Initial Studies in American Letters | Page 8

the journals of William Bradford, first governor of
Plymouth, and John Winthrop, the second governor of Massachusetts,
which hold a place corresponding to the writings of Captain John Smith
in the Virginia colony, but are much more sober and trustworthy.
Bradford's History of Plymouth Plantation covers the period from 1620
to 1646. The manuscript was used by later annalists but remained
unpublished, as a whole, until 1855, having been lost during the War of
the Revolution and recovered long afterward in England. Winthrop's
Journal, or History of New England, begun on shipboard in 1630, and
extending to 1649, was not published entire until 1826. It is of equal
authority with Bradford's, and perhaps, on the whole the more
important of the two, as the colony of Massachusetts Bay, whose
history it narrates, greatly outwent Plymouth in wealth and population,

though not in priority of settlement. The interest of Winthrop's Journal
lies in the events that it records rather than in any charm in the
historian's manner of recording them. His style is pragmatic, and some
of the incidents which he gravely notes are trivial to the modern mind,
though instructive as to our forefathers' way of thinking. For instance,
of the year 1632: "At Watertown there was (in the view of divers
witnesses) a great combat between a mouse and a snake, and after a
long fight the mouse prevailed and killed the snake. The pastor of
Boston, Mr. Wilson, a very sincere, holy man, hearing of it, gave this
interpretation: that the snake was the devil, the mouse was a poor,
contemptible people, which God had brought hither, which should
overcome Satan here and dispossess him of his kingdom." The reader
of Winthrop's Journal comes every-where upon hints which the
imagination has since shaped into poetry and romance. The germs of
many of Longfellow's New England Tragedies, of Hawthorne's
Maypole of Merrymount, and _Endicott's Red Cross_, and of Whittier's
John Underhill and _The Familists' Hymn_ are all to be found in some
dry, brief entry of the old Puritan diarist. "Robert Cole, having been oft
punished for drunkenness, was now ordered to wear a red D about his
neck for a year," to wit, the year 1633, and thereby gave occasion to the
greatest American romance, The Scarlet Letter. The famous apparition
of the phantom ship in New Haven harbor, "upon the top of the poop a
man standing with one hand akimbo under his left side, and in his right
hand a sword stretched out toward the sea," was first chronicled by
Winthrop under the year 1648. This meteorological phenomenon took
on the dimensions of a full-grown myth some forty years later, as
related, with many embellishments, by Rev. James Pierpont, of New
Haven, in a letter to Cotton Mather. Winthrop put great faith in special
providences, and among other instances narrates, not without a certain
grim satisfaction, how "the Mary Rose, a ship of Bristol, of about 200
tons," lying before Charleston, was blown in pieces with her own
powder, being twenty-one barrels, wherein the judgment of God
appeared, "for the master and company were many of them profane
scoffers at us and at the ordinances of religion here." Without any effort
at dramatic portraiture or character-sketching, Winthrop managed in all
simplicity, and by the plain relation of facts, to leave a clear impression
of many prominent figures in the first Massachusetts immigration. In

particular there gradually arises from the entries in his diary a very
distinct and diverting outline of Captain John Underhill, celebrated in
Whittier's poem. He was one of the few professional soldiers who came
over with the Puritan fathers, such as John Mason, the hero of the
Pequot War, and Miles Standish, whose Courtship Longfellow sang.
He had seen service in the Low Countries, and in pleading the privilege
of his profession "he insisted much upon the liberty which all States do
allow to military officers for free speech, etc., and that himself had
spoken sometimes as freely to Count Nassau." Captain Underhill gave
the colony no end of trouble, both by his scandalous living and his
heresies in religion. Having been seduced into Familistical opinions by
Mrs. Anne Hutchinson, who was banished for her beliefs, he was had
up before the General Court and questioned, among other points, as to
his own report of the manner of his conversion. "He had lain under a
spirit of bondage and a legal way for years, and could get no assurance,
till, at length, as he was taking a pipe of tobacco, the Spirit set home an
absolute promise of free grace with such assurance and joy as he never
since doubted of his good estate, neither should he, though he should
fall into sin. . . . The Lord's day following he made a speech in