Mayflower Bastard : A Stranger Among the Pilgrims (9781429976992) by Lindsay David

Author:Lindsay, David [Lindsay, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780312325930
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2010-02-15T06:00:00+00:00

BY THE BEGINNING of July, the New England authorities had muddled through their own, larger property disputes, and the Sedgwick fleet sailed on the fourth, under the flag of the Protectorate, through the icy Down East waters that Richard knew so well. On July 14, when they reached St. John’s, a small French settlement tucked into the coastline of Acadia, the takeover proved to be child’s play. La Tour had been busy feuding with a rival Frenchman and was completely unprepared for an attack from the outside. After a three-day siege, the French soldiers were given quarter and permitted to “march out of ye fort with Coilers flying and with Drums.” Then they were put aboard a ship—one of their own, it seems—and transported home to France.

As captain of the supply ship, Richard rode anchor in the harbor while the others commenced plundering the town of its cannon and brandy and furs. Thomas Lathrop, a Salem man from the earliest days, had been told he would receive a bell and asked if he could have the one in the fort tower at St. John’s, but he was advised by Sedgwick to wait until they arrived at the second outpost.

Two weeks later the fleet sailed for Port Royal, where the French surrendered after some of the Roundheads, eager to see action at last, mauled them badly. The largest take at Port Royal was the ship Chateaufort and its sumptuous cargo, but there was indeed another bell, weighing about two hundred pounds and worth some three hundred English pounds. With the help of a few men, Sedgwick threw it down from the friary into the courtyard, where Lathrop and some other men carried it to the vessel waiting in the harbor: Richard’s ketch.

Bells were especially prized possessions in North America in the seventeenth century, for the simple reason that there were very few ironworks in which they could be made. The bell that ended up on Richard’s deck, in fact, was among the very first in the New World. It had been brought to Acadia sometime not long after 1632, when Isaac de Razilly arrived with three hundred men and three Capuchin monks, who had subsequently built a chapel, monastery, and school at Lequille, near Port Royal.11

As a religious object, this bell was also imbued with symbolic power. De Razilly’s expedition having embarked from the town of Auray and the port of Saint Goustan, patron saint of sailors, the bell most likely was cast in that area of Brittany. A famous chapel had been built in the same diocese in the 1620s, after a farmer visited by visions of Saint Anne, mother of the Virgin Mary, received permission from the bishop to erect a shrine in her honor. Sainte-Anne d’Auray later became a major pilgrimage site and may have been one by the time of the Sedgwick expedition. French bells tended to be feminine; this one was therefore likely to have been dedicated to Saint Anne—the perfect mother of the perfect woman.

That

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