The Wordy Shipmates—Larsa Ramsini

Vowell, Sarah. New York: Penguin Group, 2008. 272 pp.

Anne Hutchinson is “the Puritan Oprah—a leader, a guru, a star” (208). This is one of the many comparisons comedian Sarah Vowell makes in her book The Wordy Shipmates between the seventeenth century Puritans and our modern United States. Despite the many points of humor found throughout the work, most of her exploration of the life of the Nonseparatist Puritans who arrived in New England on the Arbella with Reverend John Winthrop in 1630, ten years after the Separatists Puritans arrived on the Mayflower, is used as a critique against our country’s present arrogance and self-adoration, or what Vowell refers to as “American exceptionalism” (6). The title of the work refers to the complete obsession with reading and writing that the Puritans possessed. Vowell explains that “their single-minded obsession with one book, the Bible, made words the center of their lives—not land, not money, not power, not fun” (13). As an example of their devotion to literary study, she explains their founding of Harvard in response to an embarrassing loss of wits due to a theological disagreement between Anne Hutchinson and the representatives of the Massachusetts Bay Colony (225-6). Throughout the book, Vowell defends her interest in this particular group of Puritans, as most Americans would probably hesitate to read an entire book on what has come to be known as such a boring group of people. She does succeed, however, in making them resonate with the values we hold today. In one especially moving part, as Vowell describes Winthrop’s goal of creating a unified community working together towards a common goal, she writes, “despite their unruly theology, their sometimes hair-trigger hate, the fact that the image of being members of the same body was so agreed upon to the point of cliché, makes them worth getting to know” (53). The most effective way Vowell helps the modern reader to connect with the Arbella Puritans is in drawing connections between the two seemingly divergent cultures. She describes Winthrop as “Peter Seeger, gathering a generation around the campfire to sing their shared folk songs,” and Roger Williams, the independent thinker adhering to the separation of church and state, as “Bob Dylan plugging in at Newport, making his own noise” (128-9). In explaining the Pequot War between the English and the Pequot Indian tribe, she claims that “severed body parts” are the “seventeenth-century equivalent of a gift basket of minimuffins” (186-7). And returning to her theme of past and present American exceptionalism, she compares the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s seal of a Native American saying “Come Over and Help Us” to Dick Cheney remarking on Meet the Press in 2003, “My belief is that we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators” (26).

The strong theme of exceptionalism begins in Vowell’s introduction of John Winthrop’s sermon “A Model of Christian Charity,” given, presumably, to the passengers of the Arbella in the middle of the Atlantic in 1630 (35). He tells them that their colony is to be “as a city upon a hill,” an expression most Americans have probably heard before (35). What most seem to forget, however, and Vowell’s reason for spending so much time on the subject, is that the Puritans who listened to this sermon were God-fearing people who possessed so much self-hatred that they labored their entire life so as to appear as if they were already saved, as they were Calvinists who believed in predestination. As Vowell explains, The thing that appeals to me…is that at least the arrogant ballyhoo that New England is special and chosen by God is tempered by the self-loathing Puritans’ sense of reckoning…this humility, this fear, was what kept their delusions of grandeur in check. That’s what subsequent generations lost. From New England’s Puritans we inherited the idea that America is blessed and ordained by God above all nations, but lost the fear of wrath and retribution (71-2). The Wordy Shipmates is an incredibly interesting work of historical nonfiction that is well-researched and emotionally charged with drama pertaining to European imperialism, conflicts between the church and the state, and basic freedoms that we take for granted like freedom of religion, speech, and assembly. Despite some instances of over-sentimentality, poorly worded phrases, and over-description of the Pequot War, this book is an easy read for anyone interested in the history of the United States and some reasons for how we ended up where we are today, a country in which we are free to write the following sentence without fear of banishment, while at the same time having it speak the truth: As I write this, the United States of America is still a city on a hill; and it’s still shining—because we never turn off the lights in our torture prisons. That’s how we carry out the sleep deprivation (72).