Springfield 1636-1886, History of Town and City, by Mason A. Green ...

598 SPRINGFIELD, 1636-1886.
fill, by which he is generally known in history. In order to do this I must take
a brief survey of his career, for his life, from the beginning to the end, was a
busy and eventful one.
At this time, two hundred and fifty years ago, May 25, 1636, he was only fif-
teen years of age, having been born at Springfield, in Essex, England, in 1621.
He was, therefore, only nine years old when he was brought by his father to
America, together with his mother and his three sisters, in the sliip " Jewell," one
Hurlston, master, in company with the other vessels of the fleet that bore the
Massachusetts charter to this side of the Atlantic. About ten of the clock,
Easter Monday, those vessels weighed anchor at Cowes, Isle of Wight, and on
Monday, the 14th day of the following June, they cast those same anchors in the
inner harbor of Salem, in Massachusetts. In the course of a very few days they
sailed again and landed their company at the confluence of two rivers, near the
bottom of Massachusetts Bay. "Winthrop planted himself at Charlestown, but
Pynchon, almost immediately, removed to Roxbury. where we find him in the
early part of July of the same year, and where he built a house, beautifully
situated on rising ground sloping towards the east, afterwards sold to Governor
Dudley and now occupied by the Universalist church.
Hence the worshipful major, being now, as I have said, about nine years of
age, first made his acquaintance with the great wilderness and with the copper-
colored savages, in whose future history he was destined to play such an im-
portant part. In the course of that summer, his mother dying, he passed into
the care of his sisters, who were considerably older than himself, and a little
later into the hands of Mrs. Frances Sanford, a grave matron of the church at
Dorchester, whom his father married within a year. Of early schooling the
worshipful major probably had not much, but what he had, no doubt, came from
Rev. John Eliot, the apostle to the Indians, who arrived from England in 1631,
and became the first minister of Roxbury, and from him he probably acquired
that interest in the Indians and that knowledge of their character which was one
of his leading characteristics during the whole of his life.
Two hundred and fifty years ago it was a hurried and busy time in that house-
hold at the foot of the Rocksborough cliffs. On the 22d of April his father had
returned from his first trip, that season, to the Connecticut river, in order to ex-
pedite the loading of the " Blessing of the Bay," as he wrote to John Winthrop, Jr.,
at Saybrook, at the river's mouth. On May 14 he was again at Springfield, and on
July 4 was back once more at Roxbury. B}' July 15 he Avas once more in Spring-
field, and the probabiUty is that it was between these last two dates the family
was moved, and that somewhere about the 8th or 9th of July the youthful major,
being, as I have said, about fifteen years of age, gained his first sight of the Con-