Mistress Bradstreet (15 page)

Despite his nervousness, Anne’s father was likely thrilled that at last he would get to see “Godly” action. When the strange ships were “within a league, [the captain], because he would show he was not afraid of them . . . tacked about and stood to meet” the pirates.
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This was just how Dudley enjoyed things, skimming along the icy edge of danger.

In the last few minutes adrenaline ran high. The men clutched their weapons. There was a hush onboard, the only sound the muttered prayers of the pious. The enemy ships drew closer and closer, and then, whether someone waved, shouted, or ran up a flag, or whether one of the sailors recognized a mate on one of the vessels, it was suddenly clear that these were not pirates. All apprehension vanished, and the passengers became giddy and lighthearted. It turned out that the fleet was friendly and mostly English. No one on the
Arbella
was going to die, at least not yet.

The women streamed up the ladders, and “mirth and friendly entertainment” ruled the afternoon. Suddenly it seemed a blessing just to be alive. The ship was safe, and the waves were gentle. Offshore fishermen sold the passengers fresh catch; that afternoon Anne and the other women built fires down below (that were carefully encased in boxes of sand) to roast the fish “of divers sorts”—a splurge for this rather tightfisted group.
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As they ate heartily, the sun still lingering in the sky, they gave thanks for their delivery, and it seems not one person complained about the unnecessary loss of their blankets and bolsters.

This close brush with danger led Dudley and Winthrop to post lookouts each night in case they ran into any real armed sea bandits. There were certainly plenty around. “Dunkirk rovers, Dutch capers, Irish raiders, and French, Flemish and Spanish privateers” were all likely to be lurking in the waters ahead, and everyone had heard horrible stories about “the Islamic Sallee-men, ‘Turkish’ raiders from Algiers” who captured English people and sold them as slaves.
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Of course, even without the threat of piracy, on the ocean nothing could be counted on—a good theological lesson from the Puritan perspective. Still, it was tempting to try to discern patterns in the chaotic weather, and since most pious travelers believed that their success hung upon the state of their consciences, this meant that everyone’s mind and soul had to be clear if they were going to have a smooth passage.

Soon after their pirate scare, a thick fog engulfed the boat; immediately, a fight broke out on deck between “two young men, falling at odds.” Naturally, the two events seemed connected. As punishment, the quarreling fellows were forced “to walk upon the deck till night with their hands bound behind them.” But when the fog still didn’t lift, it was clear that something else was amiss. It was now up to Dudley and his team to scour the ship, like some kind of Puritan secret police. Within a few hours, he and Winthrop discovered another man, who used “contemptuous speeches in our presence.” This errant soul was “laid in bolts till he submitted himself, and promised open confession of his offence.” No sooner had they taken this action, Winthrop wrote, than the fog was blown away by “a fresh gale at N and by W, so we stood on our course merrily.”
¹⁵
Once again the pious had evidence for the link between their progress and their souls.

As the days passed, Dudley and Winthrop became worried about the passengers’ weakness and growing despondency and came up with a plan for bolstering their spirits.

Our children and others, that were sick, and lay groaning in the cabins, we fetched out, and having stretched a rope from the steerage to the mainmast, we made them stand, some of one side and some of the other, and sway it up and down till they were warm, and by this means they soon grew well and merry.
¹⁶

When there were storms, however, there was little Winthrop and Dudley could do to cheer their flock. Even if they prayed publicly for deliverance, no one could hear them. The wind howled. The water slammed against the hull. Anything that was not fastened down flew through the air or skidded across the floor. These were desperate times, when each pious individual had to lean heavily on faith in order not to panic.

Even when the weather was calm, however, not all passengers on these overseas expeditions could be shaken out of their depression. A few years later onboard the
Champion,
a man named Peter Fitchew succumbed to despair and attempted to hurl himself over the side in front of the horrified eyes of his fellow passengers.
¹⁷

AS THE DAYS STRETCHED INTO WEEKS,
the hours alternated between terror and tedium. When gales swept upon them, or when they found themselves becalmed in the middle of the “great waters,” it was impossible to find a rhythm for eating and sleeping. By the third week of the ordeal, most people were exhausted and dispirited, although Winthrop was the miraculous exception; somehow he managed to retain his optimistic outlook in the face of their difficulties.

His fellow emigrants, however, had fallen into bad habits right from the start. Captain Milbourne, outraged at their sloth, declared that the passengers “were very nasty and slovenly, and that the gun deck where they lodged was so beastly and noisome with their victuals and beastliness as would much endanger the health of the ship.” Winthrop responded by establishing teams of four men who would “keep that room clean for three days, and then four other [men] should succeed them.”
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The shipboard diet did little to cheer anyone up, as it consisted of “dried bread and biscuits, oatmeal pottage and buttered peas, salted eggs, salted fish, bacon and cured meats, [calf] tongues in bran or meal, ‘bag pudding’ made with raisins and currants, and perhaps some fruit or cheese, all of it subject to spoilage.” Every passenger was entitled to basic rations, “included in the price of the passage,” but those who had the resources, as Anne and her family did, brought extra supplies including meat, vegetables, ale, and, if they could find them, lemons to fight scurvy. There were some business opportunities here; one entrepreneur on a later voyage traveled with his cow and “sold the milk to the passengers for 2d. the quart”—a profiteering sort of activity that Winthrop would have promptly shut down on the
Arbella.
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Cooking was rare. The only way to boil, fry, or stew anything was over an open flame, and since everyone was deathly afraid of a fire breaking out onboard, most meals were eaten cold. Passengers had water and beer, and sometimes wine and stronger spirits, to wash down their unappetizing meals. But none of these beverages could be counted on to be palatable, or clean. One man grumbled, “Our supply of water stank very much and our beer was like mud because of the slovenly negligence of those who should have taken care of it.” And another complained that the drink was “either very salt or as thick as pudding.”
²⁰

In such tight quarters it was impossible to escape people you did not like. Frequently Anne was crammed down below with strangers, servants, or others she would never have had to consort with back in her old life. But despite the many weeks on the ship, she still would not have known the names of all the passengers, especially those who were not Puritans or were below her in rank. One passenger wrote that there were “about 140 persons out of the western parts from Plymouth, of which I conceive there were not six known either by face or fame to any of the rest.” Most people stuck to those they already knew from home, though some new acquaintances did spring up.
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The voyage was turning out to be more than a test of physical limits. Spiritual and mental fortitude were essential and could only be had with the support of others. Those new relationships that did occur formed with an intensity not usually found in villages back home; existing friendships deepened, and marriages tightened. The opposite was also true. When fights broke out, they were fired by the pent-up frustrations of shipboard life.

For Anne, Simon was the man upon whom she had lavished her “longing hopes” and “doubting fears.”
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But now that their old home was far away, there was no privacy for long conversations between a husband and a wife and even less opportunity for marital pleasures. In many ways, Anne was right back to where she had started as a young girl, immersed in the company of women as though she had never married and left home. Fortunately, Arbella was there, and their shared years at Sempringham, their mutual commitment to piety, and the fact that both were married but did not yet have children must have rapidly overcome their differences in stature and rank. It was their duty, after all, to shore up each other’s faith, courage, and strength, especially as the journey drew on and neither could ignore that many of the women were growing physically weaker, including Arbella herself.

The sailor’s curses and rowdy songs were a shock for most of the gently bred Puritans, especially the women and children. Cotton Mather would describe this “obscene, smutty, bawdy talk” as “so much filthy bilge water.”
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Some measure of social hierarchy was preserved, since Anne and her family and friends all rated slightly better lodgings than the others, servants still obeyed masters, and richer people had more food to eat than their poorer brethren, but the differences in class were not as evident as on land; everyone suffered the same miseries during a storm and the same boredom when becalmed.

The only amusements for adults and children alike, aside from prayer, contemplation, and conversation, were occasional fantastical sights from the deep. To begin with, there were “strange fish”—“some with wings flying above the water, others with manes, ears and heads, and chasing one another with open mouths like stone horses in a park.” The minister of the advance party, Francis Higginson, remembered the “bonitos, carvels, grampuses, sunfish and whales” that swam by the
Talbot.
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Sometimes the passengers managed to catch one of these curiosities, and then it was like a carnival onboard—the thrashing, dying animal, the cries of the men intent on subduing it, the shrieks of the thrilled onlookers. One traveler, Richard Mather, remarked that spearing porpoises and swinging them up on deck was “marvelous delightful recreation.” He also reflected that the dissection of these creatures “in view of all our company was wonderful to us all, and marvelous merry sport, and delightful to our women and children.”
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The fish they caught also provided a change in their diet, although not all of these creatures were such delicacies. Another traveler wrote that shark meat was “very rough grained, not worthy of wholesome preferment.” He did not much like porpoise, either, declaring that it “tastes like rusty bacon or hung beef, if not worse, but the liver boiled and soused in vinegar is more grateful to the palate.” A fellow passenger disagreed; he declared that he relished porpoise when it was fried “with salt, pepper, and vinegar.”
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Early in May the passengers were startled by an apparition far more alarming than any they had yet encountered. On the morning of the eighth, the wind was strong, the rigging was whistling, and the ship was whisking along, when suddenly a fountain of water sprang up, at least thirty feet high, right in front of the bow. The lookouts shouted warning and the passengers rushed to see the biblical sight of “a whale, who lay just in our ship’s way (the bunch of his back about a yard above water).” The captain shouted for the sailors to tack and pushed the wheel hard to windward, but the whale followed them, as though he were lonely and wanted to play. Despite the wonder of such an encounter, the enormous animal could do great damage even to a ship this size. Repeatedly the
Arbella
shifted course, lurching back and forth between starboard and portside tacks, but despite these evasive maneuvers, “He would not shun us,” Winthrop wrote. Finally, for no apparent reason, the giant creature gave up and they passed “within a stone’s cast of him.” He did not follow but lay spouting up water, as though he had had his fill of the game.
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Although none of the other passengers recorded their interpretation of this episode, they could only have experienced the whale’s presence as frightening, albeit in an exalted sort of way. A leviathan seemed incontrovertible evidence of God’s great might, and such a miraculous appearance suggested that the psalmist’s perspective was accurate: “They that go down to the sea in ships, and do business in great waters, these men see the works of the Lord and his wonders in the deep.”
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The travelers were now among the select few who had had the opportunity to behold the wonders of God’s oceans.

EVERYONE HAD HOPED
that May would usher in warmer weather, since the first month of the voyage had been glazed by an arctic cold. But as time drew on and the weather remained frigid, it was hard for the passengers not to worry that freezing temperatures lay in wait for them in America.
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The loss of the blankets and bolsters they had thrown overboard weeks before must have made the chill even more difficult to bear.

Although they shivered, Anne and her family were learning the ways of the sea. Winthrop could now observe that the passengers were no longer “sick” or “troubled” by storms even when they were “tossed” for “forty eight hours together.” Understandably, both he and Dudley took some pride in the staunch behavior of their people; it would be a weathered and toughened company that would land in America, and this boded well for their colony.
³⁰

But there was still the naturally sinful inclinations of the passengers that had to be kept in check. Dudley and Winthrop required all of the faithful, and as many of the sailors as they could persuade, to listen to the minister, the Reverend George Phillips, who preached most Thursdays and twice on Sundays. These gatherings tended to unite the people, reminding the faithful why they had signed on for this adventure in the first place, and even converting a few non-Puritans to the “true religion.”