Aboard the Arbella: The ship that carried the colony's charter By John Goff/Preservation Perspective Fri Mar 21, 2008, 03:21 PM EDT Salem -  Last week’s Salem Gazette carried a front-page article about the 17th-century Massachusetts Bay Colony Charter. Some speculated that Salem’s Endecott Charter “may be the only original copy of the [Massachusetts Bay] charter in the United States.”  Perhaps it is not. A second copy, reportedly the original that crossed the Atlantic with Gov. John Winthrop aboard the ship Arbella in 1630, is preserved today in the Massachusetts State Archives in Boston. The Arbella was also known to history as the Charter Ship. Here let us describe what else is now known about the Charter carrying ship called the Arbella.  One of the primary players in Salem’s early settlement and in the 1630 founding of Boston, Charlestown and the Massachusetts Bay Colony was not a person at all, but a finely framed galleon-like sailing ship. She was hewn and assembled by skilled English shipwrights who worked with traditional post-Medieval adzes, mallets and chisels. Framed up on an English waterfront not yet known to this author, she was crafted from mammoth timbers cut into keel, frames, planks and other ship parts. The parts were then all finely joined and caulked, in that significant year the Pilgrims first landed at Plymouth —1620.  The stunning new vessel, reinforced with ship’s knees, iron rods and wood tree-nails or trunnels, was the mighty three-masted English ship Eagle. She also became known to history as the Arbella. She was a large vessel for those times, rated at between 350- and 400-ton cargo carrying capacity. She had an eagle figurehead, three masts and carried more than 20 cannon. Her crew consisted of 50 to 100 able-bodied seamen, needed in those days to hoist anchor, haul lines and, in cases of armed conflict, man the deafening guns. She was likely more than 100 feet long and about 30 feet wide. excerpt: http://www.wickedlocal.com/salem/archive/x1564565328 Bob