63 pages • 2 hours read
Caleb's Crossing
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BetaPart 3, Chapters 1-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3: “Anno 1715 Aetatis Suae 70 Great Harbor”
Part 3, Chapter 1 Summary
As the heading of this part of the book indicates, almost 55 years have passed since the events of the previous part of the novel. Elderly Bethia often cannot sleep through the night. Indeed, she is ill and will die soon.
She has recently been rereading the journal entries she wrote many years ago. She feels both pained and freed at reading these entries. Bethia is about to die, and she feels almost relieved as dying is easier than mourning the dead.
Part 3, Chapter 2 Summary
Bethia recalls that she remained at her job at the buttery for one year. She educated herself during this time by listening to lectures through the buttery hatch and read as much as possible before going to bed.
There were many social hardships. Most conspicuously, Caleb and Joel suffer because there is a scarcity of food for those who do not receive extra supplies from their families. Bethia does supply her hungry friends with some scraps of food when she can.
Caleb suffers additional persecution because he refuses to participate in the system of serving an upperclassman. However, good fortune comes to Joel and Caleb when their low-paid tutor turns out to be an alcoholic, and Chauncy finds it necessary to take charge of Caleb and Joel himself. Chauncy’s guidance results in an improvement in their education and their quality of life.
Part 3, Chapter 3 Summary
Samuel waits six months, as Bethia requested, before he asks again for her hand in marriage. During this time, she tries to control her sexual thoughts about him and worriedly waits until she gets her period to make sure their dalliance didn’t result in pregnancy. This time, when he asks her to marry him, she agrees. They are quickly married.
News comes that Anne has settled successfully among the Takemmy. Makepeace, who brings the news, seems much more content and happy than he previously did. He has married a widow with a young child and his new life has given him satisfaction and a sense of purpose. His acquisition of property from this marriage in fact allows him to give some of his property to Bethia, which means that Samuel can advance his studies more rapidly. Thus, Bethia and Samuel depart for Padua, where Samuel will study medicine while Bethia tutors young girls.
In 1664, they return to Cambridge. Immediately after their arrival, Bethia realizes that she is pregnant. When the child is born, they name him Ammi Ruhamma: “from the bible verse: Call your son ammi (my people) and your daughter ruhama (beloved)” (276). Bethia recalls going with her infant to see Caleb and Joel perform solstices—learning exhibitions where they spend several days responding to challenges by other scholars. To her consternation, Bethia notices that Caleb is extremely thin and plagued by a cough. Still, she is happy to know that Joel will be valedictorian and that Caleb is apprenticed to the college treasurer, Thomas Danforth.
Part 3, Chapter 4 Summary
In 1675, when Ammi Ruhamma is ten, her family moves to the island to escape the mainland war between the Native American leader Metacom and the white population. Bethia’s island is spared because there are good relations between the settlers and the Indigenous population.
By the time the war ends, Ammi Ruhamma only has negative associations of the mainland and wants to stay on the island. He becomes a boat builder, creating innovative designs that make use of old world technology.
Part 3, Chapter 5 Summary
Bethia describes another time she returned to the island, in 1665. On that journey, she accompanies Joel, who marries Anne, with Bethia’s grandfather presiding over the service. Caleb does not accompany them, and Bethia speculates that this is because Caleb fears encountering his pawaaw uncle.
After the wedding, Joel departs on a boat but she stays behind.
Part 3, Chapters 1-5 Analysis
This portion of the book is set many years in the future while Bethia is on her deathbed. This new vantage point allows her to highlight only the most important parts of the intervening years. Since we know that both Caleb and Joel died young, Bethia’s old age also provides a bittersweet consolation to their lives cut short.
The years spent in Padua bring about a contrast only briefly mentioned in the novel’s beginning – the contrast between the European Old World and New World of the North American colonies. At present, Europe is superior in many ways—for instance, Samuel must study medicine in Italy because the colonies have no comparable educational opportunities, but people like Bethia are convinced that the New World is where the future lies. To this end, Samuel is eager to disseminate bring Old World knowledge in the New World. Of course, even the time’s most modern medical knowledge cannot do much for tuberculosis, which has already started to consume Caleb’s health.
Tensions between settlers and Indigenous people finally erupt into open warfare during the real historical conflict of the First Indian War (sometimes called King Philip’s War after Metacom’s adopted English name). In the novel, the fate of Bethia’s island, which escapes the fighting because of warmer relationships between its white settlers and the Wampanoag tribe, suggests that another form of relationships could be possible.
This section comes back to the themes of marriage and the kind of partnership possible between spouses of similarly intellectual bent. Samuel and Bethia are clearly happy together—both are committed to education as an unalloyed good, so their connection surpasses the dysfunctional one Samuel had described between his parents. Makepeace finds happiness with a wife who shares similar ideals as well—both value farming and family over erudition. Finally, the marriage of Joel and Anne offers a happier conclusion to her narrative of sexual victimization. Joel not rejecting Anne based on her lack of virginity (something most men of the time would have balked at) echoes Samuel and Bethia’s sexual appetite for each other.
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