Atlantic Crossings
The Atlantic in these years was not a bridge. It was a gamble — wood ships, salted pork, compasses that lied in fog, and kings who treated whole coastlines as chess squares. Our people were still mostly in parish registers on both shores, but the water between them was filling with names that would matter.
In England the births came steady as rain. William Preston in Chesham in 1591. Edmund Rice in Berkhamsted in 1594. John Upham in Devon, John Bent in Hampshire, William Towne in Norfolk, Martha Blanchard and Arthur Gary — each a line on a page that would later cross the sea. On 6 January 1609, Thomas Barrett was born at Thornbury in Gloucestershire to Christopher Barrett and Elizabeth Clarke; his granddaughter would one day sit in a Boston jail accused of witchcraft. On 8 July 1605, Walter Powers Sr. was baptized at Stanton St. Quintin in Wiltshire — the Powers name that Edith would carry into Vermont and Iowa was already in the font.
Scotland's James VI published his Daemonologie in 1597, obsessed with witches and violent death. When Elizabeth died childless in 1603, he walked south as James I of England — one crown, two kingdoms, and a church he meant to hold together with a new Bible. The Hampton Court Conference of 1604 set translators to work on what would become the King James Version: English words where Latin had ruled, Puritan hopes half-met and half-denied.
France was moving faster on the river. Samuel de Champlain — soldier, cartographer, royal geographer to Henry IV — had seen the Caribbean and Tadoussac where the Saguenay meets the St. Lawrence. , the Paris apothecary born in 1575, married Marie Rollet in 1601 and kept shop while men around him talked of Acadia and the north. Their children Guillaume and Guillemette were born in the city; their father's life was already bending toward kebec — the Algonquin word for where the river narrows.