There was a sharp tang of spring in the air as Martha Wilder stood looking out from the grey medieval walls of Southampton with her thirteen-year-old daughter Mary. It was 11 April 1638, and she was preparing for a new life in North America with her family.
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| Southampton's medieval walls - the last sight of England Martha would have |
Martha's husband had died in 1634 at their family home. Thomas Wilder, a descendant of Tudor soldier Nicholas Wilder, lived in Shiplake with his wife and five children; three sons and two daughters. Their personal lives in the riverside village would have revolved around looking after the children, ensuring their education and managing the family estates in Shiplake, and also in Sulham, Berkshire. They had married by 1615-1616, their eldest son, John of Nunhide, born before 1617. Another son, Thomas, was born in around 1618, a daughter Elizabeth in around 1620 and another son Edward, in around 1623. The youngest, a daughter named Mary, was born in around 1625. After Thomas' death, the family made the decision to leave England.
The country was then ruled by Charles I and was hurtling towards civil war. Charles had begun to anger his Parliament with dismissive and authoritarian behaviour, believing that he ruled by the will of God and was therefore answerable to no one but Him. The two sides would soon fracture into all-out war, as Royalists and Parliamentarians fought for control of the country. It would end in 1649 with the Charles' execution by axe at Whitehall in London. There is evidence that the Wilders were Puritans, a more extreme form of Protestantism, and felt unsafe following Charles' imposing of religious rules and structures in the 1630s. As Martha waited for permission to step onto the gangplank of the wooden ship Confidence, her thoughts would have turned to her older children, who had already made the journey to Hingham in Massachusetts before her. The family historian Mary Rose Wilder Turner, writing in 1927, believed Martha had stayed behind to finalise the terms of her husband's will and ensure the family estates were dealt with. There would also have been a last goodbye with her son John, who inherited his father's estate and remained as a landowner in England. He later died in 1688.
Martha and Mary boarded Confidence with 82 other passengers, from Wiltshire, Oxfordshire, Hampshire and Dorset. Its passenger list survives, and reveals the wide variety of trades and ages of the people who went to settle in America with the Wilder women. There were husbandmen, servants and a tailor, with Nicholas Wallington from Nether Wallop in Hampshire described simply as a 'poor boy'. There were also families with children. Anne and Thomas Jones also boarded the ship with four children aged under ten years old - Thomas was a tailor in the village of Caversham near Reading.
Passengers would have felt a flutter of excitement as the ship lurched gently forward, its sails billowing with wind as they creaked out of Southampton Water. They sailed on 11 April 1638 under the command of Master John Gibson and reached Boston in the U.S. on 24 April in the same year. Martha and Mary would have then taken the short journey to Hingham to meet her other children, who were now in their mid-teens to early twenties. It didn't take long for the family to settle into their new lives in the colony. A family account written by Edward's great grandson places their settlement at 'the south side of Boole's Pond', Edward later purchasing another piece of land 'between two brooks'. Grants of land were made to Martha and her son Edward in 1638, the year of Martha's arrival. Martha's daughter Elizabeth married a Boston man named Thomas Ensign, in January 1639. Thomas, Martha's second eldest son, became a freeman and assumed a position in Charlestown's church in 1640 and married a woman named Anna. Edward seems to have been especially loyal to his mother, and stayed with her until her death in 1652. He later married Elizabeth Ames and they had eleven children. He died in 1690, Elizabeth in 1692. Mary, the youngest daughter, is more elusive in the records, but it is believed that she married and settled in Plymouth, Massachusetts.
It was from Martha and Thomas that this branch of the Wilders of Massachusetts were descended, and their children and grandchildren served as leaders, judges, churchmen and estate owners in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and onwards. They were also affected directly by attacks from native Americans when there were repeated episodes of wartime at the colony.
While port towns like Southampton and Plymouth on the south coast of England are usually associated with the sailing of Pilgrims to America, Martha's story reminds us of their own personal circumstances and the many families away from the coast that ventured towards a new life overseas.
Liked this? You might also like Wilder's Folly - an Eighteenth Century Love Nest, and The Forgotten Link Between Shiplake and Sulham and The Battle of Bosworth in 1485.
Sources:
Confidence's Passenger List at https://www.packrat-pro.com/ships/confidence.htm
Mary Rose Wilder Turner, Extracts of the Book of the Wilders, 1927, Hathitrust
Moses H. Wilder, Book of the Wilders, New York, 1878
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