Authors: Kenneth C. Davis
America's Hidden History: Untold Tales of the First Pilgrims, Fighting Women, and Forgotten Founders Who Shaped a Nation Paperback (6 page)
Early on August 8, the English sent “fireships,” filled with gunpowder and set ablaze, toward the armada. The Spanish ships sailed out to sea to escape the flames. Later that morning, about sixty English ships attacked an equal number of Spanish ships off the French port of Gravelines, with the English sinking two Spanish ships and damaging scores of others. Crippled, the remnants of the armada attempted to return to Spain by sailing north around the British Isles.
Storms and high winds wrecked many ships off Ireland’s coast, and only about half of the fleet returned to Spain. Of the other half, there was no word. In a history of the Spanish Armada, Neil Hanson summarizes, “English losses were nil.” As a result of the defeat, Philip was declared bankrupt. 17
z
i n t h e y e a r that Spain’s armada was crushed, a child was born on a country manor in Groton, England, far from the great halls of kings, queens, and popes. The boy’s grandfather, a London cloth merchant, had purchased the manor in 1544. It had once been part of a monastery called Bury St. Edmunds. But when King Henry VIII broke with the Vatican, he had confiscated the Church’s lands and properties, many of which were then sold to men such as merchant Adam Winthrop. In 1588, the former monastery became the birthplace of John Winthrop, the future governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
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1607 Jamestown, Virginia, the first permanent English settlement in America, is founded.
1608 Samuel Champlain settles Quebec.
1611
Publication of a new English-language Bible, authorized by King James.
1612 Dutch traders establish trading post on Manhattan.
1619 Virginia’s first elected assembly, called the House of Burgesses, meets; African slaves carried on a Dutch ship are sold as “servants” in Jamestown; a shipload of marriageable young women arrives in Virginia and planters pay 120 pounds of tobacco for each woman’s passage; a hundred London slum children are sent to Virginia as servants.
1620 On November 11, Pilgrims aboard the
Mayflower
sign the Mayflower Compact; it outlines rules for a rudimentary democracy.
After exploring Cape Cod, the Pilgrims establish Plymouth Plantation on December 21.
1622 Powhatan Indian attacks devastate Virginia.
1625 Charles I ascends the British throne.
1629 King Charles I dissolves Parliament.
1630 The great Puritan emigration begins; Massachusetts Bay Colony is founded with Boston as its capital.
1634 Maryland founded as a refuge for English Catholics by Lord Baltimore.
1636–1637 Pequot War fought in New England.
1638 Religious dissenter Anne Hutchinson is tried in Massachusetts.
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1642 The English Civil War begins. In 1649, Charles I is beheaded; his son Charles II is defeated by the forces of Puritan leader Oliver Cromwell and escapes to France.
1653 Oliver Cromwell takes on dictatorial powers as “Lord Protector” and holds power until 1658.
1660 The Restoration brings King Charles II, a Roman Catholic, back to claim the British throne.
1664 English seize Dutch New Amsterdam and rename it New York.
June-August 1676
King Philip’s War devastates New England.
1682 The Frenchman La Salle descends Mississippi River to its mouth and claims the Louisiana Territory for France.
1685 King James II becomes England’s last Roman Catholic ruler.
1688 In the Glorious Revolution, King James II flees to France; the constitutional monarchy is restored under William and Mary, James’
daughter.
1689–1697 The Second Indian War, or King William’s War.
1692 Salem witchcraft trials.
1702–1711
Queen Anne’s War (known as the War of the Spanish Succession in Europe). In 1704, French and Indians massacre English settlers at Deerfield, Massachusetts; English forces massacre Apalachee Indians at Spanish missions in Florida.
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Mrs. Hutchinson, you are called here as one of those that have troubled the peace of the commonwealth and the churches here; . . . you have spoken divers things as we have been informed very prejudicial to the honour of the churches and ministers thereof, and you have maintained a meeting and an assembly in your house that hath been condemned by the general assembly as a thing not tolerable nor comely in the sight of God nor fitting for your sex.
—Governor John Winthrop
during the trial of Anne Hutchinson (1643)
The New-Englanders are a People of God settled in those which were once the Devil’s Territories; and it may easily be supposed that the Devil was exceedingly disturbed, when he perceived such a People here.
—Cotton Mather,
T he Wonders of the Invisible World (1693)
There was a type of man whom the Puritan never tired of denouncing. He was a good citizen, a man who obeyed the laws, carried out his social obligations, never injured others.
The Puritans called him a “civil man,” and admitted that he was “outwardly just, temperate, chaste, carefull to follow his worldly businesse, will not so much as hurt his neighbours dog, payes every man his owne, and lives of his owne; no drunkard, adulterer or quareller; loves to live peacably and | 41 \
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quietly among his neighbours.” This man, this paragon of social virtue, the Puritans said, was on his way to Hell, and their preachers continually reminded him of it.
—Edmund S. Morgan,
T he Puritan Family (1944)
Puritanism—the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
—H. L. Mencken (1949)
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a
Haverhill, Massachusetts—March 15, 1697
In the cold darkness of a late winter New England morning, Hannah Emerson Dustin was lying in. Six days earlier, the forty-year-old mother and farmer’s wife had given birth to a girl, her eighth child. The infant, named Martha, was being tended by Mary Neff, a widow who served the frontier village of Haverhill as nurse and midwife.
As winter’s grip lingered on this bleak Ides of March, spring’s promise must have seemed very remote in Haverhill. Situated near the New Hampshire border, the small town still shuddered from a brush with witchcraft a few years earlier. Accusations of sorcery and spectral doings had sent a chill of fear through Haverhill, although the town had escaped the notorious trials and mass executions that had shattered nearby Salem village during its witchcraft crisis at about the same time.
Adding to Haverhill’s unease, the town bordered Indian country, and with war in the air, that was no small threat. Overwhelmed by the English influx, the Algonquian-speaking “people of the dawnland”— the Abenaki, who were spread across northern New England—had been pressing English frontier settlements with growing ferocity for nearly ten years. Just two years earlier, Haverhill had barely fended off an attack by eighty Indians. In York, Maine, the people had been less fortunate. In what was called the Candlemas Massacre, more than fifty settlers had died and another hundred had been taken captive in the early winter of 1692. That the settlers believed that the Indi-
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ans were actually in league with the devil only served to heighten the climate of fear. The connection between witches, magic, and Native Americans was not coincidental. Contemporary scholars have much more closely connected the outbreak of New England’s witchcraft hys-teria in the 1690s with the growing threat from local tribes who were widely viewed by Puritans as demonic agents.
For Haverhill’s residents, these dangers—both the spiritual and the worldly—simply confirmed the constant admonishments of their Puritan preachers: they were hopeless sinners with little chance of redemption, in this life or the next. As the Reverend George Burroughs, a minister from Wells, Maine, wrote after the devastating surprise attack on York, “God is still manifesting his displeasure against this Land.”1
On this cold March morning, Thomas Dustin, Hannah’s forty-five-year-old husband, suddenly burst into the house in a panic. Haverhill was under attack. Half a dozen nearby houses were already burning. An Abenaki raiding party was heading for the Dustin home.
Hannah implored her husband to collect their other children and get them to safety. She and Mary Neff would fend for themselves and the baby.
After what must have been a torturous moment in which he had to choose between trying to save his wife and newborn and saving the rest of his family, Thomas Dustin did as his wife asked. Rushing from the house, he gathered his seven other children, ranging in age from two to seventeen, and managed to shepherd all of them to safety. Desperately holding off the Abenaki warriors who followed his family as they fled, Thomas Dustin kept the Indians at bay without actually firing his musket, which might have spelled his doom. Had he gotten off a shot, the Indians would have certainly overwhelmed him before | 44 \
Hannah’s Escape
he could reload. The little group reached the town’s designated garrison, the fortified house of veteran Indian fighter and Salem witch trial judge Nathaniel Saltonstall, about a mile away.
Barely moments after Thomas rushed off, some twenty Abenaki raiders, armed with war axes and muskets, came crashing into the farmhouse where Hannah cowered by the hearth. Hannah and the nurse, clutching newborn Martha, expected death. Instead, they were pulled from the house, which was then set ablaze. One of the raiders grabbed newborn Martha from Mary Neff’s arms and brained the six-day-old baby against a nearby apple tree.
In this inconceivable moment of terror, shock, and grief, the two women were spared. Taken captive along with at least ten other prisoners from Haverhill, they began a wilderness trek. According to the most famous contemporary account of this ordeal, “several of the other captives, as they began to Tire in their sad Journey, were soon sent unto their Long Home; the Salvages [
sic
] would presently bury their Hatchets in their Brains, and leave their Carcasses on the Ground for Birds and Beasts to Feed upon.”2
As the raiders pushed over the rugged, snow-covered backwoods with their prizes, Hannah Dustin and Mary Neff’s fate remained uncertain. Like the other captives, they might be killed in an instant simply because they could not keep up with the war party as it wound its way north in the late New England winter. They might be forced to become servants of an Indian family, or even adopted by one to replace family members lost in fighting.
Or, in what was perhaps their best hope, they might be turned over to the Abenaki’s European allies, the French, who might pay the Indians a bounty for the English prisoners. The women would then possibly be ransomed back to the English or used as bargaining chips in | 45 \
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a negotiated hostage exchange between the two contentious European nations as they battled for control of North America. In the big picture, this Abenaki raid on Haverhill was but a single, brief moment in a larger conflict, known in New England as the Second Indian War and later called King William’s War, after England’s reigning monarch. This running battle was a mere instant in a much longer drama of fighting between England and France that raged across North America for three-quarters of a century.
After several days’ march, the women were taken to an island near the convergence of the Contoocook and Merrimack rivers (now known as Dustin Island, near Concord, New Hampshire) and handed over to a native family. Here they joined another captive, Samuel Lennardson, a young English boy who had been taken from his father’s farm near Worcester, Massachusetts, a year and a half earlier. Like young Samuel, the two women were given as servants to this family of twelve Indians—two men, three women, and seven children. More distress-ing, as Puritan cleric Cotton Mather underscored in his account of the captives’ plight, these Indians said their prayers three times a day and made their children pray before eating or sleeping, as the French priests had taught them. In other words, they were not merely what Mather termed “Salvages;” they were Roman Catholics to boot—“idol-aters like their whiter Brethren Persecutors,” by which Mather meant the French. One of Boston’s most famous and influential preachers, Mather pointedly observed in recounting Hannah Dustin’s story that some Puritan families might profit from the Indians’ example of such rigorous devotion.
If the image of Indians faithfully reciting Catholic prayers seems at odds with the traditional view of Native American families in wigwams, consider the report of a French priest, Father Pierre Thury. Two | 46 \
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years after the Haverhill raid, he described the scene as an Abenaki war party prepared to assault an English fort at Pemaquid, Maine: “Almost all our warriors, who numbered about one hundred, took confession before they left, as if they were going to die on this expedition. . . .
The women and children also followed their example and took confession, after which the women recited an endless rosary in the chapel, taking turns one after another from the first light of dawn until night, asking God through the intervention of the Sainted Virgin, to take pity on them and protect them during this war.”3
Shortly after Hannah Dustin and Mary Neff arrived at the island camp, one of the Abenaki men told young Samuel that the entire party would ultimately head toward Canada. There, at an Indian rendezvous, the three English captives would be stripped and forced to “run the gauntlet.” As Cotton Mather described it, with what sounds like a mix of breathless horror and a slight frisson of wishfulness, “When they came to this Town, they must be Stript, and Scourg’d and Run the Gantlet, through the whole Army of Indians. They said this was the Fashion when the Captives first came to a town; and they derided some of the Faint-hearted English, which they said, fainted and swoon’d away under the Torments of this Discipline.”4