stitching together an October of four years ago, and realize that the most obscure person on the planet today is, comparatively, like a god: observed, adored, commented upon, celebrated. Hannah, whose 1745 Memoirs forms the basis of much of the early life, and only a bit of the middle, the warrant, if you wish, for the linkages in my earlier investigations, still eludes my net. Time has made her free from me, just as an ocean passage made her free of the watchful God who punished every venal sin with droughts, drownings, cripplings. Free from the brutal justice of pious expatriates with confused errands. Out of earshot of the whippings and weepings of Original Sinners.
What made Hannah abdicate sovereign rule of her fenced, peaceable suburban kingdom and sail with Gabriel on the Fortune , a four-hundred-ton East Indiaman, in May 1694?
Fear, perhaps, for she knew there was (there always is) a dark side to her husband’s rascality. Or simple practicality—she was, after all, a Puritan orphan, strictly raised. She appreciated the value of money. Her widow’s subsistence, and with it her freedom, vanished on Gabriel’s reappearance.
But there are traits even a modern woman can relate to: her curiosity, the awakening of her mind and her own sense of self and purpose. And I think of Gabriel as well, deceiver, liar, thief and pirate—a gentleman cutthroat with a feared gang to do his bidding—why didn’t he kill her, as he had others who displeased or deceived him? Why did he test her, for surely that was his ploy, and why were her indiscretions with doctors, researchers, patients, accusers, not punished?
Venn says he wanted to know if she was prized. If anyone would make a move on her, even more than wanting to test her faithfulness. Gabriel had been in the East; he would know these things.
THE FORTUNE was in a convoy of East Indiamen headed for the Coromandel Coast of India by way of the Cape of Good Hope. Hannah’s name appears in Madras Records , the Fort St. George consultation books, as having disembarked in that English settlement in early 1695. There were three other women on board the Fortune on that trip, all three from the same village in Lancashire, and all three single. Their reasons for leaving home were sensible, lucid. The Company paid each of them a monthly maintenance allowance of about fifteen shillings in local currency to provide its bachelor English staff of lonely factors, clerks and soldiers companionship leading, it was hoped, to marriage. Like the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the Honourable Company needed but feared the wilderness, and abhorred miscegenation. Hannah got to know the Lancashire women because, like them, she and Gabriel ate at the third mate’s table and grumbled about having to share the decks with livestock that were mainly there as the Captain’s and the richer passengers’ future provision. A schoolmaster sent out by the Company on the same ship mentions Hannah as being of the four women the only one with comeliness and delicacy. In a letter to his brother started on the Fortune and finished in the port town of Masulipatnam, he worried that Mistress Legge will not find any “towne of Moors, fackeers and Hindoos cleane after the manner in England,” for “hogs, filth, dirt and swine” clog the streets.
WHAT INTERESTS me about this letter is that the outbound schoolteacher clings to class-conscious perspectives and absorbs Hannah, the flower of the New World Zion, into the Old World hierarchy.
If status had mattered to Hannah, she would have stayed in Stepney. Her curiosity was robust. She wanted to earn, not inherit, dignity. She moved on. Without regrets.
Venn inputs data more boldly, more mischievously than I do. I watch my convoy of East Indiamen voyage across his computer screen, freed of space and time. He compresses by supercomputer Hannah, Gabriel, the schoolmaster, the maiden ladies from Lancashire, caulkers and coopers, soldiers and sail-makers, gunners, cabin
What made Hannah abdicate sovereign rule of her fenced, peaceable suburban kingdom and sail with Gabriel on the Fortune , a four-hundred-ton East Indiaman, in May 1694?
Fear, perhaps, for she knew there was (there always is) a dark side to her husband’s rascality. Or simple practicality—she was, after all, a Puritan orphan, strictly raised. She appreciated the value of money. Her widow’s subsistence, and with it her freedom, vanished on Gabriel’s reappearance.
But there are traits even a modern woman can relate to: her curiosity, the awakening of her mind and her own sense of self and purpose. And I think of Gabriel as well, deceiver, liar, thief and pirate—a gentleman cutthroat with a feared gang to do his bidding—why didn’t he kill her, as he had others who displeased or deceived him? Why did he test her, for surely that was his ploy, and why were her indiscretions with doctors, researchers, patients, accusers, not punished?
Venn says he wanted to know if she was prized. If anyone would make a move on her, even more than wanting to test her faithfulness. Gabriel had been in the East; he would know these things.
THE FORTUNE was in a convoy of East Indiamen headed for the Coromandel Coast of India by way of the Cape of Good Hope. Hannah’s name appears in Madras Records , the Fort St. George consultation books, as having disembarked in that English settlement in early 1695. There were three other women on board the Fortune on that trip, all three from the same village in Lancashire, and all three single. Their reasons for leaving home were sensible, lucid. The Company paid each of them a monthly maintenance allowance of about fifteen shillings in local currency to provide its bachelor English staff of lonely factors, clerks and soldiers companionship leading, it was hoped, to marriage. Like the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the Honourable Company needed but feared the wilderness, and abhorred miscegenation. Hannah got to know the Lancashire women because, like them, she and Gabriel ate at the third mate’s table and grumbled about having to share the decks with livestock that were mainly there as the Captain’s and the richer passengers’ future provision. A schoolmaster sent out by the Company on the same ship mentions Hannah as being of the four women the only one with comeliness and delicacy. In a letter to his brother started on the Fortune and finished in the port town of Masulipatnam, he worried that Mistress Legge will not find any “towne of Moors, fackeers and Hindoos cleane after the manner in England,” for “hogs, filth, dirt and swine” clog the streets.
WHAT INTERESTS me about this letter is that the outbound schoolteacher clings to class-conscious perspectives and absorbs Hannah, the flower of the New World Zion, into the Old World hierarchy.
If status had mattered to Hannah, she would have stayed in Stepney. Her curiosity was robust. She wanted to earn, not inherit, dignity. She moved on. Without regrets.
Venn inputs data more boldly, more mischievously than I do. I watch my convoy of East Indiamen voyage across his computer screen, freed of space and time. He compresses by supercomputer Hannah, Gabriel, the schoolmaster, the maiden ladies from Lancashire, caulkers and coopers, soldiers and sail-makers, gunners, cabin
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