Fortitude at roots of Stout family tree
When honoring mothers it is appropriate to recognize Penelope
Stout, whose fortitude in the face of great danger helped her
survive to bear 10 children and to become the matriarch of a
notable family.
Fortitude at roots of Stout family tree
When honoring mothers it is appropriate to recognize Penelope Stout, whose fortitude in the face of great danger helped her survive to bear 10 children and to become the matriarch of a notable family.
Penelope Thomson was born in Amsterdam in 1622 to an English couple who had sought greater religious freedom in Holland. She was 20 when she married Kent Van Prinzen, and they set off to begin their life together in the New World.
The seven-week voyage was difficult and Van Prinzen became gravely ill. He was raving in delirium by the time the ship ran aground off New Jersey. The passengers were terrified of being killed by Indians and set off immediately for New Amsterdam (now New York). Van Prinzen was too ill to travel so they abandoned him to the care of Penelope who refused to leave him.
Several hours later a band of Indians came across the pair. They killed Van Prinzen and left Penelope for dead with tomahawk blows to her head and left shoulder and a deep slash across the abdomen that exposed her bowels.
She regained consciousness hours after the Indians had gone but feared their return. Penelope painfully crawled to a hollow tree, holding her entrails in her right hand, and took shelter in it. For the next seven days, she scraped excrescence from the tree to eat and drank dew to keep alive.
On the eighth morning, she was startled by the sudden appearance of two Indians. The younger one started toward her with tomahawk in hand but the older said something and an animated conversation ensued. Just before she fainted from shock and fear, the older Indian threw her across his shoulder.
She regained consciousness in a tent with mudpacks applied to her wounds and an Indian woman urging her to sip broth.
Over the next few months, Penelope became part of the tribe and shared the duties of the women in gathering food and cooking. Her benefactor, Tisquantam, developed a fatherly fondness for her and was disappointed when she chose to return to her own people in New Amsterdam.
There she met and married Richard Stout, an Englishman who had a land grant in New Jersey. The settlers and the Indians got along and Penelope’s life took a good turn with the birth of two sons a year apart.
Then one day Tisquantam visited her and said the Indians were going to attack the settlers that night. Penelope told Stout who dismissed the story as unlikely.
However, upon reconsidering, he told the other settlers who armed themselves and waited. At midnight a band of Mohawks ran from the forest whooping but halted when they saw armed men waiting, rather than the sleeping victims they had anticipated.
Stout told the Indians that they wanted to live in peace but would fight savagely to defend themselves. The Indians reconsidered and a lasting peace followed.
When Penelope died at age 110 in 1732, the year George Washington was born, 502 descendants mourned her. The number of descendants is now more than a million. I am privileged to be among them but none of us would have existed at all except for Penelope’s fortitude.
