Ancestors

Stephen Hopkins

Stephen Hopkins was baptised at Upper Clatford in Hampshire on 30 April 1581, son of John Hopkins and, as usually given, Elizabeth Williams. Upper Clatford is a small village on the river Anton, a mile below Andover, in the chalk country of north Hampshire. The family afterwards moved to Winchester, and then to Hursley, a village six miles south of that city on the road to Romsey.

He married Mary before 1604, and three of their children were baptised in Hursley church. The register enters Constance in the clerk's Latin: "undecimo de May, Constancia filia Steph. Hopkins fuit baptizata." Elizabeth came in 1604, Constance in 1605, Giles in 1607. What sort of man he was in those years is recorded only obliquely, in the job he was later given: he could read, and he knew the scriptures well enough to be trusted to read them aloud to a congregation. In a village of that size that put him in a small minority.

In 1609 the Virginia Company was recruiting hard. Jamestown was two years old and failing, and the company had just been granted a new royal charter, reorganised itself, and put together the largest relief expedition yet sent to America: nine ships, five hundred or so settlers, and a new interim governor. Hopkins signed on as clerk to the ship's minister, Richard Buck, aboard the flagship Sea Venture. He left his wife and three small children in Hampshire. Giles was about two.

The Sea Venture carried the leadership of the whole venture: Sir Thomas Gates, the incoming governor; Sir George Somers, admiral of the fleet; Christopher Newport, who had commanded the original 1607 voyage; William Strachey, going out as secretary of the colony, who wrote the account that makes Hopkins a person instead of a name. John Rolfe was aboard with his pregnant wife. Rolfe would later plant the tobacco that saved Virginia and marry Pocahontas.

On 24 July a hurricane took the fleet apart. The Sea Venture, separated from the rest, opened her seams. Water rose in the hold faster than the pumps could take it, and for three days and four nights every person aboard, gentlemen included, bailed and pumped in shifts around the clock without sleep. They stuffed the leaks with beef. On the morning of 28 July, with the ship settling and the crew at the end of it, Somers sighted land and deliberately drove her onto the reefs off Bermuda, where she wedged upright between two rocks close enough to shore to get everyone off. About a hundred and fifty people came ashore alive, and a dog. Nobody drowned.

Bermuda was uninhabited and had a name in every seaman's mouth: the Isle of Devils. Ships avoided it. What they actually found was the best-provisioned island in the western Atlantic. Wild hogs, descended from animals put ashore by passing Spaniards, ran in the woods. Green turtles came up the beaches. A ground-nesting seabird the Spanish called the cahow was so unafraid of people that it could be picked up by hand at night. There were palmetto hearts, berries, and fish in quantity. Timber was cedar, and it was everywhere. They stayed ten months and built two small ships, Deliverance mostly out of Bermuda cedar and the wreck's timber, and Patience almost entirely out of cedar.

Ten months on an easy island, under a governor whose authority came from a company three thousand miles away, was long enough for the question to be asked out loud: why leave. Virginia was known to be starving. Several men asked it. Hopkins asked it best, and it nearly killed him. He was arraigned in irons, condemned to hang, and pardoned only because he wept and named his wife and children. A later conspiracy went worse for the man who led it: Henry Paine was shot by a firing squad for insolence and mutinous words, and Gates allowed him to be shot rather than hanged as a courtesy to his standing.

Two children were born on the island and christened there. Bermuda Rolfe, daughter of John Rolfe, was baptised on 11 February 1610 with Christopher Newport and William Strachey standing as witnesses. She died on the island, and Rolfe's wife died shortly after they reached Virginia. A boy, Bermudas Eason, was born to another couple and lived. Two Powhatan men were also in the company, Namontack and Matchumps, sent to England and returning; Matchumps killed Namontack on the island and buried him, and Strachey knew it and kept it out of the official telling.

Deliverance and Patience sailed on 10 May 1610 and came up the James on 23 May. What they found ended any argument about whether the colony needed them. Of about five hundred people at Jamestown the previous autumn, roughly sixty were alive. The winter is still called the Starving Time. The palisades were down, the gates off their hinges, and the empty houses had been pulled apart for firewood by men too weak to walk to the treeline. They had eaten the horses, then the dogs and cats, then rats, then leather. That they also ate the dead was a story the company denied for four hundred years, until a girl's skull excavated at James Fort in 2012 was found to carry the cut marks of butchering.

Gates gave it up. On 7 June 1610 the whole colony was ordered aboard, and there was talk of burning the fort behind them, which Gates refused. They fired a farewell salute of small shot and dropped downriver on the tide, abandoning Virginia. They had made about a dozen miles when a longboat came up the river towards them. It was the advance party of Lord De La Warr, the colony's new governor, who was entering the bay behind it with three ships and a hundred and fifty fresh men and supplies. He turned them around. Hopkins was on one of those decks. English Virginia continued because of a margin measured in hours.

He stayed in Virginia about four years, and the record of him there is nearly blank, which is ordinary; almost nobody below the rank of gentleman leaves a paper trail in that colony before 1620. He was there for the beginning of the tobacco economy, since Rolfe planted his first crop of West Indian seed in 1612. He was not there for the thing that mattered most to him. Mary was buried at Hursley on 9 May 1613, and the probate drawn up the next day names Giles, Constance and Elizabeth as her children. He was on the other side of the ocean and would not have heard for months. The three children were taken in by their grandmother, the widow Kent, in the same village.

He was back in England by 1617. On 19 February 1617/8 he married Elizabeth Fisher at St Mary Matfellon in Whitechapel, then a parish just outside the London wall on the road to Essex. That church was destroyed by bombing in 1940 and never rebuilt; the churchyard is a public park now, and the outline of the building is marked in the grass.

In 1620 he did the crossing a second time, and this time he took everyone. The Mayflower carried Stephen, Elizabeth, Giles at about thirteen, Constance at about fifteen, a small daughter Damaris, and two servants, Edward Doty and Edward Leister. A son was born to Elizabeth during the passage and christened Oceanus. Bradford's list reads "mr Steven Hopkins, & Elizabeth his wife; and 2. children, caled Giles, and Constanta a doughter, both by a former wife. And 2. more by this wife, caled Damaris & Oceanus; the last was borne at sea. And 2. servants, caled Edward Doty, and Edward Litster." Eight people, counting the two servants and the son born at sea, made his the largest household aboard after the Carvers.

He signed the Mayflower Compact in November 1620, fourteenth in the list as it comes down. He was worth more to that ship than his signature: he was the only man aboard who had already lived in America, and the colony used him accordingly. He went on the exploring parties that chose the site. He was one of two men sent unarmed across the brook to the first Wampanoag who showed themselves. He kept Samoset in his house overnight when nobody knew what else to do with him. He walked forty miles inland with Edward Winslow in July 1621 to treat with Massasoit, and did it again on later errands.

Then he settled into being a Plymouth townsman with property. In the 1623 land division "Steven Hobkins" took six acres, one for each person in his household. In the 1627 division of the colony's cattle he, Elizabeth, Giles, Caleb and Deborah made the first five names of the seventh company. He served as an assistant to the governor from 1633 to 1636, which put him on the colony's small governing council. He kept an ordinary, which is to say he sold beer and wine and food and let people sit in his front room to drink it, and the last decade of his life survives mostly as the court's opinion of how he ran it.

He made his will on 6 June 1644. He was dead by 17 July, when the inventory of his estate was taken, and the will was exhibited to the court on 20 August. He left the house and lands at Plymouth to his son Caleb as heir apparent. To Giles he left "my great Bull which is now in the hands of Mrs. Warren," and to Giles's son Stephen, his namesake grandson, twenty shillings. The instruction that ends it is the one that dates his wife's death: he asked to be buried "as neare as convenyently may be to my wyfe Deceased." Elizabeth had gone sometime between 1640 and 1644, and nobody wrote down when.

If Stephen Hopkins is in your family, start your own tree.

Cite: Heirology, "Stephen Hopkins (1581-1644)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/stephen-hopkins-1581-1644-b7eb89.