The Grace Abounding

"Imagine, sir, being born into a world in which nearly every thing you see around you is morally wanting."

It is 1722. David Wellbery, a Puritan ship captain who works for the Royal African Company, has just been told he must take command of a slave ship, the Avery. He takes the commission, but his conscience weighs on him, and he frees the Africans on board in a mutiny against the Company. Then, with ship and crew, he roams the Atlantic coast, freeing slaves in transit from Africa to Colonial America. He renames the ship "The Grace Abounding," after John Bunyan's spiritual classic.

So the pirates in this play are actually liberators. The British and the Spanish join in league to hunt him down as he makes his way north along the Atlantic coast. Working with a ship redesigned by his master engineer, Augustine Kincaid, a slave whose former master had trained him in architecture and engineering, they evade capture and free many enslaved Africans by using his own intelligence to overcome the odds.

The play has another point of location in American history. David Wellbery is in love with the daughter of Cotton Mather, the judge of the famous witch trials of 1692. In the last act, The Grace Abounding makes its way to Boston, where Wellbery and his crew are put on trial. The judge is Cotton Mather himself, who now, in old age, is haunted by what he has done. Wellbery and Kincaid and his crew plead their case, and Mather delivers a final judgment.

Thomas Richards taught literature at Harvard. He has written four novels, The End of the Line, Pretty Peggy-O, Mrs. Sinden, and Zero Tolerance, as well as a long poem, Antigone at Antietam.