Over the holiday break I am reading John Barry's "Roger Williams and The Creation of the American Soul (Viking, 2012) and re-reading Francis Bremer's "John Winthrop: America's Forgotten Founding Father" (OUP, 2003). Both men are very important to 17th century British American colonial history, and both are linked to the emigration of part of the Ong family (the Lavenham, Suffolk Onges) to America. John Winthrop was of course the first locally-based Governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony and led the original "Great Migration" fleet of about 1000 people to the colony in the summer of 1630. (From this book I learned that his great-grandfather Adam Winthrop was in fact a Lavenham clothier, and the opening chapter of Bremer's biography reviewing the family's history is titled "From Lavenham to London".) Roger Williams, an ordained priest of radical Calvinist or "godly" (we would now say Puritan) persuasion and a protégé of the important statesman and jurist Sir Edward Coke (pronounced "Cook"), was the founder in 1636 of the Providence Plantation Colony (which subsequently merged into the Rhode Island Colony), a move necessitated by his expulsion from Massachusetts Bay for doctrinal non-conformity with Winthrop's brand of reformed religion.
Roger Williams sailed to Massachusetts Bay on somewhat short notice as it became clear that there was a high risk of his arrest as a "godly" priest by English ecclesiastical courts under the traditionalist, retro-reform influence of Archbishop William Laud who was trying to end all non-conformity to Anglican Prayer Book-based religious practices by the ordained clergy during the early years of the reign of Charles I (who had even married a Catholic). So Williams and his wife found themselves booked on a winter trans-Atlantic passage on the "Lyon" departing from Bristol (Gloucestershire in the West of England) on 1 December 1630. The Lyon's captain William Pierce was a very experienced trans-Atlantic seaman, and the Lyon had been part of the original Winthrop fleet. Captain Pierce had pledged to Governor Winthrop to return to Boston during the winter of 1631 with provisions for the colony once it became clear that the settlers had arrived too late for plantings in the summer of 1630 and their food supplies would therefore not last through the winter. The "Lyon" on that winter-rescue voyage also had as passengers the recently widowed Frances Onge with several of her children, accompanied by her late husband's young cousin Francis and his wife. (Francis and family returned the next year to England allowing Francis to seek a degree at Cambridge University and be ordained into the priesthood. He served parishes in Essex, and his elder son Francis was noted as "born in New England" when he registered for grammar school in Colchester in 1644.)
Why did the Onges emigrate in the winter rather than participate in the larger migration the previous summer in better weather? Motivations are guesswork, but the death of Frances' husband Edmund in June 1630 may explain the delay.
It is hard to imagine what this voyage might have been like. Williams' biographer Barry offers the following narrative:
"The North Atlantic storms most violently in winter, so few ship captains and fewer travelers chose to spend those months upon it. The storms then were themselves dangerous, and ice made sailor's lives treacherous. But Pierce, master of the Lyon, had no choice: he knew the desperation of the Bay colony and he had promised Winthrop to return with supplies. Williams too had no choice but to cross in winter what he later called "the terrible Atlanticke ocean."
"The sea did not disappoint. Williams and the handful of other passengers - not the hundreds who packed the ships in Winthrop's fleet - endured a "verye tempestuous voyage" to America. Human and animal smells made life below rank, with little respite, but to go above decks risked one's life. Mountains of waves broke over the ship, tossing and shaking it. Great winds coming out of the northeast buffeted it, ice coated the deck itself, icicles hung from the rigging - ice could hang so heavy on the rigging that it could capsize the ship - and the wind drove needles of frozen spray into exposed skin...
"Yet on the Lyon, God was merciful: only a single death occurred, when waves washed a youth overboard in one of the storms (the son of the captain -Ed). Those on deck, helpless to lower a boat, watched him straining to stay afloat, rising and falling on huge swells for a quarter of an hour before the sea swallowed him. Finally on February 5, 1631, the ship anchored safe amid great and dangerous ice floes in Boston harbor...
"Winthrop had lived up to his sermon by giving away his personal stores of food, handing the last of it out the same day - but before - the ship was sighted. Even so, it was not enough. He reported, "The poorer sorte of people (who laye longe in tentes &c.:) were much afflicted with the Sckirvye, & manye dyed."
"Deaths from scurvy were one things, at least, that the Lyon's arrival could stop. Sailors already knew citrus juice cured scurvy, so Pierce carried a large store of lemon juice. He distributed it...
"For this and for the relief from the threat of outright starvation which the other supplies provided, Governor Winthrop and the other magistrates called for a day of prayer and thanksgiving. The celebration, while deeply felt, was nonetheless muted. Winter, and hardships, continued. Those who had built homes lit great fires for warmth, but in several buildings these fires proved too great - the flames escaped the hearth and burned down the home. Wolves howled outside settlements each night and feasted on cattle; the government offered a bounty for their heads.
"By the time winter ended roughly 40 percent of those who had accompanied Winthrop had either died or returned to England..."
(from Chapter 12 - The New World, "Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul")
But Massachusetts Bay Colony did thrive after this rough start. The 1631 plantings and subsequent harvest were successful, and other industries (fishing, fur trading, shipbuilding) began to take root. The mortality rate was still high however. Frances Onge herself died in 1638, aged 55, when the oldest of the children which had accompanied her, Simon Onge, was 19. (An older sister, Mary Onge, emigrated to Massachusetts in 1634, and her fate remains a bit of a mystery for another post.)
More on the early Onges to follow, but in the meanwhile the Editor extends best wishes to all friends and family, on either side of the Atlantic, for a Happy 2015.
