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in some cases executed. Three women were hanged on board ships on their way to the English colonies in the Chesapeake, Mary Lee on her way to Maryland in 1654 (see document 9), Elizabeth Richardson, bound for Maryland in 1658 or 1659, and Katherine Grady on her way to Virginia in 1658.116 And one vessel reached Bermuda in that same troubled decade with two women on board who were soon identified by their fellow travelers as witches. Court records characterized all three of the Chesapeake travelers as old. Possibly there was something about these women’s behavior—either physical manifestations, maladies, odd spasms, muttered prayers, superstitious acts, or unpleasant dispositions—that marked them as witches. Certainly their rapid identification by their fellow travelers points to the tenacity of English expectations about witches: that they were likely to be elderly women and that they could be a particular menace at sea.

Another explanation for their murders comes from the dreadful storms that plagued Grady’s and Lee’s Atlantic journeys. That witches could conjure storms was a long-standing element of English and Scottish witch beliefs. One of the earliest cases from Scotland featured just such a fear. James VI of Scotland and his new wife, Anne of Denmark, were caught in a terrible storm on their return from Denmark to Scotland. At least seventy, and possibly as many as a hundred, accused witches were rounded up at Berwick in 1590. Under torture many confessed to, among other things, conjuring a storm to sink the ship and murder the king and queen, a crime that was considered, because of the alleged targets, to be treason using sorcery. A large—but unfortunately unknown—number of the accused were executed for their crimes (see figure 5).117

Two examples from English popular culture in the seventeenth century hint at the pervasiveness of these ideas. William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, first performed by 1611 and probably written between 1603 and 1607, famously opens with three witches conjuring in the midst of thunder and lightning. The witches in Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas (1689), an English opera based on Virgil’s Aeneid, conjure two such storms, one on land to drive Dido away from a grove and another at sea to destroy the Trojan fleet. Virgil’s version contained no witches; the addition of the characters in Purcell’s opera (probably by the librettist Nahum Tate, who based his libretto on his own witch-laden 1678 play, Brutus of Alba, or The Enchanted Lovers) reflects the importance of such figures in English culture and the dramatic value of their actions for the opera.118

One other context might explain the concentration of cases in the 1650s. Two historians, Christine Leigh Heyrman and Elaine Forman Crane, have suggested that women accused of witchcraft in this decade about whom we otherwise know little may have been Quakers.119 The Quakers were part of a new religious movement that emerged in England in the 1640s. They adhered to what was then regarded as a radical doctrine: that the spirit of God (what they referred to as the inner light) lay within each person. They were aggressively egalitarian in an era of hierarchy. They rejected trained clergy, organized churches, and formal, written doctrine. Because the spirit of God lay within all, anyone could preach the word, which shocked observers in an era when women, children, and untrained men were barred from public professions of faith. Quakers dispersed throughout the world to preach their leveling message, and almost everywhere met hostility from orthodox religious structures and governments. The first Quakers sailed to the colonies in 1655, and in the next few years they visited all the mainland colonies in addition to Bermuda, Barbados, and Jamaica. Banished from Massachusetts, four brave Quakers returned and were hanged between 1659 and 1661 for their pains, the only instances in British America of Protestants dying because of their religious beliefs.120

In their opposition to the new movement, Puritans and mainstream Anglicans readily linked Quakers and