The Wordy Shipmates

The Puritans practiced Christianity in the vein of John Calvin’s Protestant theology, which came to be known as Calvinism. Calvinism, like other Protestant sects, grew out of the Protestant Reformation that swept Europe to overturn Catholicism (sometimes through warfare) in the 16th century.

The central tenet of Calvinism is predestination: God determines an individual soul’s fate (saved or damned) before that person is born, so no amount of good deeds or devotedness on Earth can earn a person’s place in heaven. Still, a godly life on Earth might reflect that a particular person is among God’s “Elect.” Vowell’s primary sources stress the anxiety and fear that beset believers in Calvinist uncertainty.

There are several “Great Migrations” in American history, but the Great Migration at stake in The Wordy Shipmates describes the 1630s. During that decade, the English aristocracy “dissolves the Puritan-friendly English Parliament” (23), and maintained a social and religious order that drove more than 20,000 emigrants to New England.

While religious conflict was a major driver of dissent and relocation, the cross-Atlantic voyages also furthered a larger colonial project that Great Britain and other European nations like the Netherlands, Spain, France, and Portugal launched in the Americas. Charters for land and company dominion enabled colonies, where settlers unleashed violence, land theft, and indirect damage in the form of germs on Native peoples. 

In 1630, during his congregation’s voyage from England to Massachusetts, John Winthrop supposedly delivered a sermon called “A Model of Christian Charity.” The sermon was not published until 1838 and its true origins are murky, but in it, Winthrop articulated the image of the soon-to-be New England colony representing “a city upon a hill” that would embody and project the genius and righteousness of a pure Christian society.

The speech has become one of the most famous surviving documents from the Puritan era. Its importance solidified centuries after its initial debut. 20th- and 21st-century American politicians have invoked the sermon’s famous “city upon a hill” imagery to articulate an enduring American goal of standard-setting and national superiority. 

The Pequot War was a colonial war born of power struggles and strategic alliances among European colonists and several Native nations in New England in the mid-1630s. The conflict centered on animosities and conflicts between the English colonists of Massachusetts Bay and the Pequot; however, the events that led up to the climax of the war involved Dutch colonists, the Narragansett, and the Mohegan, who aided British colonists in their pursuit and destruction of a particular group of Pequots. In this climactic incident, English, Narragansett, and Mohegan forces attacked and burned a palisaded Pequot village at Fort Mystic in 1637, massacring hundreds of Pequot, including unarmed women, children, and elders.

The conflict illustrates the severity of the challenges and moral decisions that Puritans faced. Occupying space in New England meant navigating complex standing trade, kinship, and rivalry networks among regional sovereign Native powers. Colonists vied for land, protection, and resources in order to survive. The brutal warfare against the Pequot did not, in the colonists’ estimations, devalue their godliness. They interpreted their victory even by such ruthless means as God’s will.