♂Thomas Mayhew

Thomas Mayhew^W (died March 1682) was a merchant who had reached Massachusetts Bay by 1632 and in October 1641 obtained, with his son, the right to settle Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard and the Elizabeth Isles. He made the Vineyard his home and carried on his son’s mission to its Native people after the son was lost at sea. He was the ninth great-grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through his son Thomas Mayhew (1621–1657).

Merchant at Medford

His English origins are uncertain. He was probably the Thomas, son of Matthew Mayhew, baptized at Tisbury in Wiltshire on 1 April 1593, and Daniel Gookin^W, who knew him, called him “a merchant bred in England, as I take it at Southampton.” By family tradition his first wife was named Abigail Parkus; no record names her, and the only child known from that marriage is his son Thomas.

The colony records place him in Massachusetts Bay by 6 March 1631/2, when he signed, with Nathaniel Turner and George Alcocke, the report setting the bounds of Charlestown and Newtown. In July 1633 the court granted him administration of the goods of Ralph Glover, deceased, and he exhibited the inventory at the court of June 1634.

He came over as the agent of Matthew Cradock^W, a London merchant and former governor of the Massachusetts Bay Company, and ran Cradock’s business from Medford. He was admitted a freeman of the colony on 14 May 1634, and that same day he was fined, jointly with the Court of Assistants, half to be paid by him and Mr Pynchon, “for breach of an order of Court against imployeing Indeans to shoote with peeces”.

That June he wrote to John Winthrop from “Meadeford” to borrow his team to haul timber for a mill at Watertown. Cradock, in London, came to think himself badly served and wrote to Winthrop of “the most vyle bad dealings of Thomas Mayhew”. Nothing came of the complaint, but by about 1637 a new agent had taken over Cradock’s affairs.

Watertown

He had married again by 1635. His second wife, Jane, was the widow of Thomas Paine, a London merchant, and four daughters were born to them between 1635 and 1640: Hannah, Bethia, Martha and Mary. In 1639 the couple were named guardians of Jane’s young son, Thomas Paine. By then the family lived at Watertown, where Mayhew sat as the town’s deputy in the General Court^W from 1636, served as its commissioner, or local magistrate, and was chosen selectman from 1637 to 1643.

Money was his trouble there. He bought the Watertown mill in two halves, in 1635 and 1639, but in April 1640 sold the whole to Thomas Dudley, and Dudley’s will later counted “the debt which Thomas Mayhew his heirs do owe me”. In May 1640 he told Winthrop that although the colony had owed him more than seventy pounds for a year and seven months, he “must now have my goods sold” to pay his rates: “Money is verry hard to gett upon any termes.” He built a bridge over the Charles by the mill in 1641, and the General Court took it for the country. On 17 October 1643 it granted him 300 acres “in regard of his charge about the bridge by Watertowne mill”, laid out on 29 May 1644.

The islands

In October 1641 James Forrett, agent of the Earl of Stirling^W with a commission to dispose of the islands between Cape Cod and the Hudson, made a grant “unto Thomas Mayhew at Watertowne, Merchant, and to Thomas Mayhew his Sonne”. On 13 October it gave them the right to plant and inhabit Nantucket and two small islands beside it; on 23 October it added as much on Martha’s Vineyard and the Elizabeth Isles. Mayhew then paid Richard Vines, steward of Sir Ferdinando Gorges, for a second grant, since Vines claimed the islands for his own master. Forty years on, his grandson Matthew wrote that nothing “but the largeness of the grant” could have induced father and son to take on the settlement.

The son went to the Vineyard first and became its minister. The father kept his Watertown offices until 1644 and is first called “of Martin’s Vineyard” in a document of November 1647. Together they granted land to the first settlers at the place that became Edgartown, and the father ruled the island as its proprietor and governor.

Missionary and governor

In November 1657 the younger Thomas sailed from Boston for London, and his ship was never heard of again. The father, then in his sixties, asked the Commissioners of the United Colonies^W, who paid for the mission, to find another minister (“If my Sonne be gonne to heaven, I shall press very hard upon Mr. Higginson to come here”) and to help “my daughter and her six children”. No minister came, so he took up the work himself. In September 1658 the commissioners paid him twenty pounds “for his paines in teaching and instructing the Indians this year”, and the next summer he wrote that he had “taught them this year, and doe still goe on”. He is said to have visited one of their settlements every week, and at that age sometimes to have walked nearly twenty miles through the woods to preach.

In July 1671 he went with his grandson Matthew to Fort James in New York, whose government now claimed the islands. Governor Francis Lovelace^W, citing his good work “in reclayming and civilizing the Indians”, is said to have commissioned him governor and chief magistrate of Martha’s Vineyard “during his Naturall Life”. After the Dutch retook New York in July 1673, “severall Disorders” broke out on the islands, but in November 1674 the restored English government ordered that, “by Reason of the first Right Mr. Thomas Mayhew Sr. hath had to the Island”, he should preside at its courts for the rest of his days.

Death

By one account, he asked for a last chance to preach to the English of Edgartown, where he lived; he preached the following Sunday, fell ill that evening, and died six days later, in March 1682. His grandson Matthew wrote to Governor Thomas Hinckley of Plymouth that God had kept him alive “to a great age, wanting but six dayes of ninety yeares”, and that in his illness he said, “I have lived by faith, and have found god in his son”. Matthew added: “no man ever in this land approved himself so absolute a father to the Indians as my honoured grandfather”.

He most likely made his will on 16 June 1681, which begins “I, Thomas Mayhew of Edgartown upon the Vineyard in this ninetieth year of my age” and leaves his daughter Hannah half of his three-quarters of the Isle of Kataymuck. The will was attested in court on 28 March 1682, apparently after his death.

Notes

Sources

Most of this account follows Charles Edward Banks, The History of Martha’s Vineyard, vol. 1 (1911), which prints Mayhew’s letters, the 1641 grants, the 1671 commission and the colony and commissioners’ records it draws on. The October 1641 grant is also printed in Franklin B. Hough’s Papers Relating to the Island of Nantucket (1856), from the deed books at Albany. Shorter accounts are in James Savage’s Genealogical Dictionary of the First Settlers of New England and in a 1909 history of Maine families; Dudley’s will is quoted in Robert Charles Anderson’s The Great Migration Begins. The weekly visits, the long walks and the last sermon come from the Boston minister Thomas Prince, who had them from Mayhew’s great-grandson Experience Mayhew. The colony court and office entries of 1631 to 1643 come from Nathaniel B. Shurtleff’s edition of the colony records (cited MBCR); the marriage comes from the Watertown Records; and the will’s text comes from Amelia Forbes Emerson’s Early History of Naushon Island (1935).

Origins and birth

Banks identified him with Thomas, son of Matthew Mayhew, baptized at Tisbury on 1 April 1593, and called the identification inferential: it rests on the names Tisbury and Chilmark, which reappear on the Vineyard, on the name Matthew in the family, and on the ages Mayhew gave for himself. Savage gives his birth as early in 1591 and has him a merchant at Southampton; the 1909 Maine history makes him born in 1592 at Clippesby in Norfolk and brings him over in the ship Griffin, which Savage argues against.

Arrival

The colony record is the report of 6 March 1631/2 on the bounds of Charlestown and Newtown, which puts him in Massachusetts Bay by that date. Savage’s estimate is 1631, in his words “must have been here in 1631”.

First wife

The name Abigail Parkus comes from a memorandum by Deacon William Mayhew of Edgartown, born in 1748. Banks found no record of the marriage, which he placed about 1619. Savage gives the tradition as Martha Parkhurst, and the 1909 Maine history as Hannah or Anna Parkhurst.

Second wife

Thomas Lechford’s notebook of 1639 names Mayhew and his wife Jane, “sometimes wife of Thomas Payne”, as guardians of one Paine child, her son Thomas, then aged seven. Banks gives her two Paine children; Savage calls the second wife Grace. Banks dates the four daughters’ births from June 1635 to January 1639/40; Savage names three of them, leaving out Martha. The Watertown town records put the marriage before 15 June 1635, when their daughter Hannah was born at Watertown or Medford; Hare dates it about 1633. Lechford’s notebook writes the first husband’s name as Thomas Payne, late of London, merchant; this page keeps the Paine spelling used for Jane’s family.

Cradock’s complaint

Banks found no sign of a breach of trust behind Cradock’s letter and judged the fault to be poor business sense at most.

Date of death

He was alive on 24 March 1681/2, when he acknowledged a deed, and his will was attested in court on 28 March. Counting the six days of illness from the Sunday sermon, Banks puts his death on 25 March 1682, as does the 1909 Maine history; Savage gives 1681. Matthew’s “six dayes of ninety yeares” would put his birth at the end of March 1592; Banks argues that in old age Mayhew overstated his age by a year, which fits the 1593 baptism.

Watertown offices

Banks (volume 1, pages 120 to 124) gives his years as Watertown’s selectman, 1637 to 1643; Savage gives him as a representative for 1636 to 1644, except 1642. The colony’s listings in its first two volumes name him deputy and commissioner for Watertown from 1636. The 1643 grant and its survey in May 1644 are in the second volume, page 76.

Governorship

Banks gives the New York council’s order of 7 July 1671 (N.Y. Col. Mss. XXIV:92) and Lovelace’s commission of 8 July 1671 (N.Y. Col. Mss. Deeds III:70), and describes the post as governor and chief magistrate of Martha’s Vineyard for life, over the English and the Indians. The commission is known through Banks’s history, which is why the body hedges it.

Will and probate

The will of 16 June 1681 survives in an extract that Amelia Forbes Emerson printed in 1935; the whole will is in the Dukes County probate records. Banks’s second volume gives “admitted to probate, March 8, 1682”, which would be before the death Banks dates to 25 March 1682. The date may be 8 March 1682/3.