Mistress Bradstreet (23 page)

Although Winthrop Jr. hastily fled the scene of his young wife’s death, leaving the little settlement to develop on its own, Dudley was not discouraged by the young man’s departure. He believed wholeheartedly in the enthusiastic accounts of Ipswich, just as he had swallowed the good news from the New World back in the 1620s. The new promised land seemed so close, they had better rush there quickly.

To Anne there was nothing remarkable about Dudley’s behavior. She understood that it would be as hopeless to attempt to deter her father in his pursuit of a more ideal settlement as it had been for Dudley to try to stop Williams from seeking a pure kingdom of Christians. Even the fact that the little clearing in the wilderness was particularly vulnerable to Indian attacks could not prevent her father from chasing the mirage of perfection.

As usual, Dudley rolled through all obstacles to their move with the sense that he was merely doing his duty. It did not seem to cross his mind that his commitment to the spiritual health of his family might end up shortening their lives. As his children knew well, he deemed such worries beneath the notice of any truly religious person.

Anne helped the servants pack boxes and sort through clothing, repair the holes in their blankets, and heap grain into sacks, but she undoubtedly mourned the leave-taking that lay ahead. New Towne may have been tiny compared with the cities of the Old World, but the settlement had swollen to more than sixty families, and nearby Boston was even larger. Almost every month in the summer and fall a fresh boatload of immigrants arrived, many of them intent on seeking their salvation in the holy land of New England. The newly arrived settlers gave Anne news from home, and she and her family could easily order silks, spices, books, and other amenities from England.

Indeed, in the four years they had been there, Anne and her family had sown the seeds of a recognizably English life. Her brother and his wife, Mary, lived nearby, as did her sister Patience, who had married a military captain named Daniel Denison. Neighbors had become friends, and Anne had established bonds with the women in the little village since giving birth to a baby in their company. She could borrow soap or rosemary and ask anyone to watch two-year-old Samuel if she needed to go into the fields. And though, reportedly, there was a fine minister in Ipswich named Nathaniel Ward, it was always difficult to become accustomed to a new church and a new preacher.

This fresh departure could only remind Anne of the bitterness of their flight from England. To her, Dudley had never ceased to embody a kind of idealized self-denial and detachment from earthly comforts. Each time he pulled her away from what she cared about, she knew he was acting in her own best interest. But she sorrowed over the fact that she could not emulate him and felt unworthy of the blessings God had showered upon her.

The trek that lay in front of Anne and her family was forbidding enough to keep most settlers close to Boston and New Towne. But even the fact that Anne was in her second trimester of pregnancy and had a two-year-old in tow did not seem to give her or her family pause. Indeed, Anne’s pregnancy was probably one of the reasons Dudley and his family were intent on leaving quickly. It was easier for a woman to travel while pregnant than after childbirth, and Dudley, impatient as always, had little interest in waiting the months it might take his daughter to recover from labor.

Even Anne’s husband did not seem to raise any objections to his father-in-law’s haste. An intelligent businessman, Simon could see that the resources of New Towne were becoming stretched. The earth was thin and gravelly and could not sustain the livestock of all the families who had settled there in the last three years. Farmland was limited, constrained by the town’s tight boundaries. To Simon, Ipswich may have represented the utopian purity that his father-in-law craved, but it also offered him the chance to fulfill some of his chief responsibilities as a Puritan father by expanding his holdings. A few of his friends from college had also chosen to settle in Ipswich, and so the move would bring him into a far more congenial community than the one he was leaving behind in New Towne.

Although no one spoke about it, everyone knew that it was less overwhelming for the men to say good-bye to their old home than for the women. Dudley and Simon would still be able to make frequent trips back to Boston and New Towne for matters of business and government. In general, men were far more mobile than women, who were limited by the constraints of “breeding”—either they were far advanced in a pregnancy, had a new baby to nurse, or were recovering from the effects of labor or, in some cases, miscarriage. Anne and her sisters would be far more bound to Ipswich than their husbands and father—an alarming prospect given the town’s remoteness.

But without complaint, the women joined the men on the path to the frontier, a track not yet wide enough for large wagons. As a result, they had had to leave behind much of their furniture—chests, tables, and their few chairs—and Anne could only hope that these reminders of her old home would soon be shipped down one of the local rivers to the new settlement. Everything else they had to carry, pack on the animals, or drag along in carts—pots, kettles, shovels, grain, dried meat and vegetables, bolsters, clothing, and books. As they walked, the young men were largely concerned with keeping the rangy cows, chickens, and pigs in order, for it would have been unthinkable to set up a new home in the wilderness without livestock.

Their servants traveled with them and did much of the heavy labor of the move, but there was not enough indentured help to go around. Consequently, New England servants could often be recalcitrant and were notoriously “insolent” if they felt overly taxed by their employers; no one could be sure how much one could ask of them.
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The Indian track rolled up and down large sloping hills the farther north they went. Fortunately, the forest that separated New Towne from Agawam was more like a park than the tangled English woods Anne and her family were used to. The undergrowth was negligible, thanks to centuries of controlled burning by the Indians. As one settler wrote, the natives’ fire “consumes all the underwood and rubbish which otherwise would overgrow the country, making it unpassable, and spoil their much affected hunting. . . . In those places where the Indians inhabit, there is scarce a bush or bramble or any cumbersome underwood to be seen.”
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These repeated ground fires set by the Indians had discouraged the growth of some trees, allowing others to flourish. Hemlocks, beeches, and junipers tended to be almost absent in southern New England, whereas chestnuts, oaks, and hickories grew to enormous heights.

It must have been an extraordinary experience to walk through one of these cultivated woodlands. Even in late November, which is probably when they set out, the overall impression would have been one of imperial variety. There were long wide avenues of what Anne called “glistering” sunlight, and the soil was warm and dry. Later in life, Anne would write admiringly of the beauties of the New World trees, describing the “strength, and stature” of “a stately oak . . . whose ruffling top the clouds seemed to aspire.” Even burdened as she was by her heavy unborn child and her bundles of possessions, she could not help but gaze up at the sun through “the leavie tree[s]” and confess that the more she “looked, the more [she] grew amazed.”
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But it was dangerous to be alone in the forest. Few Englishmen had ever ventured so far into the wilderness. The path itself was barely discernible, and it was hard to trust that their Indian guides knew where they were taking them. Indeed, naive and inexperienced as she and her family were, it would have been easy for the Indians to betray them and to steal their goods, leaving them to die.

America still seemed treacherous, unknowable, and untamable to the English; it could fool you into taking a wrong turn. Winthrop often told a story about searching for firewood not far from his home and suddenly finding himself lost. He spent a terrifying night wandering in the forest, bewildered and turned around, before he found his way back in the morning. The newcomers believed that every moment they were away from a settlement they were in mortal danger, and they were not far from the mark. There were many tales of vanished explorers and settlers who had strayed too far from their villages only to encounter wolves, a sudden impenetrable snowstorm, or other dangers too awful to consider.

Anne must soon have been exhausted by the long trek. It is possible that the women had the opportunity to ride one of the few horses that had survived the journey from England, but even the respite from using their own legs would have ushered in other discomforts—stiffness, blisters, and cold. At times they walked through stands of enormous trees, at others they emerged into clearings and grassy meads, startling deer and geese that Dudley, Simon, and Anne’s brother, Samuel, attempted to shoot for their dinner. When they were silent, the sounds of the land crowded in upon them. Odd birds cried, branches cracked, the wind tossed. Anne could not help but feel the enormity of the countryside around them, its vastness, its mystery, and its danger, as well as the presence of the Lord. Later she would write, “If so much excellence abide below, / How excellent is He that dwells on high?”
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On that first night as they built a fire and breathed in the comforting smell of smoke, Anne must have been grateful to be able to sink to the ground and hold Samuel in her lap while the servants busied themselves, clearing places on the ground to sleep and preparing the evening meal. As the night thickened and the dark closed in around them, the disconcerting howl of the wolves would have reminded everyone of their danger. The livestock was herded close to the fire, and the men posted a watch with their guns ready. Hard as it might have been to sleep under such conditions, it was important to rest. There were twenty more miles to cover.

The next day, the hills began to slope down into lower country and they began to encounter marshy lands that were reminiscent of the Sempringham fens. This meant they were drawing near the settlement, but the sun set early in late November. If they did not want to spend another night in the wilderness, they would have to push along briskly. At last, shimmers of lights, curls of smoke, and the sharp triangular pitch of well-roofed homes lay spread out before them. Thankfully, Ipswich was not another Salem. In the two years of their settlement, over fifty settlers had constructed sturdy cabins and a few “great houses.” The homes were grouped together in a wide and pleasant-looking clearing that spilled down the side of one of the seven hills ringing the village.

As they strode into the town, footsore, thirsty, and weary, they were greeted by Simon’s old Cambridge friends as well as by many of the General Court’s officials. Surprisingly, this remote settlement was the home of eleven elected assistants, or magistrates, notably Richard Saltonstall, Nathaniel Ward, Richard Bellingham, and Samuel Symonds. All of them, like Simon and Dudley, had wanted more land and a certain distance from the politics and disturbances at the center of the colony. These men were wealthy, educated, and pious and, to Anne’s delight, had substantial libraries. They prided themselves on staying in touch with the latest political and theological developments in England and the New World. No other frontier town in history had ever been populated by so many intellectuals and university colleagues. It might have taken longer than usual for roads to get built and fences erected, but the conversations and debates were undoubtedly lively. Perhaps life in Ipswich would not be as terrible as Anne had feared.

At the heart of the settlement, there was a simple meetinghouse with two respected ministers installed: Nathaniel Rogers, yet another Emmanuel College alumnus, and more important, the distinguished Nathaniel Ward. Ward was famous among the Puritans because of the strength of his convictions. It was reassuring that he, too, had selected the frontier for his home. Anne and her family recognized a kindred soul in this eccentric old Elizabethan, a man with many of the same tastes and inclinations as Dudley. In fact, both men were in their fifties, elder statesmen in what was really a young man’s world, since the bulk of emigrants were in their twenties and thirties.

Almost immediately, Ward warned the newcomers that despite the tidy new houses that had been constructed and the old friends they were glad to see again, they must “be carefull” whom they trusted in Ipswich. The settlement did not consist only of highly educated and wealthy colonists. There were plenty of other “ill and doubtfull persons” who spent the majority of their time “drinking and pilferinge.” He complained bitterly about the “idle and profane young men, servants, and others” who seemed drawn to life on the edge of civilization.
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But Anne seems to have been untroubled by these ne’er-do-wells. Instead, it seems likely that she and her family took up temporary lodging in the largest house in Ipswich, since it was vacant when she and her entourage arrived. Built by John Winthrop Jr., the cottage had wind-tight walls and enough room to store their belongings until their new homes were constructed. The library alone contained hundreds of books. Certainly this young man’s house would have been a far more agreeable shelter than any that Anne had enjoyed since they arrived in America.

It is likely that most of the extended Dudley clan—Dorothy, Dudley, Sarah, and Mercy; Samuel and Mary; Anne, Simon, and baby Samuel; Patience and Daniel; and their servants—spent at least part of their winter in this snug “great house.” Despite the quarrels such tight lodgings might have caused, there was comfort to be had in close quarters. The gentle hills notwithstanding, Ipswich seemed forbidding when wintry nor’easters banged in from the ocean and battered the hopeful little town.

It is not clear when Anne went into her second travail, but it was probably early in the year 1636. She entered this trial without the benefit of Mrs. Hutchinson, but the attendance of the Ipswich women and her mother and sisters seems to have worked just as well. To her delight, she delivered another healthy baby—this time a little girl. In honor of her mother, Anne named the new infant Dorothy. The Dudley-Bradstreet clan must have seen the infant as an auspicious sign. Perhaps their future on the edge of both ocean and forest would be fertile and filled with joy. Of course, Anne viewed the birth in religious terms. Little Dorothy seemed evidence that God was yet again blessing her with His love.