Richard Francis’s new novel covers ostensibly familiar ground. Set in and around Boston in the 1690s, it tells the story of the Salem trials, which resulted in the execution of 20 people (14 of them women), and which are sometimes regarded as a hinge event in the evolution of American secularism. As the historian George Lincoln Burr put it in 1914:
‘Salem witchcraft was the rock on which the theocracy shattered.’
This seismic moment was last visited by Francis in his 2005 biography of Samuel Sewall, the judge who presided over the trials. And it is to Sewall’s life that Francis returns in Crane Pond. He opens his story in January 1690, at which time Sewall is engaged in trying a handful of men for piracy. The men are destined to be hanged — until a gathering of Sewall’s contemporaries, for reasons of expedience and personal attachment, persuade him to offer them a reprieve.
Sewall — a kindly and thoughtful 38-year-old— fears the consequences of this instance of weakness.
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