Crossing the Atlantic, 1635

By the 1630s, England was a nation under strain. The reign of Charles I had brought mounting conflict between the Crown and Parliament, and the Puritan community — already subject to religious persecution under Archbishop Laud's campaign to enforce Anglican conformity — faced an increasingly hostile climate. For men like Ralph Bleasdale of Lancashire, a devout Puritan and wool trader, the calculus was becoming clear: the New World offered what the Old World was rapidly closing off.

The Great Migration of the 1630s saw tens of thousands of English Puritans cross the Atlantic to New England. Between 1630 and 1640, an estimated 20,000 settlers made the crossing. Ralph Bleasdale and his family were among them — part of a deliberate, organized movement to build a godly society in the wilderness of North America.

The Angel Gabriel was a Bristol merchantman of approximately 240 tons burden, armed with ordnance and fitted to carry both passengers and cargo. She had a history of Atlantic and coastal voyages before her final crossing. In 1618, she had ventured as far as South America on an earlier adventure. By 1635 she was a seasoned vessel, well-known in Bristol's merchant circles.

Her final voyage carried settlers, supplies, and livestock bound for the English settlements of coastal Maine. The passenger manifest included families from across the west of England — Puritans, tradesmen, and their children — all staking their futures on the promise of a new life. Ralph Bleasdale, his wife Elizabeth Parker, and their three-year-old son Henry were among them. Ralph boarded not at Bristol but at Milford Haven, Wales — a deliberate choice to avoid the scrutiny of the more closely watched Bristol docks, where authorities were increasingly alert to Puritan emigration.

The crossing from England to New England in the seventeenth century typically took between six and twelve weeks, depending on winds and weather. Passengers lived in cramped, dark quarters below decks, sharing space with livestock, provisions, and cargo. Fresh water was rationed. Disease was a constant threat. The Atlantic in summer could be deceptively calm for weeks, then turn violent without warning.

Rev. Richard Mather, who crossed the Atlantic in 1635 aboard a different vessel, kept a detailed journal of his voyage that gives a vivid picture of what such crossings were like: the terror of storms, the relief of calm seas, the daily prayers and sermons that sustained the passengers' spirits. For the Bleasdale family, the crossing lasted roughly nine weeks — from their boarding at Milford Haven on June 9 to their arrival at Pemaquid Point on August 14, 1635.

The Angel Gabriel arrived at Pemaquid Point on the evening of August 14, 1635, and her passengers came ashore. They had survived the crossing. They had arrived. The ordeal, it seemed, was over.

It was not. In the early hours of August 15, 1635, one of the most powerful storms in the recorded history of New England struck the coast of Maine. The Great Colonial Hurricane — known also as the Hurricane of 1635 — made landfall with catastrophic force. Contemporary accounts describe winds of extraordinary violence, a storm surge that swept inland, and widespread destruction from Virginia to Nova Scotia. The Angel Gabriel, still at anchor in Pemaquid Harbor, was torn from her moorings and destroyed. The passengers had escaped with their lives. Their possessions, their provisions, and the ship that had carried them across the ocean were gone.

The wreck of the Angel Gabriel has never been definitively located. Archaeological searches in 1977 and 1978 found evidence consistent with a seventeenth-century wreck in Pemaquid Harbor, but the ship herself remains elusive beneath the waters where she sank nearly four centuries ago.

The Blaisdell family found themselves on the rocky coast of Maine with little more than the clothes on their backs. Pemaquid was a small but established English settlement — one of the oldest in Maine — with a handful of houses, a trading post, and the beginnings of a community. It sat at the northern edge of English land claims, bordering French territory, and was subject to the tensions and dangers of that frontier position.

Ralph and his family did not remain long at Pemaquid. Within a few years they had moved south to York (then called Agamenticus), and by 1640 Ralph had settled in Salisbury, Massachusetts, where he became one of the town's 69 founding fathers. But Pemaquid Point remained the place where the Blaisdell story in America began — the shore where Ralph Bleasdale first set foot on the New World, the harbor where the Angel Gabriel was lost, and the spiritual home of the family for nearly four centuries since.