Knowing her household are clothed with the scarlet cloth of her weaving."
For they were no idle butterflies of fashion, no languid great dames, these wives and daughters of the Pilgrims. Their hands knew the rush of the thread on the wheel, the touch of the distaff, and were even not unacquainted at need with the weight of musket and bird-gun. They were cast to some extent in the fine old Spartan mould, these Pilgrim mothers; they feared God--and nothing else--and they bent their energies to the performance of their sole aspiration, that of "doing their duty in that state of life to which it had pleased God to call them." It was a state of life that held peril and toil and little reward for these things; but they cared nothing for this, these splendid pilgrim dames, but lived their lives bravely and died with the consciousness that they had done their best to make noble the birth of a new land which should shelter their children forever.
The first authentic record that we have of an individual woman in the time of the first northern settlement comes to us in the shape of a death, as the first feminine name of the Roanoke settlers came to us connected with a birth. It was in 1630, when the settlement of Massachusetts Bay had begun to take some aspect of permanency, that there came into its harbor a fleet of some ten or eleven ships, the flagship, a vessel of three hundred and fifty tons, being named the Arabella. She was thus called because of the presence on board of Lady Arabella Johnson, wife of a commoner called Isaac Johnson. The pair had come to America to breathe a purer atmosphere of freedom in religion than they had been able to find at home; but Lady Arabella was not destined long to enjoy the liberty she sought. The words of Cotton Mather may be quoted in regard to her, the first of noble blood to succumb to the rigors of the new climate:
"Of those who soon dyed after their first arrival, not the least considerable was the lady Arabella, who left an earthly paradise in the family of an Earldom, to encounter the sorrows of a wilderness, for the entertainments of a pure worship in the house of God; and then immediately left that wilderness for the Heavenly paradise, whereto the compassionate Jesus, of whom she was a follower, called her. We have read concerning a noble woman of Bohemia, who forsook her friends, her plate, her house and all, and because the gates of the city were guarded, crept through the common sewer, that she might enjoy the institutions of our Lord at another place where they might be had. The spirit which acted that noble woman, we may suppose carried this blessed lady thus to and through the hardships of an American desart. But as for her virtuous husband, Isaac Johnson, Esq.,
'"He try'd
To live without her, lik'd it not, and dy'ed.'
"His mourning for the death of his honourable consort was too bitter to be extended a year; about a month after her death his ensued, unto the extreme loss of the whole plantation."
There is here much cause for smiling, especially in old Dr. Mather's unconscious snobbery as to the "paradise of an earldom," even to italicising the important word, and to his wonder how anyone could leave such delights for the goal of a "desart"; but there is also some moving if equally unconscious pathos, and for this, as well as for the fact of Lady Arabella's being the first feminine name to come down to us from Plymouth in the dignity of history, her virtues and fate are here recorded. Moreover, that otherwise unfamed lady from Bohemia who left her "plate" behind her in her search for religious liberty deserves to be rescued from oblivion.
