The Wordy Shipmates

The author stresses that myths about the Puritans are alive and well in American popular culture and in the colloquial American lexicon: “Puritan [is] shorthand for a bunch of generic, boring, stupid, judgmental killjoys” (22). Vowell would rather revise this public image to one of “very specific, fascinating, sometimes brilliant, judgmental killjoys who rarely agreed on anything except that Catholics are going to hell” (22). While modern American culture retains its oversimplified characterization of Puritans, it has largely lost their actual words apart from a few key figures and speeches.

Vowell names and briefly discusses some of these icons, including John Winthrop, whose famous “A Model of Christian Charity” speech articulated the idea of Puritan supremacy and collective responsibility to set an example for the world. Vowell traces this mindset of righteousness (coming from England and adopted in the US) through the centuries. The Massachusetts Bay Colony’s emblematic seal features an Indian saying, “Come over and help us” (25)—an English invention that cemented the paternalist idea that Puritans were “helping” primitive savages. This rhetoric endured as a pattern of foreign policy through US invasions of the Philippines, Vietnam, the Persian Gulf, and Iraq.

On the Arbella, Winthrop’s writings not only sought to comfort the nervous colonists on their trip to a new continent, but also to “justify the venture” (27). The trip was both an escape from an overcrowded, expensive England that sat on the border of European religious warfare, and a Christianization mission to lands that God had apparently conveniently cleared for them.

The last part of this section explains why Puritans were convinced God had cleared the North American continent for their arrival. European germs had been decimating the Native population from the time of the conquistadors, and widespread epidemics led to further disruption and famine. In turn, British political and religious leaders, including Winthrop, boasted of capitalizing on Indigenous death, or what King James called “this wonderful plague among the savages” (31). Anti-Indigenous racism permeated Puritan (and American) literature, justifying the colonization of Native lands. 

Vowell explains the religious worldview of John Winthrop and company. His “A Model of Christian Charity” speech delivered that now-famous image of the Puritan “city on a hill,” but that image was “just one more metaphor for the pile” of sources that defined Puritans as God’s chosen people (37). The speech also further articulated central tenets of Puritan theology: “God created all men unequal” and a community needs to work together to have all jobs and duties performed (37-38).

Another critical piece of theology for this particular group of Calvinist Puritans was the doctrine of predestination. Predestination holds that before birth every person already carried God’s judgment of saved or damned, so actions taken during life cannot guarantee a place in heaven. Instead, a person’s actions, at best, could reflect God’s destiny for them. The anxiety surrounding an uncontrollable eternal fate weighed heavily on believers, who suffered “jangling nerves” or went “mad by spiritual doubt” (42). Aiming to reflect God’s grace was the foundation of the “Protestant work ethic”—“tireless labor and ambition in pursuit of salvation” (44). Social pressure not to appear idle continues when modern Americans invoke the term.

Religion was at the center of the Puritan world, but Vowell reminds us that emigration was also a political act. John Winthrop was not only a religious leader, but also the governor of the Massachusetts colony and a lawyer that wrote of “covenants” with God (50). His plea for togetherness and mutual aid addresses both Christian values and skills that would be necessary for survival. The author attributes Massachusetts’s eventual status as a commonwealth to this ideology, and credits it for the community bonding she witnessed in the wake of the 9-11 terrorist attack on New York City.

The colonists suffered greatly, but were still “at the grace note before the downbeat of gloom,” anticipating with excitement the possibilities of their ordained venture but knowing, as Winthrop did, that their example had the potential to become “a lighthouse of doom” (54-55; 58).