Master Fancher's Light Unto Our Path - Illuminating the Mysteries of John Faunce and Stephen Hopkins

Book excerpt: Master Fancher's Light unto Our Path, is a story of tragedy and triumph, as an English boy faces his father's death at the tender age of six. Unable to provide for himself, he spends time in houses of refuge until signing as a servant to a master in the Colony of Virginia. After his servitude, he returns to England where he learns the craft of weaving, before returning to Virginia as a landowner. Triumphs and tragedies continue as he and his wife sell their land and go meandering throughout New England. There they resort to a transient lifestyle highlighted by years of hardships and humiliations. "Wm Fancy owned it as his sin his oft drinking..." William's lack of vision, magnified by his lifelong trend of non-channeled self-sufficiency plus his drinking, led to Katherine's humiliating propositions as she worked as a handmaid. In search of their place in life, the couple's wanderings heaped humiliations upon them, until triumph revisited when the two finally began to prosper in Brookhaven, L.I., N.Y.