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CHAPTER SIX

Lessons from a Wayward Son

An elaborate narrative about the remarkable adventures of the Griswold family’s disobedient son provided Boston minister Cotton Mather with material for a sermon.

In this time two Godly ministers came to see my family and one of them, then putting up a fervent prayer with us on the behalf of my absent child, he was directed into such expressions that I was persuaded that the prayer was not lost, and that my poor son was then in some remarkable distress.

Sometimes Moses Noyes’s voice can be heard indirectly. A letter that Matthew Griswold Jr. (1652–1716) composed in 1712 after the death of his eldest son conveys the guidance of Lyme’s minister. Echoing the biblical parable of the prodigal son, the lengthy narrative relates the “remarkable circumstances” of a wayward youth who strays and suffers before reuniting with his father. Mr. Griswold sent the sermon-like story to Rev. Cotton Mather in Boston.

The letter’s context leaves little doubt that the “two Godly ministers” who prayed with the Griswold family at its time of affliction were Moses Noyes and Azariah Mather (1685–1736), age twenty-seven at the time and Cotton Mather’s cousin. Ordained in Saybrook in 1710, he had succeeded James Hale as tutor at the Collegiate School, and Cotton Mather had noted in his diary, “I have a Kinsman who is Minister of Saybrook, and who has also an Opportunity to do good unto the College there.” While Matthew Griswold Jr. had no personal acquaintance with Cotton Mather, Azariah Mather had recently received several notes of encouragement from his influential relative, along with a request for assistance “in dispersing books of Piety thro’ the Colony.”

“Sir,” Mr. Griswold wrote, “Though I am an utter stranger to you, yet, considering that it ought to be the chief and continual care of every man to glorify God, I thought it my duty humbly to present unto you the following narrative, desiring you to improve it as God shall direct.” The letter began with an account of his eldest son Matthew Griswold 3rd (1689–1712), age seventeen and described as “weakly” since childhood, disobeying his father and “escaping” from his house to go to sea. How he reached the West Indies, presumably on a coastal trading vessel, is not explained, but the narrative of loss and redemption provides extended detail about the missing son’s spiritual tests. After barely surviving a severe storm at sea, the young Griswold acknowledged his dependence on providential mercy, but harsher lessons followed.

London portrait artist Peter Pelham launched his reputation as an American engraver by reproducing his own painting of Cotton Mather, just months before the Boston minister’s death at age sixty-five in 1728.

The sandy point where Matthew Griswold 3rd allegedly returned after a harrowing five years at sea appears as a sun-drenched site for summer bathing two centuries later in William Chadwick’s Bathers at Griswold Beach. “Moonlight drives to Griswold’s beach are in order this week,” reported Old Lyme’s hometown newspaper the Sound Breeze in August 1893.

Impressed aboard a man of war in Jamaica, he obtained release after punishing months of service, only to fall in “with a privateer, on board whereof he was exposed unto eminent hazard of his life, in an hot engagement, wherein many were killed.” After that desperate fight “God caused him to take up solemn resolutions to reform his life, and he resolved to return as soon as might be to his father’s house,” but the consequences of his disobedience had not yet concluded. Captured first by the French and then by the Spanish, marched in chains without food or water, sickened by fever, ague, and smallpox, the prisoner faced a threat of hard labor in the mines unless he became a papist.

Taken aboard a Spanish galleon, where he was bled by the ship’s doctor, the runaway youth from Lyme then “lay for dead.” The Spanish captain, having no son of his own, offered kindness and assistance if the young Protestant would accept baptism into the Catholic faith, but even when close to death, the disobedient son resisted temptation and “put his trust in the providence of God.” Surmounting additional challenges and aided by the charity of strangers, he eventually returned home in gravely ill health after a five-year absence. Three weeks later, having manifested true penitence, Matthew Griswold 3rd, age twenty-two, died in his father’s house.

The elaborate tale sent to Cotton Mather resembles a shorter account of misfortunes at sea that Richard Ely’s eldest son William Ely (1647–1717) allegedly encountered on a voyage from Barbados to Lyme. That story, related at an Ely family reunion in 1878, described a brigantine dismasted in a furious gale with William the “only soul on board” to survive after “the ill-fated vessel sank to rise no more.” Floating on a yardarm and “lashed in fury by the raging storm,” William was picked up on the third day by a Spanish cruiser exploring the shores of New England. He later landed “on the coast not far distant from the mouth of the Connecticut River,” where “he sought and soon found the rude hamlet of his father.” Richard Ely “with joy unspeakable” then “embraced his son, who related the story of “his voyage, his rescue, and his escape from a watery grave.”

The Ely shipwreck story, said to describe an incident in Richard Ely’s life some twenty-four months after he moved from Boston to Lyme, concludes with the father and son offering up prayer and thanksgiving “for this Divine interposition.” It adds that Mr. Ely ascended daily for weeks and months “to the height of a neighboring hill and there alone, with outstretched arms, poured forth his gratitude to the Divine Master for the preservation of his child.” Whether Moses Noyes contributed to the shorter narrative about trials at sea, said to demonstrate the religious feeling that imbued Richard Ely’s soul and to “illustrate the fervency of his devotion and piety,” cannot be determined, but the families had close ties. In 1713, a year after the death of Matthew Griswold 3rd, Moses Noyes Jr. married Richard Ely’s granddaughter.

A note from “your sincere Friend & Servt Cotton Mather” acknowledged the receipt of Matthew Griswold’s letter. The Boston minister noted in his diary his “inclination” to publish a sermon based on the letter he had “received from a gentleman in Connecticut, concerning the remarkable circumstances of his own prodigal and repenting son.” Such a sermon was “urgently called for,” he added, and would “prove of manifold use.” When his sermon Repeated Warnings: Another essay to warn young people against rebellions that must be repented of appeared in print in Boston in 1712, it included the letter from Lyme.

In a simple string-bound diary kept between 1681 and 1724, Rev. Cotton Mather recorded observations about his sermons and ministerial duties, comments about current events like the witchcraft trials in Salem, and news of his family and friends.