Hero Tales from History — John Winthrop, A Puritan Maker of Massachusetts
JOHN WINTHROP, A PURITAN MAKER OF MASSACHUSETTS
John Winthrop can not be called a boy’s hero; yet he was a hero, and his life was strange and interesting.
He was a son of a good Puritan family in England.
When a young man he met Oliver Cromwell, who became Lord Protector of England.
He was acquainted with John Milton, the blind Puritan poet who wrote “Paradise Lost,” one of the greatest poems in the English language.
John Winthrop had also to transact certain business with Cromwell’s cousin, John Hampden, the great English patriot who opposed King Charles when he sought to impose taxation upon the people without their consent.
[Illustration: GOVERNOR JOHN WINTHROP.
] Young Winthrop was married the first time when he was seventeen, and his son Henry was born when the young father was eighteen.
In 1629, the father decided to go to America where he could worship God as he thought best.
He and four hundred men and women set sail from England in a fleet of small ships, intending to join the settlement at Salem, started a year before.
One of these ships was the _Mayflower_, in which the Pilgrims of Plymouth had sailed nine years before.
On their second morning out from England they spied eight ships coming behind them.
The captain of the _Arabella_, the ship on which Winthrop sailed (as he wrote in the logbook or journal of the voyage), “caused the gun-room and gun-deck to be cleared.
After noon we still saw those eight ships to stand towards us.
Having more wind than we, they came up apace.
We all prepared to fight with them, and took down some cabins which were in the way of our ordnance [cannon] and out of every ship were thrown such bed matters as were subject to take fire.
We drew forth our men and armed them with muskets and other weapons and instruments for fireworks.
To try it our captain shot a ball of wildfire fastened to an arrow, out of a crossbow, which burnt in the water a good time.
“The women and children were removed into the lower deck that they might be out of danger.
All things being thus fitted, we went to prayer upon the upper deck.
It was good to see how cheerful all the company appeared; not a woman or child showed fear.
“It was now about one of the clock, and the fleet seemed to be within a league of us; therefore our captain, because he would show he was not afraid of them, and that he might see what was to be done before night should overtake us, tacked about and stood to meet them.
And when they came near, we perceived them to be our friends.
“So every ship (as they met) saluted each other and the musketeers discharged their small shot; and so, God be praised, our fear and danger was turned into mirth and friendly entertainment.
Our danger being thus over, we espied two boats fishing in the Channel.
So every one of our four ships manned out a skiff, and we bought of them great store of excellent fresh fish of divers sorts.
” The voyagers were seventy-six days--nearly eleven weeks--crossing the Atlantic.
They had passed through storms, but when, early in June, they sighted America, Winthrop wrote in his journal: “We had now fair sunshine weather, and so pleasant a sweet air as did much refresh us; and there came a smell off shore like the smell of a garden.
There came a wild pigeon into our ship, and another small land bird.
” In four days the _Arabella_ was anchored in Salem Harbor.
The poor little settlement welcomed some of the newcomers with “a good supper of venison pasty.
In the meantime most of our people went on shore upon the land of Cape Ann, which lay very near us, and gathered store of fine strawberries.
” “Salem, where we landed, pleased us not,” wrote one of the men on board to a countess in England.
Winthrop, who had been elected governor of the colony they were to found, looked about for a better place to settle, and decided on a site they called Charlestown, on the Charles River.
Although they had left England because of their obstinate and foolish king, Charles the First, they named rivers and towns for him, and one of their earliest churches was called King’s Chapel.
When no one was allowed to think for himself, or even to wear such clothes as he saw fit, it would have been regarded as almost a crime to speak a word against the king, no matter how much he deserved a bad name.
When Governor Winthrop came back from Charlestown to Salem, he wrote in his journal: “We went to Massachusetts to find out a place for our sitting down.
” By “Massachusetts” he meant only that part of the country along Boston Harbor, about fifteen miles south of Salem.
Just after his return, his eldest son Henry, who had come over on another ship, arrived at Salem.
That very day the young man started with several of the ship’s officers to visit some Indian wigwams.
In his journal the father describes what happened: “They saw, on the other side of the river, a small canoe.
He would have had one of the company swim over and fetch it, rather than walk several miles on foot, it being very hot weather, but none of the party could swim but himself; and so he plunged in, and, as he was swimming over, was taken with a cramp a few rods from shore, and drowned.
” “My son Henry!
My son Henry!
” wrote the bereaved governor to his wife in England.
“Ah, poor child.
Yet it grieves me much more for my dear daughter.
Yet for all these things (I praise my God) I am not discouraged.
” Henry, the son of John Winthrop’s first wife, had been married in England.
He had come without his bride to the western wilds to build a little home before sending for her.
Heartsore but not dismayed, Governor Winthrop took his followers and tried to make the settlement at Charlestown, now part of the great city of Boston.
But their sufferings were not over.
As at Jamestown, on the James River in Virginia about twenty-five years before this, the settlers were ill with malaria and some of them died.
Then a strange old hermit, who had lived about twenty years alone on a tree-topped hill on the other side of the river, came to see the new governor, and invited him to come over the river and build his town on the hill which had been named Three-mount, Tri-mountain, or Tremont.
So Winthrop and his people moved once more and named the new place for the city of Boston in England.
The old hermit proved to be William Blackstone, a minister from old England.
On the Three Mounts he tilled a small farm which extended down into the now historic Boston Common.
He had brought from England his library, and spent his time reading, farming, and raising apples.
He had left England because he would not worship according to the legal forms there.
But he did not like the way the Puritans wished him to worship, either.
So he moved away from Boston as soon as he could dispose of his house and other real estate.
Blackstone also had been kind to the Indians.
His influence did much toward keeping the red tribes friendly with the white settlers of Boston.
On the highest of the three mounts was placed a sort of lighthouse or beacon which sailors could see far down the harbor.
This gave the name of Beacon Hill to that part of Boston.
On this hill the State House has since been erected.
This building has a great dome covered with gold-leaf which glistens in the sun and can be seen for many miles around.
“All roads lead” to the dome of the State House in Boston, as the spokes of a wheel come together in the hub.
Because of this fact, a humorous writer gave Boston the title of “The Hub of the Universe.
” Though the Indians gave the early settlers very little trouble, the wolves which howled around the settlement were alarming, and sometimes dangerous to the little children.
Sometimes a bear would come ambling into “Boston Town.
” The people’s cows were pastured on the Common.
This made some people who wished to make fun of Boston claim that the narrow, crooked streets of that city were laid out by the cows, as they wandered down from the Common to drink at a certain spring.
Sometimes the town suffered from disease and famine.
One day, when Governor Winthrop had divided his last cupful of cornmeal with a starving beggar, he appointed a day of fasting and prayer to God for food.
On the very day set for this fast, a ship arrived from England with provisions, and the people had a feast instead.
Another time when the people did not have enough to eat, an Indian chief named Chickataubot came and presented the governor with a great quantity of corn.
As with the Indians, so with the white settlers at first, it was either feast or famine.
The people of Boston were kinder to the Indians than to the white men who failed to agree with them in religion.
They banished the Baptists and hanged the Quakers.
Besides Roger Williams, they drove out a good woman named Anne Hutchinson, because she argued too well against some of their beliefs.
This gifted woman and her family were murdered and scalped by Indians in the log cabin in which they lived after they were banished from Boston.
Governor Winthrop finally sent for his wife and his other children.
One of his sons became governor of Connecticut.
John Winthrop was twelve times elected governor of Massachusetts.
More than once he was chosen deputy governor.
He was good to the poor and unfortunate.
In this he was far in advance of his time.
It was said that he kept his private purse open for the public.
Once, when he found that a man was stealing wood from his pile, he laughed and said he would stop that.
He did so by inviting the man to come in the daytime and help himself to all the wood he needed.
But the man never came again.
Cotton Mather, one of the greatest of Boston preachers, said of Governor Winthrop that he was-- “The terror of the wicked, and delight of the sober, the envy of the many, but the hope of those who had any hopeful design in hand for the common good of the nation.
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