Mistress Bradstreet (11 page)

Anne’s father and his colleagues devoted themselves to planning their journey, not only because of the practical benefits of such careful measures, but also because this was one of the requirements of their spiritual notion of “preparedness.” This ideal held that you should aspire toward a perpetual anticipation of Judgment Day—a daunting task. Getting ready for the voyage, however, was as difficult spiritually as it was physically, since it involved one sacrifice after another; Anne soon found that her willingness to submit to her father’s dream was constantly put to the test. She would have to weed out unnecessary luxuries from her household and pack what they hadn’t sold—blankets, linens, pewter, clothing, and smaller boxes of food—in large wooden chests that were so heavy many men would be needed to hoist them aloft when it was time to leave.

Before sailing, they had to complete what were essentially the tasks of a dying person—selling cattle, houses, and furniture and transferring beloved items to people who were staying behind—and each activity naturally assumed a funereal hue. In a kind of mute acceptance of their fate, most Puritans who had not yet done so wrote their wills in the months before they sailed for America.
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To make matters worse, non-Puritan neighbors often mocked what seemed to them a foolish venture. In a much later poem, “The Flesh and the Spirit,” Anne would capture the scoffing voices whose jeers echoed her own doubts: “Dost [thou] dream of things beyond the moon, / And dost thou hope to dwell there soon?” and “Art fancy sick, or turned a sot / To catch at shadows which are not?”
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Anne could triumph over these insults in her poems, declaring, “I’ll stop mine ears” against all insults, but at the time, lonely, sad, and terrified of what lay ahead, she had little choice but to worry: What if her tormenters were right and her father was wrong? What if the voyage to the New World turned out to be a disaster?

Still, despite her reservations about the enterprise, Anne remained devoted to her father, and so when disapproving neighbors asked why she and her family were deserting England, she knew exactly what to say and how to promote his vision. The colony in New England would one day take care of England, Anne had been taught. In the years to come she would have New England actually speak in one of her poems, asking a disease-ridden Old England, “What medicine shall I seek to cure . . . [your] wound?”
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Anne would also have been able to cite one of the famous arguments for the exodus articulated most forcefully by the minister Richard Mather: “It was right,” he declared, “to remove from a corrupt church . . . because by staying voluntarily in places corrupt we endanger ourselves to be corrupted.”
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But Anne remained uninspired by the prospect of the move, and even her mother’s stalwart example did not help. While they sorted and packed or sold one possession after another—including, no doubt, the artifacts of her childhood: the cradle used by all of the Dudley children and their few toys—to friends who were staying behind or to strangers in the busy Boston marketplace, Dorothy remained steadfastly organized and calm. It was her duty to bend cheerfully to her husband’s wishes, and she would have had little patience for Anne’s anxieties.

There was no sympathy to be had from her father either. Dudley acknowledged that the journey to America was not to be undertaken by the fainthearted but remained firm in his decision to bring his children with him. Winthrop, on the other hand, reflected the more ordinary person’s approach to the journey, leaving his wife and young child behind to save them from the dangers of the wilderness and the ocean voyage. They could join him later, he decided, once he had established a home where they could dwell in comfort and safety.

Still, Anne could not help but derive an odd confidence from her father’s unflagging commitment to bring her and her siblings to New England. It was really a compliment of sorts: Dudley had singled his family out for a kind of noble odyssey. And so, in her attempt to live up to his ideals as well as to please her new husband, Anne seems to have decided that she would not be like one prospective emigrant’s stubborn wife, who declared that she would rather be “a living wife in England than a dead one in the sea.”
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Only toward the end of her life, long after her father had died, did she acknowledge her misery, and even then, only briefly.

Still, despite his overall optimism, Dudley was well aware that if they made mistakes now, the entire venture was doomed. To begin with, it was enormously expensive to undertake such a mission, and so it was important to figure out exactly what supplies had to be purchased. Dudley, who was wealthier than most prospective colonists, was worth around three hundred to four hundred pounds a year, and Simon’s income was probably somewhat less. According to best estimates, a carpenter’s income was around forty-five pounds a year. A shoemaker might make eighty pounds. Clergy usually earned less than one hundred pounds.
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Gentlemen like Dudley, therefore, could afford the expenses of the journey with careful planning. But other working men often needed to have their passage paid for them. In general, it cost about five pounds for an individual to book passage, around twenty-five pounds to ferry a family across the ocean, fifty pounds for rudimentary household materials such as “ammunition . . . soap, candles, implements and utensils, beer, wine, and liquor . . . steel, iron, merchandise for trading with the Indians, clothing, shoes, house furnishings, sail cloth, hay for fodder, and cattle,” and perhaps an additional one hundred pounds or more to ship over the requirements of wealthy, highly placed families like the Dudleys and the Bradstreets.
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This meant that Dudley would have to shell out at least two-thirds of his yearly earnings to make the pilgrimage to America; Simon would be even more hard-pressed. For both families, the journey could only be undertaken after a complete overhaul of their holdings; luxuries such as Anne and her sisters’ fine lace collars or pearl hair ornaments would have to be sold to help purchase supplies. It was fortunate, then, that their religion explained material loss as sacred gain and as a sign of devotion to God and His mission.

This process of parting with worldly goods was not only a trial all future New Englanders had to undergo, it was also a stumbling block that prevented many of the faithful from joining the expedition. Aside from the emotional toll of “preparedness,” Anne and her family were hard-pressed to convert all of their holdings into the cash they needed to purchase their basic requirements: heavy woolen capes for the sea voyage and the freezing winters they had been warned of, as well as thick linen shirts, handkerchiefs, “Irish stockings,” extra pairs of shoes, and leather for repairs. Dudley, Simon, and Samuel each needed an extra pair of boots and also many more tools than they were accustomed to using in England.

Contemporary lists cited spades, shovels, hatchets, axes, hoes, pitchforks, vises, brands for livestock, hammers, hand saws, grindstones, nails, locks, hooks and twists for doors, cod hooks for fishing and mackerel line, chains and locks for small boats, a bellows, scoops, pairs of wheels for carts, plows, ladders, and anything else the emigrants could afford and believed would be useful for their new lives as farmers. But the Dudleys and Bradstreets also had to assuage their fear of potential human enemies—pirates on the ocean, Indians, French Catholics in Canada—and so the men brought their armor, including helmets, shields, and swords; twenty pounds of powder each; sixty pounds of lead for bullets, pistols, muskets, and other arms. Anne and her mother prepared for their own kind of battle, as they were forewarned that to make beds they would require “ells of canvas,” and that for a working kitchen, they would need at least “one iron pot, one great copper kettle, a small kettle, a lesser kettle, one large frying pan, a small frying pan, a brass mortar, a spit, one gridiron, two skillets, platters, dishes and spoons of wood.” Then, for a family like Anne’s, there were amenities to consider like “sugar, pepper, cloves, mace, cinnamon, nutmegs.”
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The unsteadiness of the monetary rates underlined the financial ruin they might face. Anne and her family knew that if their mission failed and they had to return to England, they could never recoup what they had spent, and many of their supplies were useless except in America. Each purchase, then, further sealed their fate, and each possession they parted with deepened their commitment to the future. Ten years earlier, the Pilgrim leaders John Robinson and William Brewster had acknowledged, “We shall much prejudice both our arts and our means by our removal; who if we should be driven to return, we should not hope to recover our present helps and comforts, neither indeed look ever for ourselves to attain unto the like in any other place during our lives.”
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Despite these risks, no prudent person skimped on provisions. Francis Higginson, the minister who had been sent ahead to America in the advance party, wrote a letter home warning his friends to “be careful” and to pay attention to their needs

before you come. . . . For when you are once parted from England, you shall meet neither with taverns nor alehouses, nor butchers, nor grocers, nor apothecaries’ shops to help what things you need, in the midst of the great ocean nor when you come to land.”
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This was one of the few letters they had received from the expedition, and so Higginson’s words had particular weight.

During the last few months of preparation, Simon and Dudley were usually either in London ordering supplies, such as the ten thousand gallons of ale or the two hundred dried oxen tongues that they would store in the
Arbella
’s hold, or meeting with Winthrop and the other company leaders in Cambridge. Their absence during such an anxious time threw Anne wholly on the resources of the women in her family, a circumstance that was somewhat unfamiliar, as she had spent so much of her girlhood in the company of her father and Simon. Yet these weeks provided excellent training for another aspect of what lay ahead. Anne would have to learn to do without either her husband or her father for long stretches once she was in the New World, and so she and her sisters needed to weave strong relationships as they sorted, prayed, sewed, and worried, comparing notes with the other women bound for America.

In fact it was almost impossible to stop the deepening of intimacy that occurred among the prospective travelers. Their daily routines had been dismantled, while their old friends were still going about their accustomed business. Consequently, even someone like Anne Hutchinson, who fully supported them in their venture but who had not yet chosen to take apart her own home or to trade her extra woolen underskirts for cart wheels and cod hooks, must have sometimes seemed unconcerned, or at least on the other side of the fence from those who were about to plunge into the unknown. Fortunately for the flagging spirits of the Dudley women, the Lady Arbella was undoubtedly a frequent visitor.

However, even Arbella could not cheer them up when a strain of what was apparently the black plague struck that winter. The affliction was so virulent it wiped out two of Hutchinson’s daughters in less than a week. When word spread of the rising death toll in Lincolnshire, tension escalated rapidly; it was increasingly urgent for the truly devout to flee England, as this scourge seemed a new sign of God’s displeasure with the corruption of the Old World. Dudley, Simon, and the other leaders rushed through the company’s business transactions in an effort to speed their departure. But no matter how hard they pushed, they could not control the slow pace of the captains they had hired. Eleven ships needed to be readied, and the sailors seemed intent on puttying every crack and polishing each brass fixture.

Businessmen as well as pious pilgrims, Dudley and the other men spent as much of their waiting time dreaming up new ventures for potential investments as praying. As a result, their official letters often dealt with projects for salt production, “planting vines, collecting furs, setting up iron mines and exploiting New England’s vast timber reserves.”
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Even Higginson, in his famous letter home, had written urgently requesting more skilled workers instead of more preachers, arguing that “of all trades carpenters are most needful, therefore, bring as many as you can.”
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Dudley and his fellow planners understood that piety was not the only requirement of their recruits. The settlers would also need to take care of themselves, and so Dudley called for voyagers who were “endued with grace and furnished with means.” True believers should be able to “feed themselves and theirs for eighteen months.” If his vision of an American “plantation” were to succeed, the colony would have to be productive as well as saintly, rich in goods as well as religion.
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That these two realms, economic and religious, were tangled in an uneasy but inevitable snarl created an odd mix of snobbery, humility, disdain for material possessions, and a high estimation of wealth that seemed logical only to Anne and her family. When Dudley discouraged “the poorer sort” from joining their mission, it was not only because he was convinced that indigent “godly” men without any skills could endanger the fledgling colony but also because in the Puritan mind, destitution was often a sign of divine disfavor. Those who possessed solid assets were more likely to be righteous individuals because they had clearly found a righteous calling, or vocation. Those who were poor, on the other hand, might well have done something to deserve God’s disfavor.

Thus, although Anne’s father never promoted the Puritan mission as a profit-gaining adventure, he had no intention of taking a vow of poverty in the New World. Indeed, Dudley strongly disapproved of any such notion, declaring that any pious man who wished to come to America with no “goods” should be dissuaded. However, the other extreme was just as bad. A year after he had arrived in New England, Dudley wrote, “If any come hither to plant for worldly ends, that can live well at home, he commits an error, of which he will soon repent him.”
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