Capt. Robert Andrews Master and Owner of the Angel Gabrial

Capt. Robert ANDREWS (1593 – 1643) 

Robert Andrews was born about 1593 in Norfolk, England.  He married Elizabeth (Franklin) about 1618 in Norwich, Norfolk, England. Capt. Robert Andrews came from Norwich, Norfolk, England, early in the year 1635, as owner and master of the ship”Angel Gabriel”  which sank in the Great Colonial Hurricane [modern scientists believe this was a category four storm], Robert died 1 Mar 1642/43 in Ipswich, Mass.

Elizabeth was probably a widow with a young daughter Elizabeth when she married Robert.  

Children of Robert and Elizabeth:
1- Elizabeth Andrews (probably from mother Elizabeth's first marriage), born 1616 Norwich, Norfolk, England, first married Humphrey Griffin 1639 Ipswich, MA, second married Hugh Sherratt 10 Feb 1662/63 Haverhill, MA,  Departed 8 Apr 1670 Haverhill, MA.

2- Alice Andrews, born about 1618 Norwich, Norfolk, England, married William Franklin abt 1638 Ipswich, MA, Departed 2 Apr 1641 Boston, MA.

3- Abigail  (Rebekah) Andrews [our ancestor], born 1622 Norwich, Norfolk, England, married Capt. Danial Hovey [our ancestor] 1640, Departed 24 Jun 1665 Brookfield, MA.

4- John Andrews, born 1629 Norwich, Norfolk, England, married Sarah Holyoke abt 1660 Ipswich, MA, Departed 13 Mar 1665  Ipswich, MA.

5- Thomas Andrews, born abt 1631 Norwich, Norfolk, England,unmarried, Departed 27 Nov 1683  Ipswich, MA.

The Angel Gabriel  was a 240 ton English passenger galleon. She was commissioned for Sir Walter Raleigh's last expedition to America in 1617 and took part in the Duke of Buckingham’s 1627 assault on Cadiz. She sank in a storm off Pemaquid Point, near the newly established town of Bristol, Maine, on August 15, 1635. The sinking occurred during the middle of the Great Migration. 

The ship was initially built as the Starre in 1615 and renamed the Jason by Sir Walter Raleigh for use in his second expedition to Guiana (then under control of the Spanish) in 1617. Following Raleigh’s return it was seized and became a merchant ship, renamed the Angel Gabriel....

The ship “Angel Gabriel” pulled into Pemaquid Bay (Pemaquid, Maine) on August 13, 1635 and laid at anchor. The next day there was a terrible rain storm which ravaged the whole coast from Nova Scotia to New York starting at morning. The Angel was torn to pieces by the savage storm and cast away. Most of the cattle, 1 seaman and 3 or 4 passengers died. The others escaped to shore. Among the few personal belongings saved was a chest belonging to the Burnham boys. The tides had been as high as 20 feet.

Some passengers set up tents along the shore and John Cogswell [Coggswell] went to Boston and sought the help of a Capt. Gallop who commanded a smallbark, or barque as it was called then. He took some passengers to Ipswich and made another trip the end of October. Andrew probably went to Chebacco [southeast Ipswich, then Essex] with his nephews, the three Burnham brothers, and John Cogswell and his family in Capt. Gallop’s barque.

Pemaquid Point Light House

In a book entitled “Ancient Pemaquid,” by J. W. Thornton, 1857, it says:

“On the last wednesday of May in this year (1635), the Angel Gabriel, a strong ship of 240 tons, and carrying a heavy armament of 16 guns swung at her moorings in the King’s Road,  four or five miles distant from the city. Her destination was Pemaquid. On her deck was a company of many Godly Christians, some from other ships, bound for New England; one of them was Richard Mather, visited there by Sir Ferdinando Georges [Gorges] but the chief personage in the company was John Cogswell, a London merchant of wealth who with the fragments of his freight, and accompanied by his servants, settled at Ipswich.”

In the fury of an easterly storm the ship with her cargo were totally lost; some of the passengers not escaping death, most notably the Blaisdell family. This shipwreck is chronicled as one of the greatest disasters in the annals of Pemaquid.

Great Colonial Hurricane

Category 4 hurricane (SSHS)
Formed	August 1635
Dissipated	August 25, 1635
Highest winds	1-minute sustained: 135 mph (215 km/h)
Lowest pressure	≤ 930 mbar (hPa); 27.46 inHg (Estimated [1])
Fatalities	46+ direct
Areas affected	Virginia, Long Island, New England, other areas? (Information scarce)
Part of the 1635 Atlantic hurricane season

(Wikipedia)

-----------------------

Passengers on the last voyage:

Capt. Robert ANDREWS, Ship’s Master, Ipswich, Massachusetts [our ancestor] 

John Bailey, Sr., weaver from Chippenham, England to Newbury, Massachusetts [also our ancestor] 

John Bailey, Jr., b. 1613 [also our ancestor] 

Johanna Bailey (possibly came on a later ship)

Henry Beck

Deacon John Burnham [Robert's nephew]

Thomas Burnham  [Robert's nephew]

Robert Burnham  [Robert's nephew]

Ralph Blaisdell of Lancashire, settled in York, Maine

Mrs. Elizabeth Blaisdell

Henry Blaisdell

William Furber, age 21, London, England, settled in Dover, New Hampshire

John Cogswell & Elizabeth Cogswell and eight of their children, Westbury Leigh, Wiltshire, England, settled in Ipswich, Massachusetts Mr. Cogswell and his family escaped with their lives, but well drenched by the sea and despoiled of valuables to the amount of five thousand pound sterling.  (He had sold his “mylls called Ripond, situate within the Parish of Frome Selwood,” and other real estate early in 1635)

Samuel Haines, about age 24, apprentice to John Cogswell, settled in Greenland, New Hampshire

William Hook

Henry Simpson

John Tutle, about age 17, Devonshire, England, settled in Chebasco near Essex, Massachusetts and finally Dover, New Hampshire (known to locals as “Shipwreck John Tuttle”)

-----------------------

” This Capt. Andrews had a sister Mary,who was the wife of Robert Burnham. Their three boys were John, Thomas and Robert, it is said,were put in the charge of their uncle Andrews, master of the ship”Angel Gabriel.” This ship was cast away at Tammaquid, in Maine, in a terrible storm Aug 15, 1635, after which loss, Capt. Andrews settled with his three nephews at Chebacco in Massachusetts Bay.

Robert was “made free 6 May 1635.” 

The name of Robert Andrews does not appear among those who went to Aggawam [soon to be Ipswich] in 1633; but it does appear frequently in the public records after that date. Hammatt says that he possessed a houselot on the south side of the river in 1635 and it is said that he lived near the South Church. His name appears several times in the records of grants of lands.

3 Sept 1635 — Robte Andrews licensed to keep ordinarye (an Inn / Tavern  “The White Horse.”) in the plantacon where he lyves during the pleasure of ye court.” This is the earliest reference to a public house in the records of Ipswich.   Robert lived near the South Church. In 1635; Robert is allowed the sell wine by retail “If he do not wittingly sell to such as abuse it by drunkenness.” May 13, 1640, Robert is granted to draw wine at Ipswich, with the conditions of the towne.

SEE: minerdescent.com and Wikipedia.

Ancestry Chain: 11th great grandfather Capt. Robert ANDREWS Immigrant b.1560 /  Abigail (Rebekah) ANDREWS Immigrant b.1623 /  Lt. Thomas HOVEY Immigrant b.1648 /  Abigail Rebecca HOVEY b.1678 / Abigail LANE b.1716 / Elijah REMINGTON b.1743 / Esther REMINGTON-3691 b.1772 / Mary BRONSON b.1806 / Martin Luther ENSIGN b.1831 / Harriett Camilla ENSIGN b.1859 / George Ensign SMITH b.1898 / Camilla SMITH b.1926 / Lark / JR. 

John BAILEY and the 1635 Hurricane

Clues found to area's most devastating hurricane

Staff and wire reports Daily News of Newburyport

NEWBURYPORT - The winds whipped up to 130 mph, snapping pine trees like toothpicks and blowing houses into oblivion. A surge of water, 21 feet high at its crest, shipwrecked an Amesbury man and his family on the rocky coast of Maine.

The merciless storm, pounding the coast for hours with torrential sheets of rain, was like nothing ever seen before.

This was New England in August 1635, battered by what was later dubbed "The Great Colonial Hurricane" - the first major storm suffered by the first North American settlers, just 14 years after the initial Thanksgiving celebration in Plymouth Colony.

Even today, its frightening characteristics are drawing the attention of hurricane experts. After exhaustive research, they believe the storm of 371 years ago holds some insight - and warning - for the area.

At the time, the only English settlement in Greater Newburyport was a small village at Newbury's lower green, and it was only two months old. A decaying cellar hole stood in what is now downtown Newburyport's waterfront, the remains of a trading or fishing post built by Walter "Great Watt" Bagnall, who had been killed by Indians four years earlier.

Amesbury was still unsettled by the English, but the storm would play a major role in the fate of its first settlers and one of Greater Newburyport's founding families, the Baileys.

John Winthrop, head of the Massachusetts Bay colony, recalled in his Aug. 16, 1635, entry that the winds were kicking up a full week before the hurricane.

Once it did arrive, the hurricane "blew with such violence, with abundance of rain, that it blew down many hundreds of trees, overthrew some houses, and drove the ships from their anchors," Winthrop wrote. He detailed the deaths of eight American Indians sucked under the rising water while "flying from their wigwams."
Once the weather cleared and the sun rose again, the few thousand residents of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay colonies were left to rebuild and recover from a hurricane as powerful as 1938's killer Long Island Express. The 20th century hurricane killed 700 people, including 600 in New England, and left 63,000 homeless.

"The settlers easily could have packed up and gone home," said Nicholas K. Coch, a professor of geology at Queens College and one of the nation's foremost hurricane experts. "It was an extraordinary event, a major hurricane, and nearly knocked out British culture in America."

Coch has used information that he collected from detailed colonial journals to reconstruct the great hurricane. The 371-year-old data was brought to Brian Jarvinen at the National Hurricane Center, where it was interpreted using the SLOSH (Sea, Lake and Overland Surges from Hurricanes) computer model.

The result: The hurricane likely tracked farther west than was long thought, passing over uninhabited easternmost Long Island before moving north into New England. Once clear of the colonies, it veered off into the Atlantic.

Coch said the pioneers from across the Atlantic likely endured a Category 3 hurricane, moving faster than 30 mph, with maximum winds of 130 mph and a very high storm surge - 21 feet at Buzzards Bay and 14 feet at Providence. Reports at the time said 17 American Indians were drowned, while others scaled trees to find refuge.

The storm was moving about three times as fast as the typical southern hurricane, and arrived in full bluster. Although it struck nearly four centuries ago, very specific details about the first recorded hurricane in North America were provided by the local leaders' writings.

"The documentation was better than any hurricane until the mid-1800s," Coch said. "That's a story in itself."

As the hurricane approached, John Bailey was heading to America with his son, John, and perhaps his daughter, Johanna, on board the ship Angel Gabriel. When the storm struck, the ship was anchored in Pemaquid, Maine, where it was utterly destroyed. Bailey and other passengers - among them the Blaisdells, one of Salisbury's founding families - lost almost everything. Bailey and his children moved from place to place for two years, before finally settling down in what is now Amesbury. They built their house where the Powow River drains into the Merrimack River, in the vicinity of the intersection of Merrimac and Main streets. Bailey had planned to establish a home before sending for his wife [Eleanor KNIGHT] to come over, but she was so traumatized by his account of the hurricane that she refused to come. He would never see her again, despite the fact that Town Meeting voters ordered him in 1650 to force her to join him in America.

So brutal was the storm that 50 years later, Increase Mather wrote simply, "I have not heard of any storm more dismal than the great hurricane which was in August 1635." His father, the Rev. Richard Mather, was aboard one of the ships nearly sunk at sea by the ferocious weather - but he survived, along with about 100 other passengers.

Coch said the most interesting news about the hurricane is that storms can often follow the same track. And just a minuscule shift of a storm's movement in the area of North Carolina - "a fraction of a degree" - could send a hurricane up through Providence and right into Boston, the professor said.

"We could have a catastrophic situation with national repercussions," Coch said. "If the track of a future moves 25 miles to the west of the 'Colonial Hurricane,' the dangerous right side could pass right over Boston and Providence. That's why we study old hurricanes in the Northeast."