ABSTRACT
The ambitious scope of Saybrook is clear enough from the commission to John Winthrop, Jr., for the “makinge [of] fortifications,” which included specific instructions that “such houses as may receive men of qualitie” are to be “builded within the fort.” When the elder Winthrop stopped writing about fortifications, Boston was largely unfortified. The ideal was validated by at least one contemporary French observer, who, writing from the rock of Quebec in the darkest days of New France in 1663, called Boston “a beautiful city built by the English,” even though she had never seen it. While “the deplorable state of the common affairs of this country,” as Marie described New France in 1660, owed much to the so-called Beaver Wars with the Iroquois Confederacy, Marie’s letters point to the deeper and more comprehensive problems that stem from the conflicted goals of the colony.
