An Afternoon on the Sofa with a Bastard
Sunday, November 21st, 2004 08:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tamaranth Mayflower Bastard: A Stranger Among the Pilgrims by David Lindsay.
Richard More was born in Shropshire in 1614: he sailed on the Mayflower as a boy of five, taken with his three siblings from his mother's care because they were children of adultery: he died in Salem around 1694, and is the only 'First Comer' whose grave is known.
David Lindsay is descended from Richard More, but that doesn't mean that he glosses or gilds his story. (One rather gets the idea that he is pleased to have someone as colourful in the family.) Richard More did not lead an exemplary, or Puritan, life. He was a master mariner, not above smuggling and outright piracy: a bigamist -- one wife in Salem, one in Stepney, and ne'er the twain shall meet: not especially religious or law-abiding: semi-literate: and spirited to the end. (He was excommunicated at the age of 70 on a, possibly trumped-up, charge of adultery). He lived through the creation and decline of the Plymouth colony, saw his friends and neighbours hanged or pressed to death under suspicion of witchcraft, made some powerful enemies and a few valuable allies. Meanwhile, his mother's husband's son (by husband's second marriage), also baptised Richard More, stayed in London feting his mistresses and being all privileged.
I'm not sure I approve of Lindsay as a historian, but then this isn't really a history book. It reads more like a novel, and I have a strong sense of his enjoyment at piecing together Richard More's life. Some of his theories (presented as near-fact) rest on extremely shaky foundations, for example:
Whether Judeth was slave or servant is impossible to say definitively, not only because the record describes her simply as Richard's 'neager', but also because the distinction in New England at the time was slight. Neither condition was racially defined, and neither was necessarily permanent ... [but, on the next page] it is worth pointing out that at least one Mayflower passenger ... held complete power over a black human being, to do with her as he wished.
That, to me, doesn't add up: it's in a passage about Richard More paying a fine for Judeth's 'fornication' rather than letting her be whipped.
I also choked on my soup at occasional unfortunate phrases.
The mariners' community extended from the Tower of London all the way out to Southend [which didn't actually exist then], an entire distended city of riggers and sail-makers, naval officers, sea-mad captains, privateers, haberdashers, tobacconists, smugglers, adventurers, failed and returning colonists, entrepreneurs of every type ...
Haberdashers?! I came over all Pirates of Penzance ...
and there's a lovely passage about stag-hunting in Bushy Park: the very same stags that the King had procured [about twenty years before] from Lord Zouch. One can only think that they were very crafty and cunning stags, or that the King was an utterly ineffectual huntsman.
But it is a fascinating book: perhaps most fascinating when Lindsay digresses from the narrative to address, second-person familiar, the unknown individual who accused Richard More of 'unspeakable' adultery. At those points there's a real sense of echoes down through time, of thin walls between past and present (I think I borrowed this image from the introduction to Christa Wolf's Medea: I like it a great deal). More was a pragmatist and a businessman, never mind his ill-advised entanglements with women, and though he ended his days in poverty (having outlived three wives and several of his children) he did regain his status in the community, post-witch trials.
Ever so much less relevant (and yet more credible) than some of the genealogical sites I've been cruising lately. It took me a while to notice that Dampier's son, whose child was born in 1720, died in 1717 ...
Richard More was born in Shropshire in 1614: he sailed on the Mayflower as a boy of five, taken with his three siblings from his mother's care because they were children of adultery: he died in Salem around 1694, and is the only 'First Comer' whose grave is known.
David Lindsay is descended from Richard More, but that doesn't mean that he glosses or gilds his story. (One rather gets the idea that he is pleased to have someone as colourful in the family.) Richard More did not lead an exemplary, or Puritan, life. He was a master mariner, not above smuggling and outright piracy: a bigamist -- one wife in Salem, one in Stepney, and ne'er the twain shall meet: not especially religious or law-abiding: semi-literate: and spirited to the end. (He was excommunicated at the age of 70 on a, possibly trumped-up, charge of adultery). He lived through the creation and decline of the Plymouth colony, saw his friends and neighbours hanged or pressed to death under suspicion of witchcraft, made some powerful enemies and a few valuable allies. Meanwhile, his mother's husband's son (by husband's second marriage), also baptised Richard More, stayed in London feting his mistresses and being all privileged.
I'm not sure I approve of Lindsay as a historian, but then this isn't really a history book. It reads more like a novel, and I have a strong sense of his enjoyment at piecing together Richard More's life. Some of his theories (presented as near-fact) rest on extremely shaky foundations, for example:
Whether Judeth was slave or servant is impossible to say definitively, not only because the record describes her simply as Richard's 'neager', but also because the distinction in New England at the time was slight. Neither condition was racially defined, and neither was necessarily permanent ... [but, on the next page] it is worth pointing out that at least one Mayflower passenger ... held complete power over a black human being, to do with her as he wished.
That, to me, doesn't add up: it's in a passage about Richard More paying a fine for Judeth's 'fornication' rather than letting her be whipped.
I also choked on my soup at occasional unfortunate phrases.
The mariners' community extended from the Tower of London all the way out to Southend [which didn't actually exist then], an entire distended city of riggers and sail-makers, naval officers, sea-mad captains, privateers, haberdashers, tobacconists, smugglers, adventurers, failed and returning colonists, entrepreneurs of every type ...
Haberdashers?! I came over all Pirates of Penzance ...
and there's a lovely passage about stag-hunting in Bushy Park: the very same stags that the King had procured [about twenty years before] from Lord Zouch. One can only think that they were very crafty and cunning stags, or that the King was an utterly ineffectual huntsman.
But it is a fascinating book: perhaps most fascinating when Lindsay digresses from the narrative to address, second-person familiar, the unknown individual who accused Richard More of 'unspeakable' adultery. At those points there's a real sense of echoes down through time, of thin walls between past and present (I think I borrowed this image from the introduction to Christa Wolf's Medea: I like it a great deal). More was a pragmatist and a businessman, never mind his ill-advised entanglements with women, and though he ended his days in poverty (having outlived three wives and several of his children) he did regain his status in the community, post-witch trials.
Ever so much less relevant (and yet more credible) than some of the genealogical sites I've been cruising lately. It took me a while to notice that Dampier's son, whose child was born in 1720, died in 1717 ...
