In April 1630, the Rev. John Cotton went from London to Southampton to preach a farewell sermon to 700 or so non-separatist Puritans under the leadership of John Winthrop. They were leaving for America—a two-month trip on the 350-ton sailing ship, "Arabella". In his sermon entitled, "God's Promise to his Plantation" Cotton insists that the travelers are God's new chosen people destined to create a new righteous world.
One reason they can, as Vowell documents, is that ninety percent of the Indian population have been decimated by disease, especially smallpox. This gave the Puritans the belief that God had cleared the land for them to build their new city on the hill. The first sentence in Vowell's book is, "The only thing more dangerous than an idea is a belief. And by dangerous I don’t mean thought-provoking. I mean might get people killed." (twenty-five percent of the voyagers die in their first year in Massachusetts.) Two months after leaving England, the ship makes it to Massachusetts and three years later Rev Cotton follows them and becomes one of John Winthrop's helpers in the founding of Boston, Cambridge, Dorchester, and Harvard University.
Fascinating as it is, I hesitate to call Vowell's book a typical history. She does document her story with quotes from various contemporary sources, primarily Winthrop's journals. Vowell writes that her book is about those Puritans who came and settled Massachusetts and Rhode Island between 1620 and 1692. She concentrates "primarily on the words written or spoken during" this Great Migration era. Her main motivation for writing is that the country she lives in today—the USA "is haunted by the Puritan's vision of themselves as God's chosen people, as a beacon of righteousness that all others are to admire."
Her purpose seems to be to establish a direct line of evolution of American values and principals from the very Calvinistic Puritans all the way to John F. Kennedy whose inaugural address she quotes at the end of her book. Of course, along the way we learned that Kennedy might have been beheaded if he as a Catholic had been caught in Winthrop's Boston.
The Wordy Shipmates is full of details, for example, an inventory of the items Winthrop requested for the Arabella provisions before setting off for Massachusetts. And quotes from his debate with Ann Hutchinson over their minute theological differences that caused her teaching sessions—attended by more than 60 folks gathered in her front room—to be banned and she banished to Rhode Island.
Those readers who find themselves falling asleep or into anxiety after three pages of dates, places, and characters—the stuff of the usual history book, those readers will be relieved to find in Vowell's book, intrusions of her own personal life experiences for example, comparison of her growing up in an evangelical-Pentecostal home with what it must have been like for anyone living in Winthrop’s Puritanical Boston. Vowell writes her history in what might be called a smart-alecky style. This makes some serious stuff more approachable if not understandable.
I found though that the juxtaposition of humor against the tragedies of our history such as the trapping and burning of 700 Pequot Indian men, women, and children off-putting.
Plus, I prefer my history, like my coffee—hot, black, without cream, and please no sweetener. But this I consider a minor criticism of her book. I learned a great deal about the trials, tribulations, and successes of the early Puritans and especially that we are still living with their ideas and values as the bedrock principals of the American experience.
