The Enemy Within (12 page)

November 28, 1654; again the court is convened at Hartford. But this is not a regular session; instead it is announced as “special.” Three years have passed since the first hearing on Stiles's death; now there will be another. A new jury is sworn “by the ever living God . . .
[
to
]
faithfully present . . . what criminal offense you shall judge meet.” The room is crowded with anxious spectators, including many who have made the ten-mile trip down from Windsor. The magistrates preside at the front, from heavily-framed armchairs set on a raised platform. Below them stands a middle-aged woman, her legs in ball and chain—evidently a defendant. Today there is one matter, and one only, on the court's agenda. The clerk reads aloud: “Lydia Gilbert, thou art here indicted . . . that, not having the fear of God before thy eyes, thou hast of late years, or still dost, give entertainment to Satan, the great enemy of God and mankind; and by his help hast killed the body of Henry Stiles, besides other witchcrafts, for which, according to the law of God and the established law of this commonwealth, thou deservest to die.”

The jury has been taking evidence in support of these charges for weeks; many Windsor townsfolk have come forward to testify. The damage and danger attributed to Goodwife Gilbert spans a broad range: spoiled food, the loss of cattle, illness and injury in several of her neighbors. But Henry Stiles's death is the clincher; that is what brings her to the present moment. Clearly, she had a motive to attack him, even kill him. (Remember all he owed her, and the angry words that passed between them.) Likely, too, she had the means; her prior “witchcrafts” are proof enough. Yes, she might well have agreed to “give entertainment to Satan”; and Satan, for his part, must have given in return—the extraordinary power to perform
maleficium.
Now, at last, a deeper cause of Stiles's death can be openly acknowledged. The bullet that took his life was not simply a random mischance; to the contrary, its course was carefully and purposefully guided. Here, then, is the sum of it: a spiteful witch has used a young man's carelessness to murder another whom she hated. The jury declares: “The party abovementioned is found guilty of witchcraft.” Therefore, Lydia Gilbert, “thou deservest to die.”

 
Postscript: Many of the records from the Gilbert witchcraft case have not survived; historians can never reconstruct the full story. But we may at least imagine a further piece or two. . . .

CHAPTER V

Much of the early “settlement” phase of American history is shrouded in obscurity. Records are few, and historians' access correspondingly limited. We do know a good deal about the leaders, their broad goals and strategies, but we have little that illuminates the lives of the rank and file.

Still, we can visualize, infer, imagine—starting with the process of migration itself. Tiny (by our standards) sailing ships, crammed with people, animals, “goods.” Sickness, including near-constant nausea for the many who had never previously been to sea; sometimes death. Intense feelings of anticipation, hope, puzzlement, worry, and (for at least a few) suicidal despair. No doubt individual settlers were fortified, to some extent, by the Old World heritage they carried with them—in their heads and hearts as well as their shipping trunks and boxes. They were Europeans, through and through: English (by far the largest number), French, Dutch, Swedish, Finnish, Spanish, and a small scattering of others. They were Protestants (again, the largest number), Catholics (most of those headed to one place in particular, the colony of Maryland), and Jews (just a handful). In a great many ways, they reflected the traditional stock from which they were sprung. To be sure, they did not constitute an entirely representative sample: “Puritans,” for instance, were disproportionately included, and “gentlefolk” (persons of high rank and privilege) were scarcely to be found at all. Still, when considered from the broadest possible perspective, their values and opinions, their habits of thinking and doing, fell within the usual range for European folk of their era.

The first of several migration bursts coincided in time (the early 17th century) with the peak of the great European witch craze. Hence the migrants themselves would surely have known witchcraft—and feared witchcraft, and maybe experienced, or even practiced, witchcraft—firsthand. As well, they would have carried it with them to their new homes overseas. Indeed, the Devil troubled them, both literally and figuratively. An elderly New Englander, reflecting late in life on his decision to migrate some 50 years before, remembered the hope “that I should be more free here than there [i.e. Old England] from temptations”; in fact, however, “I found here a devil to tempt, and a corrupt heart to deceive.” Were there individual passengers, aboard the first transatlantic ships, suspected of performing witchcraft? That does seem a reasonable presumption. Evidence from a generation or two later suggests that ocean travel may actually have primed witchcraft suspicion in special ways. In 1654, on a ship traveling from London to Maryland, sailors spread a “rumor . . . [that] one Mary Lee, then aboard the said ship, was a witch.” At first the captain rebuffed their urging “that a trial might be had of her”; but then, as “cross winds” rose to impede the voyage and “the ship grew daily more leaky—almost to desperation,” his attitude changed. The sailors were permitted to “search her body,” and quickly discovered “the mark of a witch upon her . . . [whereupon] they importuned the Master [Captain] to put her to death.” He replied that “they might do what they would, and went into his cabin.” And so, “laying all their hands to the execution of her,” they proceeded finally to “hang her as a witch.” A similar scene was enacted a few years later on a boat sailing to Virginia. Details of this one have not come down to us but, according to a later summary filed in a local court, “An old woman named Katherine Grady . . . [was] accused of witchcraft . . . [and] hung from a yard's arm,” supposedly at the “clamorous demand of . . . passengers during the progress of a violent storm.”

In sum: bad weather, sickness, confining conditions, uncertainty about the future, and real danger in the present must together have served to heighten anxiety and suspicion during sea journeys. Always there were shipboard prayers, fervent pleadings for divine mercy (especially in the face of ocean storms). And, alongside such outward, openly voiced entreaties, there would have been—there had to be—inward, perhaps unvoiced, imprecations against the Devil and his human confederates. God and Satan; angels and demons; pious folk and “foresworn” witches; the saved and the damned; righteousness and sin: these pairings were omnipresent and indivisible.

Such matters must have preoccupied settlers of every ethnic and religious group, no matter what their specific New World destination. If we had some way to peel back the years, and to visit wherever we liked in 17th-century North America, we would find many signs of witchcraft belief. We might land, say, in a Massachusetts village, and accost one or another inhabitant as he walked along the rutted street:
What can you tell us, Goodman Jones, of witchcraft in your town?
And he would have stories to offer, perhaps about his own experiences or (at a minimum) those of his neighbors.
'Twas Whitsuntide when my cow fell a-roaring, and her belly swelled strangely, and she died after a fortnight, and I could never tell the reason of it, but thoughts of witches kept running in my mind.
We could stop at an “ordinary” (tavern) by a crossroads in the tidewater region of Virginia and eavesdrop from a seat near the back wall. And, sooner or later, the conversation would turn to whatever had recently gone bump in the night.
Last Sabbath eve Mr. Watson was kept up to all hours with great noises like stones flung upon the roof of the house, and looked out and saw nobody; and he said there was a Devil abroad.
We could linger at a public well in Albany (then a thriving little
entrepôt
up the Hudson River from New York) where local women gathered to draw water; their chat, too, might move in the same direction.
Goodwife Gerritsen's daughter is fallen into fits and complains of Mistress Sanders for afflicting her.
Again, most of this lies beyond the reach of any surviving records, and may never have been written down in the first place. But some of it does turn up, at least indirectly, in witchcraft cases from later on. And all of it belonged to the prevalent popular mentality on both sides of the Anglo-Atlantic world.

The same mentality conditioned the response of colonists to the native people they would encounter upon coming ashore. Indeed, it had framed expectation throughout Europe even before such encounters began. From well back in the 16th century, a large and constantly expanding literature of New World travel had cast American Indians as “Devil worshipers.” The notorious English explorer-pirate Francis Drake, for example, reported seeing a native group dance in “hellish” costumes on a beach with the aim (so he believed) of destroying his ships. Similarly, Captian John Smith—he of the legendary “rescue” by the Indian princess Pocahontas—regarded Virginia's Powhatan tribe as being very much “in league with Satan.” And Reverend Alexander Whitaker, an early visitor to the same region, wrote at length to a colleague at home about the strange “antics” of Indians. “All these things,” he concluded, “make me think that there be great witches among them, and that they are very familiar with the Devil.” Farther to the north, Governor William Bradford remembered, in his history
Of Plymouth Plantation
, how Indian “powwaws” had greeted the little settler band he led by gathering “in a horrid and devilish manner . . . to curse and execrate them with their conjurations.” Even Roger Williams, long regarded as uncommonly sympathetic to native cultural ways, declared flatly that Indian “priests [are] . . . no other than our English witches.”

The same refrain continued to be heard in all regions long after the initial period of colonization: Indians as “minions of Satan,” as “sorcerers” and “conjurors,” as consorters with “Evil Angels.” However, there is a notable gap in such depictions: Indians do not appear as perpetrators of
maleficium.
This element, the infliction of injury by diabolical means, was everywhere key to the image of homegrown witches; hence, its absence in portrayals of native culture is striking.

In fact, the activity that the colonists were identifying as Indian witchcraft was what we would now call shamanism. The powwaws were, for the most part, practitioners of traditional medicine: witch
doctors
perhaps, but not witches in the full and classic European sense. One early colonist noted that their main “office and duty” was “curing diseases of the sick and wounded.” Another described them as “partly wizards and witches . . . [and] partly physicians”; in the latter capacity, moreover, “they seem to do wonders.” What made them objectionable, in European eyes, was their apparent “familiarity with Satan,” their propensity to “cure by the help of the devil”—in short, their methods rather than their intended and actual results. Close-up observation brought their “Satanism” into sharp focus; a typical account of an Indian powwaw emphasized his “hideous bellowing and groaning . . . sometimes roaring like a bear . . . foaming at the mouth like a chased boar, smiting his naked breast and thighs with such violence as if he were mad,” all of which “will he continue sometimes half the day.” Such “fiendish rites” could only be inspired by the Archfiend himself. And they were bizarre, awesome, terrifying.

Still, none of this is quite the same as
maleficium.
So, again: Did individual Indians, and especially the powwaws themselves, attempt to effect their own forms of harmful witchcraft? And did Indians at large believe in such possibilities? Certainly this was true of native groups well inland—the Sioux of the Great Plains, the Navajo in the Southwest. However, for eastern Indians, those living closest to the early colonies, evidence of such belief (and practice) is virtually nil. If the colonists had seen signs of native
maleficium,
they surely would have said as much.