American Jezebel: The Uncommon Life of Anne Hutchinson, the Woman Who Defied the Puritans

by Eve LaPlante

But the banished Reverend Roger Williams, who had settled Providence Plantation two years before, urged them to try Aquidneck Island, which met all their requirements. (Aquidneck was the native name of the island that Europeans, starting with Giovanni da Verrazzano in the early sixteenth century, called Rhode Island, which now contains the towns of Portsmouth, Middletown, and Newport.) Other than Williams’s plantation sixteen miles north by water and the encampment at modern-day Cumberland, Rhode Island, of the solitary Reverend William Blackstone, who had been forced from Beacon Hill in 1634 by Boston’s rapid population growth, this region had no English settlers. Best of all, from Will Hutchinson’s perspective, the island of Aquidneck was only forty-five miles southwest of Boston. This was a boon to a man who, initially at least, had to leave most of his children and his incarcerated wife in Massachusetts.