“Relation of the Pequot Warres,” by Lion Gardiner: Introduction

Relation of the Pequot Warres

In 1809 William Trumbull Williams found among the papers of his grandfather, the former Connecticut governor Jonathan Trumbull, a manuscript endorsed in the “bold handwriting” of Trumbull’s seventeenth-century predecessor John Winthrop Jr.: “Lieft Lion Gardiner his relation of the Pequot Warres” (figure 1).¹ Williams presented this manuscript to the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1833, along with a handwritten copy made by Trumbull. The MHS Publications Committee elected to use the copy as the basis for their edition, “on account of the difficulty the printer would find in deciphering the original.”² Indeed, the orthography of Gardiner’s manuscript is both difficult and inconsistent. All subsequent editions reproduced the MHS version, except for one, produced in 1901 by the Acorn Club of Connecticut. “The present edition alone gives the Relation exactly as it appears in Gardener’s own manuscript,” wrote the Acorn Club’s editor W. N. Chattin Carlton, “and a comparison with any of the previous issues will show how extensively, in orthography and other details, the original differs from the version hitherto printed. This fact may be considered a justifiable raison d’être for the present edition.”³ The Acorn Club version, however, was not republished, nor was it much used in historical scholarship. The following, the first new edition of Gardiner’s “Relation” in more than a century, is a somewhat modernized adaptation of the Acorn Club text, corrected against the original manuscript and annotated.

Figure 1.

Detail from the title page of the manuscript of Lion Gardiner’s “Relation of the Pequot Warres.” The writing is in the hand of John Winthrop Jr., the governor of Connecticut in 1660. Courtesy of the Watkinson Library, Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut.

Whereas Carlton argued that the discrepancy in the appearance of the manuscripts and the resulting editions provided a sufficient rationale for using the original, Trumbull limited his editorial interventions to standardizing the orthography and punctuation. Gardiner’s “Relation” is not, for example, like the sonnets of his contemporary John Milton, in which interpretations can hinge on editors’ decisions regarding quotation marks and periods.⁴ It would be difficult to make the case that the understanding of the warfare and other interactions between English settlers and Native Americans in seventeenth-century Connecticut and Long Island has been in any degree distorted by the use of the MHS version of Gardiner’s “Relation.”

Gardiner himself, however, supplies a stylistic raison d’être for an edition based on his manuscript. In his prefatory letter to his friends Robert Chapman and Thomas Hurlburt, he offers a disclaimer for the rawness of his “Relation.” Drawing an analogy to the carpenter’s tools that he sometimes had occasion to use early in his career, he recalled that though he could handle a “shifting chisell” or “houldfast” (clamp), he “could never endure nor abide the smothing plane.” He described his “Relation” as “a piece of Timber skored and forehewed unfit to Joyne to any handsome piece of worke,” and he advised Chapman and Hurlburt to “get sumbodie to chip it and to smooth it least the splinters should prick sum mens fingers.” In Gardiner’s presentation, this physical roughness is a metaphor for candor— “for the truth Must not be spoken at all times”—but it is also consonant with a rough (or un-planed) style.

As Michael Householder observes, “the admission of stylistic clumsiness both masks and marks a writer’s sophistication.”⁵ Householder’s essay is original in considering Gardiner as an author as well as a historical actor, and in making his “Relation” an object of analysis. As both a literary text and a historical source, the “Relation of the Pequot Warres” offers some features that distinguish it from the other three “classical contemporary histories of the war,” those by Philip Vincent (1637), John Underhill (1638), and John Mason (1736), especially with regard to perspective.⁶ Together these make a varied set. Charles Orr, who reprinted all four in his History of the Pequot War (1897), considered Gardiner’s “Relation” to...