Nooks and Corners of the New England Coast Part 18

[Ill.u.s.tration: PORTSMOUTH AND THE ISLES OF SHOALS.]

On the 15th of July, 1605, as the sun was declining in the west, a little bark of fifteen tons, manned by Frenchmen, was standing along the coast of New England, in quest of a situation to begin a settlement. The princ.i.p.al personage on board was Pierre du Guast, Sieur de Monts, a n.o.ble gentleman, and an officer of the household of Henry IV. His commission of lieutenant-general bore date at Fontainebleau in the year 1603. He was empowered by it to colonize Acadia from the fortieth to the forty-sixth parallel, in virtue of the discoveries of the Tuscan, Verazzani. It recited, in quaint old French, that Du Guast had already made several voyages to these and other neighboring countries, of which he had knowledge and experience.[97] The commission likewise conferred authority to make war or peace with the peoples inhabiting the country of Acadia, with sole power to traffic in skins and furs for ten years in the Bay of St. Clair and the river of Canada. The broad autograph of Henry and the great seal of yellow wax are appended to the parchment.

On board the bark, besides the leader of the expedition, were a few gentlemen adventurers and twenty sailors. The name of De Monts's pilot was Champdore.[98] The geographer of the expedition was Samuel Champlain. Accompanying De Monts, as guides and interpreters, were two natives, Panounias and his wife.

Since the 15th of June De Monts had been minutely examining the New England coast from St. Croix, where he had wintered, to near the forty-third parallel, in the hope of finding "a place more suitable for habitation and of a milder temperature" than the inhospitable region he had first pitched upon. The greater part of De Monts's colony remained at the Isle of St. Croix.

After leaving the mouth of the Saco, and looking in at the entrance of Kennebunk River, De Monts, still keeping as close in as was prudent with the land, which Champlain describes as flat and sandy (_platte et sabloneuse_), found himself on that July afternoon in presence of three striking landmarks.[99] Cape Ann bore south, a quarter east, six leagues distant. To the west was a deep bay into which, the savages afterward told him, a river emptied; and in the offing they perceived three or four islands of fair elevation. These last, historians agree, were the Isles of Shoals.

Notwithstanding the isles are not identified on either of Champlain's maps (1612 and 1632), it is no longer doubtful that De Monts made them out nine years before Smith saw them, though the latter has first given them on a map a locality and a name. But I take Pring to have been the first to mention them, when, two years before De Monts, he sighted a mult.i.tude of small islands in about forty-three degrees, and anch.o.r.ed under the shelter of the greatest.[100] Gosnold must have seen the isles, but thought them hardly worth entering in his log. Prince Charles, afterward Charles I., graciously confirmed the name Smith had, in 1614, given the isles. Yet he has little or no t.i.tle to be considered their discoverer, and has left no evidence that he ever landed upon them. The French, Smith relates, had two ships forty leagues to the westward (of Monhegan) that had made great trade while he was on the coast. Beyond all these, the Basque shallop seen in these waters by Gosnold remains a nut for historians to crack.

De Poutrincourt's expedition of 1606 into Ma.s.sachusetts Bay was the sequel to that of 1605. De Monts, a heretic, through the jealousy of rivals and Jesuit intrigue, was soon deprived of the privileges with which he had been endowed by his fickle monarch. In this his experience was not unlike that of Gorges and the Council of Plymouth. De Monts was really the head of a commercial company, organized by Chauvin, governor of Dieppe.[101] The detail of his voyage along the New England coast in 1605 is the first intelligible record to be found. Shall we not, at last, have to do the tardy justice of acknowledging him the chief and guiding spirit of the expedition, now universally referred to as Champlain's? The latter has become the prominent figure, while Du Guast is not even mentioned in some of our so-called school histories.

Christopher Levett is the first Englishman to give an account of the isles worthy of the name. Its brevity may be advantageously contrasted with later descriptions, though the natural features remain, in many respects, the same. He says, writing seven years after Captain Smith:

"The first place I set my foot upon in New England was the Isle of Shoals, being islands in the sea about two leagues from the main.

"Upon these islands I neither could see one good timber-tree nor so much good ground as to make a garden.

"The place is found to be a good fishing-place for six ships, but more can not well be there, for want of convenient stage room, as this year's experience hath proved."

The year 1623 is the earliest date I have seen of the islands being occupied as a fishing station. Monhegan was earlier known, and more frequented by English vessels for this purpose. A word or two about the fishery of those days.

Cabot notices the cod under the name of "bacalo;" Jean Alfonse speaks of the "bacaillos;" Captain Uring calls it "baccalew;" the Indian name was "tamwock." Smith says the fish on our coast were much better than those taken at Newfoundland, which he styles "poor John," a nickname ever since current up the Mediterranean. One of his ships, in 1614, loaded with dry fish for Spain, where the cargo brought "forty ryalls," or five dollars, the quintal. Fifteen or eighteen men, by his relation, took with the hook alone sixty thousand fish in a month.

Charlevoix believed this fish could turn itself inside out, like a pocket. He says they found bits of iron and gla.s.s, and even pieces of broken pots, in the stomachs of fish caught on the Banks of Newfoundland; and adds that some people believed they could digest them.

Josselyn says the fishermen used to tan their sails and nets with hemlock-bark to preserve them.

Allusion has been made to the number of fishermen frequenting the Grand Banks in 1578. Without the evidence few would be willing to believe the fishery had attained such proportions at that early day, on a coast we have been accustomed to regard as almost unknown. It certainly goes very far toward dispelling illusions respecting the knowledge that was had of our own sh.o.r.es by those adventurous "toilers of the sea."

In Captain Richard Whitbourne's relation of his voyages and observations in Newfoundland (Purchas, vol. iv., p. 1882), he says:

"More than four hundred sail of fishing ships were annually sent to the Grand Banks by the French and Portuguese, making two voyages a year, fishing winter and summer.

"In the year 1615, when I was at Newfoundland," he adds, "there were then on that coast of your Majestie's subjects two hundred and fiftie saile of ships, great and small. The burthens and tonnage of them all, one with another, so neere as I could take notice, allowing every ship to be at least three-score tun (for as some of them contained lesse, so many of them held more), amounting to more than 15,000 tunnes. Now, for every three-score tun burthen, according to the usual manning of ships in those voyages, agreeing with the note I then tooke, there are to be set doune twentie men and boyes; by which computation in these two hundred and fiftie saile there were no lesse than five thousand persons."

De Poutrincourt, writing to Paris in 1618 from Port Royal, estimates the fishery to be then worth a "_million d'or_" annually to France. He declares he would not exchange Canada for Peru if it were once seriously settled; and foreshadows the designs of the English on New France as soon as they should have made themselves strong in Virginia. By a royal edict of 1669 the French fishermen of New France were allowed to land their fish in all the ports of the mother country, except Havre, free of duty.

The advantages possessed by the Isles of Shoals were deep water, with a reasonably secure haven for ships, free from molestation by the savages, while the crews were engaged in taking and curing their fish. To this ought to be added their nearness to the best fishing grounds. All along sh.o.r.e the islands were, as a rule, earlier frequented than the main-land. Levett says (and he thought it a fatal objection) the ships that fished at Cape Ann in 1623 had to send their boats _twenty miles_ to take their fish, and the masters were in great fear of not making their voyages. "I fear there hath been too fair a gloss set upon Cape Ann," writes Levett.

La Hontan, writing from Quebec in 1683, says of the cod-fishery on the Banks of Newfoundland: "You can scarce imagine what quant.i.ties of cod-fish were catch'd there by our seamen in the s.p.a.ce of a quarter of an hour; for though we had thirty-two fathom water, yet the hook was no sooner at the bottom than the fish was catch'd; so that they had nothing to do but to throw in and take up without interruption. But, after all, such is the misfortune of this fishery that it does not succeed but upon certain banks, which are commonly past over without stopping. However, as we were plentifully entertain'd at the cost of these fishes, so such of 'em as continued in the sea made sufficient reprisals on the corpse of a captain and of several soldiers who died of the scurvy, and were thrown overboard three or four days after."

It is worthy of note that the _Trial_, the first vessel built in Boston, took a lading of fish to Bilboa, in 1643, that were sold to good profit.

From thence she took freight for Malaga, and brought home wine, oil, fruit, iron, etc. She was then sent to trade with La Tour and Acadia.

The _Trial_ was of about a hundred and sixty tons burden.[102] In the year 1700 there were two hundred New England vessels loaded in Acadia with fish. The cargoes were taken to Boston, and there distributed to different parts of the world.

After the isles became permanently inhabited the fishery continued prosperous, and by 1730 three or four vessels were annually loaded for Bilboa. Before the Revolution seven or eight schooners hailed from the islands, but from this period the fishery dates its decay. In 1800 only sh.o.r.e-fishing was pursued, which employed thirteen whale-boats similar to those now in use, and the best of all boats in a sea.

Besides the fish itself, the liver of the cod, as is well known, is saved for the oil it contains. Hake sounds are of greater value than the fish, being extensively used in the manufacture of isingla.s.s. The efficacy of the cod's liver was early known. "Their livers and sounds eaten," says an old writer, "is a good medicine for to restore them that have melted their grease."

The interest with which the obscure lives of these islanders and the cl.u.s.ter of inhospitable rocks on which they dwell are invested is remarkable enough. It may be in a measure owing to the irregular intercourse formerly held with the main-land, and to the consequently limited knowledge of them. And it is heightened in no small degree by the mystery of a residence in the midst of the sea, where all ties with the adjacent continent would seem to be dissevered. But if the open Polar Sea be a fact and not a myth, the continents are themselves but larger islands with more expanded horizons.

I happened one day to be in Portsmouth. _Entre nous_, if you want to be esteemed there you must say "Porchmouth," as even the lettered of that ilk do. The morning air had been freshened and sweetened by copious showers; little pools stood in the streets, and every blade of gra.s.s was tipped with a crystal rain-drop. Old Probabilities had foretold clearing weather. Every thing seemed propitious, except that it continued to rain "pitchforks," with the tines downward, and that the wind was steadily working round to the eastward. As the struggle between foul and fair seemed at length to incline to the latter, I went down to the wharf to find the packet for the Shoals had already unmoored, and was standing across the river. Unloosing a dory that was lying conveniently near, I boarded the _Marie_ as she came about, thus putting myself _en rapport_ with the Shoals by means of this little floating bridge, or island, as you may please to have it.

[Ill.u.s.tration: s.h.a.g AND MINGO ROCKS, DUCK ISLAND.]

It being the first day of summer, the pa.s.sengers were so few as to be easily taken in at a glance. They were chiefly workmen employed on the great hotel at Star Island, or, as they chose to style themselves, convicts going into servitude on a desert rock: so cheaply did they hold the attractions of the isles. Perhaps one or two of the pa.s.sengers had no more business at the islands than myself.

It is not easy to have a more delightful sail than down the Piscataqua, or to find a more beautiful stream when its banks are clothed in green.

It has often been described, and may again be, without fear of exhausting its capabilities. The movement of shipping to and fro; the shifting of objects as you glide by them, together with the historic renown with which its sh.o.r.es are incrusted, fill the eye while exciting the imagination. A few miles above Portsmouth the river expands into a broad basin, which receives the volume of tide, and then pours it into the sea between narrow banks.

We gained the narrows of the river with Peirce's Island on the right and Seavey's on the left, each crowned with gra.s.s-grown batteries thrown up in the Revolution to defend the pa.s.s. Here the stream is not a good rifle-shot in breadth, and moves with increased velocity within the contracted s.p.a.ce, the swirl and eddying of the current resembling the boiling of a huge caldron. Its surface is ringed with miniature whirlpools, and at flood-tide the mid-channel seems lifted above the level of the river, as I have seen the mighty volume of the Missouri during its annual rise. It is not strange the place should have received the anathemas of mariners from immemorial time, or boast a name so unconventional withal as Pull-and-be-d--d Point.

Clearing the narrows, we left behind us the city steeples, the big ship-houses, lazy war ships, and tall chimneys on Kittery side. The wind being light, the skipper got up a stay-sail from the fore-hatch. As it was bent to the halyards, a bottle labeled "ginger ale," but smelling uncommonly like schnapps, rolled out of its folds. We were now slowly forging past Newcastle, or Great Island. The sun came out gloriously, lighting up the spire of the little church at Kittery Point and the masts of vessels lying at anchor in the roads.

Glancing astern, I remarked four wherries coming down at a great pace with the ebb. They kept directly abreast of each other, as if moved by a single oarsman, while the rowers talked and laughed as they might have done on the pavement ash.o.r.e. I could see by the crates piled in the stern of each boat that they were lobstermen, going outside to look after their traps. As they went by they seemed so many huge water-spiders skimming the surface of the river.

Fort Const.i.tution, with its dismantled walls and frowning port-holes, is now pa.s.sed, and Whale's Back, with twin light-houses, shows its ledges above water. We open the mouth of the river with Odiorne's Point on the starboard and Gerrish's Island on the port bow, the swell of ocean lifting our little bark, and making her courtesy to the great deep.

The islands had appeared in view when we were off Newcastle, the hotel on Star Island, where it loomed like some gray sea-fortress, being the most conspicuous object. As we ran off the sh.o.r.e, the "cape of the main-land" and the "_cul-de-sac_" of Champlain came out, and fixed themselves where he had seen them. One by one the islands emerged from the dark ma.s.s that involved the whole, and became individuals. The wind dying away off Duck Island, I was fain to take an oar in the whale-boat towing astern. We rowed along under Appledore into the little haven between that island and Star, with no sound but the dip of our oars to break the stillness, and beached our boat as the evening shadows were deepening over a stormy sea.

There had been a striking sunset. Great banks of clouds were ma.s.sed above the western horizon, showing rifts of molten gold where the sun burst through, which the sea, in its turn, reflected. As I looked over toward White Island, the lamps were lighted in the tower, turning their rays. .h.i.ther and thither over a blackness that recalled Poe's sensuous imagery of lamp-light gloating over purple velvet. The weather-wise predicted a north-easter, and I went to bed with the old sea "moaning all round about the island."

I pa.s.sed my first night, and a rude one it was, on Star Island. When I arose in the morning and looked out I fancied myself at sea, as indeed I was. The ocean was on every side, the plash of the waters being the last sound heard at night and the first on waking. I saw the sun rise over s.m.u.tty Nose through the same storm-clouds in which it had set at evening. I am an early riser, but even before I was astir a wherry crossed the little harbor my window overlooked.

The islands lie in two States, and are seven in number. Duck Island, the most dangerous of the group; Appledore, sometimes called Hog Island; s.m.u.tty Nose, or Haley's, and Cedar, belong to Maine; Star, White, and Londoner's, or Lounging Island, are in New Hampshire. Appledore is the largest, and Cedar the smallest. In one instance I have known Star called Staten Island, though it was formerly better known as Gosport, the name of its fishing village, whose records go back to 1731. Counting Malaga, a little islet attached to s.m.u.tty Nose by a breakwater, and there are eight islands in the cl.u.s.ter. They are nine miles south-east of the entrance of the Piscataqua and twenty-one north-east from Newburyport Light. The harbor, originally formed by Appledore, Star, and Haley's Islands, was made more secure by a sea-wall, now much out of repair, from s.m.u.tty Nose to Cedar Island. The roadstead is open to the south-west, and is indifferently sheltered at best. Between Cedar and Star is a narrow pa.s.sage used by small craft, through which the tide runs as in a sluice-way. The group is environed with several dangerous sunken rocks. Square Rock is to the westward of Londoner's; White Island Ledge south-west of that isle; Anderson's Ledge is south-east of Star Island; and Cedar Island Ledge south of s.m.u.tty Nose.[103]

The name of the Isles of Shoals is first mentioned by Christopher Levett in his narrative of 1623. The mariners of his day must have known of the description and the map of Smith, but they seem to have little affected the name he gave the islands. It would not be unreasonable to infer that the group was known by its present name even before it was seen by Smith, and that his claims were of little weight with those matter-of-fact fishermen. Some writers have made a difficulty of the meaning of the name, attributing it to the shoals, or schools, of fish seen there as everywhere along the coast at certain seasons of the year.

East of the islands, toward the open sea, there is laid down on old charts of the Province an extensive shoal called Jeffrey's Ledge, named perhaps for one of the first inhabitants of the isles, and extending in the direction of the coast from the lat.i.tude of Cape Porpoise to the southward of the Shoals. On either side of this shallow, which is not of great breadth, are soundings in seventy fathoms, while on the ledge the lead brings up coa.r.s.e sand in thirty, thirty-five, and forty-five fathoms. The presence of this reef tends to strengthen the theory that these islands, as well as the remarkable system of Cas...o...b..y, once formed part of the main-land. The earlier navigators who approached the coast, cautiously feeling their way with the lead, soon after pa.s.sing over this shoal came in sight of the islands, which, it is believed, served to mark its presence. Jeffrey's Ledge has been a fishing-ground of much resort for the islanders since its first discovery.[104]

To whatever cause science may attribute the origin of the isles, I was struck, at first sight, with their resemblance to the bald peaks of a submerged volcano thrust upward out of the waters, the little harbor being its crater. The remarkable fissures traversing the crust of the several members of the group, in some cases nearly parallel with the sh.o.r.es, strengthens the impression. In winter, or during violent storms, the savagery of these rocks, exposed to the full fury of the Atlantic, and surrounded by an almost perpetual surf, is overwhelming. You can with difficulty believe the island on which you stand is not reeling beneath your feet.

After exploring the sh.o.r.e and seeing with his own eyes the deep gashes in its mailed garment, the basins hollowed out of granite and flint, and the utter wantonness in which the sea has pitched about the fragments it has wrested from the solid rock, the futility of words in which to express this confusion comes home to the spectator. Mr. Hawthorne's idea greatly resembles the Indian legend of the origin of Nantucket. "As much as any thing else," he says, "it seems as if some of the ma.s.sive materials of the world remained superfluous after the Creator had finished, and were carelessly thrown down here, where the millionth part of them emerge from the sea, and in the course of thousands of years have become partially bestrewn with a little soil."

The old navigators stigmatized Labrador as the place to which Cain was banished, no vegetation being produced among the rocks but thorns and moss. What a subject White Island would make for a painting of the Deluge!

A Finlander with whom I parleyed told me his country could show ruder places than these isles, and that the winters there were longer and colder. Parson Tucke used to say the winters at the Shoals were "a thin under-waistcoat, warmer" than on the opposite main-land. Doubtless the Orkneys or Hebrides equal these islands in desolateness and wildness of aspect, but they could scarce surpa.s.s them.

The islands are so alike in their natural features that a general description of one will apply to the rest of the cl.u.s.ter; and hence the first explored, so far as its crags, sea-caverns, and galleries are in question, is apt to make the strongest impression. But after closer acquaintance each of the seven is found to possess attractions, peculiarities even, of its own. They grow upon you and charm away your better judgment, until you find sermons, or what is better, in stones, and good health everywhere. The change comes over you imperceptibly, and you are metamorphosed for the time into a full-fledged "Shoaler," ready to climb a precipice or handle an oar with any native--I was about to say of the soil--but that would be quite too strong a figure for the Shoals.

The little church on Star Island is usually first visited. When I was before here, it was a strikingly picturesque object, surmounting the islands, and visible in clear weather twenty miles at sea. It is now dwarfed by the hotel, and is perhaps even no longer a sea-mark for the fishermen. Such quaint little turrets have I seen in old Dutch prints.

The ma.s.sive walls are of rough granite from the abundance of the isle.

Its roof and tower are of wood, and, being here, what else could it have but a fish for its weather-vane? The bell was used, while I was there, to call the workmen to their daily labor; but its tones were always mournful, and vibrated with strange dissonance across the sea.

The whitewash the interior walls had received was plentifully bespattered upon the wooden benches. In a deeply recessed window one of the tiny sea-birds that frequent the islands was beating the panes with its wings. I gave the little fellow his liberty, but he did not stay for thanks. The church is not more than ten paces in length by six in breadth, yet was sufficient, no doubt, for all the church-goers of the seven islands. Its foundations are upon a rock, and it is altogether a queer thing in an odd place.

After the desertion of Appledore, a meeting-house was erected on Star Island, twenty-eight by forty-eight feet, with a bell. Mr. Moody, of Salisbury, Ma.s.sachusetts, was, in 1706, called to be the first minister there. In 1730 he was succeeded by Rev. John Tucke.

Mather relates many anecdotes of Rev. John Brock, one of the early ministers at the islands, in ill.u.s.tration of the efficacy of prayer. The child of one Arnold, he says, lay sick, so nearly dead that those present believed it had really expired; "but Mr. Brock, perceiving some life in it, goes to prayer, and in his prayer uses this expression, 'Lord, wilt thou not grant some sign before we leave prayer that thou wilt spare and heal this child? We can not leave thee 'til we have it.'