Why Adam and Recompense Got No Sympathy from the Governor's Watchdog

The Beaver
1629 - 1634

Another buxom newcomer lands on the peninsula, not from England but nearby Plymouth, where she has served out her time with the Separatists. Recompense West is twenty-four, newly released from her yoke by Brother Stone, who sends her into the world with thirty shillings, a kyrtle of coarse woolen stuff and a blue bonnet. At Boston, Recompense is reunited with her old flame and joyfully falls back into sin with him.

With a whipping post in place, things may have gone badly for Adam was he not the only Englishmen enjoying full confidence of the Massachusett sachem, Chickataubut.

In March 1631, Trane arranges a meeting between Winthrop and Chickataubut, who dines at the governor’s table   “ . . . as soberly as an Englishman. The next day Chickataubut returned home, the governor giving him cheese and peas, a mug and some other small things.”

Adam gets no respect from Governor Winthrop’s clerk, who considers him the equal of the heathens, “without faith, law or religion.”

Thomas’s vigilance is finally rewarded, not through an act of rebellion but transgression of one of the burgeoning set of rules for society.

Way of Good and Evil - John Hailer 1862 - Library of Congress

 

It’s forbidden for single men and women to live alone, a rule Adam and Recompense happily violate. – The couple is severely punished. Recompense is stripped naked to the waist, given twenty stripes and made to walk behind a cart in shame. Adam is fined £20.

Reverend Blaxton intervenes to prevent his former servant from thrashing Thomas Steele. William takes Recompense into his own house, where she stays until July 1633, when the couple marries. – They are progenitors of the Tranes of Boston, who through the generations hark back to the wild boy of the fens and his lusty love, more often than not marching to a different drummer than other Boston folk.

The Puritan, lithograph (1846)

 

Blaxton himself resents the growing list of puritanical laws, including a prohibition against smoking a pipe in public, a small pleasure that the bookish recluse enjoys. In 1634, the townspeople buy all but six acres of William’s property; the forty-four acres purchased are laid out as a training field and cattle pasture, the future Boston Common. (In 1635, Blaxton quits the peninsula for Narragansett Bay, remarking that he left England because “he did not like the Lord Bishops and finds the rule of the Lord Brethren not one jot better.”)