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other London properties, clerk, cattle breeder, putative minister, and husband to Ann Sadler, was going to America. The Harvards were part of the great Puritan migration. Men and women of conscience, who did not hold with the rituals of the church and despaired of the corruption in the state, had obtained a charter to build a new England some three thousand miles from the old, well beyond the reach of robed bishops and royal authority.
    They were a week into the journey, and Ann Sadler Harvard was seasick. With skies darkening and seas rising, it was likely that she would be seasick some time more.
    So John put his body between his wife and the sea-foam spraying over the bow, in hope that she could vomit in peace.
    “Good Lord, but what a stream,” cried Nathaniel Eaton, a young man of such surpassing strong stomach and lack of compassion that he went about the seasick deck chewing on a piece of smoked herring. Black-bearded and burly, he might have been taken for a sailor, though he was the son of a leading churchman, brother to a member of the Massachusetts Bay Company, which backed the voyage, and author of a respected treatise on the meaning of the Sabbath. All of this had put him in line to be first master of the colony’s new college. None of this, however, meant that he had received the gift of tact.
    “John,” he said, “she pukes like a grass-fed dog, but no man on the ship show better devotion to his wife.”
    Ann Harvard looked up, her delicate features sharpened by sickness and fear, her skin the color of the sea. “’Tis the same devotion my husband will show to a flock, once we reach America, sir.”
    “A fine place for man to become a preacher,” answered Eaton, “though the company shows true foresight in bringin’ aboard a dozen Warwickshire breeders. Such beasts will give birth to a mighty herd, should they survive. Though they do stink, do they not, ma’am?” Eaton grinned, as if he enjoyed turning a lady’s stomach by mere suggestion. “Ship smells like a floatin’ barnyard.”
    And the face of Ann Harvard grew a little grayer.
    “’Tis as if we travel on the ark,” said John Harvard, who himself looked more gray than pink, “on our way to make a new world of righteousness.”
    “My husband will nourish men’s minds,” said Ann Harvard, “with books.”
    “Books shall nourish, especially in the college, where we shall raise up new Puritan ministers and magistrates.” Eaton popped the last of the herring into his mouth. “But if your belly be empty, food matter more than books.”
    “I carry four hundred books.” John Harvard shivered off the cold, then sought to cough it away, then spat a phlegmy splatter over the side. “Books to enrich our souls and lighten our lives. A man will be known by his books, Nathaniel.”
    “Had I such a cough as that, I’d see to my health, John, before my books.”
    “I’ve survived worse, Nathaniel. The plague carried away all but my mother and one brother. Now they, too, be gone. The Lord spares me for a purpose. That I know.”
    Suddenly, a great wave struck the bow and sent a shudder down the length of the keel. A fountain of water burst over the rail, knocking the Harvards to the deck and knocking the bulk of Nathaniel Eaton on top of them.
    The ship rode down into the trough behind the wave, then up the side of the next, and from belowdecks came cries of fear as the green sea poured down the gangways.
    Ann said, “The books, John!”
    “Fear not for the books!” cried Eaton. “Worry for the cattle.”
    John Harvard prayed for his books but imagined the water doing its damage, spilling down into the hold full of trunks, trickling down into one of his trunks of books, seeping down through the oilcloth lining, swelling the bindings on his Latin texts, staining the covers of his Calvin, and causing the ink to run on the pages of one book that should never have been in the trunk of a good Puritan—a play by William Shakespeare, a play