The Townie is an opinion website. The views expressed in this piece belong solely to the author, do not represent those held by The Townie, and should not be interpreted as objective or reported fact.
Traveling through England has a special pleasure for those of us who come from the northeastern corner of the United States. You feel at home. Round any corner and you will collide with villages and hamlets whose names befuddle the imagination (Upper Nether Stowey or Sturton le Steeple come to mind); but other corners resonate with their Newburys, Dedhams, Stonehams, Dorchesters, Newtons, and Tewkesburys. There is barely a town around old Massachusetts Bay that doesn’t have its geographical and linguistic counterpart somewhere in Old England. Two of the foremost stand anchoring the innermost reaches of The Wash, an enormous, watery embrasure that faces northeast from the coast of England, looking outwards to the shores of the Netherlands and the Baltic. These are King’s Lynn and Boston.
English namesakes
King’s Lynn was originally called Bishop’s Lynn, but Henry VIII’s greed and lust changed that in the early days of the Reformation. Both Lynn and Boston were great bastions of mercantile wealth in the 13th and 14th centuries, when agents for the Hanseatic League kept permanent offices down by the quaysides. Lynn retains many vestiges from those glory days, Boston less so, except for the overwhelming majesty of its parish church, known locally as the Stump. The rivers servicing these former ports, the Ouse and the Witham, have silted up over the centuries — still serviceable for the famous cogs from Hanseatic times, if they existed, but obsolete for today’s behemoths that routinely unload their thousands of cargo containers in Rotterdam and Antwerp across the North Sea. Boston, in the parlance of old tour guides, is “decayed” and looks it.
From the pulpit of the Stump, John Cotton, “this burning and shining light,” preached for some 21 years (Anne Hutchinson was an early admirer). It was he who delivered a parting sermon, the moving God’s Promise to His Plantation, when John Winthrop and several hundred other Puritans departed for Salem in 1630 on a convoy headed by the Arbella, from whence they traveled further south to found Boston. But the Stump is not why I came here.
Thanksgiving origins: legend vs. reality
Extraneous incidents attached to Winthrop’s voyage, and that of the more famous Mayflower a decade before that, have been well embellished (and exaggerated) in our New England ethos. The famous Mayflower Compact, for example, has been roundly misinterpreted ever since it was written, to the detriment of fully understanding the Pilgrim Fathers and why they crossed the Atlantic. Plymouth Rock is a touristic figment of the imagination, pure and simple, about as foolish as New Hampshire’s now vanished Old Man in the Mountain. The famous Thanksgiving feast, as depicted in 19th century romantic paintings, can be counted on for a few quiescent Native Americans lounging about in fraternal coziness as the Pilgrims “give thanks.”
Few New Englanders recall (or were taught) that Massasoit’s son, monikered King Philip, led a vicious guerrilla war against these same Englishmen, mostly in response to their predatory, land-grabbing ways. The more melodramatic Indian wars of the 1800s (Custer, Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull!) have obscured a very ugly and genocidal feature of our own local history, a collective loss to us all.
The attempted crossing
Boston, King’s Lynn, and all that surrounds it is fens country, mostly drained and now extremely fertile, if unscenic, land. In the 1600s, it was largely a watery morass of marsh, oozy rivulets, and mud. The Wash itself, some 225 square miles of shifting shoals and deceiving currents, presents a vast panorama of nothingness. King John, in 1216, trying to save time with his cumbersome pack train, sent it across these sands at low tide as a shortcut. It was caught out in the wastes. He watched his “treasure” and his crown disappear in the onrushing sea and died, some say from mortification, just a few days later.
On a dark night in 1607, the birth of Massachusetts might be safely said to have begun here, as a small contingent of religious “pilgrims” began an odyssey that would ultimately result in the foundation of both Plymouth and Boston.
Led in large measure by William Brewster and superbly chronicled by William Bradford (why is his Of Plymouth Plantation not required reading in every high school in our state?) these bold souls, “both scoffed and scorned by the profane multitudes,” secretly skulked out of Boston and followed the meandering Witham until it reached a murky anchorage called Scotia Creek. There they boarded a Dutch tramp supposedly bound for Amsterdam via the Wash, whose roguish captain took their passage money, then signaled to shore for the cops, a betrayal as base as that of Judas.
These “catchpoll officers” then proceeded to pillage their captives. Looking for gold, they stripped the men of their shirts and, to Bradford’s indignation, took liberties with the women as they patted them down. Their books, their goods, all their worldly possessions, were “rifled” and spoiled, they were packed into open boats and returned to Boston, then marched through the streets, made “a spectacle and wonder to the multitude which came flocking” (presumably from taverns) “on all sides to behold them.”
At the Guildhall, the cells where Brewster, Bradford, and the others were held, are still there to see. Every Pilgrim was finally released, over the course of several weeks, and told to go home. Many, of course, had no homes to return to, having sold everything to finance their voyage. Just a year later another attempt was made, again with calamitous results, but over time many Pilgrims made the trek to Amsterdam or Leyden, and from there, as we all should know, an even fewer number to the New World. I asked a custodian at the Guildhall how many Americans visit the old jail annually. “Only about 5% of the total,” he replied.
The Witham has long since been dredged and straightened out, and Scotia Creek filled in, but a small obelisk still marks the spot where the Pilgrim Fathers made their first try, “as the Lord’s free people,” to seek religious freedom “whatsoever it should cost them.” The site is obscure, even by English standards, a lonely, seemingly insignificant footprint stranded in a maze of empty fields and a deserted, semi-industrial shoreline. From this small beginning, however, came the panorama that any traveler today can appreciate as his or her plane approaches Logan Airport, with Cape Anne and Plum Island below, and sees stretched before their collective gaze the amazing breadth and energy of what we in in New England call the Hub, our amazing city on a hill.
James Charles Roy
Historian and independent scholar
Newburyport resident
Passionate about a local issue? We want to hear from you. Check out our submission guidelines.
Subscribe to our Newsletter
Leave a Reply