recovered long afterward in
England. Winthrop's Journal, or _History of New England_, begun on
shipboard in 1630, and extending to 1649, was not published entire
until 1826. It is of equal authority with Bradford's, and perhaps, on
the whole the more important of the two, as the colony of Massachusetts
Bay, whose history it narrates, greatly outwent Plymouth in wealth and
population, though not in priority of settlement. The interest of
Winthrop's Journal lies in the events that it records rather than in
any charm in the historian's manner of recording them. His style is
pragmatic, and some of the incidents which he gravely notes are trivial
to the modern mind, though instructive as to our forefathers' way of
thinking. For instance, of the year 1632: "At Watertown there was (in
the view of divers witnesses) a great combat between a mouse and a
snake, and after a long fight the mouse prevailed and killed the snake.
The pastor of Boston, Mr. Wilson, a very sincere, holy man, hearing of
it, gave this interpretation: that the snake was the devil, the mouse
was a poor, contemptible people, which God had brought hither, which
should overcome Satan here and dispossess him of his kingdom." The
reader of Winthrop's Journal comes every-where upon hints which the
imagination has since shaped into poetry and romance. The germs of
many of Longfellow's _New England Tragedies_, of Hawthorne's _Maypole
of Merrymount_, and _Endicott's Red Cross_, and of Whittier's _John
Underhill_ and _The Familists' Hymn_ are all to be found in some dry,
brief entry of the old Puritan diarist. "Robert Cole, having been oft
punished for drunkenness, was now ordered to wear a red D about his
neck for a year," to wit, the year 1633, and thereby gave occasion to
the greatest American romance, _The Scarlet Letter_. The famous
apparition of the phantom ship in New Haven harbor, "upon the top of
the poop a man standing with one hand akimbo under his left side, and
in his right hand a sword stretched out toward the sea," was first
chronicled by Winthrop under the year 1648. This meteorological
phenomenon took on the dimensions of a full-grown myth some forty years
later, as related, with many embellishments, by Rev. James Pierpont, of
New Haven, in a letter to Cotton Mather. Winthrop put great faith in
special providences, and among other instances narrates, not without a
certain grim satisfaction, how "the _Mary Rose_, a ship of Bristol, of
about 20