The Cambridge Press, 1638-1692: A Reexamination of the Evidence concerning the Bay Psalm Book and the Eliot Indian Bible as Well as Other Contemporary Books and People

THE heavily subsidized Indian work has befogged the realization that there was an increasing resort to the Press for job printing after 1655. The few examples of this work which have survived are samples of what it was called upon to do, rather than a record of its production. The earliest existing broadside elegy, VERSES ON JOSEPH BRISCO, who died in 1658, is described in Chapter iv with the reasons for thinking that similar tributes to the departed came from the Press ten years earlier.

Two years before the occasion for the Brisco Verses, Daniel Gookin of Cambridge returned from a trip to London and announced that he had been authorized by the home government to enter into agreements with any English who might desire to remove to Jamaica, which Cromwell was anxious to colonize. Gookin distributed a flysheet To ALL PERSONS WHOM THESE MAY CONCERN dated March 25, 1656. The surviving copy of this, preserved among the papers of the Winthrop family, is the earliest recorded forerunner of the Colonization Societies of two centuries later.

It was a time of increasing unsettledness in the Puritan Commonwealth, and the disturbing elements in the colony made the most of the conditions. The Quakers were particularly annoying because they were being ignored in large measure in England, and this neglect drove some of the more uneasy ones to seek attention in the Bay Colony. They dared the scandalized people of Boston and Salem to do their worst, and got what they were after. When public opinion reacted, the situation was explained by the authorities in a printed DECLARATION OF THE GENERAL COURT. OCTOBER 18. 1658. CONCERNING THE EXECUTION OF TWO QUAKERS, which had to be supplemented by a further TRUE RELATION OF PROCEEDINGS AGAINST CERTAIN QUAKERS. Neither of these broadsides has survived in the original Cambridge issue, but both were reprinted in England, perhaps sponsored by Quaker partisans. One of these states that it was "Printed by their Order in New-England and Reprinted in London 1659." As the gravity of the situation which they had created for

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