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Richard More, The Pilgrim Saint Who Sinned a Lot

Richard More was just six years old when his embittered legal – but not biological – father packed him off to the New World on the Mayflower, along with his brother and two sisters.

Indentured to William Brewster, he was the only one of the More children to survive past the first terrible winter in Plymouth. He returned to the sea at age 14 and spent most of his life as an enterprising ship captain. Richard More may have been the last of the First Comers to die, having lived long enough to witness the Puritan experiment go awry with the Salem witch trials.

The Mayflower in Plymouth Harbor by William Halsall.

During the course of a colorful lifetime he sailed the Atlantic, carried supplies to infant colonies, fought naval battles, fought King Philip’s War, ran a tavern and married at least three wives, not all sequentially. As a First Comer who survived the Ancient Beginning, he enjoyed certain privileges. He took full advantage of them.

Richard More

Richard More’s legal parents were Katherine and Samuel More, landed gentry in Shropshire, England, on the Welsh border. His real father, though, was probably Jacob Blakeway. Katherine and Jacob were betrothed before her father arranged a marriage with Samuel More, when Samuel was 17 and Katherine 25. Katherine had four children in quick succession: Elinor in 1612, Jasper in 1613; Richard in 1614; and Mary in 1616.

Mayflower plaque in St. James Church in Shipton, Shropshire commemorating the More children baptism. courtesy of Phil Revell.

By the time the youngest came along, Samuel More began to notice they looked more like Jacob Blakeway than him. He accused Katherine of adultery, seized the children and stashed them with a tenant. Katherine didn’t deny the charge. She argued her betrothal to Blakeway meant she’d married More illegally. After years of court battles, Samuel More won the right to pack the children off to the New World on the Mayflower – a likely death sentence.

He didn’t care. He called the children “a spurious brood” and justified his cruelty by claiming to send them away from their home, where “great blotts and blemishes may fall upon them.”

First Comer

By the end of the first winter in Plymouth Colony, Elinor, Jasper and Mary had all died.

Six-year-old Richard, the lone survivor, grew up a servant for elder William Brewster. He lived in the Brewster household with his two sons, Love and Wrestling, who were about his age. Later two older children, Patience and Jonathan, joined them. Richard helped the family with chores, learned to read and write and attended Sunday meeting, where William Brewster often presided.

William Brewster

His indenture ended in 1627, when he turned 14. The next year he was apprenticed to Isaac Allerton, a merchant seaman. Allerton married one of William Brewster’s daughters, Fear, who arrived in Plymouth in 1623. Richard sailed with Allerton up and down the coast buying and selling fish, grain, tobacco and other commodities.

Sometime in the 1630s, More sailed to England — exactly when and why is unclear. He then returned to Plymouth in 1635 on the Blessing. Romance must have bloomed on the voyage, for a few months after his arrival he married a fellow passenger, Christian or Christiana Hunter.

They lived on a 20-acre farm in Duxbury, where the Plymouth settlers had distributed land and begun to spread out on it. The Mores didn’t stay long, but sold their property in 1637. They then moved 50 miles north to another Puritan settlement, Salem Neck. Together they would have seven children.

From Stranger to Saint

When Richard More boarded the Mayflower as a six-year-old child, he did not belong to the tight-knit group of 40-some Separatists who called themselves Saints. He belonged to the other, secular group of about five dozen people called Strangers.

Signing the Mayflower Companct 1620 by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris.

As time passed, the Mayflower settlers took on a mythic aura. They had suffered and survived the “Ancient Beginning.” So in 1643, Richard More became a Saint when the Puritan congregation in Salem admitted him as a member.

But for a Saint, he had a good deal of the sinner in him.

He became a sea captain and pursued the coastal cargo trade he’d learned from Allerton, delivering provisions to colonies in Virginia, New York, the West Indies and Nova Scotia. He probably carried tobacco, grain, salt fish, lumber and fur to England and the West Indies. In 1674, he started a tavern in Salem, selling beer and cider.

Bigamy?

In 1645, 10 years after his marriage to Christian, a “Richard More of Salem” married Elizabeth Woolnough in St. Dunstan’s Church in Middlesex, England. That “Richard More of Salem” left town in a hurry after he was charged with drunkenness in the company of a prostitute. Historians don’t agree on whether it was the Mayflower Richard More who cut that swathe through Middlesex in the 1640s. Whether it was or not, that Richard More had a daughter named Elizabeth, after her mother.

While still in his 30s, the Puritan elders considered Richard More an “Ancient Freeman” and gave him land in Plymouth. A fighter as well as a lover, he fought a naval battle against the Dutch near New York in 1653. The next year he joined a fleet of English ships to capture the French fort at Port Royal. And in 1675, after King Philip’s War broke out, he marched with a thousand-man militia to what is now South Kingstown. There he joined in the Great Swamp Fight, a massacre of as many as 1,000 Narragansett Indians, mostly noncombatants.

Christian More gravestone in Salem.

Christian died in Salem during King Philip’s War, in 1676. Samuel quickly remarried Jane Crumpton. Two years after her death, the 72-year-old man was caught performing “gross unchastity” with another man’s wife. The Salem elders censured him.

According to the records of the First Church of Salem, Old Captain More had been for many years “under suspicion and a common fame of lasciviousness at least some degree of incont[in]ency.” Sundry brethren and elders spoke to him several times about his debauchery. However, they had no proof and could go no further.

Then, left to himself, three witnesses saw him commit “gross unchastity” with another man’s wife. Justices of the peace censured old Captain More for his scandalous sin, and the church elders cast him out of the parish.

Salem Witch Trials

Richard repented, however, and returned to the church in 1691. In 1692, he witnessed the hysteria of the Salem witch trials – a second perversion of Puritan zealotry during his lifetime. The first had sent him to Plymouth Colony, an orphaned, six-year-old servant.

Richard More gravestone in Salem.

Richard More died sometime between April 1694 and April 1696, possibly the oldest surviving First Comer. He lies buried in the Charter Street Burial Ground in Salem.

With thanks to Mayflower Lives by Martyn Whittock.

Images: Plaque By Phil Revel, Shipton, Shropshire – https://www.flickr.com/photos/25709911@N08/6809987125, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18269228. Christiana More grave marker By Max Anderson, Chicago IL – https://www.flickr.com/photos/25709911@N08/6809950259, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18269206. Richard More grave marker By eagle.dawg – Richard More, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18184059. This story updated in 2022.

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John Quincy Adams’ Bad Boy Brother Charles

John Quincy Adams’ diary must have been irresistible reading for his bad boy brother Charles.

John Quincy started his diary at the age of 12 because his father insisted on it. He made his first entry on the eve of his voyage to Paris with his father and Charles, then nine.

Bad boy brother Charles and John Quincy Adams in their youth.

On Nov. 19, 1779, John Quincy wrote, “This morning at about 11 o’clock I took leave of my Mamma, my sister, and brother Tommy and went to Boston with Mr. Thaxter, in order to go on board the frigate the Sensible of 28 pounders.”

John Quincy had already accompanied his father once on a diplomatic mission to France during the American Revolution. He had been sturdier and older than Charles, described as “charming,” “sensitive” and “delicate.”

Story of a Bad Boy

The second diplomatic mission starting in 1779 turned out a disaster for young Charles. The Sensible headed into a gale and then sprung a leak. The captain enlisted passengers, including John Quincy, to take turns pumping the ice water out of the ship. The Sensible limped into El Ferrol, the first friendly port it could find, on the northwestern tip of Spain. The Adamses then traveled 1,000 miles overland in a journey John Adams called the worst experience of his life. After a brief time in Paris, they went on to the Netherlands, where John Adams negotiated a loan from the Dutch to the continental American government.

John Adams upon completion of the Treaty of Paris. Courtesy Harvard Art Museums.

John Quincy and Charles enrolled in a Latin school in Amsterdam where the tutors beat them regularly. Their father found out and sent them in December 1780 to another school, the prestigious Leiden University. John Quincy, though, left for St. Petersburg in July as secretary to Francis Dana. The boys’ father realized Charles was terribly homesick and sent him back to Massachusetts.

Charles left London with a chaperone in August of 1781, but his ship didn’t get far. Needing repairs, it went into drydock in Spain. The Adams family didn’t know what happened to him and thought he’d been lost at sea. He arrived home five months later, but by some accounts he had returned a lost boy.

Little survives of the notoriously voluminous Adams’ family papers when it comes to Charles’ disappearance in Spain. Or much else about Charles.

John Quincy kept up his diary for a few months after he embarked on the Sensible, but stopped writing during and after Charles’ departure.

A Sad End

Five years later, in July 1786, Charles had finished his first year at Harvard. He had already started getting into trouble at Harvard, drinking heavily and disturbing the peace.

John Quincy Adams

John Quincy had just been admitted as a junior to ‘the Seat of the Muses,’ as his father called his alma mater. He had started keeping his diary again, and on July 27, 1786, he wrote about something else his bad boy brother had done.

“I perceive Charles has been guilty of a trick which I thought he would despise; that of prying into, and meddling with things which are nothing to him: and ungenerously looking into Papers, (which he knew I wished to keep private,) because I could not keep them under lock and key. If he looks here, he will feel how contemptible a spy is to himself, and to others.”

Charles did graduate from Harvard, and his parents sent him to New York to study law. He lived with Baron von Steuben, believed to be gay, and found him fascinating. Eventually he married, but he had extramarital affairs and failed at the law. Some historians believe Charles was gay as well.

His father later disowned him as a “a mere rake, buck, blood and beast.” Charles died at 30 of cirrhosis of the liver while living in poverty apart from his wife and two daughters.

John Quincy had another bad boy brother: Thomas. The baby of the family, Thomas ended up living with his parents, along with his wife and seven children. He couldn’t support himself or his family, and he vanished for days on drinking binges. He died at 59.

Like Father, Like Son

John Adams famously wrote to his eldest son that he’d only have himself to blame if he didn’t rise to president of the United States. “You come into life with advantages which will disgrace you if your success is mediocre,” he wrote. “And if you do not rise to the head not only of your profession, but of your country, it will be owing to your own laziness, slovenliness, and obstinacy.”

Some speculate that John Adams’ two youngest sons failed under the pressure of his demands.

John Quincy Adams

John Quincy Adams also demanded a great deal of his sons. And like his father, he would have one son who would make him proud and two who would disappoint him.

George Washington Adams

George Washington died at 28, a dissolute drunk who fathered an illegitimate child and may have committed suicide. John lived until 31, but led no happier or soberer a life than his older brother. Only the youngest, Charles Francis Adams, would win acclaim as a diplomat and historian.

John Adams II

This story last updated in 2023.

With thanks to J.L. Bell and his Boston 1775 blog and Steven Lee Carson, Adams Family (History Net).

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The Irish Emigrants’ Guide To Surviving the Irish Famine Ships

From 1845 to 1855, famine ships brought 2 million Irish emigrants to ports in Boston, New York and Canada. They were fleeing the starvation and disease caused by the potato crop failure. But the famine ships carried their own dangers. Sharks were said to follow them because so many bodies were thrown overboard.

An Irish Peasant Family Discovering the Blight of their Store by Cork artist Daniel MacDonald, c. 1847

An Irish priest, the Rev. John O’Hanlon, wrote a guide for Irish emigrants to help them survive their ordeal of the famine ships. Patrick Donahoe published O’Hanlon’s Irish Emigrants Guide for the United States in Boston in 1851. (Donahoe, by the way, started publishing The Boston Pilot in 1836, and it’s still in circulation.)

The Emigrants’ Farewell, engraving by Henry Doyle (1827–1893), from Mary Frances Cusack’s Illustrated History of Ireland

No, The Streets Aren’t Paved with Gold

Father O’Hanlon’s guide began with a caution: “Change of location does not always bring better fortune to the emigrant.”

He described the perils of arriving penniless and alone in the United States. “Even supposing him to have escaped the extravagant demands of ship agents, the dangers of the sea, confinement in the sick hospitals, &c, if he lands friendless, and without sufficient funds, his case, indeed, is one that may well excite our commiseration,” wrote O’Hanlon.

Ship owners and their agents lied about the cost of passage, so the emigrant should demand to pay only $10 for a ticket, half the advertised fare, he advised. If they could get a ship that sailed directly to North America, they should take it. That way they’d avoid the dangers of Liverpool.

Liverpool

But two out of three of Irish emigrants to North America sailed famine ships from Liverpool.

Sometimes famine ships didn’t leave Liverpool when advertised, and Irish emigrants found themselves stuck. They took refuge in squalid boardinghouses or disgusting basements. Sometimes the bodies of entire families were found in the dark Liverpool cellars where they’d spent the last of their money. Some committed suicide, some committed mercy killings and many went insane.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, posted as U.S. consul in Liverpool during the famine years, compared the Irish emigrants to maggots. His friend Herman Melville thought Liverpool the worst seaport in the world. It,

…most abounds in all the variety of landsharks, land-rats and other vermin, which makes the hapless mariner their prey. In the shape of landlords, barkeepers, clothiers, crimps and boarding-house loungers, the land-sharks devour him, limb by limb; while the land rats and mice constantly nibble at his purse.

19th-century Liverpool

O’Hanlon cautioned the Irish emigrant against bringing too many clothes or belongings to Liverpool. You’ll have to pay someone to carry them, and they might get stolen, he warned.

Try to find a reputable boarding house before leaving home, he wrote. Convert all banknotes to silver or gold and prepare to protect it. Be careful of swindlers. And never give your money to a banker, or you might not get it back.

Sailing the Atlantic

The famine ships were almost always packet ships that made regularly scheduled voyages between Britain, the United States and Canada. Most were brigs, two-masted vessels that, as O’Hanlon put it, were “low between decks, badly ventilated and small.” The law, often broken, required only five feet of headroom between decks.

A replica of the Jeanie Johnston in Dublin. she was known as the good ship because no one died on her.

Liners, which had three sails, had more room. U.S. ships were faster than British ships, and steamships were fastest of all. However, the steamers cost too much, and the Irish emigrant shouldn’t even think about taking a steamer, wrote O’Hanlon.

Under shipping regulations, convicts were treated better than emigrants. Convicts at least got meat four days a week, and for every 100, the ship had to have four seamen. The emigrants got no fresh meat, and only three seamen for every 100 of them.

The Passenger Laws of the United States required each adult passenger to get three quarts of water a day and a weekly allowance of six pounds of meal, two-and-a-half pounds of Navy bread, one pound of wheat flour, one pound of salt pork free from bone, two ounces tea, eight ounces sugar and eight ounces of molasses and vinegar.

Survival on the Famine Ships

Even if the captain followed the regulation, which he often didn’t, that wasn’t enough to sustain a passenger for the six-week voyage, wrote O’Hanlon. The salt pork was usually poor quality, the Navy bread hard as flint. He advised buying a barrel of potatoes – and putting a lock on it.

To make bread, the emigrant had to use the lid of his trunk, which doubled as a table and chair. The emigrant must also furnish knives, spoons, cups, plates and cooking utensils. Buy tin cups and plates, urged O’Hanlon, because they won’t break when the ship lurches, and it will.

Boil milk in sugar before leaving to keep it sweet during the voyage, he advised.

“The cooking is performed on deck, over coal or wood fires, contained in long grates,” he wrote. “Most differences among passengers arise from the undue monopoly of fires.” He advised a system of taking turns at the fires, though in stormy weather it wasn’t an issue – the emigrants couldn’t light the fires and had to eat cold meals.

The emigrant had to bring his own bedding for the wooden berths. They could fit two, but often three crowded into a bunk. Upper bunks were better than lower bunks, because the emigrant was less likely to get splashed by the inevitable vomit.

Emigrants also had to supply their own soap aboard the famine ships, though they could get washing buckets on board.

Famine national monument in Murrisk, Ireland.

The Reality

The vast majority of Irish emigrants could only afford steerage on the famine ships. Melville compared the steerage compartment to a crowded jail in his semi-autobiographical novel, Redburn’s First Voyage.

From the rows of rude bunks, hundreds of meagre, begrimed faces were turned upon us; while seated upon the chests, were scores of unshaven men, smoking tea-leaves, and creating a suffocating vapor…In every corner, the females were huddled together, weeping and lamenting; children were asking bread from their mothers, who had none to give; and old men, seated upon the floor, were leaning back against the heads of the water-casks, with closed eyes and fetching their breath with a gasp.

The United States’ efforts to regulate passenger shipping didn’t work. In 1909, a congressional investigator wrote, “The sleeping quarters were always a dismal, damp, dirty, and most unwholesome place. The air was heavy, foul and deadening to the spirit and mind.”

Canada didn’t regulate passenger vessels at all, so the worst famine ships sailed to Canadian ports. Because of that, fares to Canada were cheaper – and mortality higher.

Many Irish emigrants, known as two-boaters, came to Boston through Canada.

Detail from The Irish National Famine Monument

When To Sail on Famine Ships

As the guide’s title suggests, O’Hanlon only had advice for emigrants sailing to America aboard the famine ships.

Patrick Donahoe, publisher of the Emigrant’s Guide

He urged those bound for New York or Boston to, “leave as soon as possible after the middle or close of January, that they may arrive at the breakup of winter, which is the opening of the business season in those cities; this time affords the best chance of employment, as the tide of emigration has but then commenced.”

For those heading to Maine, New Hampshire or Connecticut, he advised leaving home between April 1 and mid-August because “northern lakes, rivers and canals are closed with ice.”

Cleaning Up the Famine Ships

Brian Murphy, in his book, Adrift, A True Story of Tragedy on the Icy Atlantic and the One Who Lived to Tell about It, described how the crew had to clean up after the emigrants disembarked from the famine ships:

The stench quickly grew overpowering. The unmistakable acid-sweet smell of vomit infused every corner. If you couldn’t get to the deck, the only place to retch was in your berth or into the floor. Washing up was out of the question. The only way to do that was on deck with a bucket and some fat-and-lye soap. The two latrines — for more than 120 people — were simple holes that emptied into the bilge water, a horrific concoction of waste and runoff that sloshed in the hold below the steerage compartment. Rags soaked in vinegar were provided for common use as stand-ins for toilet paper.

Cleaning up was horrid, wrote Murphy. “Sailors said it could be worse than slithering down into the head of a giant sperm whale to scoop up that last bucket of oil.”

Over-Rated

More trials awaited the poor Irish emigrants once they disembarked the famine ships, and Father O’Hanlon tried to describe them all.

Depiction of Irish immigrants arriving at Constitution Wharf, Boston, 1857

His guide also served as a cautionary tale. And in a concluding chapter, he drily noted that the advantages of emigration are “over-rated.”

Images: The Emigrants’ Farewell, engraving by Henry Doyle (1827–1893), from Mary Frances Cusack‘s Illustrated History of Ireland. Image of Jeanie Johnston By Jnestorius – Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3483041. Image of National Famine Monument By Graham Horn, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=13657095. Detail from The Irish National Famine Monument by Tanya Hart via Flickr, CC by 2.0.

This story was updated in 2022.

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