Mistress Bradstreet Read Free Page A

wild creatures that lurked in their shade?
    The inhabitants of Salem who had come out onto the beach to greet them were even more dreadful to look at than the landscape. Many of them appeared to be weaker than the sickest passengers on the
Arbella,
with their bones visible through papery skin. The outpost, it turned out, had endured a brutal winter, losing eighty people to starvation and illness. The survivors seemed lethargic and defeated. Many were invalids or were disoriented, withdrawn, and sullen, as is often the case with people suffering from scurvy, one of the diseases responsible for the devastation. Some of these sad souls also exhibited an incoherence that suggested they were drunk, while others seemed strangely drugged from the strong Indian tobacco that they smoked incessantly. 5
    For once, Anne could take comfort from the fact that she was not alone in her misgivings. It was clear to Winthrop, and Dudley, too, that Salem was not Canaan. Despite the coolness of their sea-soaked clothes, the summer heat was oppressive. The stench given off by the little settlement was rancid and nauseating, its weak residents having resorted to emptying their bowels behind their own homesteads, covering the fecal matter with dirt. To the newcomers, it seemed that the Englishmen they had sent to improve the land had instead deteriorated into savages, and that the wilderness, instead of being subdued, had succeeded in toppling the forces of civilization.
    Further proof lay in the fact that the settlers had been unable to create adequate shelter for themselves. The laziest had dug caves in the hillside. Others had erected flimsy wooden huts. At best these structures had a wattle-and-daub chimney, a wooden door if the denizens had been industrious, and sometimes one small paper window. The dirt floors of all these dwellings were lined with reeds and wild grasses in a futile attempt to ward off the rain, cold, and damp.
    To the new arrivals, however, the structures that were most disturbing were the odd “English wigwams.” These were made from “small poles prick’t into the ground” that were “bended and fastened at the tops.” Like tepees, they were “matted with boughs and covered with sedge and old mats.” Copied as they were from Indian dwellings, these tiny hovels could only appear “little and homely” to the eyes of the English, since anything Indian was not worthy of Christians like themselves. 6
    With this array of miserable homesteads, no one was even slightly heartened by the majesty of the pine groves, the gloriously uneven headlands, or even the blue noontime sky. Instead the land seemed lifeless, full of death and waste. Of course, this was an astonishingly arrogant viewpoint. New England was far from being the “empty” land that the English proclaimed it to be in order to assert their rights. In fact, this “desert,” as the Puritans called it, had been cleared for centuries by the Massachusetts, the tribe that dominated the bay region.
    Though their numbers had been depleted by contact with the 1620 Pilgrims and their diseases, especially smallpox, the best estimations of Indian population suggest that as many as one hundred thousand Native Americans continued to make their living along the shores of the bay. It should have been obvious to the Puritan leaders that the land had been cleared before. The groves that the settlers had at first termed “untrackable” were in fact full of paths and almost entirely free of undergrowth thanks to the Indians’ forestry skills. But most settlers, including Anne, saw the improvements that the Indians had made to the land as a divine gift rather than as a sign of Indian expertise.
    Needing to rest after their long morning’s journey, Anne, her husband, and the other leaders repaired to what the settlers called the “great house,” where Governor John Endecott, the gruff old soldier who had headed the advance party, made his home. This simple wooden structure,