The Beaver
1629 - 1634
The Steeles are sailing in the Arbella, flagship of eleven vessels with nine hundred people bound for New England. Nine days after weighing anchor, Arbella and three ships are riding off the Isle of Wight, waiting for seven vessels still outfitting for the voyage. On April 8, 1630, at six in the morning, Arbella sets sail, followed by three consorts, Talbot, Ambrose and Jewel in scattered formation.
1629 - 1634
The Steeles are sailing in the Arbella, flagship of eleven vessels with nine hundred people bound for New England. Nine days after weighing anchor, Arbella and three ships are riding off the Isle of Wight, waiting for seven vessels still outfitting for the voyage. On April 8, 1630, at six in the morning, Arbella sets sail, followed by three consorts, Talbot, Ambrose and Jewel in scattered formation.
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| Arbella - replica postcard Boston Public Library |
On
the second day out, Arbella’s decks are cleared for action against
Dunkirk freebooters, but the ships sighted are friendly. On the edge of the
ocean, they run into a gale that leaves so many groaning in their cabins the
first Sabbath at sea passes without a service. In May, they’re battered ten
days in a row by ferocious storms that blow out sails, create mayhem among
animals tethered on the pitching decks and strike terror into the people below.
On June 12, 1630, after seventy-six days at sea Arbella drops anchor off
Cape Ann, where the first to go ashore gather “a store of fine strawberries
growing wild in the Promised Land.”
On
the voyage, the Steeles live at close quarters with leaders of the expedition:
Isaac Johnson and his wife, Lady Arbella, sister of the Earl of Lincoln and
highest-born passenger in the fleet; Thomas Dudley, deputy-governor; and John
Winthrop, the governor, destined to serve four terms as head of Massachusetts
Bay Colony.
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| John Winthrop - Artist unknown |
At
forty-two, Winthrop is considered by some to be too elderly and too gentle for
the huge task ahead. He is lord of Groton Manor, West Suffolk, part of a
confiscated monastery bought in 1544 by his grandfather, Adam. Born in 1588,
the year of the Spanish Armada, Winthrop attended Trinity College at Cambridge;
he later studied law, gaining admission to
Gray’s Inn, London in 1613. A
justice of the peace, he got an appointment as an attorney in His Majesty’s
Court of Wards and Liveries, a “rotten bench making money out of the
misfortunes of widows and orphans.” Winthrop took the post because of
diminishing income from Groton Manor, eventually relinquishing it in disgust at
the corruption he encountered.
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| Gray's Inn, London 1677 |
He
was married at seventeen to sixteen-year-old Mary Forth, who died eleven years
later, leaving six children. His second wife died on the first anniversary of
their wedding. A year later at thirty, he married Margaret Tyndal, a gracious
woman and the great love of his life. They have eight living children, seven
sons and a daughter; three sons, including his first-born Henry, sail with him
to New England. Margaret, who is expecting a child, remains at Groton Manor
with the rest of the family, planning to follow John after the birth of the
baby.
It was as a student at Cambridge – “where the boys had a woman who was from
chamber to chamber in the nighttime” – that Winthrop began his intense devotion
to the Puritan ideal. He comes to New England with a profound sense of
stewardship, seeking a Modell of Christian Charity:
“For we must consider that
we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us . . . We
must delight in each other, make each other’s conditions our own . . . The Lord
will be our God, and . . . make us a praise and a glory, that men shall say of
later plantations, ‘May the Lord make it like that of New England.’ ”
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| Modell of Christian Charity New York Historical Society
Imagining Boston - 20
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