William Penn by Murphy Andrew R.;

Author:Murphy, Andrew R.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2018-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

12

Pirates, Penn, and the Pennsylvanians

The Penn family—William, Hannah, and twenty-year-old Letitia—set sail from the Isle of Wight on board the Canterbury, bound for Philadelphia, on September 3, 1699. William Jr., who had married in January 1699, remained in England at Warminghurst. Hannah was five months pregnant. Penn carried something else with him as well: explicit instructions from the Board of Trade, communicated before his departure and soon to be followed in writing, directing him to remove Markham, Attorney General David Lloyd, and Philadelphia Justice of the Peace Anthony Morris, from public office. These orders further complicated the delicate balancing act he had been attempting—with varying degrees of success—for the past fifteen years.1 Also accompanying the Penns on this journey was James Logan, a former schoolmaster and linen merchant originally from Ireland, whom Penn had met in Bristol and hired as his secretary. Logan, who turned twenty-five on the journey, would spend the rest of his life in Pennsylvania except for several journeys to England, and would toil on the Penn family’s behalf for more than four decades. He would try—with decidedly mixed results—to represent Penn’s (and later, Hannah’s, and later still, her sons’) interests even while many Pennsylvanians’ hostility to the proprietors grew.2

The ocean crossing was “a long and sometimes a rude passage,” with the company spending thirteen weeks at sea, Penn recounted in a surprisingly cordial letter to Francis Nicholson, his former nemesis as governor of Maryland now serving as governor of Virginia. The silver lining to this long and difficult ocean passage: it enabled the Penns and their shipmates to avoid the worst of the yellow fever epidemic that had descended on the colony, and particularly on Philadelphia, during the summer of 1699.3

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Spread by the bite of the Aedis aegypti mosquito and exacerbated by the colony’s trade with the Caribbean and West Indies, yellow fever “sowed death and panic throughout Philadelphia and its environs.” It would continue to do so periodically through the late eighteenth century, including one particularly devastating outbreak in 1793, when Philadelphia was both the new nation’s capital and its largest city. Isaac Norris called it “the Barbadoes distemper,” and described its effect on its victims without embellishment: “They void and vomit blood . . . very few recover.” Thomas Story, who had arrived in America earlier that year, reported that “in this distemper had died six, seven, and sometimes eight a-day, for several weeks together.” The situation was so dire that Friends considered postponing the 1699 Yearly Meeting. After prayer and consideration, they decided to hold the Meeting as scheduled, and Story marveled that “though the distemper was very raging and prevalent all the week before, yet there was not one taken ill during the whole time of the Meeting, either of those who came there on that account, or of the people of the town.” In all, more than two hundred people died over the course of two or three months, before seasonal northwest winds picked up, dispersing the pestilence.4

The ebbing of the

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