Hello, Radio Readers. I’m Julie A. Sellers, author of the novel Ann of Sunflower Lane. Welcome to this High Plains Public Radio Radio Readers Book Club BookByte of The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell.
This book is an interesting mix of historical facts, humorous one-liners, and social commentary of today’s world. Vowell’s focus is not the fabled Puritans who land at Plymouth Rock in 1620, but those who found the Massachusetts Bay Colony and, by a circuitous and really cold route of banishment, Rhode Island. She uses these facts to consider American identity and culture across the years and in the present.
The title of the book references all the words left by the Puritans who left England as part of the Great Migration. These are sermons, documents, diaries, letters, and books. Central to the author’s argument that the twenty-first century United States, “is haunted by the Puritans’ vision of themselves as God’s chosen people” (24) is John Winthrop’s sermon, “A Model of Christian Charity.” A passenger on the Arabella in 1630, Winthrop propagated the image of “a city upon a hill” where all formed one body. Although conflicts were not lacking in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, this notion is repeated across the centuries to express American exceptionalism.
But Winthrop is not the only writer. Roger Williams, banished from the colony for refusing to stop propagating “‘new and dangerous opinions against the authority of the magistrates,’” is His banishment is originally deferred to spring, but Williams is not silenced, and so, he is cast out in the dead of winter. Williams goes on to found what becomes Rhode Island, supporting freedom of religion throughout his life—and his writing.
Williams, however, was every bit as strict about his faith as Winthrop. Vowell tells of a letter he sends to his ill wife along with a gift he characterizes as better than precious metals. Vowell asks, “And what is this gift a girl wants more than jewelry? A sermon… Flowers would have been nice. Can’t go wrong with flowers.”
Vowell likewise pokes fun at Winthrop, who immigrated without his wife, Margaret, to get settled. In one of his letters to Margaret, Winthrop proposes they both think of each other on “Mondays and Fridays, at five of the clock at night’” (90). Later, he admits that he became distracted with work and had forgotten these spiritual dates more than once.
Anne Hutchison is another noteworthy colonist whose words are reported by Winthrop. Vowel paints her as an independent minded academic ahead of her time. Hutchison holds meetings in her house and preaches—something that women simply could not do. Worse yet, she preaches the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, a radical thought for Puritan beliefs.
The Wordy Shipmates is an interesting history that is easily accessible for the non-historian. It brings together a variety of stories, voices, and yes, words from those early settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and gives us pause to consider what remnants of them echo through the centuries to today.
I’m Julie A. Sellers for HPPR Radio Reader’s Book Club.
