wife his first letter marked “Boston in Massachusetts” on November 29, 1630. In it, he cautions her to “provide well for the sea.” Goodly portions of the letters he sends Margaret and his son John Jr. before they join him in Massachusetts consist of the same sort of grocery lists Winthrop made before he left. Bring axes, linen, and “a large frying pan,” he commands Margaret in one letter. He harangues John Jr. to amass peas and oatmeal (“as much as you can”), “sugar and fruit, pepper and ginger,” goats, sheep, garlic, and onions. Winthrop advises him to pack these things in good barrels. After all, he sighs, “We have lost much by bad casks.”
Winthrop’s last journal entry for 1630 tells the harrowing story of Richard Garrett, a Boston shoemaker he knows from church. Garrett, his daughter, and five others went to Plymouth in a small boat “against the advice of his friends.” A windstorm blew them out to sea. Finally, they saw land and made their way to shore. But the wind had splashed so much water into their boat that “some had their legs frozen into the ice, so as they were forced to be cut out.” They tried to build a fire, but “having no hatchet, they could get little wood, and were forced to lie in the open air all night, being extremely cold.” (Seriously, Margaret, don’t forget that ax.) Come morning, two who could walk set out for Plymouth and met a couple of Indian women who had their husbands bring the pair of Bostonians “back to their wigwam, and entertained them kindly.” The Indians then guided the two to Plymouth, where the authorities there sent out the seventeenth-century equivalent of a team of first responders, who tried to rescue the freezing others. Still, Garrett died two days later, “the ground being so frozen . . . they could not dig his grave.” One of the Indians covered “the corpse” with “a great heap of wood to keep it from the wolves.” Three more of them died, including one, wrote Thomas Dudley, who “rotted from the feet upwards where the frost had gotten most hold.”
That first winter, living in a town where goats and people die, one of them by rotting “from the feet upwards,” Winthrop’s sermon about how the colonists would build some fancy city on a hill must have seemed, in retrospect, a tad laughable.
For six glorious weeks in 1999, CBS aired a sitcom with that very premise, in which an idealistic Puritan family called the Winthrops suffered through their grim first winter in colonial Massachusetts. It was called Thanks. As in Thanksgiving. As in thanks a lot. The show was quickly canceled, but I cannot overstate how excited I was about it. I felt the way an avid stamp collector might if she found out CBS was about to debut its new series, CSI: Philately.
As the pilot begins, it’s morning. Mrs. Winthrop yells at the children to get out of bed because their “boiling water’s ready.” Replies her son, “Water! Can I lick the spoon?”
The show’s ongoing gag was how miserable all the settlers were—how hungry, how cold, how cramped. The Winthrop daughter, Abigail, was a typical sitcom teenage bombshell daughter. After a disagreement with her parents about boys, she lets loose the sort of routine girl outburst that’s been seen on prime time since the dawn of Gidget. “I hate my life!” she yells. But where a modern TV teenager would run upstairs and slam the door to her room, the seventeenth-century teenager, living in a tiny one-room cabin, can only run about a foot and a half before she throws herself face first onto a bed right next to the table where everyone would eat, if there was any food.
The main character, here named James Winthrop, though he’s clearly modeled after John, is the lone dreamer in a town full of whiners. He welcomes in the spring, saying, “What a beautiful day it is. The snow is melting. Everyone out and about airing out their clothes, lugging out their dead.”
On Thanks, the optimism behind
Winthrop’s last journal entry for 1630 tells the harrowing story of Richard Garrett, a Boston shoemaker he knows from church. Garrett, his daughter, and five others went to Plymouth in a small boat “against the advice of his friends.” A windstorm blew them out to sea. Finally, they saw land and made their way to shore. But the wind had splashed so much water into their boat that “some had their legs frozen into the ice, so as they were forced to be cut out.” They tried to build a fire, but “having no hatchet, they could get little wood, and were forced to lie in the open air all night, being extremely cold.” (Seriously, Margaret, don’t forget that ax.) Come morning, two who could walk set out for Plymouth and met a couple of Indian women who had their husbands bring the pair of Bostonians “back to their wigwam, and entertained them kindly.” The Indians then guided the two to Plymouth, where the authorities there sent out the seventeenth-century equivalent of a team of first responders, who tried to rescue the freezing others. Still, Garrett died two days later, “the ground being so frozen . . . they could not dig his grave.” One of the Indians covered “the corpse” with “a great heap of wood to keep it from the wolves.” Three more of them died, including one, wrote Thomas Dudley, who “rotted from the feet upwards where the frost had gotten most hold.”
That first winter, living in a town where goats and people die, one of them by rotting “from the feet upwards,” Winthrop’s sermon about how the colonists would build some fancy city on a hill must have seemed, in retrospect, a tad laughable.
For six glorious weeks in 1999, CBS aired a sitcom with that very premise, in which an idealistic Puritan family called the Winthrops suffered through their grim first winter in colonial Massachusetts. It was called Thanks. As in Thanksgiving. As in thanks a lot. The show was quickly canceled, but I cannot overstate how excited I was about it. I felt the way an avid stamp collector might if she found out CBS was about to debut its new series, CSI: Philately.
As the pilot begins, it’s morning. Mrs. Winthrop yells at the children to get out of bed because their “boiling water’s ready.” Replies her son, “Water! Can I lick the spoon?”
The show’s ongoing gag was how miserable all the settlers were—how hungry, how cold, how cramped. The Winthrop daughter, Abigail, was a typical sitcom teenage bombshell daughter. After a disagreement with her parents about boys, she lets loose the sort of routine girl outburst that’s been seen on prime time since the dawn of Gidget. “I hate my life!” she yells. But where a modern TV teenager would run upstairs and slam the door to her room, the seventeenth-century teenager, living in a tiny one-room cabin, can only run about a foot and a half before she throws herself face first onto a bed right next to the table where everyone would eat, if there was any food.
The main character, here named James Winthrop, though he’s clearly modeled after John, is the lone dreamer in a town full of whiners. He welcomes in the spring, saying, “What a beautiful day it is. The snow is melting. Everyone out and about airing out their clothes, lugging out their dead.”
On Thanks, the optimism behind
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