Part 5

There was one which set out in December, 1642, for the Canary Islands, laden with clapboards, and fell in with pirates near the Island of Palma, one of the Canaries. A Turkish pirate ship of three hundred tons with two hundred men on board and twenty-six guns, attacked this small New Haven ship of one hundred and eighty tons, which had only seven guns fit for use and twenty men armed with rusty muskets. The fight lasted for three hours, and Captain Carman, the master of the New Haven ship, and his men succeeded in killing a good many Turks in spite of being taken at a disadvantage. But at last the pirates put their ship alongside and sent one hundred men on board the New Haven ship, When, however, they found that their captain was shot and the rudder of their ship broken, the pirates hauled, down their flag and drew off so quickly that they left fifty of their men behind. "Then the master [Captain Carman] and some of his men came up and fought those fifty hand to hand and slew so many of them that the rest leaped overboard. The master had many wounds on his head and body and divers of his men were wounded, yet but one slain. So with much difficulty he got to the Island [of Palma], where he was very courteously entertained, and supplied with whatever he needed."

But New Haven ships did not always come off as well as in this encounter with the pirates, and their voyages were not always successful. Some members of the New Haven Colony bought land in Delaware and attempted to establish a trading-post in order to take advantage of the profitable trade in beaver skins. But the Dutch and Swedes, who had settled there, objected to the coming of the English, and once, in 1642, they seized Captain Lamberton, who had come in his ship the Cock, accused him of inciting the Indians against them, and threw him into prison. As the charges against him could not be proved he was soon released, but the hostility of the Dutch and Swedes continued until the New Haven merchants were driven away from that coast and out of the rich fur-trade of Delaware. This was a great blow to the colony. Other losses, too, were met with, and at last the people became greatly discouraged as they saw their hopes of founding a successful commercial colony slowly, but surely, disappearing.

The voyage of the "Great Shippe" which took place about this time is the most tragic adventure in the story of New Haven's early shipping days. It began in this way. In 1646, as a last resource, the merchants of New Haven decided to fit out a ship with what was left of their "tradeable estate," and send her to London. Up to this time they had sent goods to England by way of Boston or of the West Indies; there might be more profit, they thought, in a direct trade, cutting out the cost of reshipment. So they bought a ship. We do not know her name, she is always spoken of as the "Great Shippe," although she was only one hundred tons; perhaps the title was given her because the colonists were staking so much on this venture. If it succeeded, their prosperity might be assured; if it failed, they must give up the sea and commerce as a dependence and turn their energies to agriculture. The "Great Shippe" was a new boat, said to have been built in Rhode Island, and she was loaded principally with wheat and peas shipped in bulk, with West Indies hides, beaver skins, and what silver plate could be spared for exchange in London. Her cargo altogether was worth about twenty-five thousand dollars, which was a large sum in those days, especially in a new and struggling colony.

The master of the ship was the same Captain Lamberton we have heard of before. He was a brave and bold skipper, but it is said that he was not altogether pleased with the ship when he first saw her; that he did not like her lines and thought her not quite seaworthy. Other people, too, besides Captain Lamberton, complained that she was not only badly built, but badly loaded, with the light goods of the cargo below and the heavy above, and some old seamen predicted that the grain would shift in rough weather and make trouble. These were mostly rumors, however, and few paid attention to them at the time; but long afterward, when people talked over the strange fate of the "Great Shippe," Captain Lamberton's words, "This ship will be our grave," were recalled and believed to have been a prophecy.

That winter of 1646 was a bitterly cold one in Connecticut, and New Haven Harbor was frozen over. When the "Great Shippe" was ready to sail, it was necessary to cut a way out for her with handsaws through the thick ice for nearly three miles. A good many people from the town walked out on the harbor ice beside the ship to see her begin her voyage, and to bid good-bye to a number of their friends who were going home to England on business of one kind or another. Seventy people had taken passage in the "Great Shippe," and among them were some who were very prominent in the colony, as, for instance, Captain Nathaniel Turner, who, having had experience in the war with the Pequot Indians, had been given "the command and ordering of all martial affairs" in the plantation, and Thomas Gregson, one of the magistrates, who was charged by the colony to obtain a charter for them, if possible, from the English Parliament, then in control in England.

Reverend John Davenport, the minister, stood in the crowd of people on the ice that winter day and offered a prayer to God for the protection of the travelers. "Lord," he said, "if it be thy will to bury these our friends in the bottom of the sea, they are thine, save them." This does not sound like a very cheerful send-off, but we must remember that a long voyage was a serious undertaking in those days and that people sometimes made their wills even before sailing from New Haven for Boston.

When the "Great Shippe" had really gone, when the people had seen the last of Captain Lamberton standing on her deck giving orders, and had watched her white sails dwindle and disappear, they walked back over the ice to their homes on the shore remembering sadly that it would be a long time before they could expect to have any news from her. It might be two or three months before she reached London and as many more before word of her arrival could come back to them. So they waited patiently through the hard New England winter and the early spring, but by summer time they were eagerly looking for tidings of her. Ships came from England as usual to the colonies, but no one of them brought news of the safe arrival in London of the "Great Shippe" from New Haven. Then the people began to question the skippers of other boats, boats from the West Indies and from the plantations on the southern coasts, and to ask if anything had been heard of her in that direction. For they remembered that there had been an unusually violent storm soon after the ship had sailed, and they began to fear that she might have been blown out of her course and possibly wrecked on some such coast or island. Public prayers were offered for her safety and for the safety of her passengers. Meanwhile, the summer passed and the cold weather came again, and still there was no word from the fated ship. Few vessels put into New England harbors during the winter, and, as the chance of news grew less and less, the anxiety of the people gradually changed to despair. They recalled the sacrifices they had made to fit out that ship, the precious cargo she carried, all the things that could not be replaced (such as the sermons and other writings of Mr. Davenport which he had sent to England for publication); and in the loss of the ship on which they had set all their hopes they saw the final blow to the prosperity of New Haven. No one now had the courage or the money for another venture of that kind. Slowly and reluctantly the people turned to agriculture instead of trade, and the days of New Haven as a commercial colony were numbered.

But far worse to them than any material loss was the loss of the dear friends and relatives who had sailed with the "Great Shippe" for England. No compensation could come to those who had loved them. In November, 1647, the passengers on the ship were finally given up as lost and counted among the dead and their estates settled.

Yet many to whom they were dear could not rest satisfied. They remembered all the perils of the sea, the dangers of shipwreck on some barren coast, of possible capture by pirates, such as those who had attacked Captain Carman off the Canary Islands not many years before, and they came to feel at last that they would be thankful to learn that the ship had foundered at sea and that their friends had gone down with her to a natural death in the waters.

Two years and a half after the sailing of the "Great; Shippe" (so the story stands in a strange old book called the Magnolia Christi, by the Reverend Cotton Mather), a wonderful vision came to the people of New Haven. On that June afternoon in the year 1648, a great thunderstorm came up from the northwest. The sky grew black and threatening, there was vivid lightning, and a cold wind swept over the harbor. Before the rain had ceased and calm had come again, it was nearly sunset.

Then, against the clear evening light, a strange ship sailed into New Haven Harbor. Around the point she came with her sails full set and her colors flying. "There's a brave ship," cried the children, and they left their play to stand and gaze at her. Men and women gathered on the water-front and the same startled hope thrilled every heart: "It may be the 'Great Shippe' come home again!" For there was the old familiar outline, there were her three masts, her tackling, and her sails. And yet there was something new and mysterious, something awe-inspiring about her, and the watchers held their breath as they realized that she was sailing toward them straight against the wind that blew strong off the north shore. For a full half-hour they stood and gazed, until they could distinguish the different parts of her rigging, until they could see, standing high on her poop, the figure of a man with "one hand akimbo under his left side and in his right hand a sword stretched out toward the sea." Then, all at once, a mist rose out of the sea behind her and covered her like smoke, and through the mist and smoke men saw dimly her shrouds give way, and her masts break and fall, as though a hurricane had struck her, and slowly she careened and plunged beneath the surface of the water.

The people turned to their pastor. "What does it mean?" they asked. "It was the form of Master Lamberton. Why is this vision sent us?" And he replied that doubtless God had sent it in answer to their prayers, to show them the fate of their friends and to set their hearts at rest, for "this was the mould of their ship, and thus her tragic end."

REFERENCES

1. Levermore, Charles H. Republic of New Haven. Johns Hopkins University Studies. Baltimore, 1886.

2. Atwater, Edward E. History of the Colony of New Haven. Printed at New Haven, 1881.

3. Blake, Henry T. Chronicles of New Haven Green. Printed at New Haven, 1892.

4. Winthrop, John. History of New England. Edited by James Savage. Boston, 1825.

5. Mather, Reverend Cotton. Magnalia Christi Americana, i, 25. London, 1702.

THREE JUDGES

In the year 1661, when the city of New Haven was a small village not much more than twenty years old, a family of boys named Sperry lived out on a farm some two or three miles west of that settlement. There was only one house then besides theirs outside the town in that direction and the woods all about were thick and wild.

That summer something mysterious was going on near the Sperry farm. Every morning Richard Sperry himself, or one of his boys, carried food, in dishes covered with a cloth, into the woods on the steep side of West Rock about a mile from the house, and left it there on a stump. Every evening he, or one of his sons, went for the empty bowls and brought them home. The boys were curious to know who had eaten the food, for they never met any one coming or going, and never saw any one up on the Rock. In reply their father told them that there were men at work in the forest near by; yet they never heard voices nor the sound of an axe, and it was only long afterward that they learned the real reason for what they had done. If one of the boys had waited long enough some morning, lying still and hidden in the bushes, he might have seen a man come slowly and cautiously through the woods toward him, a dignified, grave-looking person with something foreign in his dress, something soldierly in his bearing, as if he were accustomed to commanding others; he might have watched this stranger--so different from the people he knew--take up the dishes of food and disappear again into the dark forest. And he would have wondered why a man like that, who was evidently not a hunter and not a new settler, should be hiding in the woods around New Haven.

Twelve years before, in England, this same man had taken part in a very different scene. There was a great trial held in the stately old Hall of Westminster and the prisoner at the bar was the King of England himself, and among the fifty-nine judges who condemned him to death was the man who was now hunted for his own life and was in hiding near the Sperry farm that summer, three thousand miles away from all he loved in England.

There were nearly one hundred men who had some part, large or small, in the trial and death of King Charles the First, and all of them were in great danger eleven years later when the Royalists returned to power and his son, Charles the Second, became king. A few who had very little to do with the king's sentence were pardoned; others were seized at once, tried, condemned, and executed in the barbarous way the English law then allowed, and still others tried to escape by leaving England. Some got safely to the Continent and wandered about from one foreign city to another, trying to pass unnoticed in the crowd, and always in danger of being discovered and arrested by the messengers the English Government sent after them.

Three of them came to New England and spent some time in Connecticut. This is their story.

Early in May, 1660, a ship named the Prudent Mary lay at Gravesend near London, getting ready to sail under her master, Captain Pierce, for the colonies in the new world. Two of the regicides, General Edward Whalley and General William Goffe, had taken passage in her, but they dared not sail under their own names and they came aboard as Edward Richardson and William Stephenson. While the ship was waiting in Gravesend the new king was proclaimed. That was on Saturday, May 12. The next day General Goffe wrote in his diary,--"May 13. Wee kept Sabbath abord."

On Monday they sailed and were happy to get away from England before an order could be given for their arrest. The ships of those days were very small and the little Prudent Mary took ten weeks to make her way across the ocean, but at last Goffe wrote in his journal: "July 27. We came to anchor between Boston and Charlestown; between 8 and 9 in the morning; all in good health through the good hand of God upon us."

When the judges landed they were among friends, for most of the people in New England were of their political party. They took their own names again, called on the Governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony and went about freely. Goffe's diary says: "Aug. 9. Went to Boston lecture and heard Mr. Norton. Went afterwards to his house where we were lovingly entertained with many ministers and found great respects from them." And on the 26th: "We visited Elder Frost, who received us with great kindness and love."

This diary and his letters show that Goffe was sincere and religious, but his life tells us that he was brave and energetic too. He had made his own way, and both he and Whalley, who was his father-in-law, had been important men in England; they were major-generals who had fought in great battles and had taken part in great events in history. There is an old story about their skill in fencing.