Read Online Final Voyage by Peter Nichols - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Peter Nichols
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moved to New Netherland, now Pelham Bay, on Long Island, where she was killed in an Indian attack in 1643. (The Hutchinson River Parkway—the “Hutch” to its users—running through Westchester County and the Bronx in New York City, is named after her.)
Between the unmooring of common sense over Anne Hutchinson and the long-brewing hysteria about witches that would culminate in Salem in 1692, Massachusetts Bay Colony discovered another threat to its society, and its reaction was unwise, intemperate, and violent.
In July 1656, an elderly woman, Mary Fisher, and her maid, Ann Austin, arrived in Boston aboard a trading ship, the Swallow, from England via Barbados. The more than one hundred books in their luggage (the seventeenth-century equivalent of a suitcase full of Semtex) raised an immediate alarm. Most of the volumes, upon inspection, were determined to be heretical and, with the stridency that marked every aspect of the authorities’ approach to perceived threats to the status quo, were burned in the public marketplace by the colony’s hangman. The women were meanwhile stripped naked and examined for “evidences of witchcraft.” Such signs could be, most manifestly, “witchmarks”—unusual-looking moles or birthmarks—but also anything out of the ordinary that might raise the hackles of a knowing examiner. (When suspected witch Bridget Bishop was examined in Salem in 1692, her clothing indicated unnatural aberrations: “I always thought there was something questionable about the quality and style of those laces,” noted a witness, observing that some of the laces were so small he could not see any practical use for them.)
No sign of witchery was found on the two women, but when interviewed by magistrates they were discovered “to hold very dangerous, heretical, and blasphemous opinions; and they do also acknowledge that they came here purposely to propagate their said errors and heresies, bringing with them and spreading here sundry books, wherein are contained most corrupt, heretical, and blasphemous doctrines contrary to the truth of the gospel here professed amongst us.”
The two women were Quakers, the first to reach the Massachusetts Bay Colony. One of them had recently been whipped in England for her beliefs, and, like other pilgrims, they had sailed to the New World in the hope of finding greater freedom of religious expression. They were misinformed. After being imprisoned for five weeks, allowed no light, books, or writing materials in their cell, they were shipped back to Barbados. Soon eight more Quakers arrived in Boston on a ship from London. They, too, were imprisoned, put on trial, and eventually shipped back to London. A year later, a group of Quakers landed in Rhode Island, whose government was more tolerant: “As concerning these quakers (so called), which are now among us, we have no law among us, whereby to punish any for only declaring by words, &c., theire mindes and understandings concerning the things and ways of God.”
The Quakers were the mildest of anarchists. George Bishop, at one time an English soldier in Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army, and a contemporary of Fisher and Austin, who became a Quaker himself, wrote a scathing denunciation of the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s response to these pilgrims: “Why was it that the coming of two women so shook ye, as if a formidable army had invaded your borders?” But the Quakers were formidable in their gentle resolve; and they kept coming. In Rhode Island, where they were tolerated and largely ignored, they wanted only to travel to Massachusetts, where they provoked and were rewarded with hysteria, which they embraced with an appetite for martyrdom. This was keenly understood in Rhode Island, where the authorities had shrewdly taken the measure of the Quakers:
In those places where these people . . . in this colony, are most of all suffered to declare themselves freely, and are only opposed by arguments in discourse, there
Between the unmooring of common sense over Anne Hutchinson and the long-brewing hysteria about witches that would culminate in Salem in 1692, Massachusetts Bay Colony discovered another threat to its society, and its reaction was unwise, intemperate, and violent.
In July 1656, an elderly woman, Mary Fisher, and her maid, Ann Austin, arrived in Boston aboard a trading ship, the Swallow, from England via Barbados. The more than one hundred books in their luggage (the seventeenth-century equivalent of a suitcase full of Semtex) raised an immediate alarm. Most of the volumes, upon inspection, were determined to be heretical and, with the stridency that marked every aspect of the authorities’ approach to perceived threats to the status quo, were burned in the public marketplace by the colony’s hangman. The women were meanwhile stripped naked and examined for “evidences of witchcraft.” Such signs could be, most manifestly, “witchmarks”—unusual-looking moles or birthmarks—but also anything out of the ordinary that might raise the hackles of a knowing examiner. (When suspected witch Bridget Bishop was examined in Salem in 1692, her clothing indicated unnatural aberrations: “I always thought there was something questionable about the quality and style of those laces,” noted a witness, observing that some of the laces were so small he could not see any practical use for them.)
No sign of witchery was found on the two women, but when interviewed by magistrates they were discovered “to hold very dangerous, heretical, and blasphemous opinions; and they do also acknowledge that they came here purposely to propagate their said errors and heresies, bringing with them and spreading here sundry books, wherein are contained most corrupt, heretical, and blasphemous doctrines contrary to the truth of the gospel here professed amongst us.”
The two women were Quakers, the first to reach the Massachusetts Bay Colony. One of them had recently been whipped in England for her beliefs, and, like other pilgrims, they had sailed to the New World in the hope of finding greater freedom of religious expression. They were misinformed. After being imprisoned for five weeks, allowed no light, books, or writing materials in their cell, they were shipped back to Barbados. Soon eight more Quakers arrived in Boston on a ship from London. They, too, were imprisoned, put on trial, and eventually shipped back to London. A year later, a group of Quakers landed in Rhode Island, whose government was more tolerant: “As concerning these quakers (so called), which are now among us, we have no law among us, whereby to punish any for only declaring by words, &c., theire mindes and understandings concerning the things and ways of God.”
The Quakers were the mildest of anarchists. George Bishop, at one time an English soldier in Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army, and a contemporary of Fisher and Austin, who became a Quaker himself, wrote a scathing denunciation of the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s response to these pilgrims: “Why was it that the coming of two women so shook ye, as if a formidable army had invaded your borders?” But the Quakers were formidable in their gentle resolve; and they kept coming. In Rhode Island, where they were tolerated and largely ignored, they wanted only to travel to Massachusetts, where they provoked and were rewarded with hysteria, which they embraced with an appetite for martyrdom. This was keenly understood in Rhode Island, where the authorities had shrewdly taken the measure of the Quakers:
In those places where these people . . . in this colony, are most of all suffered to declare themselves freely, and are only opposed by arguments in discourse, there
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