BENEFACTORS OF THE CAMBRIDGE PRESS: A RECONSIDERATION
by
Lawrence G. Starkey
The story of the establishing of the Cambridge, Massachusetts, Press, the first
printing house in England's North American colonies, has been told and retold many times
during the past one hundred and forty years, but the known facts about its founding are
still relatively few, singularly open to various interpretations, and really not
materially augmented over those set down by Isaiah Thomas in the first edition of his
History of Printing in America (1810).
Especially lacking are details about the financing of the original printing house
established at Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the autumn of 1638. Writers on the subject
have been understandably reluctant to accept as sole founder and benefactor of the
Cambridge Press the Reverend Jose Glover, Non-Con-formist clergyman of Surrey, who died
at sea in the summer of 1638 while conveying the press and other printing equipment and
supplies to Massachusetts. There is, indeed, some evidence that others besides Glover
helped to procure the press and fonts of type for the new colony.
Speculation about these circumstances by writers on the Press seems to stem almost
completely from two entries made by the third president of Harvard College, Leonard
Hoar, in the early records of the college. In 1674 Hoar, attempting to list for
posterity various benefactors of Harvard in its early days, wrote down seven names as
follows:
Benefactors to the first ffont of
Letters for printing in Cambridge.
Their names collected p L H 1674
Major Thomas Clark
Capt James Oliver
Capt Allen
Capt Lake
Mr Stoddard
ffreake
Hues[1]
At a different time, but during his twenty-seven months as President, Hoar
collected and entered the following information:
Mr Joss: Glover gave to the Colledge a ffont of printing Letters.
Some Gentlemen of Amsterdam gave towards the furnishing of a Printing-Press with
Letters gave [sic] fourty nine pound & something more.[2]
The purpose of this note is to correct a widely-accepted legend that identifies the
seven names on the list made by Hoar with the "Gentlemen of Amsterdam." Both of Hoar's
entries were printed by Thomas in 1810, but Roden seems to have been the first to make
this identification with a misleading passage in his Cambridge
Press (1905), pp. 10-11:
At his [Glover's] own expense he provided a font of
type and procured funds from friends in England and Holland for a complete printing
establishment, '£49 and something more' being donated by seven men whose names
were collected by Leonard Hoar in 1674: Major Thomas Clarke, Captain James Oliver,
Captain Allen, Captain Lake, Mr. Stoddard, Mr. Freake, and Mr. Hues.
An
examination of the actual information as preserved in the manuscript records at Harvard
shows that Roden came to the wrong conclusion. The list of names and the entry about the
benefactors of Amsterdam are not even preserved in the same volume of records; thus
there is no physical connection between these two scraps of information, and the sum of
£49 is wrongly associated with the seven English names.
G. P. Winship has helped to perpetuate this false identification, first in an article
in 1938[3] and again in a
further consideration of the Cambridge Press in 1939.[4] Finally, in 1945, when Mr. Winship wrote his extensive
monograph
on the Cambridge Press, he printed the two excerpts from the
early Harvard records and then wrote the following:
The two entries made at different
times must refer to the same gift, and this gift must have been made before a press
was set up in the colony. . . . There are circumstances which render an Amsterdam
contribution toward a New England venture at the time explicable. . . . Holland had
long been the principal purveyor of type and supplies to English printers. The Dutch
ports were the most frequented commercial centers of northern Europe, and their normal
trading advantages were strengthened for English merchants by the large numbers of
disaffected fellow countrymen who were living in the Low Countries. Taking these
factors into account it would not be surprising if a group of shipmasters and
supercargoes engaged in the Massachusetts Bay trade, happening to sit together of an
evening, agreed that it might be a profitable speculation to help to establish a
printing shop overseas where the illicit Puritan printing that was being suppressed in
Holland could be done without danger of interference. Circumstances can be imagined
which might have led such a group to contribute generously to such a proposal.
[5]
Although thus conjecturally connected by Winship, there is nothing implicit in the
entries to suggest that the seven names might be identified as the gentlemen of
Amsterdam. Furthermore, none of the scholars who have written about the Cambridge Press
seem to have investigated the list to see if the names may not be identifiable.
Actually, such an investigation provides proof that the names are not those of the
gentlemen of Amsterdam. Instead, at least four of them can be positively identified as
residents of New England many years after the printing house at Cambridge was
established. Major Thomas Clark was actually an Overseer of Harvard College during
Hoar's administration;[6]
Captain James Oliver was a resident of Massachusetts and had given money to Harvard
about twenty years before Hoar recorded his name;[7] Mr. Stoddard was both an Overseer of the College and its
Librarian: he had not yet been born when the Cambridge Press was founded.[8] There was a Captain John Allen
who lived
in Massachusetts at this time, although identification of
him as a benefactor of Harvard College cannot be definite.
[9] Mr. Freake cannot be positively identified, although
two English brothers, Ralph and John Freck, are known to have given books to the Harvard
Library not long before Hoar's administration.
[10] Lake and Hues do not seem to appear in early
Massachusetts records.
There seems no doubt, then, that in light of this information all previous speculations
that Hoar's two entries refer to the same gift are erroneous.
Notes
