Julie Sievers

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Julie Sievers | Drowned Pens and Shaking Hands: Sea Providence Narratives in Seventeenth-Century New England | The William and Mary Quarterly, 63.4 | The History Cooperative

Drowned Pens and Shaking Hands: Sea Providence Narratives in Seventeenth-Century New England

I and my Wife were almost naked both of us, and wet and cold even unto death, I found a Snapsack cast on the shoar, in which I had a Steel and Flint and Powder-horn. Going further I found a drowned Goat, then I found a Hat, and my Son William's Coat, both which I put on. My Wife found one of her Petticoats which she put on. I found also two Cheeses and some Butter driven ashoar. Thus the Lord sent us some clothes to put on, and food to sustain our new lives which we had lately given unto us; and means also to make fire.

—Anthony Thacher to Peter Thacher, 1635, as edited by Increase Mather¹

IN Anthony Thacher's narrative of his shipwreck off the New England coast, he reveals how he came to survive the disaster. Thacher writes that while beginning to drown, "I had my senses remaining perfect with me all the time that I was under and in water, who at that instant lifted my head above the top of the water, that so I might breathe without any hindrance by the waters. I stood bolt upright as if I had stood upon my feet, but I felt no bottom, nor had any footing for to stand upon, but the waters." Thacher's perception of his confusing and chaotic experience leads him to formulate the event as an extraordinary providence: he walks on water.

Thacher's tragic narrative—of the twenty-one lost in the wreck, most were his or his cousin's children—was the opening text in Increase Mather's collection of wonder tales, An Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences, and offers starkly iconic images of shipwreck in the Atlantic. Thacher recalls his children as he last saw them: "my little Babe (Ah poor Peter) sitting in his Sister Ediths arms, who to the uttermost of her power sheltred him from the waters, my poor William standing close unto them, all three of them looking ruefully on me on the Rock ... Oh I yet see their cheeks, poor silent Lambs, pleading pity and help at my hands." By the story's end, this family portrait has been washed away, leaving a new image: a man and his wife, the most elemental social unit, standing naked and alone on the shore. The narrative shows how Thacher and his wife had to leave not only the Old World's society but also those they loved most to experience God and begin their roles in the divine plan for the New World. The story thus opens on the Atlantic with a slaughter of innocents but ends on the New England shore with a reenactment of Adam and Eve stripped of all they have known yet equipped with a promise as they walk forth to establish a new phase of human history. The means by which God has chosen and equipped these two, Thacher senses, are the "wonders in the deep," here portrayed as a divine presence in the North Atlantic.²

Though apparently skilled at representing the colonial sea providence experience, Thacher's "drowned Pen and shaking Hand" lacked final control of the narrative, its implied argument, and certainly its social function. Those powers would be appropriated by Mather, whose editing of the text and inclusion of it in a wonder anthology controlled the circumstances and interpretive framework through which most readers encountered Thacher's story. Mather brought Thacher's text into print in 1684, after it had circulated for nearly fifty years in manuscript. It was Mather who chose to present Thacher as the introductory case in a compilation of wonders carefully organized to present a mosaic portrait of New England composed of the most extraordinary anecdotes about its nature, people, and spiritual world. Perhaps, as Mary B. Campbell has written, "Neither power nor talent gives a travel writer his or her authority, which comes only and crucially from experience." Ultimately, however, even that authority would be controlled by when, how, and by whom his or her text was edited and published.³

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