August 1635
This year, y^ 14. or 15. of August (being Saturday*) was such a mighty storme of v»dnd & raine, as i>one Hving in these parts, either English or Indeans, ever saw.
—William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation
The Great Colonial Hurricane of 1635 was one of the most violent and destructive storms ever recorded in early New England history. Striking on August 25–26, 1635, it occurred 15 years after Richard More was the only one of his family to survive being placed on the Mayflower and remains one of the earliest well-documented hurricanes in northeastern North America.
Modern reconstructions by NOAA’s Hurricane Research Division estimate the storm came ashore on Long Island in the early hours of August 26th with sustained winds above 130 mph a high-end Category 3, possibly Category 4 before tearing north through Connecticut and Rhode Island and passing near Boston itself. Both John Winthrop and William Bradford left eyewitness accounts: storm surges of fourteen to twenty feet along the south-facing coast, entire tracts of woodland flattened, and by Bradford’s own count seventeen Native people drowned. At the head of Buzzards Bay, the surge may have reached twenty-four feet, among the highest ever recorded on the East Coast.
The ship “Blessing” (from which the name of this blog derives) left London in July of 1635 and arrived in Massachusetts Bay that August. Onboard was Richard More and Christian Hunter, who would become his first wife a year later, both were just 20 years old. They were directly in the path of one of the biggest hurricanes about hit New England and experienced it together while first meeting and falling love.
Richard had traveled back to England perhaps to find his mother Katherine after being taken from her along with his three other siblings and put on the Mayflower 15 years earlier. However they would never be reunited, despite Katherine’s 1621 legal effort to bring Samuel More (their assumed father who put them on the Mayflower) to court to find out what happened to her four children.
Bringing all seven children, Christian Hunter’s mother Susan Gentleman had to have been the heart & soul of the journey to the New World for the entire family. She had remarried shipbuilder Richard Hollingsworth following the death of Christian’s father Thomas Hunter in 1627. The family included Christian’s step siblings: Richard 7 (the same name and relative age of Richard More on the Mayflower 15 years earlier) William 4, Elizabeth 3, and Susan 2. As well as then Christians biological siblings: Elizabeth 18, Thomas 14 and William 11.
Christian Hunter, along with Richard More is my 8th & 9th Great Grandparent, (twice) through both of my maternal grandparents, who even married on what would be my birthday. Coincidentally her biological sister Elizabeth Hunter Hollingsworth, two years her junior, is also my 10th Great Grandmother, through my Grandfathers mother.
I can only imagine that given the closeness in their ages and as sisters, Elizabeth was perhaps standing nearby Christian on the Blessing when she and Richard first met. What was it that might have first captured Richard’s attention? Given that her stepfather was a shipbuilder, maybe she had a familiarity with ships and Richard was on his way to his own nautical career as a sea captain.
In 1636, Richard More sold a house he owned in Duxbury nearby the Brewster family and the newlywed couple moved to Salem where they were accepted as members of the first church the following year. As Richard More worked for his father-in-law Richard Hollingworth out on Salem neck. Like her mother Susan, Christian would have seven children with Richard. Five sons: Samuel, Thomas, Caleb, Joshua, Richard and two daughters: Susanna and Christian.
The birth of their first daughter Susanna in 1650 was the first of five women named Susanna over the next one hundred and nineteen years. The name came from Christian’s mother Susan, who brought the family here on The Blessing. She died in 1647, a few years before the birth of her first granddaughter and Richard More’s first daughter in the New World.
