And it was not only the Boston authorities who entertained such suspicions. In August 1691, John Alden arrived in Salem with orders for colonial militiamen assigned to the ketch
Endeavour
to convoy his vessel (the ketch
Ann
) to Port Royal. Bartholomew Gedney, a longtime friend and business associate of Alden’s, later informed his superiors in Boston that the men at first refused to sail to Port Royal until they had been paid for their past two months’ service, and that when they had received that compensation, they still would not serve under Alden’s command. Their captain, Benjamin Allen, recounted their reasoning: “they Generally said that said Oldin was Reported to bee an Old Indian trader & was going to trade with the frenche & therefore many of them did then Reply they would be hanged before they would goe with him said Oldin.” A Bay Colony official, pronouncing the men’s actions to be “mutiny,” directed Hathorne and Corwin to arrest the perpetrators, in order to, in Gedney’s words, “salve the honor of the Government: & prevent the hurt of such Examples.” In their response to the charges, the men insisted that Benjamin Allen too “alwayes spoke against goeing to all the Company,” presenting the voyage to them as a voluntary one and asking for a show of hands from those willing to go. They explained, “Butt was observed that neither he nor any one else did [hold up their hands]; It being left to your Petitioners voate wee did not hold ourselves obliged to goe.”
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Whether the men were prosecuted for their refusal to serve under John Alden is unknown. But retrospectively their decision proved wise, for he and those who sailed with him to Port Royal on that voyage in September 1691 were captured by the French under Castine, who also recaptured the town. Among those taken prisoner were John Alden Jr., Edward Tyng (formerly of Falmouth, who had been designated to command Port Royal under English rule), and John Nelson, one of Boston’s leading merchants. Castine dispatched Nelson, a valuable captive, to Quebec, sending Captain Alden back to Boston to collect £200 to ransom his ship, his son, Tyng, and various other English prisoners.
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When John Alden returned to Boston on that mission in October, he brought with him a number of Englishmen, including a ransomed captive who lost no time telling his dramatic story—a tale with significant negative implications for Captain Alden’s reputation.
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Mark Emerson, once a member of the garrison at Sagadahoc, had been held prisoner first by the Wabanakis, then by the French, for nearly two and a half years. In a formal statement presented to the authorities, he described his travels with the Indians, then his sale to some French people living at a place called Quithmaquig on the St. John’s River, in Acadia. “The Last winter & spring,” he recalled, “both French & Indians were forced to eate their Doggs, & some of their Captives, for haveing noe Powder nor shott could not kill a Fowle, though they swam in great Numbers before their Doors.” Those dire circumstances had changed for the better, though, when Captain John Alden sailed up the river in the
Mary
in March 1690/1, on the very voyage during which the Massachusetts government had enjoined him not to trade arms or ammunition. He “brought them all supplys, as Powder & shott, Rum, Tobbaccoe, and Bread, with other Necessaries, or they had all perished,” Emerson explained.
And he went further. “The Indians have a saying,” he revealed, “that Mr Alden is a good Man, & loves Indians very well for Beaver, & hath been with them often, since the Warr to their Great Relief.” Emerson disclosed that he had asked the captain to ransom him in March, but that Alden had refused to pay the “little” that was asked for him, saying “he came to Trade, & not to redeem Captives.” Emerson was then ransomed in October through the generosity of John Nelson, who passed through Quithmaquig on his way to prison in Quebec.
The Bostonian who forwarded Mark Emerson’s statement added information of his own. Captain Alden was said to have carried “16 Barrles of Powder with Lead & other Thinges, Convenient for Trade to assist our Enemies to Kill our Friends” on his ill-fated September voyage, he reported. And he also revealed how the governor and council of Massachusetts had reacted to the former captive’s revelations. Mark Emerson “will swear itt, when called to, but our Authority [the governor and council], will not hear him against Mr Alden, tho’ severall others prof[es]s to swear the same.”
Emerson thus supplied New England’s gossipers with the evidence they needed to support the already widespread belief that John Alden was an “Old Indian trader & was going to trade with the frenche.” The Salem seagoing militiamen who thought as much in July 1691 had been absolutely correct in their assessment of their potential captain’s current intentions and past activities. Ann Putnam Jr.’s charge in Salem Village on May 31, 1692, would therefore have come as no surprise to any of her listeners, much less to Alden himself or to the examining magistrates, who had heard Emerson’s charges at least semiofficially months earlier.
Emerson surely told the truth. How many veteran sailors from Alden’s numerous voyages “to the eastward” had sat afterwards in Boston or Salem taverns and told their fellows about calling not just at Falmouth, Port Royal, or other English-controlled harbors, but also at French outposts or native villages? According to the man who transcribed Emerson’s narrative “from his owne Mouth,” other witnesses were prepared to “swear the same.” Mark Emerson had no reason to like Alden (whose failure to ransom him in March 1690/1 had kept him in captivity for several additional months), but the former soldier also had no reason to lie either about the difficult straits in which he and his captors had found themselves in the early spring of 1690/1, or about John Alden’s fortuitous appearance with supplies. Likewise, the Wabanakis’ reputed saying, Alden “loves Indians very well for Beaver,” appears an appropriate judgment for an “Old Indian trader.” The Wabanakis, according to Emerson, did not suggest that Alden traitorously favored them or the French, but rather indicated that a quest for profitable pelts motivated him above all else.
Then, too, it was doubtless true that “Authority” (the ultimate male gatekeepers) did not wish to consider bringing charges of trading with the enemy against John Alden, a member of the colony’s elite and a friend, fellow congregant, and business associate of many of them. He supplied the colony with valuable, even essential services, and if he chose to make some profit (or simply to recoup unreimbursed expenses) from certain clandestine stops on voyages undertaken chiefly at the colony’s behest, such acquaintances as Bartholomew Gedney seemed prepared to look the other way. They might even have invested in his enterprises. One could certainly speculate, on the basis of Emerson’s recollection that the Wabanakis reported that Alden “hath been with them often, since the Warr,” that Captain John Alden was one of the merchant captains who sailed to Maine shortly after Andros’s overthrow in April 1689 to sell vital ammunition and supplies to the Wabanakis.
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One of the most compelling indications that the leaders of the Bay Colony were prepared to disregard what they learned from Mark Emerson in the fall of 1691—or at least an indication of their total dependence on Captain Alden’s sailing skills, contacts, and knowledge of the Maine coast—was their decision in March 1691/2 to employ the captain once more to sail east on colony business. In dispatching Alden and the militia captain James Converse to Maine, the governor and council told them to parlay with the Wabanakis and to redeem as many of the captives taken at York in January as possible, in addition to retrieving Edward Tyng and Alden’s son. The mission was partially successful, for a number of the captives were released to the Anglo-Americans, but Tyng died en route as a prisoner to France and John Alden Jr. had already been sent to Quebec.
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By the time Captain Alden returned from that voyage, probably in late April, the witchcraft crisis had exploded in Essex County. The connection to Maine, initially established a week or so earlier, made Alden vulnerable to charges of witchcraft for his by then well-known involvement in trading with the French and Indians. But the precipitating factor that caused the authorities to finally move against Alden, who, according to one document, had been “complained of a long time,” seems to have been news conveyed to Boston by Elisha Hutchinson on May 19. Two recent escapees from the Indians near Pentagoet had just arrived at Portsmouth, he revealed. They reported that “Castene had been at the port whence they came. . . . Exspecting to find goods there which he Sayd Capt Alden owes him & promist to leave there, but finding none threatens what he will do when he meets him againe.” The information that their greatest French enemy, Castine, had been “promist” goods by John Alden appears to have been the last straw. Nine days later, John Alden was formally accused of being in league with the devil.
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Thus in the heated atmosphere of May 1692 the Salem Village afflicted accomplished what a returned Indian captive had not achieved seven months earlier: causing the arrest of a member of the colony’s elite. Susannah Sheldon, Mercy Lewis, and Mary Walcott—all with significant ties to Maine— were among John Alden’s most active accusers. Surely they saw Alden’s collusion with the Wabanakis, devil-worshippers who had devastated their families, as an indication of his fidelity to Satan. In contrast to many of their accusations, in which they parroted the concerns of other Essex County residents about malefic activities by distrusted neighbors, in charging John Alden (and John Floyd, as well) with witchcraft these afflicted young women spoke for themselves and for many other refugees from the northeastern frontier. That the magistrates listened to them, whereas they had listened neither to Mark Emerson nor to many earlier complaints from Maine about illegal trading, discloses that the justices too saw the crisis facing New England as resulting from an alliance of their enemies in the visible and invisible worlds and further underscores the extent of the power now being wielded by the youthful female accusers.
Nowhere was that made clearer than by Bartholomew Gedney’s reaction to the complaint against his former business associate. Alden, confronted with the standard charges that he pinched the tormented young people and struck them down with his glance, “appealed to all that ever knew him, if they ever suspected him to be such a person, and challenged any one, that could bring in any thing upon their own knowledge, that might give suspicion of his being such an one.” The Salem magistrate replied, “he had known Aldin many Years, and had been at Sea with him, and always look’d upon him to be an honest Man, but now he did see cause to alter his judgment.” Gedney in fact “bid Aldin confess, and give glory to God.” Alden responded that “he hoped he should give glory to God, and hoped he should never gratifie the Devil . . . [and] hoped God would clear up his Innocency.” After several of the afflicted had been cured by the touch test, the captain told Justice Gedney “that he could assure him that there was a lying Spirit in them, for I can assure you that there is not a word of truth in all these say of me.” That such assurances, which once would have carried a great deal of weight with his longtime acquaintance, did Alden no good speaks volumes about the mindset of the examining magistrates. He was committed to the marshal, and sent to jail in Boston.
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After observing the examinations on May 31, the new attorney general, Thomas Newton, informed the colony’s secretary, Isaac Addington, that he had “beheld strange things scarce credible but to the spectators.” Indeed, he added, “I must say according to the present appearance of things,” John Alden and Philip English “are as deeply concerned as the rest, for the afflicted spare no person of what quality soever neither conceale their Crimes tho’ never soe hainous.” In short, even someone previously unfamiliar with the proceedings found the evidence of the tormented young people convincing, although it was directed against high-status men. Indeed, that they targeted such men, not attempting to “spare” them or “conceale” their offenses, seemed a mark in the young female accusers’ favor, an indication of the truth of their charges.
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Newton’s and Gedney’s approving reactions to what they saw as plausible charges against men of their own rank reveal the inadequacy of historians’ standard interpretation of such accusations as inexplicable and overwrought. Because many of the high-status people identified by the accusers were, like Mistress Margaret Thacher, protected from formal charges by their friends and relatives, most of their names remain unknown today, as does an indication of precisely when they were accused. But in all likelihood many such names first emerged, like those of English, Thacher, Floyd, and Alden, during the four to six weeks after the initial accusation of the Reverend George Burroughs on April 20. The people in question were variously described at the time as “some . . . [with] great estates in
Boston
” or as “Gentlemen of the Councell Justices of the peace Ministers and severall of their wives.”
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Where names and the timing of specific accusations are known, as is the case with two justices and several clergymen or their spouses, they will be considered later in this book. But extant documents fail to list any member of the Massachusetts Council among the accused, in spite of the statement in the letter just quoted. That, of course, is hardly surprising: if any charge was likely to be disbelieved and suppressed by the male gatekeepers, it was one naming a man (or men) who served with them on the colony’s primary governing body. And yet, given the logic of these accusations, such a charge was perhaps the most obvious of all. In the context of the government’s near-total failure to prevent the devastation of flourishing northeastern frontier communities during the war, witchcraft accusations directed at those viewed as responsible—of wealthy council members, their allies and relatives—could easily be pursued by those whose families and livelihoods had been destroyed.
MAJOR ELISHA HUTCHINSON (PORTSMOUTH) TO ISAAC ADDINGTON (BOSTON), MAY 19, 1692:
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