The Arbella, Anne Bradstreet, and Lydia Very
Salem Harbor

Before the Arbella sailed to Boston from England and the colonists’ leader, Governor John Winthrop, proclaimed that Boston would be “a City upon a Hill,” the ship first sailed to Salem Harbor in 1630. One of its passengers was Anne Dudley Bradstreet (1612-72) who was born in Northampton, England, to parents who saw to it that Anne learned to read and write when she was very young — an advantage over other girls of her age. At age sixteen, Anne married Simon Bradstreet, and in 1630, her entire family decided to begin a new life in America. Although the Arbella group left Salem for Boston, Anne eventually returned to the North Shore to live in Ipswich and then Andover. Of her new life, she wrote, “I found a new world and new manners, at which my heart rose.”⁹ The birth of eight children between 1633 and 1652 strengthened Anne’s connection to Massachusetts, and probably explains the title of her 1650 book of poems published in London and entitled The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America. Anne Bradstreet was the first English woman to write a book of poems in America, and Salemites were well familiar with her literary works.

Another well known poet and journalist during her day was Salem-born Lydia Louisa Ann Very (1823-1901), whose style was described as having “an ease of versification, and a freedom from tricks of style and mannerism which cover up shallow thoughts with deep-sounding words… she writes because she has something to say.”¹⁰ Her subjects were often religious, or involved children and the natural world. She contributed work in both genres to Salem and Boston newspapers, and in 1856, published a volume of verse she called, simply, Poems. Also an accomplished artist, Lydia Very provided illustrations for a number of children’s books that were published in Germany. Her son, Jones Very, became a highly regarded Transcendentalist poet and essayist in his own right.

Notes
9. Elizabeth Wade White, Anne Bradstreet: The Tenth Muse (New York, 1971), 115.

10.Sidney Perley, Poets of Essex County (Salem, Mass., 1888), 170.