The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell

From The Week of April 18, 2010

In another life, I can well imagine Ms. Vowell distilling her playful brand of political and cultural satire into a successful stand-up routine. She might take the stage with her collection of cultural curios, acquired through her investigative travels, and have the audience in snickers as she reveales the origins of the bizarre. In this life, however, Ms. Vowell has channeled her considerable talents towards literature and journalism and, for us bibliophiles who enjoy our history with a healthy side of sarcastic wit, we are the better for it.

The Wordy Shipmates is primarily an accounting of the events that rippled out from John Winthrop's decision to, in 1630, lead a flock of British emigrants to the Massachusetts Bay colony where, as Puritans, they would be free to practice their religion, safe from the persecution of their anti-Puritan king, Charles I. In many ways, this mission proved to be fateful for the future United States of America. It not only prepared the ground for that nation's strong, Protestant roots to take hold, it established the sense of American exceptionalism, the City Upon a Hill, which would come to influence American policy in the centuries to come. Ms. Vowell has a particularly good eye for small, telling details, reconstructing here the lists of supplies the adventurers stored about their wooden ships for the months-long journey across the temperamental Atlantic. She lavishes her attentions upon the many characters who sailed with Winthrop, the devoted zealots to the opportunistic hedonists, recreating an amusing tapestry of what those founding colonists might have been like. She saves her most devastating wit for the theological battles fought out between Winthrop and the liberal, for his times, Roger Williams, the reformed Baptist and later founder of Rhode Island. The evidence of the extent to which their disagreements have been mirrored through the subsequent generations of American thought and belief is startling and more than a bit tragic.

There's so much here to enjoy, from the descriptions of life in the new colonies, to the religious and societal conditions that instigated the colonists' flight from England. What stands out most, however, is the extent to which the virtuousness of extremism is determined by history. By all accounts, the Winthrop emigrants were no different than any desperate separatists who attempt to forego civilization in the hope of giving birth to a newer, fairer society in the wild. From the vantage point of civilization in the 21st century, we view such people as anti-social non-conformists who have likely sadly fallen under the sway of some half-mad prophet. And yet these wayward souls are Ms. Vowell's protagonists. More than that, they are the shapers of the future United States, non-conformists who've handed down their legacy of religion smashing up against religious freedom, stirred up with a healthy distrust of the State. This is a wonderful mishmash of history, culture, and biography, shot through with thick veins of comedy. I devoured it. (4/5 Stars)