were generally very loving and pitiful, yet the sickness did so
prevail, that the whole were not able to tend the sick as they
should be tended; upon which many perished and died, and were
buried about the Town Hill."

Saddest of all among these deaths must have been that of the Lady
Arbella, of whom Mather in a later day, wrote: "She came from a
paradise of plenty and pleasure, in the family of a noble earldom,
into a wilderness of wants, and took New England in her way to
heaven." There had been doubt as to the expediency of her coming,
but with the wife of another explorer she had said: "Whithersoever
your fatal destiny shall drive you, either by the waves of the
great ocean, or by the manifold and horrible dangers of the land,
I will surely bear you company. There can no peril chance to me so
terrible, nor any kind of death so cruel, that shall not be much
easier for me to abide, than to live so far separate from you."

Weakened by the long voyage and its perpetual hardships, and
dismayed, if may be at the sadness and privations of what they had
hoped might hold immediate comfort, she could not rally, and Anne
Bradstreet's first experience of New England was over the grave,
in which they laid one of the closest links to childhood and that
England both had loved alike.

Within a month, Winthrop wrote in his journal: "September 30.
About two in the morning, Mr. Isaac Johnson died; his wife, the
lady Arbella, of the house of Lincoln, being dead about one month
before. He was a holy man and wise, and died in sweet peace,
leaving some part of his substance to the Colony."