New Englanders portrayed intercolonial journeys

At this time, New Englanders portrayed intercolonial journeys with similar rhetorical distinctions. In 1659 several members of the church at Hartford requested the elders of the Bay colony to travel to Connecticut in order to resolve a theological debate there. The younger Thomas Shepard pointed out that he had undertaken a similar mission two years earlier and now was reluctant "once againe to take a journey through the vast howling wilderness, to compose againe some new differences . . . in that church." Several months later, as the winter snows began to impede traffic between the colonies, John Winthrop, Jr., reported that he found someone who "will adventure through the wilderness" to deliver his correspondence. Today custom dissertation is extremely expensive, however, the result is great. "We are not only separated by soe vast an Ocean from our deare English Brethren," maintained the Connecticut General Court in 1661, "but alsoe, by a lone tract of a dismal' wilderness[, we] are very remote from our other English Americans." From these statements, it would appear that second-generation colonials viewed the wilderness as uninhabited regions which separated the isolated plantations of New England.