The loss was a heavy one to the colony as well as the father, for Henry Winthrop, though but twenty-two, had already had experience as a pioneer, having gone out to Barbadoes at eighteen, and became one of the earliest planters in that island. Ardent, energetic, and with his fathers deep tenderness for all who depended on him, he was one who could least be spared. "A sprightly and hopeful young gentleman he was," says Hubbard, and another chronicle gives more minute details. "The very day on which he went on shore in New England, he and the principal officers of the ship, walking out to a place now called by the Salemites, Northfield, to view the Indian wigwams, they saw on the other side of the river a small canoe. He would have had one of the company swim over and fetch it, rather than walk several miles on foot, it being very hot weather; but none of the party could swim but himself; and so he plunged in, and, as he was swimming over, was taken with the cramp a few roods from the shore and drowned."
The father's letter is filled with an anguish of pity for the mother and the young wife, whose health, like that of the elder Mrs. Winthrop, had made the journey impossible for both.
"I am so overpressed with business, as I have no time for these or other mine own private occasions. I only write now that thou mayest know, that yet I live and am mindful of thee in all my affairs. The larger discourse of all things thou shalt receive from my brother Downing, which I must send by some of the last ships. We have met with many sad and discomfortable things as thou shalt hear after; and the Lord's hand hath been heavy upon myself in some very near to me. My son Henry! My son Henry! Ah, poor child! Yet it grieves me much more for my dear daughter. The Lord strengthen and comfort her heart to bear this cross patiently. I know thou wilt not be wanting to her in this distress."
Not one of the little colony was wanting in tender offices in these early days when a common suffering made them "very pitiful one to another," and as the absolutely essential business was disposed of they hastened to organize the church where free worship should make amends for all the long sorrow of its search.
A portion of the people from the Arbella had remained in Salem, but on Friday, July 3Oth, 1630, Winthrop, Dudley, Johnson and Wilson entered into a church covenant, which was signed two days after by Increase Nowell and four others—Sharpe, Bradstreet, Gager and Colborne.
It is most probable that Anne Bradstreet had been temporarily separated from her husband, as Johnson in his "Wonder-working Providence," writes, that after the arrival at Salem, "the lady Arrabella and some other godly women aboad at Salem, but their husbands continued at Charles Town, both for the settling the Civill Government and gathering another Church of Christ." The delay was a short one, for her name stands thirteenth on the list. Charlestown, however, held hardly more promise of quiet life than Salem. The water supply was, curiously enough, on a peninsula which later gave excellent water, only "a brackish spring in the sands by the water side … which could not supply half the necessities of the multitude, at which time the death of so many was concluded to be much the more occasioned by this want of good water."
Heat was another evil to the constitutions which knew only the equable English temperature, and could not face either the intense sun, or the sudden changes of the most erratic climate the earth knows. In the search for running-water, the colonists scattered, moving from point to point, "the Governor, the Deputy-Governor and all the assistants except Mr. Nowell going across the river to Boston at the invitation of Mr. Blaxton, who had until then been its only white inhabitant."
Even the best supplied among them were but scantily provided with provisions. It was too late for planting, and the colony already established was too wasted and weakened by sickness to have cared for crops in the planting season. In the long voyage "there was miserable damage and spoil of provisions by sea, and divers came not so well provided as they would, upon a report, whilst they were in England, that now there was enough in New England." Even this small store was made smaller by the folly of several who exchanged food for beaver skins, and, the Council suddenly finding that famine was imminent "hired and despatched away Mr. William Pearce with his ship of about two hundred tons, for Ireland to buy more, and in the mean time went on with their work of settling."
The last month of the year had come before they could decide where the fortified town, made necessary by Indian hostilities, should be located. The Governor's house had been partly framed at Charlestown, but with the removal to Boston it was taken down, and finally Cambridge was settled upon as the most desirable point, and their first winter was spent there. Here for the first time it was possible for Anne Bradstreet to unpack their household belongings, and seek to create some semblance of the forsaken home. But even for the Dudleys, among the richest members of the party there was a privation which shows how sharply it must have fared with the poorer portion, and Dudley wrote, nine months after their arrival, that he "thought fit to commit to memory our present condition, and what hath befallen us since our arrival here; which I will do shortly, after my usual manner, and must do rudely, having yet no table, nor other room to write in than by the fireside upon my knee, in this sharp winter; to which my family must have leave to resort, though they break good manners, and make me many times forget what I would say, and say what I would not."
No word of Mistress Dudley's remains to tell the shifts and strivings for comfort in that miserable winter which, mild as it was, had a keenness they were ill prepared to face. Petty miseries and deprivations, the least endurable of all forms of suffering, surrounded them like a cloud of stinging insects, whose attacks, however intolerable at the moment, are forgotten with the passing, and either for this reason, or from deliberate purpose, there is not a line of reference to them in any of Anne Bradstreet's writings. Scarcity of food was the sorest trouble. The Charlestown records show that "people were necessitated to live upon clams and muscles and ground nuts and acorns, and these got with much difficulty in the winter-time. People were very much tried and discouraged, especially when they heard that the Governor himself had the last batch of bread in the oven."