The Wordy Shipmates

Vowell reflects on the implications of Hutchinson’s story for women, lamenting “that her gender kept her from pursuing her calling” (237). Midwifery was an approved profession for women, but they could not become religious leaders or magistrates. Vowell visits the Women’s Healing Garden in Portsmouth to view statues of Hutchinson and her contemporary and friend Mary Dyer. The scene irks Vowell because the space is overtly feminine and sad. Hutchinson had no opportunity to flower to her full potential— even when she founded Portsmouth, only men could sign the new colony’s compact.

Meanwhile, after the court banished Hutchinson, John Winthrop followed up on a rumor that Hutchinson, in her capacity as a midwife, covered up the birth of a monstrous child stillborn with scales, horns, and claws. Seeking to prove that God had punished the mother for spending too much time in close proximity to Hutchinson, Winthrop ordered the corpse exhumed. Winthrop confirmed that the baby was indeed a monster to advertise the “cautionary tale” of the perils of friendship with a woman like Hutchinson (233). When the mother of the supposedly monstrous stillborn baby preached against anti-Quaker laws in Massachusetts in the 1650s, officials sentenced her to death.

Rhode Island grew into “a place of refuge for the unwanted and displaced, the outcasts and the cranks, including Baptists, Quakers, and Jews” (241). Religious disputes defined Rhode Island society, but they took the form of debates, not banishments.

King Philip’s War between the Wampanoag and Massachusetts colonists in 1675 devastated Native and Anglo populations in New England. Williams, previously a friend to and fair trader with Indigenous, now sold “vanquished Indians into slavery, primarily in Bermuda, where their descendants still reside” (243).

Vowell reminds the reader again that Winthrop endures in American mythology as a hero and example, like the beacon city that he preached about creating. Americans have flattened Puritan settlers into two-dimensional foundational myths—but myths cannot communicate the complexity of their objectives, triumphs, and defeats like real history can.