Nooks and Corners of the New England Coast Part 34

When Edward Winslow was in England as agent of the colony, and was interrogated at the instance of Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, before the Lords Commissioners of the Plantations, he was, among other things, questioned upon this practice of marriage by magistrates. He answered boldly that he found nothing in Scripture to restrict marriage to the clergy. He also alleged that the plantation had long been without a minister, and finished by citing, as a precedent, his own marriage by a magistrate at the _Staat-haus_ in Holland. Morton, who appeared as an accuser of Winslow, says, "The people of New England held the use of a ring in marriage to be a relique of popery, a diabolical circle for the Devell to daunce in."

As soon as they had definitely settled upon a location, the colonists went to work building their town. They began to prepare timber as early as the 23d of December, but the inclemency of the season and the distance every thing was to be transported--there were no trees standing within an eighth of a mile of the present Leyden Street--made the work painfully laborious and the progress slow. On the twenty-eighth day the company was consolidated into nineteen families, the single men joining some household in order to lessen the number of houses to be built. They then staked out the ground, giving every person half a pole in breadth and three in length. Each head of a family chose his homestead by lot, and each man was required to build his own house. By Tuesday, the 9th of January, the Common House wanted nothing but the thatch to be complete; still, although it was only twenty feet square, the weather was so inclement that it took four days to cover it. They could seldom work half the week.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SITE OF THE COMMON HOUSE.]

Captain Smith says, in 1624, the town consisted of two-and-thirty houses and about a hundred and eighty people. The Common House is believed to have stood on the south side of Leyden Street, where the abrupt descent of the hill begins. In digging a cellar on the spot, in 1801, sundry tools and a plate of iron were discovered, seven feet below the surface of the ground. This house is supposed to have served the colonists for every purpose of a public nature until the building of their fortress on Burial Hill. Mourt calls it their rendezvous, and relates that a few days after completion it took fire from a spark in the thatch. At the time of the accident Governor Carver and William Bradford were lying sick within, with their muskets charged, and the thatch blazing above them, to their very great danger. In this Common House the working parties slept until their dwellings were made ready.

It was worth living two hundred years ago to have witnessed one street scene that took place here. John Oldham, the contentious, the incorrigible, dared to return to Plymouth after banishment. He had, with Lyford, tried to breed a revolt among the disaffected of the colony. A rough and tough malignant was Oldham, fiercely denouncing the magistrates to their teeth when called to answer for his misdeeds. He defied them roundly in their grave a.s.sembly. Turning to the by-standers, he exclaimed:

"My maisters whar is your harts? now show your courage, you have oft complained to me so and so; now is ye tyme if you will doe any thing, I will stand by you."

He returned more choleric than before, calling those he met rebels and traitors, in his mad fury. They put him under guard, until his wrath had time to cool, and set their invention to work. He was compelled to pa.s.s through a double file of musketeers, every one of whom "was ordered to give him a thump on ye brich, with ye but end of his musket," and was then conveyed to the water-side, where a boat was in readiness to carry him away. They then bid him go and mend his manners. The idea of the gantlet was, I suspect, borrowed from the Indians.

This little colony of pilgrims was at first a patriarchal community.

Every thing was in common. Each year an acre of land was allotted to every inhabitant to cultivate. The complete failure of the experiment ought to stand for a precedent, though it seems somehow to have been forgotten. Men, they found, would not work for the common interest as for themselves, and so the idea of a community of dependents was abandoned for an a.s.sociation of independent factors. From this time they began to get on. The rent-day did not trouble them. "We are all freeholders," writes Edward Hilton home to England. In 1626 the planters bought themselves free of the undertakers, who oppressed them with ruinous charges for every thing furnished the colony. Allerton, who was sent over in 1625 to beg the loan of one hundred pounds sterling, was obliged to pay thirty pounds in the hundred interest for the two hundred pounds he had obtained. In the year 1627 they divided all their stock into shares, giving each person, or share, twenty acres of land, besides the single acre already allotted.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE ALLYNE HOUSE.]

It is time to resume our walk down Leyden Street. On reaching the bluff before mentioned the street divides, one branch descending the declivity toward the water, while the other skirts the hill-side. The Universalist Church at the corner marks the site of the Allyne House, an ancient dwelling demolished about 1826. By the Plymouth records, it appears that, in 1699, Mr. Joseph Allyne married Mary Doten, daughter of Edward, and granddaughter of that Edward Doten who had come in the _Mayflower_.

Among the children of Joseph Allyne born in the old homestead was Mary, who became the mother of that "flame of fire," James Otis. The house commanded a fine view of the bay, its foundations being higher than the chimneys in the streets below. It may not, perhaps, be generally known that James Otis, after completing his studies in the office of Jeremiah Gridley, then the most eminent lawyer in the province, came from Boston to Plymouth, where he took an office in the main street. He practiced there during the years 1748-'49, when his talents called him to a broader field.

Mercy, the sister of James Otis, married James Warren, a native of Plymouth. He succeeded General Joseph Warren as president of the Provincial Congress of Ma.s.sachusetts, but is better known as the author of the celebrated "Committee of Correspondence," which he proposed to Samuel Adams while the latter was at his house. Mrs. Warren, at the age of seventy, was visited by the Duke De Liancourt. "She then retained,"

he says, "the activity of mind which distinguished her as a sister of James Otis; nor had she lost the graces of person or conversational powers, which made her still a charming companion." For reasons apparent to the reader, she resolved not to send her "History of the Revolution"

to the press during her husband's lifetime.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE JOANNA DAVIS HOUSE, COLE'S HILL.]

Going beyond the church, we come upon the open s.p.a.ce of greensward, intersected by foot-paths, known as Cole's Hill. Some defensive works were erected on this bank in 1742, in the Revolution, and again in 1814.

I have already traversed it in imagination, when standing on the summit of Burial Hill. It is no longer a place of graves, nor does it in the least suggest, by any monumental symbol, the tragedy of the Pilgrims'

first winter here, when, as Bradford touchingly says, "Ye well were not in any measure sufficient to tend ye sicke; nor the living scarce able to burie the dead." Their greatest strait was in May and June, when there were no wild fowl. Winslow says they were without good tackle or seines to take the fish that swam so abundantly in the harbor and creeks.

We may not disguise the fact. The least attractive object is the Rock of the Forefathers. The stranger who comes prepared to do homage to the spot the Pilgrims' feet first pressed, finds his sensibility stricken in a vital place. The insignificant appearance of the rock itself, buried out of sight beneath a shrine made with hands, and the separation of the sacred ledge into two fragments, each of which claims a divided regard, give a death-blow to the emotions of awe and reverence with which he approaches this corner-stone of American history.

Plymouth Rock, or rather what is left of it in its original position, is reached by following Water Street, which, as its name indicates, skirts the sh.o.r.e, conducting you through a region once devoted to commerce, now apparently consigned to irretrievable decay. Near Hedge's Wharf, and in close vicinity to the old Town Dock, is the object of our present search. A canopy, designed by Billings, has been built above it. I entered. In the stone pavement is a cavity of perhaps two feet square, and underneath the uneven surface the rock appears. I had often wished to stand here, but now all enthusiasm was gone out of me. I had rather have contented myself with the small piece so long treasured, and with the loom of the rock as my imagination had beheld it, than to stand in the actual presence of it.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLYMOUTH ROCK IN 1850.]

By the building of street and wharf on a higher level the rock is now at some little distance from high-water mark.[196] At one time the sea had heaped the sand upon it to the depth of twenty feet, but the tradition of the spot had been well kept, and at the dawn of the Revolution the sand was cleared away, and the rock again laid bare. This was in 1774.

In the attempt to remove it from its bed it split asunder, the superst.i.tious seeing in this accidental fracture a presage of the division of the British empire in America. The upper half, or sh.e.l.l, of Forefathers' Rock was removed to the middle of the village, and placed at the end of a wall, where, along with vulgar stones, it propped the embankment. In 1834 the fractured half was removed from the town square to its present position in front of Pilgrim Hall, where it is now lying.

The honor of having first set foot on this threshold of fame is claimed for John Alden and Mary Chilton. The question of precedence will probably never be settled. It is also claimed for the exploring party who landed from the shallop on Monday, the 21st of December, commonly called Forefathers' Day.[197]

For more than two hundred years the 22d of December had been observed as the day of the landing; that is, in effect, to say, it had been so observed by the Pilgrims themselves, by their descendants around their firesides, and had received the sanction of formal commemoration, in 1769, by the Old Colony Club. Men were then living who were within two generations of the first comers, and retained all their traditions unimpaired. After this long period had elapsed, it was a.s.sumed that the Pilgrims had designed to signalize the landing of the exploring party of eighteen, rather than that from the _Mayflower_, and upon this theory, by adopting the new style, the landing was fixed for the 21st, a subst.i.tution which has been generally acquiesced in by recent writers.

Unless it is believed that the landing of the party of discovery possessed greater significance to the Pilgrims, and to those who lived within hearing of the voices of the _Mayflower_, than the disembarkation of the whole body of colonists on the very strand they had finally adopted for their future home, the presumption of error in computing the difference between old and new style has little force.

For six weeks these explorations had continued all along the coast-line of Cape Cod, and nothing had been settled until the return of the last party to the ship. The _Mayflower_ then sailed for Plymouth, and cast anchor in the harbor on the 16th; but the explorations continued, nor was there a decision until the 20th as to the best point for fixing the settlement. Moreover, there are no precise reasons for saying that the first exploring party landed anywhere within the limits of the present town of Plymouth, nor any tradition of its making the rock a stepping-stone.

We prefer to believe that the Pilgrims meant to ill.u.s.trate the landing from the _Mayflower_--the event emphasized by poets, painters, and orators--as marking the true era of settlement; that the 22d of December was intelligently adopted by those best able to judge of their intentions; and that an unbroken custom of more than two centuries should remain undisturbed, even if it had originated in a technical error, which we do not believe was the case. "This rock," says the gifted De Tocqueville, "has become an object of veneration in the United States. I have seen bits of it carefully preserved in several towns of the Union. Does not this sufficiently show that all human power and greatness is in the soul of man? Here is a stone which the feet of a few outcasts pressed for an instant, and the stone becomes famous; it is treasured by a great nation; its very dust is shared as a relic. And what has become of the gate-ways of a thousand palaces? Who cares for them?"

The skeleton of a body was here before them, but, as Carlyle says, the soul was wanting until these men and women came. Mr. Sherley, writing to Bradford, says, "You are the people that must make a plantation and erect a city in those remote places when all others fail and return."

I do not find such conspicuous examples of intolerance among the Pilgrims as afterward existed in the Bay Colony. Lyford said they were Jesuits in their ecclesiastical polity, but they permitted him to gather a separate church and perform the Episcopal service among them. Beyond question, they were not willing to see the hierarchy from which they had fled establish itself in their midst. The intrigues of such men as Lyford within the colony, and Weston in the company at home, kept back the remnant of their own chosen a.s.sociates, and re-enforced them with churchmen, or else men of no particular religion or helpfulness.

In November, 1621, the planters received an accession of thirty-five persons by the _Fortune_.[198] It was the custom in the plantation for the governor to call all the able-bodied men together every day, and lead them to their work in the fields or elsewhere. On Christmas-day they were summoned as usual, but most of the new-comers excused themselves, saying it was against their consciences to work on that day.

The governor told them if they made it a matter of conscience he would spare them until they were better informed. He then led away the rest.

When those who had worked came home at noon they found the conscientious observers of the day in the street, at play; some pitching the bar, and some at stool-ball and like sports. The governor went to them, took away their implements, and told them it was against his conscience they should play while others worked. If they made keeping the day a matter of devotion, they must keep their houses, but there must be no gaming or reveling in the streets. a.s.suredly there was some fun in William Bradford, governor.

Hutchinson--after all the abuse of him, the fairest historian as to what transpired in advance of the Revolutionary period--gives the Plymouth colonists credit for moderation. When Mrs. Hutchinson was banished by Ma.s.sachusetts, she and her adherents applied for and obtained leave to settle on Aquidneck, then acknowledged to be within the Plymouth patent.

Before this, Roger Williams, who had been their minister, was, after his banishment from Salem, kindly used, though requested to remove beyond their limits, for fear of giving offense to the Ma.s.sachusetts colony.

Many Quakers probably saved their lives by fleeing to Plymouth, although the Pilgrims detested their worship and enacted laws against them. The town of Swanzey[199] was almost wholly settled by Baptists.

The relations of the Pilgrims with the Indians were founded in right and justice, and stood on broader grounds than mere policy. This is shown in the unswerving attachment of Ma.s.sasoit, the fidelity of Samoset, and the friendship of Squanto. The appearance of Samoset in the Pilgrim village was of good augury to the colony, and is worthy of a more appreciative pencil than has yet essayed it.

About the middle of March, after many false alarms of the savages, an Indian stalked into the town. Pa.s.sing silently by the houses, he made straight for the rendezvous. I think I see the matrons and maids peeping through their lattices at the dusky intruder. He was tall, straight of limb, and comely, with long black hair streaming down his bare back, for, except a narrow girdle about his loins, he was stark naked. When he would have gone into the rendezvous the guard intercepted him. He was armed with a bow, and in his quiver were only two arrows, one headed, the other unheaded, as indicating the pacific nature of his mission. His bearing was frank and fearless, as became a sagamore. "Welcome, Englishmen," he said to the by-standers, astounded, as well they might be, on hearing such familiar salutation from the lips of a savage.

The first thing this Indian asked for was beer. The Pilgrims themselves preferred it to water, but they had none left; so they feasted him on good English cheer, and gave him strong waters to wash it down. His naked body excited astonishment, and a compa.s.sionate Pilgrim cast a horseman's cloak about him. Of all the a.s.sembly that encircled him, Samoset alone seemed unconcerned. The settlers had seen skulking savages on the hills, but they knew not what to make of this fellow, who thus dropped in on them, as it were, for a morning call. Since their first encounter with the Nauset Indians, they expected enmity, and not friendship. A midnight a.s.sault in their unprepared state was the thing most dreaded. Peace or war seemed to reside in the person of this Indian. They watched him narrowly. At night-fall they hoped he would take his leave; but he showed neither disposition to depart, nor distrust at beholding himself the evident object of mingled fear and suspicion. They concluded to send him on board the _Mayflower_ for safe-keeping, and Samoset went willingly to the shallop; but it was low tide, and they could not reach the vessel. So they lodged him in Steven Hopkins's house. The next day he left them to go to Ma.s.sasoit, and they finished by recognizing him as a friend, sent them by Heaven. Samoset was the Pemaquid chief, of whom we should gladly know more than we do.

His communications were of importance to the Pilgrims, for Bradford admits that the exact description he gave them of his own country and of its resources was very profitable to them. I suppose it led to their establishing the trading-houses at Pen.o.bscot and Kennebec, and to the addition of the strip of country on the latter river to their patent of 1629, afterward enlarged by other tracts purchased of the Indians. The Pilgrims preferred trading to fishing, and no subsequent colony had such an opportunity to enrich themselves; but it was the policy of the English adventurers to keep them poor, and it may be questioned whether they developed the shrewdness in traffic for which their descendants have become renowned.

Samoset's coming paved the way for that of Ma.s.sasoit, who made his entry into Plymouth with Indian pomp, in March. He was preceded by Samoset and Squanto,[200] who informed the settlers that the king was close at hand.

The Pilgrims were then a.s.sembled under arms on the top of Burial Hill, engaged in military exercise, and witnessed the approach of Ma.s.sasoit with his savage retinue of sixty warriors. Here were two representative delegations of the Old World and the New; the English in steel caps and corslets, the Indians in wild beasts' skins, paint, and feathers. The bearing of the Christians was not more martial than that of the savages.

The Pilgrims stood on their dignity, and waited. At the king's request, Edward Winslow went out to hold parley with him. His shining armor delighted the Indian sachem, who would have bought it, together with his sword, on the spot, but Winslow was unwilling to part with either. After mutual salutations and some talk of King James, Ma.s.sasoit, accompanied by twenty, proceeds to the town, leaving Winslow a hostage in the hands of Quadequina, his brother. At the town brook Ma.s.sasoit is met by Standish with half a dozen musketeers. Here are more grave salutations, and then the king is conducted to an unfinished house, where the utmost state the Pilgrims could contrive was a green rug and three or four cushions placed on the floor. There is a roll of drum and blast of trumpet in the street, and Bradford, attended by musketeers, enters. He kisses the hand of the New England prince--"tho'," says Mourt, "the king looked greasily"--and the savage kisses Bradford. Then they sit. The governor calls for a stoup of strong waters, which he quaffs to the king, after the manner of chivalry; the royal savage drinks, in return, a great draught, that makes him "sweate all the time after."

"Give me the cups, And let the kettle to the trumpet speak, The trumpet to the cannoneer without, The cannons to the heavens, the heaven to earth.

'Now the king drinks to Hamlet.' Come, begin."

It may interest some readers to know what a real Indian king was like.

"He was," says an eye-witness, "a very l.u.s.tie man, in his best yeares, an able body, grave of countenance, and spare of speech; in his Attyre little or nothing differing from the rest of his followers, only in a great Chaine of white bone Beades about his necke; and at it behinde his necke hangs a little bagg of Tobacco, which he dranke and gave us to drinke; his face was painted with a sad red like murry, and oyled both head and face, that hee looked greasily. All his followers, likewise, were in their faces in whole or in part painted, some blacke, some red, some yellow, and some white, some with crosses, and other Antick workes, some had skins on them, and some naked, all strong, tall, all men in appearance.

"One thing I forgot; the king had in his bosome, hanging to a string, a great long knife. He marvelled much at our trumpet, and some of his men would sound it as well as they could." Mourt also states that the king trembled with fear while he sat by the governor, and that the savages showed such apprehension of the fire-arms that the governor caused them to be removed during the conference.

This was the first American Congress of which I have found mention. The Indians knew what a treaty of amity meant. They needed no instruction in international law. I believe they knew the Golden Rule, or had a strong inkling of it. That was a convention more famous than the Field of the Cloth of Gold, though there were but a green rug and a few cushions.

"The peace," Bradford writes, "hath now (1645) continued this twenty-four years." "To which I may add," says Prince, "_yea, 30 years longer, viz., to 1675_."

The Indians, at the entertainment given them in Plymouth, partook heartily of the food set before them, but they could not be induced to taste spices or condiments. Salt was not used by them. Gosnold regaled them with a picnic at the Vineyard, of which John Brereton says, "the Indians misliked nothing but our mustard, whereat they made many a sowre face." I doubt not the English spread it thickly on the meat, even at the hazard of good understanding.

It took these simple natives a long time to comprehend the English method of correspondence. They could not penetrate the mystery of talking paper. There is a story of an Indian sent by Governor Dudley to a lady with some oranges, the present being accompanied with a letter in which the number was mentioned. When out of the town, the Indian put the letter under a stone, and going a short distance off, ate one of the oranges. His astonishment at finding the theft discovered was unbounded.

I did not omit a ramble among the wharves, but saw little that would interest the reader. When you are there, the proper thing to do is to take a boat and cross the bay to Clark's Island and Duxbury. We sailed over the submerged piles at the end of Long Wharf; for the pier, once the pride of Plymouth, was fast going to wreck. The tops of the piles, covered with sea-weed kept in motion by the waves, bore an unpleasant resemblance to drowned human heads bobbing up and down. As we pa.s.sed close to the new light-house off Beach Point, the boatman remarked that when it was being placed in position the caisson slipped in the slings, and dropped to the bottom nearer the edge of the channel than was desirable.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE GURNET.]

Having wind enough, we were soon up with Saquish Head, and in a few minutes more were fast moored to the little jetty at Clark's Island. The presence at one time of two islands in Plymouth Bay is fully attested by competent witnesses. Many have supposed Brown's Island, a shoal seaward of Beach Point, to have been one of these, tradition affirming that the stumps of trees have been seen there. One author[201] believes Brown's Island to have been above water in the time of the Pilgrims. Champlain locates two islands on Duxbury side, with particulars that leave no doubt where they then were. Mourt twice mentions them, and they are on Blauw's map inside the Gurnet headland. In an account of Plymouth Harbor, printed near the close of the last century, two islands are mentioned: "Clark's, consisting of about one hundred acres of excellent land, and Saquish, which was joined to the Gurnet by a narrow piece of sand: for several years the water has made its way across and insulated it. The Gurnet is an eminence at the southern extremity of the beach, on which is a light-house, built by the State."[202]

Bradford mentions the narrow escape of their pinnace from shipwreck on her return from Narraganset in 1623, by "driving on ye _flats_ that lye without, caled Brown's Ilands." Winthrop relates that in 1635 "two shallops, going, laden with goods, to Connecticut, were taken in the night with an easterly storm and cast away upon Brown's Island, near the Gurnett's Nose, and the men all drowned." In 1806 it was, as now, a shoal. There can be little dispute as to Saquish having been permanently united to the main-land by those shifting movements common to a sea-coast of sand.[203]

It is rather remarkable that, with a sea-coast exceeding that of the other New England colonies, Plymouth had so few good harbors. The beach, the safeguard of Plymouth, was once covered on the inner side with plum and wild cherry trees, pitch-pines, and undergrowth similar to that existing on Cape Cod and the adjacent islands. The sea has, in great storms, made a clean breach through it, digging channels by which vessels pa.s.sed. There was a shocking disaster within the harbor in December, 1778, when the privateer brig _General Arnold_ broke from her anchorage in the Cow Yard,[204] and was driven by the violence of the gale upon the sand-flats. Twenty-four hours elapsed before a.s.sistance could be rendered, and when it arrived seventy-five of the crew had perished from freezing and exhaustion, and the remainder were more dead than alive.[205]

As we sailed I observed shoals of herring breaking water, or, as the fishermen word it, "scooting." Formerly they were taken in prodigious quant.i.ty, and used by the Pilgrims to enrich their land. Squanto gave them the hint of putting one in every hill of corn. His manner of fishing for eels, I may add, was new to me. He trod them out of the mud with his feet, and caught them in his hands. I was surprised at the number of seals continually rising within half a cable's length of the boat, at which they curiously gazed with their bright liquid eyes. We did them no harm as ever and anon one pushed his sleek round head and whiskered muzzle above water. Hundreds of them disport themselves here in summer, though in winter they usually migrate.