over his son’s death than that single sentence in his journal records. “We have met with many sad and discomfortable things . . . and the Lord’s hand hath been heavy upon myself,” he grumbles. Then this: “My son Henry! my son Henry! ah! Poor child!”
Remembering that outburst of pain, I look down at my soggy socks and over at the postholes of Winthrop’s house. Then I just stare at Interstate 93 for a while, wondering how someone whose child had died could still believe in God, much less describe Him as “merciful” and “good.”
Winthrop actually praises God for his misfortune. He reassures Margaret he doesn’t regret coming, tells her not to worry about her impending voyage the following summer. “My most sweet wife,” he coos, “be not disheartened.”
How could she not be, though? In September, Winthrop would write Margaret a letter announcing, “Lady Arbella is dead. . . . Thus the Lord is pleased still to humble us. . . . He is our God, and may dispose of us as he sees good.” Dispose—what an encouraging word to use around the poor woman he is trying to coax into making a transatlantic death trip. She’ll go all that way only to be thrown away like Jehovah’s trash.
Within a month, Winthrop records in his journal that Lady Arbella’s husband, Isaac Johnson, also “died in sweet peace.” Thus the two Massachusetts settlers of the most noble birth were gone by autumn.
In the first year of settlement, the letters home were frequently grim epistles. Deputy Governor Thomas Dudley wrote to the Countess of Lincoln (the late Lady Arbella’s mother), “We yet enjoy little to be envied, but endure much to be pitied in the sickness and mortality of our people. . . . There is not [one] house where there is not one dead.” As for reinforcements from England, only the well-off need apply. Dudley, perhaps thinking sarcastically of the optimistic Massachusetts seal, writes, “If there be any endowed with grace and furnished with means to feed themselves and theirs for eighteen months, and to build and plant, let them come over into our Macedonia and help us.”
The September 30 entry of Winthrop’s journal is historic if not exactly illustrious. Winthrop mentions Boston for the very first time, noting that a goat died there.
Winthrop himself is mum on when or why he and his cronies decamped Charlestown for good and made Boston their new home. Edward Johnson, a woodworker who would go on to be one of the founders of the town of Woburn, later recalled that the reason Winthrop and his shipmates traded in Charlestown for Boston “was the want of fresh water.” Charlestown had “but one spring,” accessible only “when the tide was down.”
Go to 276 Washington Street in Boston and see how Winthrop’s luck would change by moving there. At that address, on the side of the Winthrop Building, the aforementioned first skyscraper in Boston, there are two plaques. One brags that it was the former “site of the home of the city’s first colonial governor, John Winthrop.” The other reads, “Here was the Great Spring which for more than two centuries gave water to the people of Boston.” Thus did the governor, having learned from his Charlestown mistake, build his house next to the best spring in town.
The original white settler of Boston, then called Shamut, was Englishman William Blaxton (or Blackstone). He invited Winthrop and friends to join him across the Charles River. He had attended Cambridge University with Isaac Johnson and moved to land that is now Boston Common and Beacon Hill in 1625 after he jumped ship from an expedition. He built his little hermit cabin in what is now Louisburg Square, one of the fanciest addresses in town. (Louisa May Alcott lived and died there, and Senator John Kerry, a Winthrop descendant, lives there now.) So Blaxton welcomed the Puritans to join him. Apparently, he enjoyed their company so much that he soon moved to Rhode Island.
John Winthrop writes his
Remembering that outburst of pain, I look down at my soggy socks and over at the postholes of Winthrop’s house. Then I just stare at Interstate 93 for a while, wondering how someone whose child had died could still believe in God, much less describe Him as “merciful” and “good.”
Winthrop actually praises God for his misfortune. He reassures Margaret he doesn’t regret coming, tells her not to worry about her impending voyage the following summer. “My most sweet wife,” he coos, “be not disheartened.”
How could she not be, though? In September, Winthrop would write Margaret a letter announcing, “Lady Arbella is dead. . . . Thus the Lord is pleased still to humble us. . . . He is our God, and may dispose of us as he sees good.” Dispose—what an encouraging word to use around the poor woman he is trying to coax into making a transatlantic death trip. She’ll go all that way only to be thrown away like Jehovah’s trash.
Within a month, Winthrop records in his journal that Lady Arbella’s husband, Isaac Johnson, also “died in sweet peace.” Thus the two Massachusetts settlers of the most noble birth were gone by autumn.
In the first year of settlement, the letters home were frequently grim epistles. Deputy Governor Thomas Dudley wrote to the Countess of Lincoln (the late Lady Arbella’s mother), “We yet enjoy little to be envied, but endure much to be pitied in the sickness and mortality of our people. . . . There is not [one] house where there is not one dead.” As for reinforcements from England, only the well-off need apply. Dudley, perhaps thinking sarcastically of the optimistic Massachusetts seal, writes, “If there be any endowed with grace and furnished with means to feed themselves and theirs for eighteen months, and to build and plant, let them come over into our Macedonia and help us.”
The September 30 entry of Winthrop’s journal is historic if not exactly illustrious. Winthrop mentions Boston for the very first time, noting that a goat died there.
Winthrop himself is mum on when or why he and his cronies decamped Charlestown for good and made Boston their new home. Edward Johnson, a woodworker who would go on to be one of the founders of the town of Woburn, later recalled that the reason Winthrop and his shipmates traded in Charlestown for Boston “was the want of fresh water.” Charlestown had “but one spring,” accessible only “when the tide was down.”
Go to 276 Washington Street in Boston and see how Winthrop’s luck would change by moving there. At that address, on the side of the Winthrop Building, the aforementioned first skyscraper in Boston, there are two plaques. One brags that it was the former “site of the home of the city’s first colonial governor, John Winthrop.” The other reads, “Here was the Great Spring which for more than two centuries gave water to the people of Boston.” Thus did the governor, having learned from his Charlestown mistake, build his house next to the best spring in town.
The original white settler of Boston, then called Shamut, was Englishman William Blaxton (or Blackstone). He invited Winthrop and friends to join him across the Charles River. He had attended Cambridge University with Isaac Johnson and moved to land that is now Boston Common and Beacon Hill in 1625 after he jumped ship from an expedition. He built his little hermit cabin in what is now Louisburg Square, one of the fanciest addresses in town. (Louisa May Alcott lived and died there, and Senator John Kerry, a Winthrop descendant, lives there now.) So Blaxton welcomed the Puritans to join him. Apparently, he enjoyed their company so much that he soon moved to Rhode Island.
John Winthrop writes his
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