1629 The Puritan minister Francis Higginson was one of the most strenuous and ingenious boosters of settlement in the New World. Educated at Cambridge, he took up a ministry in Leicestershire before deciding to join the Massachusetts Bay Company’s emigration to New England, leading an advance group, a year ahead of John Winthrop’s Great Migration of 1630 (see 11 November). Higginson’s account of the crossing was kept as a journal, then – dated this day – turned into a letter to be sent home. A later letter describing the country for ‘his friends in Leicester’ was published as New-Englands Plantation (1680), some time after his death.
Hoisting sail at Gravesend on 25 April 1629, the fleet made its way slowly around the south coast of England into the Atlantic. At sea one of Higginson’s eight children, a little girl, died of smallpox. But since she had long been ill, he recuperated the tragedy as an expression of God’s mercy, ‘a blessing from the Lord to shorten her misery’.
Apart from the Puritan saints, there were labourers on board, hired to build log houses and plant crops for the larger migration still to come. One of these was a ‘notorious wicked fellow that was given to swearing and boasting … that he had got a wench with child … railing and jesting against puritans’. He too ‘fell sick of the pox and died’, but this time it was God’s justice operating, not his mercy. Meanwhile, the saints ‘sounded and found thirty-eight fathom’, showing that they were now close to land. They celebrated by pausing briefly ‘to take codfish and feast … merrily’.
Most challenging of all were ‘five beastly sodomitical boys’, whose
… wickedness not to be named … was so foul we reserved them to be punished by the governor when we came to New England, who afterward sent them back … to be punished in Old England, as the crime deserved.
Just two days further on, the sea was wreathed in flowers, ‘which we supposed to be brought from the low meadows by the tide.… Now fine woods and green trees by land and these yellow flowers painting the sea, made us all desirous to see our new paradise of New England.’
The argument is clear. New England is for God’s elect, not for the wicked, whom God punishes either with death or the ignominious punishment fitting the crime: a passage back for those who live by the back passage. Those who pass the test of the Atlantic crossing find their ground, feast on nature’s bounty and thrive. ‘Whereas I have for divers years been very sickly and ready to cast up what I have eaten’, Higginson claimed, ‘yet from the time I came on shipboard to this day I have been strangely healthful.’
Within a year of writing this he was dead.