Author Description

As the niece and daughter-in-law of John Winthrop, Sr., Elizabeth had little choice but to exchange her life of relative ease for one of hardship and uncertainty in America. The long and dangerous sea voyage to America in a sailing ship of the 17th century was a life-threatening experience, of which today we can have only a scant conception. An immigrant crossing the Atlantic over a century after Elizabeth’s voyage in 1631, described his passage as follows: “During the voyage there is on board these ships terrible misery, stench, fumes, horror, vomiting, many kinds of sea sickness, fever, dysentery, headache, heat, constipation, boils, scurvy, cancer, mouth-rot, and the like.... Add to this want of provisions, hunger, thirst, frost, heat, dampness, anxiety, want, afflictions, and lamentations, together with other trouble.... The misery reaches the climax when a gale rages for 2 or 3 nights and days, so that everyone believes that the ship will go to the bottom with all human beings on board. In such a visitation the people cry and pray most piteously. Elizabeth’s first husband came to America with the Winthrop Fleet of 1630, only to drown the first day he got off the ship. The young widow and baby daughter arrived the following year, and Uncle John Winthrop shortly thereafter arranged for his niece to marry the wealthy, but mentally unstable Robert Feake. In time he abandoned her and the couple’s five children, and eventually lost his sanity altogether. Elizabeth’s third marriage was to William Hallett, her second husband’s property manager. Although she obtained a divorce from the more lenient government of New Netherlands, the Puritan colonies did not accept insanity as legitimate grounds for divorce. Consequently, she and Hallett created the first major scandal in the Puritan colonies, and were forced to flee their home in Greenwich (and later in New London) on three different occasions before moving deeper into Dutch territory to escape the war