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 A LETTER SAID TO HAVE BEEN WRITTEN 
 BY COTTON MATHER, SHOWN TO BE A 
 MISERABLE FORGERY. 
 
 At a meeting of the Massachusetts Historical 
 Society, held in Boston on Thursday, March 12, 1908, 
 . Hon. Samuel A. Green made the following; remarks : — 
 
 Nearly forty years ago, at the meeting of this Society in 
 June, 1870 (Proceedings, XI, 828, 329), I had occasion to speak 
 of a forged letter which was said to have been written by Cot- 
 ton Mather, and supposed to be among the manuscripts in 
 this Library. The letter, dated " September ye 15th, 1682," 
 was published first in the Easton (Penn.) Argus of April 
 28, 1870, and was widely copied into other newspapers. It 
 was signed " Cotton Mather," and purported to give the de- 
 tails of " a scheme to bagge Penne," on the part of the Colony 
 of Massachusetts Bay. In an accompan3ing statement it is 
 said that the letter was found by " Mr. Judkins, the Libra- 
 rian of the Massachusetts Historical Society, in overhauling 
 a chest of old papers deposited in the archives of that body by 
 the late Robert Greenleaf, of Maiden." 
 
 In the interest of historical truth and in order to give an 
 official denial to the story, at that meeting as Librarian I pro- 
 nounced the letter a miserable forgery. The name of Mr. 
 Judkins was utterly unknown at the Library ; no such chest of 
 old papers as is alleged to have been deposited here was ever 
 received, and no such person as the one said to have made the 
 deposit was known to the members. Evidently the story was 
 started for the express purpose to deceive the public and to 
 create a prejudice against the early founders of New England. 
 

 2 
 
 The letter, which was addressed to the Rev. John Higginson, 
 of Salem, is as follows : — 
 
 Boston, September ye 15th, 1682. 
 
 To TE AGED AND BELOVED JOHN HiGGINSON. 
 
 There bee now at sea a shippe (for our friend Mr. Esaias Holcroft of 
 London did advise me by the last packet that it wolde sail some time in 
 August) called ye Welcome, R. Greenaway master, which has aboard 
 an hundred or more of ye heretics and malignants called Quakers, with 
 W. Penne, who is ye Chief Scampe at ye hedde of them. Ye General 
 Court has accordinggely given secret orders to Master Malachi Huxett 
 of ye brig Porposse to waylaye ye said Welcome slylie as near ye 
 coast of Codde as may be and make captive ye said Penne and his un- 
 godlie crew so that ye Lord may be glorified and not mocked on ye soil 
 of this new countrie with ye heathen worshippe of these people. Much 
 spoyle can be made by selling ye whole lotte to Barbadoes, where slaves 
 fetch' goode prices in rumme and sugar and we shall not only do 
 ye Lord great service by punishing ye wicked but we shall make 
 great gayne for his ministers and people. Master Huxett feels hopeful 
 and I will set down the news he brings when his shippe comes back. 
 Yours in ye bowells of Christ. 
 
 Cotton Mather. 
 
 This spurious production appears periodically in the public 
 prints, and often has been exposed as a miserable forgery, but 
 it will not dozvn. Like a planet it seems to have an orbit of 
 its own in which it moves, and at regular intervals is printed 
 in the newspapers. At the time of its date Mather was only 
 nineteen years old, which fact alone would be presumptive 
 evidence that he was not connected with any such piratical 
 scheme. There are other ear-marks in the letter which tell 
 against its authenticity. The word " scampe " was not in use 
 two hundred years ago, ajfrd Mather would never have used 
 the phrase "ye coast of Codde." The name of the Cape was 
 given by Gosnold, and no one in this neighborhood ever called 
 it anything else but " Cape Cod." The old Puritan minister 
 was a scholar and, according to the standard of his day and 
 generation, he knew how to spell, and never would have been 
 guilty of the foolish orthography there used. Moreover the 
 writer's subscription alone would be enough to condemn the 
 letter. Mather had sins enough of his own to answer for 
 without ascribing to him the crude absurdities of this forgery. 
 In every community there is a certain number of persons 
 
 AUG 
 
always ready to adopt opinions which are in accord with their 
 .own feelings. The instances are frequent where evil-minded 
 
 cjmen have thus played upon the credulity of the public and so 
 
 ,-;} started false reports and gross slanders. 
 
 The letter has been reprinted so often, and I am called upon 
 so frequently to answer questions concerning it, that I set 
 about tracing the origin of the story to its source. After some 
 correspondence I found that it was written by the late James F. 
 Shunk, at one time editor of the Easton Argus, in the columns 
 of which it originally appeared during his connection with the 
 newspaper. He was a man of distinguished ancestry, — his 
 two grandfathers having been governors of the Commonwealth 
 of Pennsylvania, — but with a strong prejudice against the 
 Puritans. The letter was written in a spirit of hostility to 
 New England people ; and it was evidently the writer's inten- 
 tion to throw discredit on them, and to a certain extent he was 
 successful. Mr. Shunk, the author of the forgery, died in 
 1874, at the age of thirty-six years. 
 
014 076 358 51 
 

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 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 
 
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