The Witches: Salem, 1692 Read Online Free PDF Page A

the true princes of darkness. Without a knock or a greeting, four armed Indians might appear in your parlor to warm themselves by the fire, propositioning you while you cowered in the corner with your knitting. You could return from a trip to Boston to find your house in ashes and your family taken captive, all courtesy of an invisible enemy. “It is harder to find them than to foil them,” noted Cotton Mather, the brilliant, fair-haired young minister. * They skulked, they lurked, they flitted, they committed atrocities—and they vanished. Even their wigwams dematerialized from one minute to the next. “Our men could see no enemy to shoot at,” lamented a Cambridge major general. A fifteen-month contest between the settlers and the Native Americans, King Philip’s War ended in 1676. It obliterated a third of New England’s one hundred towns, pulverized its economy, and claimed 10 percent of the adult male population. Every Bay Colony resident—and especially every resident of Essex County, to which Salem belonged—lost a friend or relative. In 1692 colonists referred to those grisly months as “the last Indian war” for a reason: another had begun to take shape. A series of devastating raids portended a new conflict with Wabanaki Indians and theFrench who made them their allies in an extension of a European war. The frontier had recently moved to within fifty miles of Salem.
    Rumor was the other nimble traveler, melting through floorboards and floating through windows, insensible to mud, snow, fatigue, a light-footed fugitive from lumbering truth. As a seventeenth-century bookseller observed, “The whole race of mankind is generally infected with an itching desire of hearing news.” The condition was more acute for the lack of newspapers. A New Englander made do with what he had; when word failed to filter through knotholes or curtainless windows, it was coaxed. A Salem couple took a servant to court for spying on them and retailing what he saw. Given the shared beds and cramped, cluttered quarters—the average Salem village household consisted of six people in four rooms, the beef in the parlor and the loom in the kitchen—privacy proved a New England rarity. More than a few Massachusetts residents woke to giggling, sometimes in the very bed in which they slept. *
    Small towns subvert the natural ratio of mystery to secrecy. With a population of no more than five hundred and fifty people, Salem village knew plenty of the former, little of the latter. Hearsay enjoyed a long life, sustained by accretion as well as repetition. Everyone in 1692 Andover knew that Ann Foster had three years earlier suffered a horrific loss. Her son-in-law and her daughter had quarreled one evening over a land sale; Foster’s son-in-law had ended the argument by slashing his wife’s throat. She had been hugely pregnant with what would have been the couple’s eighth child. The murderer repented on the gallows, publicly testifying to the virtues of family harmony. (That account too is hearsay, but at least ministerial hearsay.) Also in 1689, Foster’s grandson miraculously survived an Indian ambush. Partially scalped, he had been left for dead. It was no secret either that Martha Carrier, Foster’s flying companion, had had a son before she married the child’s father, a penniless Welsh servant. In 1690 the Carriers contracted smallpox. Andover had orderedthem to leave town. They refused. The Andover selectmen quarantined the family, concerned that—if they had not already done so—the Carriers might “spread the distemper with wicked carelessness.” Decades earlier, Martha had been rumored to be a witch.
    So it was that in late January 1692—about the time that a vicious Indian attack razed York, Maine, leaving its mutilated minister dead on his doorstep; as a thaw released New England from an uncommonly brutal winter; as word arrived that an ocean away a new Massachusetts governor had kissed the ring of William III and