merry-Mount,” when John Endicott, magistrate of Naumkeag (Salem) orders that the Maypole be thrown down. He re-christens the polluted spot as Mount Dagon named for the idol of the Philistines that drove Samson to destroy their temple.

 

****

One evening in fall 1628, Blaxton watches a group of people head across the Neck on Shawmut peninsula. Eighteen months since William settled on the lower slopes of the hill of Trimontaine, he built his house with help from Chickataubut’s people.

William recognizes Chitanawoo walking proudly at the head of a small band of people that includes Jacques Petit. She orders a halt next to a pond filled with frogs, until now the reverend’s only companions. Leaving others to set up the wigwams, Chitanawoo heads up the hill to Blaxton’s house.

“No man should live alone,” Strong-and-Bold says simply.

Chitanawoo, last sachem of Shawmut, is home.

 

II

1629-1634

 

Nicholas Steele considers himself the luckiest man alive in England, when he lands at London docks in March 1629.

Six months earlier, Nicholas was ship’s factor in the Barbican, when Sallee pirates captured the bark on a run down to the Azores. The twenty-three-year-old faced a life of slavery on the Barbary Coast but for a ransom paid by his father.

Nicholas steps nimbly between the harlots in Cock Lane, his animated eyes picking out child cutpurses and footpads laying siege to Smithfield Market. A miasmic mist hangs over the Fleet, the rank waterway adrift with offal cast into it by Smithfield’s butchers. Daily, too, the river surrenders three or four bodies disposed of like so many human beasts.

Nicholas walks up Turnmill Street toward Clerkenwell Green where the Knights of St. John built their priory in the 12th century, the convent of St. Mary erected on the opposite side of the green. In 1381, Wat Tyler’s followers beheaded the Prior of St. John and left the vast pile in flames. Two centuries later the nunnery was confiscated. Clerkenwell continued as a papist refuge until three Catholics were hanged, drawn and quartered on the green.

In Nicholas Steele’s day, the district has become a haven for Puritans. At Coleman Street just to the south, the sect’s followers congregate at the Star tavern and in the Church of St. Stephen, where charismatic John Davenport walks a fine line between pulpit and prison.

Nicholas’s family is waiting to greet him at their house in St. John’s Lane. His father, Jeremiah Steele, fifty-two, is a cloth merchant and haberdasher. His mother, Agnes Steele, forty-five, is the daughter of a London apothecary. Nicholas is the middle of three sons. Richard, twenty-seven, works in the family business and is recently married. Thomas is twenty-two, a graduate of Cambridge University and a clerk in Clifford’s Inn.

Amid the joy at his homecoming, Nicholas discovers that the blow dealt his family by the Sallee pirates is disastrous. Jeremiah was part owner of Barbican, the loss of the ship and payment of his son’s ransom burdening him with debt. A calamity compounded by the rot in England itself, where King Charles I believes he has a divine right to plunder every subject’s purse.

Jeremiah and Agnes Steele are Puritans. Their sons share their faith in varying degrees. Thomas is most fervent. Richard and Nicholas hold a middle course: They accept Calvinism but still hope for internal reform of the Anglican Church from excesses of “bishops, bailiffs and bastards bringing ruin to England.”

 In September 1629, the Steeles attend a lecture at the Star tavern, where Isaac Johnson, a wealthy landowner of Boston, Lincolnshire and a founder of the Massachusetts Bay Company, comes to promote “a planting of New England.”

Swayed by Johnson’s arguments for the new colony, Jeremiah and Agnes and their three sons join other emigrants at Southampton in March 1630. In his farewell sermon, Rev. John Cotton poignantly calls on the settlers not to forget old England, “the wombe that bore you and gave you sucke.” Idlers on the docks have one word for those embarking: “cract-braines.”

The Steeles sail in the Arbella, the flagship of eleven vessels carrying nine hundred people. On April 8, 1630, Arbella finally sets sail followed by three consorts, Talbot, Ambrose and Jewel in scattered formation. In May, the fleet is battered by ten days of ferocious storms that blow out sails, create mayhem among animals tethered on the pitching decks and strike terror into the people below.

On the voyage, the Steeles live at close quarters with leaders of the expedition: Isaac Johnson and his wife, Lady Arbella, sister of the Earl of Lincoln; Thomas Dudley, deputy-governor; and John Winthrop, governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony.

At forty-two, the lord of Groton Manor, West Suffolk is seen by many as too old and too gentle for the task ahead. A graduate of Trinity College and member of Gray’s Inn, London in 1613, Winthrop served as an attorney in His Majesty’s Court of Wards and Liveries, a “rotten bench making money out of the misfortunes of widows and orphans.” Winthrop relinquished the post in disgust at the corruption he encountered.

Married at seventeen to Mary Forth, his first wife died eleven years later leaving six children. He lost his second wife on their first anniversary. A year later he married Margaret Tyndal, the great love of his life. There are eight living children, seven sons and a daughter. Three sons, including his first-born Henry, sail with him to New England. Margaret is expecting a child and is back at Groton Manor with the rest of the family, planning to follow John after the birth of the baby.

At Trinity College, “where the boys had a woman who was from chamber to chamber in the night,” Winthrop awoke to the Puritan ideal and began developing the profound sense of stewardship that will guide him in New England:

We must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us . . . We must delight in each other, make each other’s conditions our own . . . The Lord will be our God, and make us a praise and a glory, that men shall say of later plantations, ‘May the Lord make it like that of New England.’ “

Ten days before reaching land, Richard Steele’s wife, Mary, goes into labor. Arbella fires a shot to stay the Jewel on a tack ahead of them. A midwife ferried over from Jewel delivers Mary’s child safely.

On June 12, 1630, after seventy-six days at sea, Arbella drops anchor off Cape Ann, where the first to go ashore gather “a store of fine strawberries growing wild in the Promised Land.”

 

 

****

Five days after the landfall, Nicholas Steele is with Isaac Johnson in one of two exploratory parties sailing to Massachusetts Bay. His brother Thomas is in a second boat with Winthrop. The governor’s party rounds Shawmut and heads up the Mystic River. Isaac Johnson’s boatmen pull for the muddy cove on the north end of the peninsula.

At the ancient landing place, the solitary William Blaxton joyfully embraces his friend, Isaac Johnson, who was a fellow student at Emmanuel College, Cambridge.

Striding briskly from one end of Shawmut to the other, William leads Isaac and his party on a tour of his estate. At the pond below his house, he introduces the newcomers to Chitanawoo and her people, who prepare a feast of lobsters and venison for the visitors. No sooner do they sit down to dinner in Blaxton’s house, than they hear a tremendous hubbub that makes them grab their weapons.

Twelve Massachusett warriors stand outside with a stocky powerfully built fellow in a renegade’s dress. The man wears deerskin leggings and moccasins, a Spanish cuirass and a battered French helmet. He carries sword and snaphance but his weapon of choice is an Indian war club, its crescent shaft embellished with mother of pearl.

The “Indian” is twenty-five-year-old Adam Trane returning from a fur-trading expedition. At Adam’s side and just as ferocious looking is Jacques Petit, sixteen, already a giant like Porcupine Jack.

That night, while Johnson sleeps in the reverend’s house, Nicholas and the others camp below the stars, their bivouac under the branches of a great elm. Nicholas sits with Adam listening to his report of “Merry Mount.”

Thomas Morton is back in New England, Bradford’s charges against the Lord of Misrule dismissed, the adventurer returning to Nature’s Masterpiece and his role as a pox on the pious.

Johnson spends two days exploring the seven-hundred-and-eight-acre peninsula, impressed by the headland’s strong defenses and excellent springs at Blaxton’s house and elsewhere.

Isaac and Nicholas take leave of Blaxton on the shelf of land where the village of Sha-um-ut stood.

“When will you return to Trimontaine?” William asks, as Isaac bids farewell.

Tri-mon-taine . . .?” Isaac looks at the men setting the shallop’s sails. “The boat helper’s place?”

William knows instinctively what’s on Isaac’s mind. “St. Botolph’s Town?”

“Yes, my friend, not Trimontaine’— English ‘Boston.’”

In July, Winthrop makes his headquarters at Charlestown. The summer heat intensifies; fever and scurvy strike the malnourished settlers. Isaac Johnson sends Nicholas and twenty men across the estuary to Shawmut to begin a settlement. At a General Court in September, the name is officially changed to Boston.

At the same session, an “old planter” is hauled before Governor Winthrop. Thomas Morton is found guilty on new trumped up charges brought by old enemies like Endicott of Salem. The court sentences him to be put in the stocks, have his goods confiscated and his house burned. Morton sees the smoke rise above Mar-re-Mount from the Handmaid, a ship where he again awaits transportation to England. He takes up his pen to begin his tale of New English Canaan with a blistering attack on Governor Temperwell and his sect of “cruell Schismaticks.”

Winthrop moves to Shawmut peninsula in October fleeing the pestiferous air of Charlestown. By the middle of the month, one hundred and fifty people are living at Boston. The onset of winter finds them crowded into rude shacks and tents, in caves and cellars carved out of snake-infested hillsides. One colonist crawls into an empty barrel to escape the bone-chilling gales.

Two hundred settlers perish. Desperate survivors hammer at frozen mudflats to dig for mussels and clams. They throw themselves on the mercy of the Indians at the Frog Pond. Chitanawoo who has borne her share of suffering does whatever she can to help the English.

In a January blizzard, the Steeles watch in horror as their clay-daubed chimney bursts into flame and their house is destroyed. Adam Trane helps the family build an “English” wigwam. He takes Nicholas to the Massachusett hunting grounds. The food they bring back isn’t enough to save Jeremiah. The elder Steele dies in February 1631, one of scores to lie beside Isaac Johnson in the First Burying Ground.

 

****

The wretched winter claims the infant of Richard Steele and Mary, who sail back to England in spring, their branch of the family never to return to the colony.

Nicholas becomes a small trader buying directly from ships and selling to townsfolk and farmers spreading along the valleys of the Charles and the Mystic. From this small beginning comes the great trading house of Steele & Sons reaching across the oceans from Boston to the China Sea.  An enterprise that will span the centuries, too, to the boardroom of The Houqua Fund in State Street, Boston, venture capitalists of the 21st century.

Nicholas frequently crosses the bay to Noddles Island where Samuel Maverick, an “old planter” who came with Robert Gorges, holds a lively court behind a stockade armed with four “murtherers.” The twenty-eight-year-old Maverick is the richest trader on the coast. He owns three African slaves, one said to have been “a Queene of her Owne Countrey.” Stung by onerous taxes and the governing council’s attempts to monopolize Boston’s trade, Nicholas and Maverick join other merchants to fight for a free market, an early indicator of bigger battles to come.

Governor Winthrop has no more zealous watchdog than Thomas Steele, who sniffs out sumptuary offenders with one slash too many on a sleeve or fancy needlework embellishing a bonnet.

When the first tavern opens, Thomas cuts off tipplers at Cole’s “thrusting himself uninvited into a stranger’s company, and if the man calls for more burnt Madeira than he thinks he can soberly bear away, he countermands it and appoints the proportion beyond which the fellow cannot get one drop.”

Nicholas is on his toes around Thomas believing his brother won’t hesitate to have him thrown into the stocks for any error. It doesn’t stop Nicholas from patronizing Cole’s or tramping to a mud-walled shack on the westernmost of Boston’s hills, where two harlots from London’s Penny Lane are making a lively living in Puritan America.

 

****

Another lusty newcomer to the peninsula arrives not from England but nearby Plymouth:

Recompense West newly released from her yoke by Brother Garrick Stone and sent into the world with thirty shillings, a kyrtle of coarse woolen stuff and a blue bonnet.

Twenty-four-year-old Recompense is reunited with Adam Trane and falls joyfully back into sin with her Wildmore Tit.

Adam enjoys the full trust of the Massachusett sachem, Chickataubut. In March 1631, Trane arranges a meeting between Winthrop and Chickataubut, who dines at the governor’s table “as soberly as an Englishman.”

Governor Winthrop’s clerk is at the table and sees Adam as the equal of the heathens, “without faith, law or religion.”

Thomas’s vigilance is rewarded when he finds that Adam and Recompense are transgressing one of the burgeoning rules set for society. It’s not their fornication that damns them but a rule forbidding single men and women to live alone.

Adam pays a fine of £20. Recompense is stripped naked to the waist, lashed with twenty stripes and made to walk behind a cart in shame.

Reverend Blaxton takes Recompense into his house, where she stays until July 1633 when she marries Adam. They’re progenitors of the Tranes of Boston, who through the generations hark back to the wild boy of the fens and his love, always marching to a different drummer than proper Bostonians.

Blaxton personally resents the growing list of puritanical laws, including a ban against smoking a pipe in public, a small pleasure the bookish recluse enjoys. In 1634, the townspeople buy forty-four acres of William’s property that are laid out as a training field and cattle pasture, the future Boston Common. A year later, the reverend mounts a white ox and quits Shawmut peninsula for Narragansett Bay. He left England, he said, because he didn’t like the Lord Bishops and finds the rule of the Lord Brethren not one jot better.

 

****

Rumors of an Indian conspiracy rise periodically. The Massachusett are too few to pose a threat, but the southern Wampanoag, Narragansett and Pequot can field thousands of warriors. Nicholas is second-in-command of a militia company headed by master gunner John Underhill. Adam Trane and Jacques Petit enroll as scouts and interpreters.

In winter 1633/34, a smallpox epidemic rages in the Indian villages. Fifty-seven-year-old Chitanawoo, last sachem of the Shawmut, is an early victim. Chickataubut dies a week later at his village in Blue Hills. Only two English families are affected by the sickness prompting Winthrop to declare: “If God was not pleased with our inhabiting these parts, why did he drive out the native before us? And why does he still make room for us by diminishing them as we increase?”

Agnes Steele devotes herself to caring for victims entering the wigwams on Boston Common, separating the living from the dead and carrying them into the open. She enlists the help of Recompense West, the pair crossing the Neck to Blue Hills, where two-thirds of Chickataubut’s band succumbs. The stricken Jacques Petit owes his survival to Agnes.

Thomas sees the hand of God raised against the devil in New England, and it disturbs him to witness his mother nursing the savages, but he keeps silent for now.

When the epidemic passes, Agnes visits the Frog Pond on Boston Common, walking beside the shimmering pool. She senses the presence of Chitanawoo and upon on a moonlit night, catches sight too, of Oshuam, Old Dog, waiting patiently for his young master, Witawamet.

 

 

III

1634-1638

 

On a September day in 1634, Nicholas Steele is at the Town Dock, when the Griffin drops anchor from England. The ship brings Hannah Fletcher, a romping eighteen-year-old who within the year becomes Nicholas’s wife.

Another passenger landing this day will have a lasting effect on the Steele family: Anne Hutchinson, a prophet to her followers in Lincolnshire, is a minister’s daughter and skilled midwife. The forty-three-year-old Anne is married to William Hutchinson, a wealthy merchant. They have eleven children and occupy a house across from Governor Winthrop, who becomes Anne’s most determined detractor.

Agnes Steele is Anne’s first disciple in Boston, Agnes’s knowledge of the native’s pharmacopoeia bringing her to Hutchinson’s attention.

Their friendship alarms Thomas Steele. Winthrop’s watchdog fears the consequences of his mother’s association with “a haughty female, more bold than a man.” He is only echoing the prejudice of his friend, John Wilson, minister of First Church, a man of such piety that at Sunday meals all at his table are commanded to speak only of God or hold their tongues.

Another newcomer is equally unsettling to Winthrop:

Twenty-two year old Henry Vane, one of England’s brightest young sparks, has flowing locks and flashy clothes that make him the very image of a Puritan nightmare. Vane is nonetheless a visible saint come to “savor the power of religion in New Jerusalem.”

On Election Day in May 1636, Boston’s merchants sweep Henry into the governor’s seat, with John Winthrop relegated to be his deputy. Vane takes up office with pomp and splendor trooping down Cornhill to the meetinghouse with an honor guard of halberdiers. Fifteen ships in the harbor fire a salute, their captains rewarded with a roaring banquet in Cole’s ordinary.

 

****

On July 20, 1636, Adam is sailing to Narragansett Bay with fellow trader John Gallop, when they spy a pinnace riding off Block Island.

Indians crowd the vessel’s deck. When Adam and Gallop board with their men, they find the mutilated body of owner John Oldham. They slaughter all but two of the Indians and bind the pair with ropes: “Gallop being well acquainted with their skill to untie themselves, if two be together, threw one into the sea and let him drown.

Adam carries news of Oldham’s murder back to Boston. He is dispatched with an embassy to Canonicus and Miantonomo, Narragansett sachems to whom the Block Island Indians are subject. The sachems produce Oldham’s missing sons and return his goods. They reveal that two surviving assassins fled to the Pequots, who are the most feared tribe in New England.

The Narragansett reparations don’t forestall a punitive expedition against the Block Islanders. In August, Adam and Nicholas march in a twenty-six-man company led by Captain Underhill, “an eccentric soldier who generally went to excess in whatever he undertook.”

Forty Block Islanders resist the landing, one Indian killed before the rest flee. Disappointed by the failure to exterminate the natives, the soldiers destroy some dogs instead of men and burn the Indian settlements. On the mainland they attack a Pequot town, slay thirteen and plunder the wigwams and fields.

In three weeks, the Boston men return to their homes, “a marvelous providence of God that not a hair fell from any, nor any sick or feeble person among them.”

 

****

In winter 1636, Winthrop and his supporters rally against the Hutchinsonians, blocking the appointment of Anne’s brother-in-law, John Wheelwright, as First Church’s assistant teacher.

Winthrop’s next salvo is aimed at Governor Vane, the debate between them so painful to young Henry that he bursts into tears and offers his resignation. To Winthrop’s dismay, the General Court refuses to let Henry go until the regular annual election in May.

As the strife between the two factions grows, a day of fast and humiliation is kept on January 20, 1637. Invited to talk at Boston, Wheelwright illuminates Anne’s belief in a Covenant of Grace offering personal salvation through faith alone, not a covenant demanding godly deeds and total obedience to the elect.

A closed session of the General Court judges Wheelwright guilty of sedition and contempt. His sentence is also postponed until May, when Winthrop’s supporters expect to unseat Vane.

That February, Agnes Steele and Anne are called to the bedside of Mary Dyer, a milliner’s wife suffering excruciating pain with her third pregnancy in four years. An infant is stillborn two months before term, so deformed that the women hide the fetus from Mary.

They consult Reverend John Cotton, who gives the women tacit approval to bury the child near the great elm on Boston Common.

Thomas follows his mother and witnesses the internment. Agnes swears him to secrecy reminding Thomas of an ancient English custom that charges midwives with interring the stillborn “in such place as neither hog nor dog, nor any other beast may come unto it, and in such sort done, as it may not be found or perceived.”

 

****

Pequot raids kill thirty settlers, including John Tilley captured in sight of Fort Saybrook. Tilley’s hands and feet are cut off. He lives three days without his limbs and wins the admiration of his tormentors “because he cried not in his torture.”

Captain Underhill and his company march to Fort Saybrook where they’re joined by the Mohegan chief, Uncas, and sixty warriors. The Pequots – “Destroyers” – were originally known as Mohegans when they invaded southern New England. A year before the war, Uncas’s band broke from Sassacus, great sachem of the Pequots, and adopted the old name of Mohegans.

When the English question his loyalty, Uncas kills a party of Pequots and presents his allies with four decapitated heads. He also captures a spy of Chief Sassacus. At Fort Saybrook, the man’s legs are tied between two posts and he is torn limb from limb.

At dawn on May 26, 1637, the English attack the Pequot stronghold at Mystic. Nicholas and Underhill breach the stockade from the southwest. John Mason and his Connecticut men storm in on the northeast. Four hundred Pequots perish in one hour, most burned alive. Two Englishmen are killed and a third of their force wounded.

Adam and Jacques Petit are in the van, when the Pequots make their last stand at a swamp near New Haven. Sassacus and twenty followers seek refuge with the Mohawks. Awed by the violence of the Cut-Throats, no tribe offers the renegades sanctuary. Instead, the Pequot chief and his bodyguards are butchered. Sassacus’ head and the forty hands of his followers are delivered to army chaplain John Wilson, who carries the bloody trophies back to Boston.

On Boston Common, captive Pequot men, women and children are placed in holding pens next to Frog Pond. Most are given to English settlers as farm laborers and house servants. Fifteen men, three boys and a girl are chosen for transportation.

Nicholas Steele is appointed factor in a ship sailing to the Caribbean where the Pequots will be sold as slaves.

On the Common, the half-breed Jacques Petit moves stealthily as he crosses the pickets to the side of sixteen-year-old TANAWAKA, Little Cloud, the lone female held in the slave pen with her brother, MIKWEH, The Squirrel. At Mystic, Jacques pulled the girl out of a blazing wigwam.

Their love grows desperate with each hour that brings the girl closer to perpetual exile. Jacques appeals to Adam and Recompense to help him.

“I’ve thirty shillings from a saint of Plymouth,” says Recompense. It’s enough to buy one little Pequot devil!” They also arrange for Mikweh to stay behind when Nicholas sails for the Caribbean.

 

****

On Election Day, Henry Vane is ousted and Winthrop returned to the governor’s seat. In November, Anne Hutchinson is summoned before the General Court at Newtowne (Cambridge) to defend eighty-two “opinions” held as blasphemous.

Agnes and Anne make the journey to Cambridge on foot in an ice storm through woods still haunted by wolves. The women arrive half-frozen and exhausted. Anne faces Governor Winthrop and forty-eight male inquisitors in a barn-like meetinghouse. The black-coats sit on wooden benches, except their leader who has a desk and a chair with a cushioned seat. Anne who is expecting her fifteenth child is forced to stand throughout the two-day trial.

At the end of the hearing, Winthrop calls for a vote on Anne’s “delusions.” All but three magistrates and ministers vote in favor of banishment.

In March 1638, Anne is summoned to a second hearing in Boston, where among other sins, she’s accused of filling the minds of Boston’s young women with promiscuous opinions that open the door to free love.

In the meeting house, Thomas Steele is mortified to see his mother sitting on one side of Anne, and Mary Dyer, the milliner’s wife, on the other side. From ten in the morning until eight at night, Anne is subjected to harangues of the black-coats. When the hearing adjourns, she can barely walk by herself. She’s led to the house of John Cotton where her persecutors redouble their efforts to browbeat her into admitting her errors.

A week later, Anne returns to the meetinghouse to hear John Wilson’s ultimate condemnation of an “instrument of the Devil:”

In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ and in the name of the Church, I cast you out and deliver you up to Satan . . . I do account you from this time forth to be a Heathen and a Publican.”

Thomas is standing with Winthrop when Anne leaves the church with Agnes and Mary Dyer. The governor doesn’t recognize Mary and asks Thomas who she is.

“The woman who bore the monster,” Thomas blurts out. His revelation exposes his mother’s involvement in the secret burial of the stillborn child.

Five days after Anne leaves Massachusetts, Winthrop and Thomas supervise the exhumation of Martha Dyer’s daughter. The governor describes the infant in his diary:

It had a face, but no head, and the ears stood upon the shoulders and were like an ape’s. It had no forehead but over the eyes four horns, hard and sharp. It had two mouths, and in each of them a piece of red flesh sticking out; it had arms and legs as other children but instead of toes, it had on each foot three claws, like a young fowl with sharp talons.”

Agnes is hauled before the General Court. Two magistrates favor expelling her from the colony. Winthrop extends mercy toward his clerk’s mother. Agnes is forbidden to meddle in surgery or physic and cannot debate matters of religion, except with elders of the church. Disobey the gag order and she will be excommunicated and banished.

Deeply ashamed at the betrayal of his mother, Thomas flees Boston aboard a vessel sailing for England. Even as the Jewel departs another ship beats into the bay bringing Nicholas Steele home from the Caribbean.

 

 

IV

1650-1656

 

By mid-century, Nicholas Steele is a wealthy merchant and ship-owner. He faces a daunting challenge in building Steele’s Wharf on the marshy waterfront north of the Town Dock. Midway through construction, storm winds blast the sea banks and rip away pilings. Nicholas has to begin from scratch but perseveres until the three hundred foot wharf is complete.

The first ship alongside is the old Arbella, which brings Thomas Steele back to America after twelve years. The family rarely spoke of Thomas but had news of him from Richard, Nicholas’s older brother, who serves as his London agent.

Thomas earned his master’s degree at Cambridge in 1642 and applied for orders two years later. He was a chaplain in the Parliamentary army at Naseby where he lost his right forearm. He is married to Martha, daughter of David Thorowgood, a printer of Puritan tracts.

One of his father-in-law’s pamphlets, The Day Breaking, if not the Sun Rising of the Gospel with the Indians in New England, describes Reverend John Eliot’s success in converting natives around Boston. Inspired by the “Apostle to the Indians,” Thomas founded a society to support Eliot’s work and personally heard the call to “Come Over and Help Us,” emblematic of the Indians’ hunger for redemption since the beginning of the colony.

Thomas and Martha return in December 1650, with their children, Eden, five, and Margaret, four years, joining twenty thousand New England settlers, three thousand in Boston.

Governor Winthrop’s stewardship of the City on the Hill ended with his death the previous year but his watchdog comes back to New Jerusalem with greater zeal.

Thomas Steele is a grim figure, with a fierce brow and his arm hewn off by a Royalist lancer, no gentle shepherd of silly lambs but a hammer of God.

Martha Thorowgood is a rail-thin harridan who sees sin everywhere charged with a vast catalog of iniquities gleaned from countless tracts proofread for her printer-father. Martha believes the Indians belong to a lost tribe of Israel, an idea fostered by her cousin, Thomas Thorowgood, whose book Jews in America or the Probability that the Americans are Jews is a popular sensation in 1650.

Not every Boston citizen welcomes Reverend Steele. A year after Thomas left, Recompense opened The Beaver tavern in Dock Square, her patrons never having to suffer interference with their guzzling.

The Beaver is famous for a potent cherry bounce: A mountain of cherry pits rises behind the tavern, where Recompense makes her devil’s brew of cherries, sugar and aged rum. The Beaver’s keeper still bears the scars of lashes inflicted for breaking the law before she married Adam.

Often in her cups herself, she roars with laughter recalling that brutal day, when she took “ten strokes for ten little blokes!”  -- The number of sons of Adam and Recompense, who range in age from seventeen to three, all with large heads, straight backs and large feet. Not one of the rascals has managed to stay off the beadle’s hook, not even the youngest snatched out of Mill Creek by Beadle Jones who arrived in the nick of time to save a natural born sinner.

Adam Trane offers a prayer for his Indian friends, whose redemption will be guided by the iron hand of the new apostle. Literally, for Thomas wears a sinister metal prosthesis fashioned by a London glove maker.

Thomas visits John Eliot at Roxbury eager to learn from him, “the art of coyning Christians.” Key to Eliot’s work in leading perishing, forlorn outcasts to attain the higher understanding of Englishmen is to gather them in from their scattered life and place them in segregated towns where they can live without danger of contamination by degenerate settlers.

On a summer’s day in 1651, Thomas Steele begins a new Praying Town at Pungasak, “Place of the Gnats.” The three-thousand-acre site on the southern rim of Blue Hills encompasses a cedar swamp that can provide a good income for the thirty families.

First, Thomas must wean his charges from indolence. The root of this evil lies in a flourishing apple orchard, its crop used by the Indians to make a cider that’s as good as any product of their English neighbors. A law that forbids the sale of liquor to the natives becomes befuddled when Indians set up their own stills. The keeper of The Beaver considers it a moot point regularly sending a cart trundling out to Blue Hills for a fresh supply of “Pungasak Gold.”

Thomas compels the Indians to chop down their apple trees, except a single row to provide fruit for their tables.

Three Pungasak men watch the destruction of the orchard from an ancient quarry. The oldest of the three is Wapikicho, The Jester, now fifty-four and powwow of the Pungasak band. The youngest is Mikweh, The Squirrel, whose sister is married to the third man, Jacques Petit, thirty-seven. It was Jacques who planted the Orange Sweetings with cuttings from Reverend Blaxton’s trees on the Common.

The three sit drinking the last of their prized brew, a trio of devils to torment the saint who has come over to help them.

 

****

In 1652, with England and Holland at war, Dutch freebooters seize the Falcon, a ship belonging to Nicholas Steele, and take the prize and its crew to New Amsterdam. The vessel was on a trading voyage to the Portuguese islands off West Africa, then to Mina to pick up slaves for Barbados, and on the last leg of the triangle bringing molasses to be turned into rum at Boston.

Nathaniel Steele, Nicholas’s fifteen-year-old son, is serving aboard Falcon when the ship is captured.

Licensed as a privateer, Nicholas puts together a raiding party that includes Adam and the trio from Pungasak. They leave Boston in two shallops and sail down Long Island Sound to Manhattan. Nicholas and Adam spy out the Dutch settlement locating Falcon and learning that the crew is held in an old mill on Tuyn Street.

At night, the raiders make their way along a wagon road beside a fortified wall being built between the Hudson and East Rivers. One party seizes Falcon. Nicholas leads a second group to Tuyn Street, where they surprise the night watch and release Nathaniel and the crew. Then the Boston men fly down the Narrows and make their home run before the New Amsterdammers can give chase.

 

****

At Place of the Gnats, Thomas encourages the natives to abandon their rustic habitations and build frame houses. Cedar clapboards and shingles are cut in their own sawmill, the beginning of a regime of industry to regenerate “the saddest spectacle of misery of mere men on earth.” One third of the families erect English-style cottages around the meetinghouse. The rest continue to live in wigwams, which they find warmer and more comfortable.

As part of the new civic order, Thomas institutes regulations drafted by Martha:

 

 

 

 

 

 “They shall stop picking lice with their teeth, under penalty of five shillings.

 “They shall wear their hair comely as the English, and whoever shall offend, ten shillings.

“The old ceremony of a maid walking about and living apart, a penalty of twenty shillings.

“A woman with naked breasts, two shillings and six pence….”

Thomas and Martha don’t live permanently at Pungasak but trek to Blue Hills every week. He reviews regulations and fines imposed by the elders and holds Scripture classes. Martha instructs Indian women in setting up home in the English manner, giving lessons on good housekeeping and correcting the smallest imperfections.

Jacques Petit translates Martha’s interminable dialogues, a task leaving him drained by day’s end. Jacques revives himself with doses of cherry bounce supplied by the keeper of The Beaver, the Pungasaks’ credit good for years to come.

 

****

In September 1653, the Goodfellow draws up to Steele’s Wharf carrying five hundred and fifty Irish captives.

When Cromwell’s army crushed a revolt above the Shannon thousands of Irish soldiers fled to France and Spain. Their wives and children were hunted down for transportation and sale as bound servants in the American colonies and West Indies.

Goodfellow’s master parades a select group of children on deck for inspection by Boston’s citizens who flock to buy the Irish boys and girls. They will be bound as servants for ten years or until they reach their majority.

Martha Thorowgood buys two girls, KYNA O’BRIEN and KEELEY FARLING, nine-year-olds from the same village in County Cork, where “Mancatchers” snatched them from their beds.

Goodfellow’s owners dispose of half their cargo and are ready to sail for Virginia when a fire breaks out in the forecastle. Dozens of children flee like rats abandoning a sinking ship. Most are fished out of the harbor or trapped on the waterfront, but a handful of the hardiest are never caught.

One of the “Irish vermin” who escapes is the boy, MALACHY LYNCH. In the future Malachy will marry Keeley Farling. Their descendants are the fictional Lynches who gnaw away at Boston’s Puritan underbelly and make a nest in the City on the Hill.

 

****

In June 1654, Reverend Eliot and Richard Mather join Governor Endicott to celebrate Pungasak’s third year of existence. Martha proudly shows off the domestic skills of her housewives, who work at their spinning wheels and make English preserves and sweetmeats. Thomas presents the town elder, Ossocow, and five acolytes who deliver their confessions “with such tears trickling down the cheeks of some, as did argue that they spoke with much holy fear of God.”

To Thomas’s dismay, the visitors decide that his natives of are too premature and uncivilized to maintain a state of grace. Reverend Mather pronounces bluntly: “A church estate is too serious a business to be hewed out of such rubbish.”

A month later, Thomas and Martha are heading home after a visit to Pungasak, when a wheel on their cart breaks. They return to the Praying Town on foot approaching after dark. Half a mile away, they hear drumming and singing, louder and louder until they see a crowd leaping and dancing around a bonfire outside the meetinghouse.

Wapikicho, powwow of the Pungasak, is leading the celebration of Feast of Green Corn.

Thomas rages from one side of the town to the other screaming for an end to the pagan ritual. Martha’s housewives have shed their English clothes. They grab their teacher and make her dance with them barefoot and bare-breasted. Thomas hears his wife’s shrieks and rescues her, the pair fleeing into the meetinghouse where they await martyrdom.

They are not harmed. At dawn they flee and raise the alarm at Boston. A militia company dashes to Pungasak fearing a general uprising. They find the Indians calmly going about their old ways. Of Wapikicho and the other ringleaders, there’s no sign.

The Place of Gnats is the only Praying Town that fails miserably. Its embattled saint isn’t totally dispirited, for the struggle is soon joined with another enemy coming to defile New Jerusalem.

Ironically, it’s Nicholas’s ship, Falcon that brings Mary Fisher and Ann Austin from Barbados, the first Quakers to reach Boston. Already scorched by the devil, Reverend Thomas Steele quickly warms to the new challenge.

 

 

V

1660-1681

 

Two hours before dawn on June 1, 1660, Agnes Steele leaves her son’s house in the North End and walks down to the Town Dock. One of the few souls astir is the water rat, Malachy Lynch, drying out at the furnace of his master, a Ship Street blacksmith who’ll hammer him if the fire isn’t stoked when he comes to the anvil. Recompense is waiting for Agnes outside The Beaver.

They walk together to King Street and head up to the Town House. Agnes is seventy-six and moves slowly in the chill air. At the market exchange, they encounter an unusually large crowd for this hour, none engaged in trading but talking in hushed tones. Above their heads, a dim glow behind the windows of the chamber indicates that members are also gathering for the day’s events.

Agnes and Recompense continue on to the Town Prison, a gloomy stone pile blackened with grime. They’re here to bid farewell to a friend who has less than three hours before her execution.

It’s twenty-two years since Mary Dyer gave birth to the child exhumed by Governor Winthrop and Thomas Steele. Eventually excommunicated, Mary left Massachusetts for Rhode Island and later made a visit to England, where she became a follower of George Fox, founder of the Society of Friends. When Boston passed a law banishing Quakers under pain of death, Mary and two Friends penetrated the Puritan stronghold determined to “look the bloody laws in the face.”

Mary saw her two accomplices hanged, while she waited with the halter around her neck. Reprieved at the last moment, she’d come back to Boston the following year and was brought before Governor John Endicott, eternal scourge of heretics.

Endicott made short work of the “prophetess:” “You will return to prison and remain there till tomorrow at nine o’clock. Then prepare yourself to go to the gallows, and there be hanged till you are dead.”

Agnes and Recompense spend an hour with Mary before the drums roll on Court Street and the Quaker begins her final walk to the hanging tree on Boston Common.

Thomas and Martha keep vigil at the great elm with their son, Eden. The fifteen year old attends Harvard College, where he has already shown himself a true defender of Christ, rebuking his fellow students for wicked words and ungodly excesses in smoking. Eden reads fifteen chapters of the Bible each day. He locks himself in his room for twenty-four hours allowing nothing but a few drops of water to pass his lips, as he begs God to cleanse one of the filthiest vessels on earth.

A twelve-foot ladder is set up against a limb of the great elm. Mary’s arms and legs are bound, her skirts secured above her feet. One end of the rope is tied around her neck. Reverend John Wilson, her former pastor, gives the hangman his handkerchief as a blindfold for Mary. Ready for death, she’s made to climb the ladder. The hangman mounts a second set of steps to fix the rope to the tree limb.

Reverend Wilson makes one final appeal to the sinner.

“Nay, man, I am not now to repent,” she responds.

The ladder is pulled away and Mary is swung off into eternity.

One week later, Agnes dies in her sleep. Eden fasts for three days convinced that his grandmother was carried away by the demons that came for Mary Dyer. The youth’s spiritual exercises are complicated by self-guilt: In the room where he prays for God’s rapturous touch, Eden surrenders to an orgy of masturbation. The servant girls, Kyna and Keeley, are at the center of his fantasies, his eyes pressed against the boards of their room to spy on their nakedness.

 

*****

In July 1664, Nicholas’s son, Nathaniel, captains a militia company in a contingent of two hundred men en route to attack New Amsterdam.

Adam commands Trane’s Irregulars, a mongrel militia recruited from the roughnecks of The Beaver and including five Trane sons in its muster.

On August 28, the English blockade the Manhattan settlement and ten days later Peter Stuyvesant surrenders New Amsterdam without firing a shot. The victors celebrate in “New York City,” none happier than the men of Boston who see their Dutch rivals being swept from the sea-lanes of the American colonies.

For a second time, Nathaniel becomes a captive in New York, not of freebooters but Antjie Blommetjie, the daughter of Jasper Blommetjie, a Dutch West India Company official turned slaver.

Annie Flowers” becomes the wife of Nathaniel Steele, her strong Calvinist roots facilitating her entry into Puritan society. Annie also has a tolerant spirit that puts her at odds with the hard minds that rule Boston.

When the New York expedition returns that September, they’re feted on Boston Common. The highlight is a sham battle in which Trane’s Irregulars trounce a company of Hollanders.

A party of Indians visiting the town witnesses the rout:

Metacom, chief of the Wampanoag, comes to ask permission to buy a horse, an animal Indians are forbidden to own. King Philip, as the English call him, is a son of Massasoit who died three years earlier. Metacom’s brother Wamsutta succeeded but died within a year. Metacom took power at the age of twenty-four, still grieving for a brother he believes the English poisoned.

Metacom is a tall, slim man with dignity and bearing. He wears a beaded coat and elaborate buskins, his accoutrements worth £20 alone. He sits proudly on a huge black stallion received as a gift from Governor Endicott.

Rufus Trane, ten years old and too young to be a real Irregular, takes part in the mock battle. He carries the company’s banner, hollering a war cry as he charges across the Common on a fiery Lincolnshire pony.

Metacom gives a great whoop in response thrilled by the boy’s riding. When the battle ends, the King of the Wampanoag presents Rufus with a string of wampum beads worth a fortune to a wild Boston boy.

 

****

In 1675, ten years later, Rufus Trane is an express rider who starts from Marshfield early one June morning and at three in the afternoon comes clattering over the Neck.

Rufus carries an urgent message from Governor Winslow of Plymouth Colony: The Wampanoag have attacked Swansea and driven the settlers into their blockhouse. Governor Winslow declares that Plymouth will put down the uprising in a few days and no more.

It is the beginning of King Philip’s War, the deadliest and costliest conflict proportionately in American history. The war engulfs New England between 1675 and 1678 and claims nine thousand victims, two-thirds of them Indians. Fifty English towns are attacked and twelve destroyed. One thousand Indian men, women and children are sold into slavery. The war costs £100,000, a sum greater than the value of all the personal property in the colonies.

 

  • In July 1675, Trane’s Irregulars and Nathaniel Steele’s company strike Philip at Mount Hope on the Rhode Island border. A rearguard action by a small band of warriors allows the Wampanoag military leaders to escape to their allies, the Nipmucs.

 

  • Wapikicho is eighty years old when “The Great Fight” begins. He is a councilor at Punkapoag, a Praying Town established by Eliot at the cedar swamp opposite abandoned Pungasak. The Jester has waited a lifetime to avenge the murder of Witawamet and girds his old loins for battle with the Cut-Throats. Wapikicho and The Squirrel lead a dozen Christian Indians to Philip’s camp in the Connecticut Valley.

 

  • Jacques Petit is torn between love for his mother’s people and his intimate relationship with Adam. Jacques decides to stay at Punkapoag. English vigilantes suspect the Indians of raiding outlying farms in Dedham and terrorize the Praying Town. In October 1675, Jacques and his family are among five hundred Praying Indians interned on Deer Island in Boston Harbor.

 

  • Thirty-six inches of snow falls in November 1675 turning the war zone into a frozen wasteland. A bigger chill descends on the English when Canonchet, chief of the three-thousand-strong Narragansett, joins Philip. The colony musters an additional one thousand men to assault the Narragansett stronghold in the Great Swamp. The attackers are forced back in a blinding snowstorm suffering heavy casualties. Nathaniel is severely wounded. The English regroup and set fire to the wigwams, as they did with the Pequots thirty-five years before, massacre seven hundred people and take three hundred as slaves.

 

  • In February 1676, fifty-one-year-old Martha Thorowgood makes a perilous journey from Boston to Northampton to be with her daughter Margaret expecting her first child. An Indian raiding party led by Mikweh, The Squirrel, descends on the frontier town, slaying eleven and capturing Martha and Margaret. At a camp near Monadnock, the venerable Wapikicho takes special delight in tormenting the wife and daughter of the black-coat who chopped down his apple trees. Margaret is near her time and begs the Indians to let her go home. They strip her naked and make her squat in their midst, as they sing and dance around her. At a signal from the Jester, they split Margaret’s head and throw her body on a bonfire. (The same fate that befell the real Mary Rowlandson’s companion in her Narrative.)

 

  • Thomas Steele goes to The Beaver to ask Adam’s help in ransoming his wife and daughter unaware that Margaret is dead. Jacques Petit leads the Irregulars to Mount Monadnock, where they find Wapikicho’s camp deserted. The band has moved to Philip’s camp. Martha Thorowgood’s perfect housekeeping stands her in good stead, for King Philip has heard of her prowess with needle and thread and orders. He orders her to make him a new shirt.

 

  • While Martha sews to save her life, Trane’s Irregulars race to her side but never reach her. Wapikicho’s warriors ambush Adam’s company outside Springfield. Rufus is riding ahead of the column and turns back heroically cutting a path through the attackers to reach his father. Adam Trane is mortally wounded and breathes his last, no saint of the City on the Hill, just a merry, merry man going to do a jig with the lovely lasses in beaver coats. Rufus takes the troop on the warpath carrying the Headbreaker, his father’s old club, and exacting a terrible vengeance. At The Beaver, a center post is garlanded with strips of cloth nailed up by Irregulars awarded two yards of trucking material for every Indian scalp delivered to the Town House.

 

  • Nathanial and Eden pay a ransom of £30 for Martha fetching her from Philip’s camp, the last Englishmen to see Metacom alive. King Philip is betrayed and shot by one of his warriors on August 12, 1676, effectively ending the war in Massachusetts. Rufus hunts down and captures Wapikicho and Mikweh. Dragged to Boston and summarily tried they’re handed over to the Irregulars. Wapikicho is tied to the great elm on the Common. Mikweh is ordered to shoot him with the promise of a reprieve. The Jester is dispatched with a single bullet. Rufus roars with laughter telling Mikweh he was sorely mistaken to think he would go free. A rope is brought and The Squirrel hoisted aloft.

 

****

In her seventies, Widow Recompense cheerfully fills the role of “Mine Host” at The Beaver, merrily fortifying Irregulars with liberal doses of cherry bounce.

Recompense runs the tavern with the help of Keeley Farling, who grew up as a servant in the house of Thomas and Martha Steele. Keeley is married to Malachy Lynch who still labors for the tyrant of Ship Street and still suffers the occasional rain of anvil blows. They have three daughters, Margery, Fiona and Fenella, from seven to twelve years old.

Kyna O’Brien, who was with Keeley in the Goodfellow, remains in service with the Steeles. She is a drab thirty-six year-old spinster who spends her days running and fetching for Martha Thorowgood and her nights praying to be a “Model Servant of the Lord.” Kyna is obsessively jealous of Keeley Farling, envying her independence and her marriage to Malachy.

Kyna’s frustration boils over with a lurid report to Thomas and Eden, now a minister, about the three Lynch girls. She describes seeing them taken with fits in the yard of The Beaver, leaping and dancing around the mountain of cherry pits. Recompense cavorts wildly with the girls howling incantations for the entranced children.

This first evidence of what will become a “stupendous case of witchcraft” galvanizes Reverend Eden. He finds no shortage of envious neighbors willing to testify against a wealthy widow.

Fenella, the oldest of the Lynch girls, is taken for observation in Eden’s house and subjected to probing physical examinations by Eden and his father. They find no evidence of the devil’s succages, but the child’s fanciful replies to their questions leave no doubt that Fenella was marked to be a handmaiden of Lucifer.

On April 20, 1680, Recompense is charged with witchcraft and put on trial in Boston. A stream of witnesses come to testify about diabolical goings-on at The Beaver:

“I and William Sloan being at Widow Recompense’s ordinary, affirm that earth in ye chimney corner moved and scattered on us. I was hit a great blow but it was so swift none could tell what it was. An iron ladle, also a piece of wood a foot long, struck Sloan. Others speak of demonic creatures assaulting them as they sat on The Beaver’s three-seater privy. A white Thing like a Cat, which did play at my legs until I did kick it . . . It gave a loud cry, which in all reason was the cry of an imp.”

 

After two days of damning testimony, a jury finds Recompense guilty of witchcraft and sentences her to death.

Rufus appeals directly to Nathaniel Steele, now a member of the General Court. The day before Recompense is to be taken to the hanging tree, she gets a stay of execution. Her reprieve is as much due to Nathaniel’s intervention as the presence of a royal commissioner come from London to expose the vices of Puritan rule.

Recompense is spared but lingers in jail for a year before her release.

On May Day, 1681, the irregulars of The Beaver give the old witch a rousing welcome. Many there are who’ve seen more than their share of devils sitting on the tavern’s benches with Widow Trane’s magic brew revealing all the wonders of the invisible world.

 

BOOK TWO: THE SHOP AT THE SEVEN STEPS

 

 

© 2015 Errol Lincoln Uys

 

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