William and Mary Dyer co-found Newport, RI in 1639

And for the first time anywhere, learn who the 

FEMALE co-founders of Newport were!

© 2014 Christy K Robinson

This article is copyrighted. Copying, even to your genealogy pages, is prohibited by US and international law. You may "share" it with the URL link because it preserves the author's copyright notice and the source of the article.  
All rights reserved. This book or blog article, or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

 

Newport Compact -- click to enlarge

William Dyer was 28 years old when he co-founded Portsmouth, Rhode Island, in 1638. (It was called by its native American name, Pocasset, at the time.) His name appears on the Portsmouth Compact with the other men who bought Aquidneck Island from the natives, and it's his handwriting at the top of the document.


He was 29 years old on April 28, 1639, when he co-founded the city of Newport, Rhode Island and signed the Newport Compact. As clerk of the town, and later Secretary of the colony, it's almost surely William Dyer's handwriting that headed the compact that the founders signed.

Portsmouth Compact, 1638.
Click to enlarge.

Battery Park in Newport, formerly Dyer's Point, is on land
where Mary and William Dyer had their farm.

Newport from the northwest. The small island in the
foreground, Native Americans sold to
Newport in the 1650s. The Dyer land and burial site
were just beyond Coaster Island, and southward past
the Pell Bridge at the extreme right of the image.

After the town was legally incorporated came the distribution of community, home, and farm land parcels, and, of course, the streets and highways. William Dyer was one of the small commission that surveyed and apportioned the lots and boundaries. The following records are scanned from Records of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations in New England, Vol. 1, 1636-1663. (I added the modern dates.)

For a modern map of the city of Newport,
with labels for its harbor walk which would take you
along the western edge of 17th-century Dyer land, click here.

Historical records mention only the men who attended assembly meetings, voted, held court, or signed documents, but the women should be remembered for their many sacrifices in moving the household, servants, small children, livestock, and possessions, and starting in a new, rugged place where they lived in wigwams while their first houses were being built. It was the Little Ice Age, and winters were longer and more severe than we experience now. They had just settled in Boston for a few months to four years when they were exiled and had to start again in the wilderness of Rhode Island. A year later, some of the settlers at Portsmouth began again at Newport.

Unidentified English family circa 1640.

Newport's female co-founders were:

• William Coddington and Mary Mosely Coddington
• Nicholas Easton  (widowed, 2 sons, married widow Christiana Beecher later in 1638)
• John Coggeshall and Mary ___ Coggeshall, 7 children
• William Brenton and Dorothy ____ Brenton
• John Clarke and Elizabeth Harges Clarke
• Jeremy Clarke and Frances Latham Dungan Clarke, 4 Dungan children
• Thomas Hazard and Martha Potter Hazard, 5 children
• Henry Bull and Elizabeth ___ Bull, 1 child
• William Dyer and Mary Barrett Dyer, 1 child

This list is a snapshot of families taken in 1639. Some of the founding women died and were replaced by a later wife who managed the household and bore more children. The families who settled Portsmouth and Newport were young and strong, and in their 20s and 30s when they migrated from England to Boston, then settled around New England. They had even more children once settled in Rhode Island. The nine families listed as the first founders were joined by hundreds of other pioneering families within a few months and years. 

Entrance bricks to the Newport Historical Society shop.
Photo: Christy K Robinson 2016

The attraction of Rhode Island was its dedication to living virtuous, responsible lives in a secular democracy, where people of many beliefs (Puritan, Anglican, Antinomian, Catholic, Baptist, Seeker, Quaker, Jewish) or no belief, lived in safety from religious persecution. The exception was that their first, leading members among the co-founders of Portsmouth, Anne and William Hutchinson, were hounded by the Boston theocratic government (ministers, magistrates, and governors) to the point that they moved to the Dutch colony of New Netherland to try to found a new settlement, only to be massacred by Native Americans in 1643. As I learned while researching my book, Anne Marbury Hutchinson: American Founding Mother (see below), the massacre carried out by the tribe may have been sanctioned by the Boston theocrats. 

Update: NewportRI.com article on 380th anniversary of the town's founding: https://www.newportri.com/news/20190428/newport-celebrates-380th-birthday?fbclid=IwAR1FYB4VplQtpIjhYzA9tuRzRpIqSiW51Qn1Pxhmg0shzZoiQZa2KsCtttg 

 Christy K Robinson is author of two biographical novels on William and Mary Dyer, and a collection of her nonfiction research on the Dyers, as well as a 2018 biography of Anne Marbury Hutchinson. Key figures are Anne Hutchinson, Edward Hutchinson, John Winthrop, Katherine and Richard Scott, Roger Williams, Dr. John Clarke, Nicholas Easton, John Endecott, Henry Vane, and others.

*****

Christy K Robinson is author of these books:

We Shall Be Changed (2010)

Mary Dyer Illuminated Vol. 1 (2013)  

Mary Dyer: For Such a Time as This Vol. 2 (2014)

The Dyers of London, Boston, & Newport Vol. 3 (2014)  

Effigy Hunter (2015)  

Anne Marbury Hutchinson: American Founding Mother (2018)

And of these sites:  

Discovering Love  (inspiration and service)

Rooting for Ancestors  (history and genealogy)

William and Mary Barrett Dyer (17th century culture and history of England and New England)

 

Something fishy about William Dyer

© 2011  Christy K Robinson

This article is copyrighted. Copying, even to your genealogy pages, is prohibited by US and international law. You may "share" it with the URL link because it preserves the author's copyright notice and the source of the article.  
All rights reserved. This book or blog article, or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

After the October 1651 Navigation Act in England opened the door to a trade war with the Netherlands, England seized more than 120 Dutch ships over the next eight months. "The Dutch have too much trade, and the English are resolved to take it from them,” said General George Monck, Duke of Albemarle. The first of four Anglo-Dutch wars was engaged. It was a naval war entirely, and was fought between 1652 and 1654. The most famous battles took place in the North Sea waters between the Netherlands and the southeast coasts of England; however, privateer battles raged, two ships at a time, in the Caribbean and in Long Island Sound, south of New England. 

Arms of Worshipful Company of Fishmongers

William Dyer (1609-1677) was the son of Lincolnshire farmers, and apprenticed to a London leather-goods trader in the Worshipful Company of Fishmongers for nine years. When he completed his service, you might consider his education on a par with a Master’s Degree in Business Administration, with emphasis in international import/export. Many men who belonged to this Fishmongers guild had become London council members and Lord Mayors. 

Dyer and his wife (Mary Barrett Dyer) emigrated to Boston in 1635, but were excommunicated for their religious and political beliefs in early 1638. Governor John Winthrop described William Dyer, at about age 25, as a successful businessman from London. Winthrop also called Mary Dyer “Mistress Dyer,” which carried a much higher status and respect than the usual “goodwife” or use of the first name only. But later, Winthrop described William as “having little to say” for himself, and “apt to meddle in publike affairs, beyond his calling and skill;” and that he shuffled and equivocated when under scrutiny. 

William Dyer co-founded Portsmouth and Newport, Rhode Island. (See image: Portsmouth Compact of 1638, probably in William Dyer's hand, as he was clerk and recorder. His signature is halfway down the page, as "William Dyre.") 

Over the next fourteen years, William served as clerk and secretary to the courts, and was a militia captain. From 1650 to 1653, he served as Rhode Island’s first attorney general, and was instrumental in obtaining the colony charters for democratic self-government and separation of civil and church powers. 

Dyer was commissioned New England's first admiral in 1652 by Sir Henry Vane the Younger, British naval commissioner and at times, President of the Council of State when Great Britain was between monarchs during the Commonwealth and Protectorate. 

On October 1, 1652, a letter was written from the British naval commission to the Colony of Rhode Island in New England, to give them power to stay Dutch ships and to appoint some fit person to take care of and preserve them for the State. 

As soon as Dyer returned to Rhode Island from England, he began to prepare for war. Dyer, Nicholas Easton, and John Sanford created New England’s first Court of Admiralty. And Admiral Dyer was chosen to be on a committee of seven to fortify and arm Newport. His large horse and tobacco farm property is now covered by the United States Naval War College. 

On May 17, 1653, Dyer was commissioned Commander in Chief Upon the Seas by the United Colonies of New England; and Captain John Underhill was commissioned Commander in Chief Upon the Land. They were charged with the defense of Englishmen from the Dutch, and to take ships by “inducement,” but to prevent the effusion of blood, and violence. Dyer and Underhill “assisted both to other for ye preparings of ye severall seizures for the honor of ye Commonwealth of England in which they are employed.” They were to work in concert, at land and sea. 

On June 3, 1653, Admiral Dyer was commissioned by Rhode Island (Newport only, where he was a resident neighbor, land-owner, businessman, politician, and well-known) as a privateer (a government-licensed pirate) with the charge to seize any Dutch properties claimed by the English.  The more-distant towns of Providence and Warwick, however, filed “A Brief Remonstrance” to disassociate themselves from what they believed were “illegal and unjust proceedings” of Dyer and his privateers. 

Dutch maps made before the Anglo-Dutch war of 1652-54 show they claimed a large chunk of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, all of Connecticut, New Hampshire—any place they could put a trading post, they claimed as Dutch territory. According to the English colonies, the Dutch were bribing the Indian tribes to kill the English settlers. This belief appeared to be confirmed in 1643 when Anne Hutchinson and 17 members of her family and friends were killed by Indians when they lived on a Dutch farm in what is now the Bronx. 

Ship passing House of Good Hope, at Hartford, Connecticut

Among the first conquests of Dyer and Underhill was the Dutch West Indies trading post called House of Good Hope, on the Connecticut River at Hartford. In the Treaty at Hartford, September 19, 1650, between the Dutch and English, it had been agreed that the Dutch should remain in full possession of their lands on the fresh river at Hartford. But by the spring of 1653, the Dutch trading post at Hartford, settled by Reverends Hooker and Stone, looked like shooting fish in a barrel. Both Dyer and Underhill were extremely familiar with this property, and it appears that they may have had designs on it before their commissions were made.

Admiral William Dyer, age 44, was considered an opportunist, provocateur, and privateer by the members of the United Colonies of New England—the very people who provided him with letters of marque! Along with Capt. John Underhill, he plundered Dutch and French ships and farms along the New England coast, particularly Long Island Sound.

A number of ship captains sailed under the authority of Admiral Dyer, including Edward Hull and Thomas Baxter, both of whom eventually came up on charges of piracy and overtaking their authority. They had seized the ships, cargos, and seaside farms of Massachusetts, Connecticut and Long Islanders who were not Dutch—only Englishmen suspected of trading with the Dutch. Baxter had lived in New Amsterdam, and so he knew which ships and farms to plunder. Hull had lived in Barnstable, Massachusetts, as well as Connecticut, Block Island, and Newport, and knew the ports and the ships that plied the waters. They would raid not only Dutch, but French and other nations’ ships in an apparent zeal of “hostile takeover first, ask questions later—if you can catch me.” Baxter was known for pirating Dutch possessions, then dashing for cover in Connecticut or Rhode Island rivers. His exploits set an example for other unscrupulous men, and soon the Long Island Sound was heavily patrolled against pirates. A historian later wrote that the Sound was “infested” with small-time pirates.  

Hull and Baxter were involved in other shady dealings over the course of two or three years. They were later ordered to make restitution and pay punitive damages. Baxter was imprisoned and handed back to the Dutch at New Amsterdam (Manhattan Island), but after a year of incarceration, he escaped.

Loose fish in a Dutch fishmonger stall

Thomas Janvier, a historian, described Rhode Island in those years and for many succeeding years, as “the abode of notoriously hard characters—even made a start on a little war of spoliation on its own account.” He referred to Capt. John Underhill and Admiral William Dyer as ‘loose fish of thievish proclivities” with license from “that disreputable colony” [Rhode Island] to “take all Dutch ships and vessels as shall come into their power.”

In the 1905 edition of The Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, by Ebenezer Cobham Brewer, “Loose Fish” is defined as “A dissipated man. We also speak of a ‘queer fish,’ and the word ‘fishy’ means of very doubtful character. A loose fish is one that has made its way out of the net; and applied to man it means one who has thrown off moral restraint.”

Thievish proclivities. Dissipated. Doubtful character. Rejected moral restraint. Hard characters. Fishy! 

Though William Dyer is not often mentioned as a man of firsts, and his wife Mary is much more famous as the Quaker teacher who was hanged in Boston for her civil disobedience to the Puritan authorities, he did live a remarkable life as member of a prestigious guild, a Boston pioneer, co-founder of Portsmouth and Newport, horse breeder, Newport harbor developer, international trader, militia captain, politician, Rhode Island’s first attorney general, New England’s first admiral and commander in chief upon the seas, father of nine (seven of whom survived infancy)—and a licensed pirate. (Oh, dear!) 

But there’s one more thing you should know about William Dyer: A meeting of the United Colonies noted that Dyre had ‘quickly gathered around him a band of “resolute fellows” to fall on the Dutch farmes.’ New Amsterdam (now Lower Manhattan) built a defensive palisade across the island to defend themselves from land and sea raids by Indians and Englishmen (including the privateers under command of Dyer and Underhill). The wagon road running along the wooden palisade became known as Wall Street. 

Wall Street: the spiritual home of corporate raiders. Oh, the irony. 


****************************

Like this article? Read my non-fiction book on 17th-century life and times,
The Dyers of London, Boston, & Newport, by Christy K Robinson.
Nonfiction, illustrated. The research and recent discoveries behind the novels. The Dyers is a lively nonfiction account of background color, culture, short stories, personality sketches, food, medicine, interests, recreation, cosmic events, and all the "stuff" that made up the world of William and Mary Dyer in the 1600s.  Chapters on John Winthrop, Roger Williams, Anne Hutchinson, John Endecott, and many others. More than 70 chapters, and all-new, exclusive content found nowhere else!

Christy K Robinson is author of the books:

·          We Shall Be Changed (2010)
·          Mary Dyer Illuminated (2013)
·          Mary Dyer: For Such a Time as This (2014)
·          The Dyers of London, Boston, & Newport (2014)
·          Effigy Hunter (2015)
·          Anne Marbury Hutchinson: American Founding Mother (2018)

Mary Dyer, pioneer of civil disobedience

© Christy K Robinson

Little did I know when I set out to write a historical novel (part fiction, lots of fact), that I’d come upon so many fantasies, assumptions, and falsities in my heroine’s so-called biographies, or discrepancies in timelines that expose obvious mistakes. Who thought that at least one of two documents thought to be written by her, was not written by her, but significantly changed; and because that happened to the first document, the second one is highly suspect?  Or that much of what is “known” about her came from the highly-politicized and carefully-managed public relations wing of a budding religious movement?

Here’s what can be constructed about Mary Dyer:

She

• was born Mary Barrett, about 1610-11 in England, parents unknown (though sensational-but-WRONG stories have Mary as the sixth-generation descendant of Henry VII. Did I mention this is WRONG?)
• seems to have been well-educated and could write beautifully when most middle-class women could barely read and rarely could write
• married William Dyer in 1633 at St. Martin-in-the-Fields church, which was an Anglican church at the time, before the Puritan regime took over in the 1640s
• buried newborn son on first wedding anniversary
• emigrated to Boston in 1635, was admitted to church membership in a conservative Puritan church, where her new son was baptized by a man who would be a tormenter at her death
• was close friends with and mentee of outspoken female religious dissenter, Anne Hutchinson
• in 1637 had a seven-months-gestation stillbirth of an anencephalic girl with spina bifida deformities; her pastor/teacher buried the fetus secretly
• in 1638 offended Boston authorities by taking hand of Anne Hutchinson at Hutchinson’s heresy trial
• Mary’s “monster,” the stillborn fetus, was exhumed and shown to more than 100 men as proof of her heresy in following Anne Hutchinson’s beliefs.
• Because her husband William and 60 other men had signed a protest letter to the court in 1637, and refused to apologize, they were expelled from Massachusetts, effective May 1, 1638.
• William and Mary joined the Hutchinsons and about 75 families in purchasing Native American lands that would become the colony of Rhode Island. They co-founded the Rhode Island cities of Portsmouth and Newport.
• Mary had five children between 1640 and 1650 who lived to adulthood, but there are no existing records of what she was doing while William’s career in government and the law took off, and he increased their land holdings.
• In early 1652, Mary sailed to England, leaving children (aged 2-17) behind with friends. William followed later, to obtain a commission to act as privateer in the Anglo-Dutch War, in the Dutch territories around Long Island Sound. He returned to Rhode Island without Mary.
• In 1657, having at some point in the last 4 years become a Quaker, Mary and another woman sail from Bristol for Boston, but are detoured by extreme weather at sea. The ship waits out the winter in Barbados for a few weeks, and they return north on the Gulf Stream, arriving in Boston in March.
• Mary is arrested straight off the ship, having been reported as a Quaker. Her belongings are burned. She stays incarcerated for weeks until her husband receives a message in Rhode Island. He goes to Boston to rescue her and pays a bond for her release.
• Over the next two years, Mary supports the Quakers who come to Newport for refuge from Massachusetts, New Amsterdam, and Connecticut persecution. She protested the torture of Quakers in New Haven, Connecticut, and traveled again to Boston to support the imprisoned with material aid and spiritual comfort.
• After repeatedly defying her banishment orders and sentences of death if she returned, Mary and two Quaker men were condemned to death by hanging. The men are hanged before her eyes, but Mary is reprieved by the court in a piece of manufactured drama. She would rather have been martyred, and writes to the court. She is released to go home.
• But she can’t stay there when Quakers are beaten nearly to death, fined to the point of bankruptcy, and physically mutilated. She goes to Sandwich, Massachusetts and gets re-arrested and jailed for about a week. The man who transported her there is ordered to pay her jail costs and fine, and she is sent home to Newport.
• Instead of staying in safety with her family, in November 1659 Mary sails to the eastern tip of Long Island, to a small island in its harbor, called Shelter Island. She spends the winter with the Quakers who own the island. She may have taught Bible lessons to the natives there.
• Determined to rile the residents and defy the Boston court, Mary sails from Shelter Island past her own home without stopping, landing at Providence, Rhode Island. She and a female companion walk the same road back to Boston that the Anne Hutchinson group had walked in 1638 when they were expelled from Massachusetts Bay Colony. For the best effect, Mary times her arrival for late May 1660, for the sitting of the court.
• Mary is arrested for visiting Quakers being held in the prison there. This time she means to be martyred, and she is, on June 1, 1660.

Why would this Englishwoman of high social status, education, a mother of six, and economically well-off wife of an attorney general, described as beautiful and intelligent, intentionally provoke her own death at age 48 or 49?

Did her religious beliefs make her mentally unbalanced? As you know, religious beliefs, whether conservative, center, or liberal, are complicated. They’re partly about how you live your life in relationship with others and God, and partly what you expect as reward or punishment in the hereafter. For the people of the 17^th century, religion was everything. Nothing happened unless God directed it. Life on earth was fleeting, especially when waves of plague, misery, poverty, and war seemed unceasing; but the hereafter was “where it was at.” It was eternal, inevitable—and the only alternative was eternal hellfire.

The American Puritans were much more conservative than those in England, perhaps due to the bitter persecutions they’d experienced prior to their emigration. They combined their civil laws with Old Testament religious laws: Ten Commandments, plus many rules in the Books of Moses that were written specifically for the Israelites during their 40-year wanderings, along with Calvinist beliefs that men had a better chance of heaven than women (because Eve sinned before Adam) and that eternal salvation was only for a relative few that had already been chosen by predestination. How did one know one was part of the Elect who would attain heaven? They never fully knew if they’d be saved, but they showed their desire and intent to God, by keeping the laws, and by making sure that one’s community members also kept the law. This, of course, led to spying and tattling.  

American Puritans, then, were fearful of being lost, and frightened of a god as a harsh judge who, despite their lifelong, arduous work of being “good,” had no intention of saving them. When Anne Hutchinson in the 1630s and the Quakers in the 1650s came along saying that by faith in the free gift of God (grace), that God actually loved and desired their love, and that personal revelations of his will for their daily lives had replaced the old written law, people caught in that legalistic hell were attracted to a God of love and light. They could be saved. They would be saved.

Source: http://www.plainquaker.org/news.html

This was, in effect, a giant threat to the Puritan judges and ministers because their authority was undermined, they expected chaos from those who felt they weren’t required to keep any laws, their “New Jerusalem” city-upon-a-hill project had failed, and not least: that the lawlessness would bring a royal governor over to administer Anglican and secular affairs, and the magistrates and founders would lose their 1629 charter and their lifelong financial investments in the colony.

In their fear and fury at the Quaker invasion beginning in 1656, New England began making laws (which were contradictory and flimsy and were refuted by Quaker defendants untrained in the law!). The authorities burned books and papers, and arrested Quakers, putting them in prison for months at a time including freezing winters with no heat or light, forcing them to hard labor, feeding them poor rations or starving them, beating them several times a week, whipping (men and women were stripped to the waist in public and flogged), dragging Quakers through three towns and giving them 10 lashes at each town, dragging them at cart-tail out into the wilderness and dumping them barely alive, slicing off the ears, and other punishments. Some families endured these tortures and were fined large amounts of money; when the cash ran out, they lost cattle, horses, and properties, until at one time, a Quaker family’s teenagers were put up for slave auction. Because men vastly outnumbered women in the colonies and the Caribbean, the girl would probably have been doomed to be a sex slave, and the boy would have toiled until he died in the sugar fields. But the ship’s captain would not buy what appeared to be innocent young people for slave trade, and the attempt failed.

By this time, 1659, many Puritan settlers had become Quaker and Baptist sympathizers, sick of the cruelty, avarice, bloodlust, and injustice of their rulers. Some of them were fined and whipped for providing hospitality to Quakers or protesting the unnecessarily harsh penalties. Many of the sympathizers converted to Quakerism within a few months or years.

This is why Mary Dyer insisted on committing what we now call “civil disobedience.” Contrary to what many genealogy web pages say, and several accounts by Quakers of her time, Mary was no poor little victim. “She was hanged for being a Quaker,” they say. Absolutely not! She could have chosen peace, safety, health, and protection in Rhode Island, where her human rights were guaranteed. Instead, she actually sailed past her powerful and respected attorney husband and their six children who would have stopped her, to return to the scene of greatest hate and most malevolent government, and put herself face to face with their “bloody laws,” as Quakers called the system. She intended to rouse public opinion and shame the governor and court into annulling their laws. As Mary was escorted by more than 100 pikemen and musketeers to her first execution scene, she went happily and proudly, knowing she’d accomplished her purpose and would be in heaven in a flash. She didn’t need 100 armed soldiers to keep her from running away, but to keep the crowd from rallying to her rescue and to protect the Boston authorities who were executing a high-status woman, Mary Dyer. Her crimes were about the business of supporting those in prison—a biblical mandate—and disobeying the court by returning to Massachusetts, a misdemeanor in most eyes. The public opinion campaign was working.

After Mary’s 1660 execution by hanging, the early Quakers who wrote Mary’s and other heroic stories composed an appeal to King Charles II, newly restored to the throne, which refuted the Boston magistrates’ defense of their practices. As a result, the King ordered that Boston stop executions based in religion and refer their cases to England for trial.

Mary’s influential husband William was one of the framers of the 1663 royal charter of liberties for Rhode Island Colony. The charter confirmed the principle of separation of church and state, with liberty of conscience to believe, and worship (or not), in the way you choose as long as it doesn’t break the civil law. The Rhode Island charter was a model for the United States Constitution’s first amendment guaranteeing religious freedom and freedom of speech.  

So what do you think of Mary Dyer? Was she crazy to leave security and peace to be hanged? Did her choice to be a martyr have any effect on your civil rights? Would you have the courage to face death for a principle—or for people you don’t even know, hundreds of years in the future? Could you do what Martin Luther King Jr, and Mary Barrett Dyer did: own a dream, consider others’ welfare above your own, and commit civil disobedience, even unto death, to further righteousness and justice in this world?

____________ 

Previously published on Sarah Butterfield’s http://sarahshistoryblog.wordpress.com/  during Women’s History Month, March 17, 2013.

Initially, I intended to write on Mary Dyer's contribution to religious liberty, but realized that the blog’s audience is mostly British and immersed in medieval and Tudor culture. So I wrote it instead as a popular piece, simplifying the complex issues and stripping out the others (including a large group of fascinating people) that were essential to the outcome. Because, you know, that's what journal articles and full-length books are for!

If they had Shark Week in the 17th century

© 2014 Christy K Robinson

This article is copyrighted. Copying, even to your genealogy pages, is prohibited by US and international law. You may "share" it with the URL link because it preserves the author's copyright notice and the source of the article.  
All rights reserved. This book or blog article, or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

I don’t have cable or satellite TV to watch annual Shark Week programs (beginning Aug. 10 this year), but it’s difficult to miss the humorous trailers for the intentionally-bad horror film Sharknado, or see reruns of nature programs on sharks. I remember when Shark Week was only a recurring sketch on Saturday Night Live, known as Land Shark. ("Candygram!")

In a shameless bid for more readers of this 17^th-century historical research blog, I’ve had a Sharknado/brainstorm that you might enjoy a bit about how sharks were perceived in the 1600s.

Tracking two great white sharks' travels.
http://www.wired.com/2013/12/secret-lives-great-white-sharks/

Sharks are well-known in Massachusetts Bay, Long Island Sound, and in Narragansett Bay of Rhode Island, where the Dyers co-founded Newport. But in the years of America’s settlement, there were few accounts or images made of them. Governor John Winthrop wrote about the “sea horse” or walrus of Sable Island, and about the massive cod and halibut they caught off the Isles of Shoals in June 1630. But he didn’t write of sharks, or the archaic word for them, sea-dogs.

*****

In 1606, William Shakespeare refers to the “ravined salt-sea shark” in Macbeth, act 4, scene 1.  Part of the witches’ brew of “bubble, bubble, toil and trouble” was the ingredient of the violent mouth and gullet of a hungry shark.

Scale of dragon, tooth of wolf,

Witches' mummy, maw and gulf

Of the ravined salt-sea shark,

Root of hemlock digged i' th' dark,

…

Add thereto a tiger’s chaudron,

For the ingredients of our cauldron.

*****

1613: Scientist/artist: Ulisse Aldrovandi
Originally published in: De Piscibus
Aldrovandi sometimes combined
impressive realism (a recognizable
thresher shark) with puzzling chimera.
The fish on the bottom has a
mammal-like face with a saw
protruding from the head,
dragon-like scales, fishy fins and flippers.

Source: http://www.strangescience.net/stsea2.htm 

In 1634, William Wood, a commissioned public relations writer, published a book, New-Englands Prospect, about the natural wonders of Massachusetts, to encourage Puritan Englishmen to emigrate and make their fortunes. Here’s his description of the shark, amid many other creatures of the land, air, and sea:

“The Sharke is a kinde of fish as bigge as a man, some as bigge as a horse, with three rowes of teeth within his mouth, with which he snaps asunder the fishermans lines, if he be not very circumspect: This fish will leape at a mans hand if it be over board, and with his teeth snap off a mans legge or hand if he be a swimming; These are often taken, being good for nothing but to put on the ground for manuring of land.”

*****

In the whaling business, sharks were a worry to the men processing the whale carcass. They had to work quickly to get the whale dissected and onto the ship, before sharks could devour the valuable whale carcass. And the whale oil on the decks could cause a man to slip and fall overboard to the waiting sharks below.

Source: http://www.whalingmuseum.org/learn/research-topics/overview-of-north-american-whaling/whales-hunting

*****

1641: They survived the hurricane
and shipwreck,
but the sharks picked them off.

 On Sept. 24, 1641, a hurricane wrecked a convoy of eight Spanish treasure ships in the Florida Straits. When the small tender ship went down 6 leagues (.33 kilometer) off Santiago, Cuba, a priest and other survivors attempted to swim ashore, but sharks ate them all. (I'm not sure who was left to report this detail, however! Perhaps someone on another ship of the convoy?) Vast treasures of silver and gold were soon after recovered from the wrecks; even more riches were recovered in the early 21^st century.

Remarkably, on the other side of the Atlantic, one day earlier, the treasure ship Merchant Royall went down 30 miles off Land’s End, Cornwall, England. Though men died, there were no reports of sharks in that incident.

*****

 1648
Scientist/artist: Ulisse Aldrovani
Originally published in: Musaeum Metallicum
Naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi recommended fossil shark teeth as an antidote for snake venom, to be mixed in wine or water.

Source: http://www.strangescience.net/stsea2.htm 

*****

 1662
Scientist: Caspar Schott
Originally published in: Physica Curiosa
In his Physica Curiosa, Schott included scores of illustrations, many of outlandish creatures, some closer to reality. What real-life animal might have inspired this illustration isn't easy to guess. It has gills, fringes, and a long curling tail, but the predominant feature is its gaping mouth lined with sharp teeth. The teeth are shaped like those of a shark.

Source: http://www.strangescience.net/stsea2.htm

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 1667
Scientist/artist: Niels Stensen
 Originally published in: Canis Carchariae Dissectum Caput
Strange as it looks by today's standards, this picture of a dissected head of a giant white shark actually marked significant progress in marine biology. For years, fossilized shark teeth were believed to be tongues of serpents turned to stone by Saint Paul, and hence were named glossopetrae, or "tongue stones." Niels Stensen correctly identified tongue stones as shark teeth, though he was not the first person in history to do so. In fact, Steno's picture was derived from a 16th-century unpublished work by papal physician Michele Mercati.

Source: http://www.strangescience.net/stsea2.htm 

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1670
Scientist/artist: Agostino Scilla
Originally published in: Vain Speculation Undeceived by Sense Baroque
Although Steno's depiction of a dissected shark head was a step forward in scientific accuracy, Scilla felt he could improve upon Steno's work. Scilla was an accomplished painter and a coin collector. He believed—and informed his readers—that his experience in these fields gave him insights into fossils and other natural specimens that others could not. Where others perhaps saw uniformity in sharks and their teeth, Scilla saw individuality. He delivered detailed depictions to different kinds of sharks, including a hammerhead, advancing accuracy even a little further than Steno.

Source: http://www.strangescience.net/stsea2.htm 

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1709
Scientists/artists: Athanasius Kircher and Filippo Buonanni
Originally published in: Musæum Kircherianum

The 17th-century German Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher established a fabulous museum in Rome. These fish carcasses and shark teeth must have looked outlandish to the visitors to Kircher's museum, but fish like these swim in the sea today. After Kircher died, Buonanni took over his collection and published a catalog in the early 18th century. These images from the catalog show some 18th-century progress in accurately depicting sea life.

Source: http://www.strangescience.net/stsea2.htm 

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If you enjoy articles like this, you’ll love the book The Dyers of London, Boston, & Newport  (The Dyers #3), by Christy K Robinson. It’s packed with illustrations, trivia, new research, and facts about the people and culture of the 17^th century.

Christy K Robinson is author of these sites:  

• Discovering Love (inspiration)
• Rooting for Ancestors (history and genealogy)
• William and Mary Barrett Dyer (17th century culture and history of England and New England)

and of these books:

·          We Shall Be Changed (2010)
·          Mary Dyer Illuminated (2013)
·          Mary Dyer: For Such a Time as This (2014)
·          The Dyers of London, Boston, & Newport (2014)
·          Effigy Hunter (2015)
·          Anne Marbury Hutchinson: American Founding Mother (2018)

The Little Ice Age: coldest in 17th century

© 2011 Christy K Robinson 

This article is copyrighted. Copying, even to your genealogy pages, is prohibited by US and international law. You may "share" it with the URL link because it preserves the author's copyright notice and the source of the article.  
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Rubens: The Fur Cloak, about
1636-1639. His model
was Helena, his wife.

Is there global cooling in our future? Scientists are predicting a period of less solar activity, which could be a sign of temporary cooling, but warn that global warming as a trend is a fact that's here to stay.

Our ancestors survived conditions with considerably less resources than we have available. There was no central heating in their homes and shops, of course, and fuel (peat, coal, and wood) was just as expensive, or more so, as the fuels we consume today. Most people just couldn’t afford the luxury of warmth in winter. They didn’t change clothes or bathe much, especially in cold weather when they’d have to haul and heat water. They shared beds near a kitchen hearth or a chimney column if on an upper floor.

Family size burgeoned during the global temperature dip of the 16^th and 17^th centuries: maybe the long, freezing nights were not all that boring. Certainly, a number of family members of William and Mary Barrett Dyer had birthdays in September through December. So we can make an educated guess about what happened during the preceding January, February, and March deep freezes. It didn't hurt that the Puritans took the "Be fruitful and multiply" command from Creation very seriously.

The Little Ice Age, from about 1317-1800, began with catastrophic floods, crop failure, and domestic animal deaths (which brought on economic depression), harsh winters—and starvation. Epidemics raged unchecked, and millions died in the plague outbreak in 1348-1350. Because so many laborers (peasants tied to the land, who owed service to their landlords) died, cathedral and castle building ground to a halt for years. It may have begun in an active period of vulcanism in the 13th century that resulted in worldwide ash and dust distribution, which led to rapid climate cooling.

Iceland surrounded by icebergs, 17th century

Of course our ancestors knew nothing about it, but they experienced the effects of a plunge in sunspot activity in the 1600s, which corresponded with the coldest years of the Little Ice Age. Specifically during Mary Dyer’s lifetime, 1611-1660, there was the time of famines, waves of plague and other epidemics across Europe, the Thirty Years War, the Great Migration to America, the English Civil War, and the explosion of African slave trade to the Americas and Europe. On America’s east coast, there were harvest failures, starvation, epidemics of smallpox and yellow fever, and pest plagues. Iceland’s ports were ice-bound by miles for several years, and trade and passenger shipping from Europe was forced far south to avoid sea ice. Boston Harbor's sea water froze over for more than a mile out, hard enough to walk on, for two weeks at a time. See "Boston snowpocalypses of 1638" in this blog.

 Journal of Governor John Winthrop—January 1638 (when the Dyers were still living in Boston but preparing to move to Portsmouth, Rhode Island):  

“About thirty persons of Boston going out in a fair day to Spectacle Island to cut wood, (the town being in great want thereof,) the next night the wind rose so high at N.E. with snow, and after at N.W. for two days, and then it froze so hard, as the bay was all frozen up, save a little channel. In this twelve of them gate to the Governor’s Garden [an island], and seven more were carried in the ice in a small skiff out at Broad Sound, and kept among Brewster’s Rocks, without food or fire, two days, and then the wind forbearing, they gate to Pull-in Point, to a little house there of Mr. Aspenwall’s. Three of them got home the next day over the ice, but their hands and feet frozen. Some lost their fingers and toes, and one died. The rest went from Spectacle Island to the main, but two of them fell into the ice, yet recovered again. In this extremity of weather, a small pinnace was cast away upon Long Island [in Boston Harbor] by Natascott, but the men were saved and came home upon the ice.”  

Little Ice Age severity, AD1000-2000

 The Little Ice Age “peaked” in Mary Barrett Dyer’s lifetime—the coldest years in many centuries were those she spent in colonial America. This graph shows the severity of winters in Europe and North America from 1000-2000 AD. The absolute coldest period, 1600-1675, coincides with William and Mary Dyer’s life spans.

The Dyers lived in Boston from 1635 to the spring of 1638, then co-founded Portsmouth, Rhode Island, about 60 miles away. One year later, they co-founded the city of Newport, Rhode Island, where they developed a large farm and the seaport.

When Mary Dyer was making a winter trip back to America after several years in England, her ship diverted to Barbados because of severe storms. From a letter written in Barbados on Feb 25, 1657:

“A ship came in hither, which was going to New England, but the storms were so violent that they were forced to come hither, [until] the winter there was nearly over. In this ship were two Friends, Anne Burden of Bristol, and one Mary Dyer from London; both lived in New England formerly, and were members cast out of their [Puritan] churches. Mary goes to her husband who lives upon Rhode Island...”

London's Thames River frozen, 1684

 A NASA website says, “During the coldest part of the Little Ice Age, from 1645 to 1715, there is believed to have been a decrease in the total energy output from the Sun, as indicated by little or no sunspot activity. Known as the Maunder Minimum, astronomers of the time observed only about 50 sunspots for a 30-year period as opposed to a more typical 40-50,000 spots. The Sun normally shows signs of variability, such as its eleven-year sunspot cycle. Within that time, it goes from a minimum to a maximum period of activity represented by a peak in sunspots and flare activity.”

More from NASA: “Between the mid-1600s and the early 1700s the Earth’s surface temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere appear to have been at or near their lowest values of the last millennium. European winter temperatures over that time period were reduced by 1.8 to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1-1.5 Celsius). This cool down is evident through derived temperature readings from tree rings and ice cores, and in historical temperature records, as gathered by the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and the University of Virginia.”

More articles on the solar minimum:
Huffington Post http://huff.to/l2nMfW 
The New American http://bit.ly/ldkK61
LA Times http://lat.ms/nTXTqP
Climate Science International http://bit.ly/LC6P

Scientists say that global warming is already here and will continue to worsen, even if the sun goes quiet for a short period. 
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Goodnight sun: Scientists predict sunspots might disappear for years

By: Associated Press

Updated June 15, 2011

WASHINGTON - The sun is heading into an unusual and extended hibernation, scientists predict. Around 2020, sunspots may disappear for years, maybe decades.

But scientists say it is nothing to worry about. Solar storm activity has little to do with life-giving light and warmth from the sun. The effects from a calmer sun are mostly good.

There’d be fewer disruptions of satellites and power systems. And it might mean a little less increase in global warming. It’s happened before, but not for a couple centuries.

“The solar cycle is maybe going into hiatus, sort of like a summertime TV show,” said National Solar Observatory associate director Frank Hill, the lead author of a scientific presentation at a solar physics conference in New Mexico.

Scientists don’t know why the sun is going quiet. But all the signs are there. Hill and colleagues based their prediction on three changes in the sun spotted by scientific teams: Weakening sunspots, fewer streams spewing from the poles of the sun’s corona and a disappearing solar jet stream.

Those three cues show, “there’s a good possibility that the sun could be going into some sort of state from which it takes a long time to recover,” said Richard Altrock, an astrophysicist at the Air Force Research Laboratory and study co-author.

The prediction is specifically aimed at the solar cycle starting in 2020. Experts say the sun has already been unusually quiet for about four years with few sunspots -- higher magnetic areas that appear as dark spots.

The enormous magnetic field of the sun dictates the solar cycle, which includes sunspots, solar wind and ejection of fast-moving particles that sometimes hit Earth. Every 22 years, the sun’s magnetic field switches north and south, creating an 11-year sunspot cycle. At peak times, like 2001, there are sunspots every day and more frequent solar flares and storms that could disrupt satellites.

Earlier this month, David Hathaway, NASA’s top solar storm scientist, predicted that the current cycle, which started around 2009, will be the weakest in a century. Hathaway is not part of Tuesday’s [June 14, 2011] prediction.

Altrock also thinks the current cycle won’t have much solar activity. He tracks streamers from the solar corona, the sun’s outer atmosphere seen during eclipses. The streamers normally get busy around the sun’s poles a few years before peak solar storm activity. That “rush to the poles” would have happened by now, but it hasn’t and there’s no sign of it yet. That also means the cycle after that is uncertain, he said.

Matt Penn of the National Solar Observatory, another study co-author, said sunspot magnetic fields have been steadily decreasing in strength since 1998. If they continue on the current pace, their magnetic fields will be too weak to become spots as of 2022 or so, he said.

Jet streams on the sun’s surface and below are also early indicators of solar storm activity, and they haven’t formed yet for the 2020 cycle. That indicates that there will be little or delayed activity in that cycle, said Hill, who tracks jet streams.

“People shouldn’t be scared of this,” said David McComas, a scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, who wasn’t part of the team. “This is about the magnetic field and the ionized gas coming out of the sun. It’s a reduction in that, not the light and the heat.”

There are questions about what this means for Earth’s climate. Three times in the past the regular 11-year solar cycle has gone on an extended vacation -- at the same time as cool periods on Earth.

Skeptics of man-made global warming from the burning of fossil fuels have often pointed to solar radiation as a possible cause of a warming Earth, but they are in the minority among scientists. The Earth has warmed as solar activity has decreased.

Andrew Weaver, a climate scientist at the University of Victoria, said there could be small temperature effects, but they are far weaker than the strength of man-made global warming from carbon dioxide and methane. He noted that in 2010, when solar activity was mostly absent, Earth tied for its hottest year in more than a century of record-keeping.

Hill and colleagues wouldn’t discuss the effects of a quiet sun on temperature or global warming.

“If our predictions are true, we’ll have a wonderful experiment that will determine whether the sun has any effect on global warming,” Hill said.

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Emerging from the solar minimum in 2020--article from NASA and NOAA. 

Updated Sept. 15, 2020
Solar Cycle 25 is Here. NASA, NOAA Scientists Explain What That Means 
https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/solar-cycle-25-is-here-nasa-noaa-scientists-explain-what-that-means/?fbclid=IwAR0l9lvu8YcAhXMDzOycBURmo0UZKBi42xWL9KH1dYUtrzXTe56roYUh9zI

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Christy K Robinson is author of these sites:  

• Discovering Love (inspiration)
• Rooting for Ancestors (history and genealogy)
• William and Mary Barrett Dyer (17th century culture and history of England and New England)

and of these books:

·          We Shall Be Changed (2010)
·          Mary Dyer Illuminated (2013)
·          Mary Dyer: For Such a Time as This (2014)
·          The Dyers of London, Boston, & Newport (2014)
·          Effigy Hunter (2015)
·          Anne Marbury Hutchinson: American Founding Mother (2018)