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Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World. By ALISON GAMES. Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1999. xiv, 322 pp. $45.00.
DESPITE the title, this is exclusively an analysis of the familiar and engrossing London Port Register of 1635. Names, ages, and destinations of some 7,507 men, women, and children were faithfully recorded, nearly two-thirds of them bound for England's young American colonies and the rest for continental Europe. The register is less complete on migrants' places of origin, occupations, and purposes for travel, and a few soujourners were missed and others misrepresented themselves. Alison Games informs the reader fully of the biases and limits of her primary source, then undertakes a detailed "community" study of those travelers.
This study concentrates on the nearly five thousand travelers bound for English colonies in 1635. There is little that is surprising in the careful comparisons of gender, age, and status of migrants to various destinations, though it is worthy "to demonstrate with certainty what logic dictates" (pp. 50-51). Games thoroughly documents the origin of these individuals and is to be commended for discovering something of the subsequent lives and fortunes of 27 percent of immigrants after arrival in the colonies.
Predictably, Puritan migrants to New England, Providence Island, and Bermuda left extensive records, which allow Games to examine the Atlantic scope of English religious dissent and many of these migrants' later lives. Protagonists of the coming Antinomian controversy, Henry Vane, Thomas Shephard, Peter Bulkeley, and Hugh Peter were all traveling to New England from London that year, as was that other embarrassment to Massachusetts orthodoxy, Robert Keayne. A prominent cluster of those fleeing persecution in England proved remarkably quick to persecute in colonial America. In following these Puritans into disruptive...