By Paul Carrier
If you’re looking for a book about the early history of New England that is peppered with references to Elvis Costello, the Brady Bunch, the Boston Red Sox, skateboarding, Ronald Reagan, the Iran-Contra scandal and the 9/11 terrorist attacks, your search is over. The Wordy Shipmates is for you.
Sarah Vowell’s unique perspective on the Puritans of 17th-century Massachusetts offers a soberly offbeat take on these religious zealots., who still loom large in the American character. That's because we have, in Vowell's phrase, inherited their view of themselves as “a beacon of righteousness."
Vowell pulls off the improbable by approaching her topic with serious irreverence, if there is such a thing. She views the Puritans with obvious fondness as a highly principled but deeply flawed group who, at times, may even have been a bit daft.
What Vowell sets out to do, and what she accomplishes in delightfully quirky fashion, is to reclaim the Puritans from our simplistic, negative stereotype of them. Yes, she concedes, they were authoritarian and myopic, but also devout and idealistically committed to the common good of their community as a whole, the common weal.
“I’m always disappointed when I see the word ’Puritan’ tossed around as shorthand for a bunch of generic, boring, stupid, judgmental killjoys,” Vowell writes. “Because to me, they are very specific, fascinating, sometimes brilliant, judgmental killjoys who rarely agreed on anything except that Catholics were going to hell.”
As Vowell makes painfully clear, the excesses of the Puritans were extraordinarily excessive.
Non-conformists like Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson were banished, and headed south. (For which Rhode Island, which reveres them as founders, is forever grateful.) The Pequot War of the 1630s, in which the English settlers of Massachusetts and Connecticut joined with their Narragansett and Mohegan allies to virtually exterminate the Pequot tribe of Connecticut, is a ghastly preview of Indian wars to come.
Yet Vowell also notes that, in the days after the 2001 terrorist attacks, she was comforted by the words of Massachusetts Bay Colony Gov. John Winthrop, who urged his people to “delight in each other, make other’s conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together” in a true spirit of community. Vowell describes the sentence from which that quote is taken as “one of the most beautiful" in the English language.
The Wordy Shipmates takes its title from Vowell’s claim that the Puritans, far from being the anti-intellectual lemmings of our imagination, were a very argumentative and literary-minded crew who put pen to paper with remarkable frequency. (She shatters another myth by noting that the Puritans were anything but puritanical about sex within marriage. They figured God cooked it up so it must be a good thing.)
In explaining her fondness for these complex, conflicted and sometimes wacky colonists, Vowell draws a distinction between the Pilgrims of Plymouth and the Puritans who settled Boston and the Massachusetts Bay Colony a few years later.
While the Pilgrims were separatists who chose to divorce themselves from the Church of England, the Puritans were “purifiers” who hoped to purge the church of what they viewed as excessive Catholic influences.
Vowell zeroes in on the Puritans who came to Massachusetts Bay from 1628 or so until about 1640, a period that included the settling of Boston, the Pequot War and other notable events. (On a personal note, that migration included two of my ancestors: Matthias Farnsworth, who arrived about 1628, and Rowland Stebbins, who arrived in 1634.)
With that tightly focused time frame and specific setting, The Wordy Shipmates is not a study of the Pilgrims who landed at Plymouth in 1620. Nor does it deal with the most infamous event in 17th-century Puritan history - the Salem witch trials of 1692 and 1693. It is, as Vowell puts it, “about those Puritans who fall between the cracks of 1620 Plymouth and 1692 Salem."
They deserve a closer look, and Vowell provides it, in a style that is all her own.
