Not Coming Over on the Mayflower

I’ve been doing some genealogical research on my father’s side of my family.  He knew some names as far back as his great grandfather and several stories, but that was about it.  One family story had some ancestor (name unknown) settling in Long Island in 1642, and another story posited someone equally unknown being a major in the Great Swamp Fight (whenever that was), but that was the extent of it.  As so often happens, neither of those stories appears to be true.  What I have discovered, however, is that some were captured by the Indians, or fought in various wars, or founded towns.  I thought I’d devote a series of posts to some of these individuals, trying to place their lives in their historical context.  This post focuses on my ancestor who refused to come over to America on the Mayflower. 

His name was Thomas Blossom, and he was born in in 1568 in Parham, Somerset County, England.  Blossom was one of those who fervently believed that the Church of England required further reformation.  He shared with those reform-minded Puritans the conviction that the entire episcopal hierarchy of archbishop, bishops, and priests was a corrupt, papist innovation, sanctioned neither by the Bible nor by the practices of the early Christians.  Instead of this top-down structure, as we might describe it, Blossom wanted a bottom-up, congregational structure.  A few God-fearing worshippers would form their own congregation, elect a minister and perhaps a teacher, and remain altogether independent of every other congregation.  This independence meant in turn that their congregation would be entirely apart—separate from—the Church of England.  As a consequence, in their time they were called Separatists; we have mythologized them as the Pilgrims.

Under the successive reigns of Queen Elizabeth and King James I, the Church of England was the national church.  Attendance at Sunday service was obligatory; you were fined for being absent.  The more radical Puritans like the Separatists had therefore only two choices:  they could meet to worship in secret, or they could leave the country and go to Holland, another Protestant country, and one far more tolerant than England.  Blossom may well have done both, marrying his first wife Ann Sarah Palmer (1570?-1650) about 1588 or so and taking care to avoid notice by the ecclesiastical establishment.  His daughter Frances (1589?-1635) apparently was borne by Ann Palmer.  Blossom’s second marriage took place in 1605:  he married Anne Elsdon, who was the mother of his two sons Thomas and Peter.  In 1609, his daughter Frances married William Palmer (no relation to Blossom’s first wife), by trade a maker of nails. 

At some point, Blossom and his family emigrated to Holland, first probably to Amsterdam, where William Brewster had established a congregational church in 1608, and then, like Brewster in 1609, to Leiden, where they became members of John Robinson's church.  In Leiden, the Separatists were indeed free to worship as they pleased.   The difficulty was that, with a few exceptions, the Separatists were desperately poor.  Not only were most of them at an initial disadvantage in knowing no Dutch, but many of them had been farmers and herdsmen.  In Leiden, an urban center, they could gain only menial employment at minimal wages.  Worried about their children becoming more Dutch than English, anxious that the twelve year truce between Catholic Spain and Protestant Holland would be expiring in 1621 and war might resume, the Separatists began to consider emigrating to North America.

When their congregation finally obtained financial backing from a company of investors in London, Blossom decided that he, his wife, and his two sons would be among the 30 or so passengers on the Speedwell, a ship that would sail from Holland, meet the Mayflower in England, and then sail in company to New England.  The Speedwell had been fitted with new masts and sails, and there is some evidence that its master deliberately overmasted the ship because he had no desire to cross the Atlantic.  The two ships met up at Southampton and duly sailed.  Both began to leak, the Speedwell alarmingly so, with the result that they returned to Dartmouth for repairs.  Again they set out, and again the Speedwell leaked alarmingly.  Back they went to Plymouth, and this time the master refused to continue in the Speedwell.  The outcome was that the already crowded Mayflower took aboard some of the Speedwell’s passengers and made the voyage alone (it may be relevant that the Speedwell continued subsequently as a trading vessel for a number of years).  They arrived late in the year, and what with inadequate shelter, insufficient food, diseases, and the cold, nearly half of the passengers died that winter.

Thomas Blossom and his family were among those who decided not to go on the Mayflower.  They returned to Leiden, presumably hoping that they could soon make the crossing to New England.   Money continued to be scarce, so not many more were able to emigrate.  His son-in-law William Palmer came over on the Fortune in 1621; his daughter Frances, on the Anne in 1623.  Not until 1629, nine years after the Mayflower sailed from Old Plymouth, did Blossom and his family finally reach New Plymouth—on, coincidentally, a ship also named the Mayflower, but an altogether different vessel.  

Thomas Blossom was soon elected a deacon of the church in Plymouth.  (Robinson's church in Leiden appointed deacons for life, so Blossom may well have been a deacon before coming to Plymouth, but there's no record of it.)  Apparently he fulfilled that lay office well for the three years he had yet to live.  He died in 1632.  In his history Of Plymouth Plantation, William Bradford mentions Blossom by name as one of the "ancient friends" from Holland dead from an "infectious fever" that struck upwards of twenty people.  In The Barbarous Years (New York, 2012), the first volume of his work on “The Peopling of British North America,” Bernard Bailyn quotes a contemporary description of Deacon Thomas Blossom:  he was “a holy man and experienced saint, . . . competently accomplished with abilities” (349).  That sounds to me like a worthy epitaph.

Unnatural Sex and the Puritans

I've been doing some research on my father's side of the family, and I've discovered that nearly all of them came not from New York, as I'd assumed, but from Massachusetts and Connecticut.  Most of them had left England by the mid-1600's, so I've been reading up on the Puritans and Pilgrims. One of the things I've found out is that they were appalled by unnatural sex.  By that phrase they meant everything except intercourse between a husband and wife.  Masturbation was condemned everywhere in New England and made a capital crime in the colony of New Haven.  Following the Bible, adultery and sodomy were capital crimes.

And so was bestiality, sex with animals and fowls.  In Albion's Seed:  Four British Folkways in America (Oxford Univ. Press, 1989), David Hackett Fisher relates the case of George Spencer, a servant with only one eye in New Haven.  Spencer had been anything but a model servant, and when a sow gave birth to a piglet with only one eye, Spencer was accused of bestiality.  Under great pressure, Fisher relates, Spencer confessed, then recanted, confessed a second time, and then recanted again.

Two witnesses were required to convict him of bestiality, but the magistrates, determined to find him guilty, got around that inconvenient technicality.  The one-eyed piglet was admitted as one witness, and Spencer's confession was admitted as the other one, even though he'd recanted it.  Although Fischer is silent on this point, New England courts treating cases of bestiality followed the Biblical injunction of Leviticus: "And if a man lie with a beast, he shall surely be put to death: and ye shall slay the beast" (20:15), So both George Spencer and the sow would have been executed.

Fortunately for John Lawrence at his trial in 1677, the Court of Assistants in Cambridge was not willing to circumvent the required two witnesses for bestiality.  In Sex in Middlesex:  Popular Mores in a Massachusetts County, 1649-1699, (Univ. of Mass. Press, 1986), Roger Thompson relates that John Lawrence was seen by Thomas Michelson between seven and eight in the morning "standing on a tree that lay along on the ground having his face towards his mares tail and his hand clasped about her Buttock."  After awhile, he deposed, Lawrence "turned the mares tayle on one side and then he again clasped his hands about her Buttocks as before and wrought with his body against hers."  But a second person near the scene, one Isaac Amsden, deposed that he was too far away to witness the act, so the case was dismissed.

Another notable case was that of Thomas Granger, a sixteen or seventeen year-old servant in Duxbury, one of the Pilgrim settlements in Massachusetts. William Bradford found it horrible to mention his case in his history, Of Plymouth Plantation, but he believed that the truth of history required it.  Granger was first seen copulating with a mare ("I forbear particulars," Bradford comments primly), and when he was examined on that topic, he confessed to buggery not only with the mare "at sundry times" but with "a cow, two goats, five sheep, two calves, and a turkey" (Bk. II, Chapter 32).

Although Granger at first denied this charge, he eventually confessed to the entire court and was condemned to death.  But there was some difficulty in following Leviticus.  One sheep looked much like another, with the result Granger had to identify each one he'd had sex with: "whereas some of the sheep could not so well be known by his description of them, others with them were brought before him and he declared which were they and which were not."  On 8 September 1642, the executions took place: "first the mare and then the cow and the rest of the lesser cattle were killed before his face," and then Granger himself was executed.

Remarkable as these cases are, they seem far from typical.  Roger Thompson points out in Sex in Middlesex that only two men were executed for bestiality in Massachusetts in the seventeenth century. (The one-eyed George Spencer lived in Connecticut.)  Thompson's meticulous study of town and court records led him to believe that most people in that county were as law abiding about sexuality as they were about other matters.  Not all inhabitants were members of the church, and not all church members were godly, but bestiality was not common.  In part, the occurrences we know about may have been the few ones in which the act was observed (as it was not in the case of George Spencer), and more perhaps may have taken place in private.  But many members of these communities believed that God was watching them--"God can see you in the dark" was a common warning--and might well punish all of them for the sins of the few.  So were they taught, and so they believed--at least for the greater part of the seventeenth century.  They were called to be communities of their brothers' keepers for the greater glory of God, and in that watchful context what they termed "abominations in the eyes of the Lord" accordingly would have been rare.

Why the Puritan John Winthrop Gave Up Hunting

John Winthrop (1587/88-1649), who was to become the first Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Company in 1629, belonged to the socio-economic class in England that could count hunting among its privileges.  Nevertheless, he gave it up.  In 1611, when he was  twenty-three,  Winthrop carefully enumerated his reasons:

"Finding by much examination that ordinary shooting in a gun, etc:  could not stand with a good conscience with myself, as first, for that it is simply prohibited by the law of the land, upon this ground amongst others, that it spoils more of the creatures than it gets:  2 it procures offence unto many:  3 it wastes great store of time:  4 it toils a man's body overmuch:  5 it endangers a man's life, etc.:  6 it brings no profit all things considered:  7 it hazards more of a man's estate by the penalty of it, than a man would willingly part with:  8 it brings a man of worth and godliness into some contempt:  --lastly for mine own part I have been crossed in using it, for when I have gone about it not without some wounds of conscience, and have taken much pains and hazarded my health, I have gotten very little but most commonly nothing at all towards my cost and labour."

Many today would probably agree with reasons 1-8, but to my ear the final reason is the most telling. It's the only reason that is personal rather than impersonal.  Here, and here alone, I'd suggest, for just a moment we can hear the human voice of John Winthrop, a hunter who has returned home too many times empty-handed.  Despite enduring "some wounds of conscience," despite undergoing many pains and exhausting himself, he typically was unsuccessful.  That lack of success--his being crossed, thwarted in his pursuit of game, and almost certainly missing what he shot at--appears to be what motivated his inventory.  Reasons 1-8, then, serve less as reasons to change his behavior than as rationalizations.

What's fascinating to me is that even after enumerating no less than eight of these arguments, his own frustration explodes at the end, overriding everything he has listed before.  By the time he had his portrait painted, however, his projected self, his public persona, if you will, is much more contained.   He appears to be completely in control.  When a portrait was commissioned in that period, hands were an added expense. Winthrop is quietly showing that he could afford to have both hands painted, and his affluence is further displayed by the lace that edges both his ruff and his cuffs.  This is not a portrait composed to engage its audience.  His hands are not making a gesture outwards:  the upper hand, indeed, is turned inward, held close to his chest.  His youthful frustrations are long gone--and to that degree, he appears less human and much more the austere representative of Puritan authority.

Source:  The Winthrop Papers, 1498-1649, 5 vols. (Boston, 1929-1947), vol. I, p. 165; quoted by Patrick M. Malone, The Skulking Way of War:  Technology and Tactics Among the New England Indians (Lanham, MD:  Madison Books, 1991), p. 54.

Reshaping the Stock on a Marlin Golden 39 A

A few years ago, I purchased a used Marlin 39 A .22 with the idea that it would provide an understudy to my Marlin lever actions in .45-70 and (my favorite) .38-55.  Carbines have their good points, but these two lever guns were rifles, so I wanted the relatively long 24" barrel of the 39 A.  (If you want a carbine, look for the Marlin 39 M, the Mountie model, and be prepared to pay more for it.)

I didn't think to take a photo of my rifle when I acquired it, but (except for the scope) it looked almost exactly like the one illustrated here in an earlier Marlin advertisement:

Following the Marlin 39, introduced in 1921, the 39 A was introduced in 1939.  My Golden model with its gold trigger was manufactured in 1971 (and thus is now a so-called early model, the newer model dating from 1983).  Typically for its time, it had a butt stock and fore end that to my eye called out for reshaping.  The fore end was an exaggerated beavertail; the butt stock had an exaggeratedly long pistol grip.  The curve from the wrist to the nose was slack, and the fluting at the nose of the comb was clunky. Both fore end and butt bulged outwards from the slim receiver, giving the rifle an oddly wasp-waisted look when viewed from above or below.  A minor point was that I didn't like the Marlin icon of a bull's-eye in white and black plastic near the butt's sling swivel.  It could be argued the bull's eye complements the white spacers at the grip cap and buttplate, but they were going to go.  So, too, was the bull's eye.  In addition, I needed a longer length of pull.

The fore end was a reasonably quick fix.  The earlier Marlin 39's had considerably slimmer fore ends, so I removed the fore end and simply planed down its width and depth until they corresponded to the dimensions of the receiver and the fore end cap.  

As for the butt, getting rid of the white spacer and then adding a red rubber recoil pad gave me the length of pull I wanted.  A pad of course is not needed to reduce recoil on a .22 rimfire, but the friction from the rubber pad can keep the rifle from falling down when it's stood upright on a smooth surface.

Slimming down the butt stock was more of a challenge.  I reduced the width of the comb until my eye was looking down the barrel when the rifle came up to my right shoulder (I also followed the same procedure for my left shoulder).  I then tapered the sides of the comb to eliminate the fluting at the nose.  Filling the cavity where the bull's eye had been with a matching piece of wood was straightforward.  I cut back and slimmed down the pistol grip until its diameter felt comfortable and substituted for the rounded black plastic grip cap a flat piece of ebony, attaching it with black epoxy.  Rubber bands made clamping easy:

Sanding and whiskering  were straightforward.  Next came dying the stock to give it more color.  I used a blend of aniline dyes (3 parts Dark Walnut, 1 part Red Mahogany, and 1/2 part Antique Cherry) because they don't have pigment to obscure the grain.  I then added a coat of home-made walnut brew.  Here's the result:

The last steps were adding a coat of alkanet oil.  I let that dry for three days, then steel-wooled the stock to make sure no oil remained on the surface.  After burning off the tiny particles of steel wool, I started applying very thin coats of Tru-Oil, sanding them in until the pores were filled, and rubbing down the last coat of Tru-Oil with auto rubbing compound.

Checkering came next.  The black walnut was rather coarse, so I used 18 LPI, adding a narrow border.  The checkering wraps around the fore end.  The checkering pattern for pistol grip came from the illustrations of the Marlin Fire Arms catalog from June 1897 (available very reasonably from Cornell Publications) and from William S. Brophy's photographs in Marlin Firearms: A History (Stackpole, 1989).  Here is a shot of the checkering in the white, rather a contrast to the butt with its richer colors from the dye, alkanet oil, and coats of Tru-oil:



After completing the checkering, I carefully scraped inadvertent over-runs and then sanded the divots smooth with 400 grit paper.  I dyed the panels as before with my aniline blend and my walnut brew, rubbed in a coat of alkanet oil, and then brushed on a finishing coat of satin spar varnish diluted 50-50 with mineral spirits.  Touching up with Tru-Oil completed the job.



My friend Mike Bennett drilled and tapped its tang for a Marble's tang sight.  This is a tricky job, because it's illegal to deface any part of the serial number on the tang.  He used a shotgun bead drill fixture and a tap guide from Brownell's to line everything up and keep the drill and tap straight.

This is a shot of the receiver, checkered grip, and tang sight:

This 39 A is now considerably trimmer.  Here, again, is where I started:







And here's the outcome:  a sleeker stock with a shortened pistol grip, a slimmer fore end, and checkering.  The Marble's tang sight now complements its resemblance to earlier Marlin 39's.





Word has it that the quality Marlin Firearms has long been known for is becoming a thing of the past. If you've ever thought of owning a 39 A, now might be the time to buy a used one.  Older ones are still reasonably priced, but they're getting more expensive.  If current build quality continues to deteriorate, prices for the older model could jump dramatically.

Brewing Black Walnut Dye, or Brou de Noix

In Adventures in Wood Finishing (The Taunton Press, 1981), master finisher George Frank relates that when he was a young apprentice in France, his master’s wife brewed a walnut dye using walnut hulls.  “She filled a large earthenware pot with them, covered them with rainwater and added a pinch of caustic soda.  Then she put on the lid.  For two or three days she simmered this pot on the stove, never boiling the mixture.  Finally, she strained the liquid through a linen cloth and bottled it.”

In the fall of 2015, I decided to follow Frank's account and brew some walnut hulls myself.  My first task was to determine precisely what "caustic soda" was.  It turned out to be lye.  My local pharmacy didn't carry it, so I went to a hardware store.  First the clerk and then the manager asked me why I wanted to buy lye.  I explained.  The manager laughed and commented that they had some, but these days lye is kept under the counter.  Apparently, it's in demand for cooking meth.

The next step was to harvest the walnut hulls. The walnuts of Juglans nigra, the common black walnut, are enclosed within a greenish hull that, after dropping from the tree, rots and turns black.  I waited until a number had fallen in early October, put on gloves, and quickly gathered a pail full.

Back home with my harvest of hulls, I filled our slow cooker two-thirds full of hulls and then added enough distilled water (rainwater would also work) to fill the slow cooker to capacity.  I wasn't entirely certain about what a pinch of lye would amount to, so I measured out a half teaspoon and stirred it in.  After covering it, I simmered it for twenty-four hours.

Not having any linen I wanted to turn dark brown, I used folded cheesecloth to strain it.  I then decanted it into a clean plastic juice container and labeled it. 

I've only had occasion to use this Brou de Noix once, but it does work.  You can dilute it with distilled water or rainwater if you don't want so dark a color.  Conversely, additional coats will darken the wood somewhat.  As it's water based, it may well raise the grain, so be prepared for the need for whiskering.

Chemically, according to Wikipedia, this dye is effective because black walnut hulls contain juglone (5-hydroxy-1, 4-naphthoquinone), plumbagin (yellow quinone pigments), and tannin.  The tannins act as a mordant in the dying process, helping fix the color.

Bottom line?  Brou de Noix costs almost nothing.  It's simple to make, and the process is rather fun.  In a small way, when you make some you become part of a tradition of craftspeople extending back into the Middle Ages.  That's a good feeling, I discovered.  You might enjoy it, too.

What's Wrong with The Revenant

As its numerous awards and Oscar nominations would suggest, Alejandro G. Iñárritu's The Revenant (2015) is a powerful film, but it gets some matters totally wrong.  Now, I don't expect a documentary approach to the legendary mountain man Hugh Glass, and I have no objection to making a film loosely based on the 2002 novel of the same name by Michael Punke (which I haven't read).  Nor do I object to giving Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio, in case anyone doesn't know) a son he never had, any more than having his dead Pawnee wife appear to him in visions.  So what if the actual Hugh Glass never rode his horse off a cliff and, saved from death by falling into a convenient tree, then eviscerated his dead horse to climb inside its body cavity to survive the night?  Hugh Glass is granted almost no inner life, but this is an epic of survival.  A film is a visual work of fiction, and what counts in fiction is how well it works.

On one level, this film works pretty well.  For the most part, the landscape looks like the Rocky Mountains, except perhaps for a panoramic sunset which I'd guess was filmed in Tierra del Fuego.  The dialog is neither archaic nor contemporary.  The fort is architecturally convincing; its inhabitants are not sanitized like Bingham's jolly boatmen but boisterously drunk.  This marginally civil culture makes a powerful statement about life at the edge of the wilderness.  The costumes are appropriate to the time period of the 1820's, and the guns are flintlocks. (There is one lapse:  in a tense moment, expecting attack, one of the men is aiming his rifle with the frizzen open and forward, so there was no way the hammer with its flint could strike the spark needed to make a flintlock fire.)  By and large, however, this seeming veracity is at odds with the ignorance displayed by scriptwriters Iñárritu and Mark L. Smith about the realities of survival in the wild.

Again and again, this film betrays a complete ignorance of the wild and of ways to survive in it.  An elementary example involves wet feet.  Anyone who has read accounts of exploration from Lewis and Clark onwards will recall that they are always stopping after fording a river to build a fire to dry their footwear.  In The Revenant, however, nobody ever puts on a pair of dry moccasins or dries his boots.  The trappers are continually wading around in water close to freezing, unconcerned about their feet going numb, let alone about the subsequent hazards of frostbite, trench foot, and hypothermia.

Higher on the scale of ignorance is what happens when a person goes over a waterfall.  The Revenant has some exciting footage of Glass floating down a turbulent river.  As the camera pulls back, we can see he's about to go over a major waterfall.  He does, and then his head promptly pops up above the water.  He laboriously makes it to shore.

But, as every wilderness canoer or kayaker knows, that's not how waterfall hydraulics work.  At the base of a falls, there's a vertically oriented and back flowing circulation of water that traps a person and keeps him from getting up to the surface--that's why waterfalls are known as "keepers."  One's only hope of surviving is counterintuitive:  to  swim downwards to get below the circulating current and then to swim to the side.  In the real world, as opposed to the one depicted in The Revenant, Glass would have drowned.

The director has commented that the river is important symbolically to Glass's epic ordeal.  Sure enough, just as he's about to be captured by a party of Arikaras, he manages to escape by taking to the river and letting it carry him downstream.  At this point, it's still winter.  Apparently, nobody involved with the film realized that Glass would have lost consciousness in something like fifteen to twenty minutes and drowned.  Why?  Because cold water removes your body heat twenty-five times faster than cold air.  I've capsized into a glacier-fed river in late spring, not winter as in The Revenant.  I was wearing a farmer john wet suit, and it still felt like a cold hand being clamped on my heart.  You lose body heat and strength with fearful rapidity.  When your core temperature falls below 95 degrees Fahrenheit, you become confused and perhaps hallucinatory; when it falls lower, you die.  But rather than drowning (yet again!), Glass serenely floats away down this river not of death but of life.

All films require a prolonged suspension of disbelief.  Unfortunately, the imagined reality of The Revenant is only rewarding to an audience equally ignorant about wilderness survival.  I'm confident it will win lots of awards.  It's a good film, but it gets too much wrong to be more than occasionally persuasive to this viewer.

Carhart's The Piano Shop on the Left Bank

Thad Carhart's The Piano Shop on the Left Bank:  Discovering a Forgotten Passion in a Paris Atelier (Random House, 2001) is one of those books that is sui generis, perfect in its own kind.  Like Henry Beston's The Outermost House, Samuel Chamberlain's Clementine in the Kitchen, and Stephen Bodio's Querencia, Carhart's The Piano Shop on the Left Bank is so well done that it affords delight beyond all expectation.  I had never heard of this book until a friend recommended it, but I liked it so much that after I finished reading it I immediately read it again.

Carhart's plot is nearly non-existent:  he and his wife and daughter are living in Paris, and he notices a shop with a window display of tools for tuning a piano.  He thinks it might be interesting to start playing again, so he enters the shop with the idea of buying a used piano, only to be told, not just then but on a number of subsequent occasions, that there are no pianos for sale.  The French do things differently, he eventually figures out, and, indeed, he learns at last from a friend that he has to be recommended by a former client of the shop to even be considered as a suitable customer for one of their many, many pianos discreetly assembled in a back room.

Fortunately, Carhart speaks fluent French and becomes friends with the young owner Luc, who eventually lets him see and try out the piano Luc has chosen for him.  Carhart loves it, and in this instance the course of true love really does run smooth.  He finds a teacher who is willing to take on an adult, and we learn more about what really counts in music.  At intervals, Luc discovers another "dream piano," one that is extraordinary or will become so under his loving care.

The more lore Carhart learns from Luc about pianos, the more we learn about Luc and his seemingly inexhaustible passion for pianos in their almost infinite variety. I'd say that all of this is charming, but that word has become almost meaningless.  I shall say only that The Piano Shop on the Left Bank makes you wish that you too were fluent in French, living in Paris, and friends with Thad Carhart and Luc.  Oh, and that you could also play the piano so Luc could pick out the perfect one for you as well.  This book, as the subtitle indicates, is about rediscovering passion, and thus it is entirely fitting that the last line has Luc justifying his own, "You can never have too many dream pianos."