Nooks and Corners of the New England Coast

by Samuel Adams Drake

THE ISLES OF SHOALS.

"O warning lights, burn bright and clear,
Hither the storm comes! Leagues away
It moans and thunders low and drear—
Burn 'til the break of day!"
Celia Thaxter.

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 principal personage on board was Pierre du Guast, Sieur de Monts, a noble 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 Champdoré.[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 multitude of small islands in about forty-three degrees, and anchored 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 title 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 Massachusetts 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 glass, 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 shores 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 shore 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 quantities of cod-fish were catch'd there by our seamen in the space 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 shore-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 isinglass. 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 cluster 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 grass 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.

SHAG AND MINGO ROCKS, DUCK ISLAND.

It being the first day of summer, the passengers 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 passengers 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 shores 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 grass-grown batteries thrown up in the Revolution to defend the pass. Here the stream is not a good rifle-shot in breadth, and moves with increased velocity within the contracted space, 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 ashore. 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 Constitution, with its dismantled walls and frowning port-holes, is now passed, 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 shore, 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 mass 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 massed 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 hither 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 passed 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 Smutty 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; Smutty 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 Smutty Nose by a breakwater, and there are eight islands in the cluster. 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 Smutty 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 passage 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 Smutty 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 latitude 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 coarse 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 Casco Bay, once formed part of the main-land. The earlier navigators who approached the coast, cautiously feeling their way with the lead, soon after passing 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 shores, 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 shore 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 massive 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 surpass them.

The islands are so alike in their natural features that a general description of one will apply to the rest of the cluster; 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 massive 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, Massachusetts, 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 illustration 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.' The child sneez'd immediately."

MEETING-HOUSE, STAR ISLAND.[105]

Going round the corner of the church, I came upon a coast pilot, peering through his glass for the smoke of a steamer, cable-freighted, that had been momentarily expected from Halifax for a week. His trim little boat lay in the harbor below us at her moorings. It was, he said, a favorite station from which to intercept inward-bound vessels. The pilot told me, with a quiet chuckle, of a coaster, manned by raw Irish hands, that had attempted in broad day to run into the harbor over the breakwater from Haley's to Cedar island. They did not get in, he said; but it being a full tide and smooth sea, the mole only knocked off the cut-water of their craft.

Behind the meeting-house is the little school-house, in as dire confusion when I saw it as any bad boy could have wished. The windows were shattered, chairs and benches overturned, and a section of rusty stove-pipe hung from the ceiling, while the fragment of a wall map, pressed into service as a window-curtain, was being scanned through the dingy glass by an urchin with a turn for geography.

East of the church is a row of cottages, the remnant of the fishing village, serving to show what it was like before modern innovations had swept the moiety of ancient Gosport from the face of the island. Each had a bird-house on the peak of its gable. There was the semblance of regularity in the arrangement of these cottages, the school-house leading the van; but they were nearly or quite all unpainted, these homely abodes of a rude people.

On looking around, you perceived walled inclosures, some of them containing a little earth patched with green grass, but all thickly studded with boulders. Is it possible, you ask, that such a waste should ever be the cause of heart-burnings, or know the name of bond, mortgage, or warranty? Little did these impoverished islanders dream the day would come when their sterile rocks would be eagerly sought after by the fortunate possessors of abundance.

Star Island formerly afforded pasturage for a few sheep and cows. There is a record of a woman who died at Gosport in 1795, aged ninety. She kept two cows, fed in winter on hay cut by her in summer with a knife among the rocks. The cows were taken from her by the British in 1775, and killed, to the great grief of old Mrs. Pusley. Formerly there was more vegetation here, but at odd times the poor people have gathered and burned for fuel fully half the turf on the island. It is written in the book of records that the soil of the islands is gradually decreasing, and that a time would come when the dead must be buried in the sea or on the main-land.

From the year 1775 until 1820, the few inhabitants who remained on the islands lived in a deplorable condition of ignorance and vice. Some of them had lost their ages for want of a record. Each family was a law to itself. The town organization was abandoned. Even the marriage relation was forgotten, and the restraints and usages of civilized life set at naught. Some of the more debased, about 1790, pulled down and burned the old meeting-house, which had been a prominent landmark for seamen; but, says the record, "the special judgments of Heaven seem to have followed this piece of wickedness to those immediately concerned in it." The parsonage-house might have fared as ill, had it not been floated away to Old York by Mr. Tucke's son-in-law.

Rev. Jedediah Morse has entered in the record two marriages solemnized by him during the time he was on the islands, with the following remarks: "The two couples above mentioned had been published eight or ten years ago (but not married), and cohabited together since, and had each a number of children. —— had been formerly married to another woman; she had left him, and cohabited with her uncle, by whom she has a number of children. No regular divorce had been obtained. Considering the peculiar deranged state of the people on these islands, and the ignorance of the parties, it was thought expedient, in order as far as possible to prevent future sin, to marry them."[106]

THE GRAVES, WITH CAPTAIN JOHN SMITH'S MONUMENT, STAR ISLAND.

It is perhaps as well the visitor should be his own guide about the islands, leaving it to chance to direct his footsteps. After an inspection of the more prominent objects, such as may be taken in at a glance from the little church, I wandered at will, encountering at every few steps some new surprise. Some one says, if we seek for pleasure it is pretty sure to elude our pursuit, coming, oftener to us unawares, and the more unexpected the higher the gratification. It was in some such mood I stumbled, to speak literally, on the old burial-place of the islands. I am aware that one does not, as a rule, seek enjoyment in a grave-yard; but I have ever found an unflagging interest in deciphering the tablets of a buried city or hamlet. These stones may be sententious or loquacious, pompous or humble, and sometimes grimly merry.

Our German friends call the church-yard "God's Field." Here are no inscriptions, except on the horizontal slabs of Tucke and Stephens. There is no difference between the rough stones protruding from the ground and the fragments strewn broadcast about the little house-lots. So far as this inclosure is concerned, the annals of the hamlet are as a closed book. The instinct which bids you forbear treading on a grave is at fault here. It requires sharp eyes and a close scrutiny to discover that some effort has been made to distinguish this handful of graves by head and foot stones; that some are of greater and some of lesser length; or that the little hollows and hillocks have their secret meaning.

The two shepherds lie at the head of their little fold, in vaults composed of the rude masses found ready at hand. For fear their inscriptions might one day be effaced, I transcribed them:

In Memory of

THE REV. JOSIAH STEPHENS,

A faithful Instructor of Youth, and pious

Minister of Jesus Christ.

Supported on this Island by the

Society for Propagating the Gospel,

who died July 2, 1804.

Aged 64 years.

---

Likewise of

MRS. SUSANNAH STEPHENS,

his beloved Wife,

who died Dec. 7, 1810.

Aged 54 years.

---

Underneath

are the Remains of

THE REV. JOHN TUCKE, A.M.

He graduated at Harvard College, a.d. 1723,

Was ordained here July 26, 1732,

And died Aug. 12, 1773.

Æt. 72.

He was affable and polite in his manner,

Amiable in his disposition,

Of great piety and integrity, given to hospitality,

Diligent and faithful in his pastoral office.

Well learned in History and Geography, as well as

General Science,

And a careful Physician both to the bodies

and the souls of his People.

Erected 1800.

In Memory of the Just.

For two-score years this pious man labored in his stony vineyard. His parishioners agreed to give him a quintal per man of winter fish—their best. They covenanted to carry his wood from the landing home for him. With this he was content. He was their minister, teacher, physician, and even kept the accounts of a little store in a scrupulously exact way. I have been poring over his old-time chirography, clear-cut and beautiful as copper-plate. There are the good old English names of Ruth, Nabby, and Judy, of Betty, Patsey, and Love. We get a glimpse of their household economy in the porringers, pewter lamps, and pint-pots; the horn combs, thread, tape, and endless rows of pins for women-folk; the knitting-needles that clicked by the fireside in long winter nights, while the lads were away on Jeffrey's Ledge.

From here I wended my way to Smith's monument, erected in 1864, a triangular shaft of marble, rising eight or ten feet above a craggy rock. It is placed on a pedestal of rough stone, and protected by a railing from vandal hands. Its situation on one of the highest eminences of Star Island has exposed the inscription to the weather, until it is become difficult to decipher. The three sides of the pillar are occupied by a lengthy eulogium on this hero of many adventures,

"Of moving accidents by flood and field;
Of hair-breadth scapes i' the imminent deadly breach."

Like Temple Bar of old, the monument is crowned with heads—those of the three Moslems slain by Smith, and seen on his scutcheon, as given by Stow, where they are also quartered. I know of no other instance of decapitated heads being set up in New England since King Philip's was struck off and stuck on a pike at Plymouth, in 1676. Two of the heads had fallen down, and the third seemed inclined to follow. Then the monument will be as headless as the doughty captain's tombstone in the pavement of St. Sepulchre's, worn smooth by many feet. In brief, the three Turks' heads stick no better than the name given by Smith to the islands off Cape Ann—after they had been named by De Monts.

Smith says he had six or seven charts or maps of the coast so unlike each other as to do him no more good than waste paper. He gives credit to Gosnold and Weymouth for their relations.

A few rods south-east of the old burying-ground is a sheltered nook, in which are three little graves, wholly concealed by dwarf willows and wild rose-bushes. They are tenanted by three children—"Jessie," two years; "Millie," four years; and "Mittie," seven years old—the daughters of Rev. George Beebe, some time missionary to these isles. Under the name of the little one last named are these touching, tearful words: "I don't want to die, but I'll do just as Jesus wants me to." A gentle hand has formed this retreat, and protected it with a wooden fence. While I stood there a song-bird perched above the entrance and poured forth his matin lay. There is a third burial-place on the harbor side, but it lacks interest.

Another historic spot is the ruined fort, on the west point of the island, overlooking the entrance to the roadstead. Its contour may be traced, and a little of the embankment of one face remains. The well was filled to the curb with water. It once mounted nine four-pounder cannon, but at the beginning of the Revolution was dismantled, and the guns taken to Newburyport. I suppose the inhabitants for a long time to have neglected precautions for defense, as Colonel Romer, in his report to the Lords of Trade, about 1699, makes no mention of any fortification here. One of its terrible four-pounders would not now make a mouthful for our sea-coast ordnance.

Continuing my walk by the shore, I came to the cavern popularly known as Betty Moody's Hole. It is formed by the lodgment of masses of rock, so as to cover one of the gulches common to the isle. Here, says tradition, Betty concealed herself, with her two children, while the Indians were ravaging the isles and carrying many females into captivity. The story goes that the children, becoming frightened in the cavern, began to cry, whereat their inhuman mother, in an excess of fear, strangled them both; others say she was drowned here. The affair is said to have happened during Philip's War. I do not find it mentioned by either Mather or Hubbard.[107] At times during the fishing season there was hardly a man left upon the islands, a circumstance well known to the Indians.

A memoir extracted from the French archives gives a picture of the Isles in 1702, when an attack appears to have been meditated. "The Isles de Chooles are about three leagues from Peskatoué to the south-south-east from the embouchure of the river, where a great quantity of fish are taken. These are three isles in the form of a tripod, and at about a musket-shot one from the other." * * * "There are at these three islands about sixty fishing shallops, manned each by four men. Besides these are the masters of the fishing stages, and, as they are assisted by the women in taking care of the fish, there may be in all about two hundred and eighty men; but it is necessary to observe that from Monday to Saturday there are hardly any left on shore, all being at sea on the fishing-grounds."

GORGE, STAR ISLAND.

Taking note of the ragged fissures, which tradition ascribes to the day of the Crucifixion, I clambered down one of the rocky gorges from which the softer formation has been eaten out by the consuming appetite of the waves. Sometimes the descent was made easy by irregular steps of trap-rock, and again a flying leap was necessary from stone to stone. The perpendicular walls of the gorge rose near fifty feet at its outlet, at the shore. It was a relief to emerge from the dripping sides and pent-up space into the open air. The Flume, on Star Island, is a fine specimen of the intrusion of igneous rock among the harder formation.

If you would know what the sea can do, go down one of these gulches to the water's edge and be satisfied. I could not find a round pebble among the débris of shattered rock that lay tumbled about; only fractured pieces of irregular shapes. Those rocks submerged by the tide were blackened as if by fire, and shagged with weed. Overhead the precipitous cliffs caught the sun's rays on countless glittering points, the mica with which they are so plentifully bespangled dazzling the eye with its brilliancy. Elsewhere they were flint, of which there was more than enough to have furnished all Europe in the Thirty Years' War, or else granite. Looking up from among the abattis which girds the isle about, you are confronted by masses of overhanging rocks that threaten to detach themselves from the cliff and bury you in their ruins.

It is not for the timid to attempt a ramble among the rocks on the Atlantic side at low tide. He should be sure-footed and supple-jointed who undertakes it, with an eye to estimate the exact distance where the incoming surf-wave is to break. The illusions produced in the mind by the great waves that roll past are not the least striking sensations experienced. The speed with which they press in, and the noise accompanying their passage through the gullies and rents of the shore, contribute to make them seem much larger than they really are. It was only by continually watching the waves and measuring their farthest reach that I was able to await one of these curling monsters with composure; and even then I could not avoid looking suddenly round on hearing the rush of a breaker behind me; and ever and anon one of greater volume destroyed all confidence by bursting far above the boundaries the mind had assigned for its utmost limits.

Nothing struck me more than the idea of such mighty forces going to pure waste. A lifting power the Syracusan never dreamed of literally throwing itself away! An engine sufficient to turn all the machinery in Christendom lying idle at our very doors. What might not be accomplished if Old Neptune would put his shoulder to the wheel, instead of making all this magnificent but useless pother!

I noticed that the waves, after churning themselves into foam, assumed emerald tints, and caught a momentary gleam of sapphire, melting into amethyst, during the rapid changes from the bluish-green of solid water to its greatest state of disintegration. The same change of color has been observed in the Hebrides, and elsewhere.

The place that held for me more of fascination and sublimity than others was the bluff that looks out upon the vast ocean. I was often there. The swell of the Atlantic is not like the long regular roll of the Pacific, but it beats with steady rhythm. The grandest effects are produced after a heavy north-east blow, when the waves assume the larger and more flattened form known as the ground-swell. I was fortunate enough to stand on the cliff after three or four days of "easterly weather" had produced this effect. Such billows as poured with solid impact on the rocks, leaping twenty feet in the air, or heaped themselves in fountains of boiling foam around its base, give a competent idea of resistless power! The shock and recoil seemed to shake the foundations of the island.

Upon a shelf or platform of this cliff a young lady-teacher lost her life in September, 1848. Since then the rock on which she was seated has been called "Miss Underhill's Chair." Other accidents have occurred on the same spot, insufficient, it would seem, to prevent the foolhardy from risking their lives for a seat in this fatal chair.

There are circumstances that cast a melancholy interest around the fate of Miss Underhill. In early life she had been betrothed, and the banns, as was then the custom, had been published in the village church. Her father, a stern old Quaker, opposed the match, threatening to tear down the marriage intention rather than see his daughter wed with one of another sect. Whether from this or other cause, the suitor ceased his attentions, and not long after took another wife in the same village.

The disappointment was believed to have made a deep impression on a girl of Miss Underhill's strength of character. She was a Methodist, deeply imbued with the religious zeal of that denomination. Hearing from one who had been at the Isles of Shoals that the people were in as great need of a missionary as those of Burmah or of the Gold Coast, it became an affair of conscience with her to go there and teach.

She came to the islands, and applied herself with ardor to the work before her, a labor from which any but an enthusiast would have recoiled. It is asserted that no spot of American soil contained so debased a community as this.

It was her habit every pleasant day, at the close of school, to repair to the high cliff on the eastern shore of Star Island, where a rock conveniently placed by nature became her favorite seat. Here, with her Bible or other book, she was accustomed to pass the time in reading and contemplation. She was accompanied on her last visit by a gentleman, erroneously thought to have been her lover, who ventured on the rock with her. A tidal wave of unusual magnitude swept them from their feet. The gentleman succeeded in regaining his foothold, but the lady was no more seen.

Search was made for the body without success. A week after the occurrence it was found on York Beach, where the tide had left it. There was not the least disorder in the ill-fated lady's dress; the bonnet still covered her head, the ear-rings were in her ears, and her shawl was pinned across her breast. In a word, all was just as when she had set out for her walk. The kind-hearted man who found the poor waif took it home, and cared for it as if it had been his own dead. An advertisement caught the eye of Miss Underhill's brother. She was carried to Chester, New Hampshire, her native place, and there buried.

Notwithstanding the humble surroundings of her home, Miss Underhill was a person of superior and striking appearance. Her face was winning and her self-possessed manner is still the talk of her old-time associates. I have heard, as a sequel to the school-teacher's story, that some years after the fatal accident her old suitor came to the Isles, and, while bathing there, was drowned. The recovery of the body of the lady uninjured seems little short of miraculous, and confirms the presence of a strong under-tow, as I had suspected on seeing the floats of the lobstermen moored within a few feet of the rocks.

Schiller may have stood, in imagination, on some such crag as this when his wicked king flung his golden goblet into the mad sea, and with it the life of the hapless stripling who plunged, at his challenge, down into

"The endless and measureless world of the deep."

In a neighboring ravine I found a spring of fresh water, though rather brackish to the taste; and in the more sheltered places were heaps of mussel-shells, the outer surface of a beautiful purple. They look better where they are than in my cabinet, though the lining of those I secured have an enamel of mother-of-pearl. Another remarkable feature I observed were the deposits of gravel among the crevices; but I saw no flint among the water-worn boulders wedged, as if by a heavy pressure, in fissures of the rocks. I remarked also the presence of a poor schistus intersecting the strata here and there. Some of it I could break off with my hands.

Another delightful ramble is on the harbor side, from the old fort round to Caswell's Peak or beyond. Passing by the little hand-breadth of sandy beach where the dories may land, once paved, the chronicles tell us, many feet deep with fish-bones, I observed with pleasure the green oasis spread out between the hotel and the shore. The proprietor seemed resolved that the very rocks should blossom, and already "a garden smiled" above the flint.

There is a sight worth seeing from the cupola of the hotel; of the White Hills, and Agamenticus, with the sands of Rye, Hampton, and Squam stretching along shore. I could see the steeples of Portsmouth and of Newburyport, the bluff at Boar's Head, and the smoke of a score of inland villages. Following with the eye the south coast where it sweeps round Ipswich Bay one sees Cape Ann and Thatcher's Island outlying; the gate-way of the busy bay beyond, into which all manner of craft were pressing sail. Northward were Newcastle, Kittery, and York, and farther eastward the lonely rock of Boon Island. Shoreward is Appledore, with the turret of its hotel visible above; and right below us the little harbor so often a welcome haven to the storm-tossed mariner.[108]

Most visitors to the islands are familiar with the terrible story of the wreck of the Nottingham galley, of London, in the year 1710. She was bound into Boston, and having made the land to the eastward of the Piscataqua, shaped her course southward, driven before a north-east gale, accompanied with rain, hail, and snow. For ten or twelve days succeeding they had no observation. On the night of the 11th of December, while under easy sail, the vessel struck on Boon Island.

With great difficulty the crew gained the rocks. The ship having immediately broken up, they were able to recover nothing eatable, except three small cheeses found entangled among the rock-weed. Some pieces of the spars and sails that came ashore gave them a temporary shelter, but every thing else had been carried away from the island by the strong drift. In a day or two the cook died. Day by day their sufferings from cold and hunger increased. The main-land being in full view before them, they built a boat and got it into the water. It was overset, and dashed in pieces against the rocks. One day they descried three boats in the offing, but no signals they were able to make could attract notice. Then, when reduced to a miserable band of emaciated, hopeless wretches, they undertook and with great labor constructed a raft, upon which two men ventured to attempt to reach the shore. Two days afterward it was found on the beach, with one of its crew lying dead at some distance. After this they were obliged to resort to cannibalism in order to sustain life, subsisting on the body of the carpenter, sparingly doled out to them by the captain's hand. To make an end of this chapter of horrors, the survivors were rescued after having been twenty-four days on the island. The raft was, after all, for them a messenger of preservation, for it induced a search for the builders.

No one can read this narrative without feeling his sympathy strongly excited for the brave John Deane, master of the wrecked vessel. He seemed possessed of more than human fortitude, and has told with a sailor's simple directness of his heroic struggle for life. His account was first published in 1711, appended to a sermon by Cotton Mather. Deane afterward commanded a ship of war in the service of the Czar, Peter the Great.[109]

Few who have seen the light-house tower on this lonely rock, distant not more than a dozen miles from the coast, receiving daily and nightly obeisance of hundreds of passing sails, can realize that the story of the Nottingham could be true. It is a terrible injunction to keep the lamps trimmed and brightly burning.[110]

Proceeding onward in this direction, I came to the fish-houses that remain on the isle. Tubs of trawls, a barrel or two of fish-oil, a pile of split fish, and the half of a hogshead, in which a "kentle" or so of "merchantable fish" had just been salted down, were here and there; a hand-barrow on which to carry the fish from the boat, a lobster-pot, and a pair of rusty scales, ought to be added to the inventory. Sou'-westers and suits of oil-skin clothing hung against the walls; and in the loft overhead were a spare block or two and a parcel of oars, evidently picked up adrift, there being no two of the same length. In some of the houses were whale-boats, that had been hauled up to be calked and painted, that the men were preparing to launch. They were all schooner-rigged, and some were decked over so as to furnish a little cuddy for bad weather. No more sea-worthy craft can be found, and under guidance of a practiced hand one will sail, as sea-folk say, "like a witch." They usually contained a coil of half-inch line for the road, a "killick," and a brace of powder-kegs for the trawls.

The process of curing, or, as it is called by the islanders, "saving," fish is familiar to all who live near the sea-shore, and has not changed in two hundred years. It is described as practiced here in 1800, by Dr. Morse:

"The fish, in the first place, are thrown from the boat in piles on the shore. The cutter then takes them and cuts their throat, and rips open their bellies. In this state he hands them to the header, who takes out the entrails (detaching the livers, which are preserved for the sake of the oil they contain), and breaks off their heads. The splitter then takes out the backbone, and splits them completely open, and hands them to the salter, who salts and piles them in bulk, where they lie from ten to twenty hours, as is most convenient. The shoremen and the women then wash and spread them on the flakes. Here they remain three or four weeks, according to the weather, during which time they are often turned, piled in fagots, and then spread again, until they are completely cured for market."

The "dun," or winter fish, formerly cured here, were larger and thicker than the summer fish. Great pains were taken in drying them, the fish-women often covering the "fagots" with bed-quilts to keep them clean. Being cured in cold weather, they required but little salt, and were almost transparent when held up to the light. These fish sometimes weighed a hundred pounds or more. The dun fish were of great esteem in Spain and in the Mediterranean ports, bringing the highest price during Lent. They found their way to Madrid, where many a platter, smoking hot, has doubtless graced the table of the Escurial. In 1745 a quintal would sell for a guinea.

In 1775 the revolting colonies, unable to protect the islands, ordered their abandonment. A few of the inhabitants remained, but the larger number removed to the near main-land, and were scattered among the neighboring towns. The Shoals became through the war a rendezvous for British ships. The last official act of the last royal governor of New Hampshire was performed here in 1775, when Sir John Wentworth prorogued the Assembly of his majesty's lost province.

---

CLIFFS, WHITE ISLAND.

[CHAPTER XII.]

THE ISLES OF SHOALS—continued.

"—There be land-rats and water-rats, water thieves and land thieves; I mean pirates."—Merchant of Venice.

My next excursion was to Smutty Nose, or Haley's. Seen from Star Island it shows two eminences, with a little hamlet of four houses, all having their gable-ends toward the harbor, on the nearest rising ground. Round the south-west point of Smutty Nose is the little haven already alluded to in the previous chapter, made by building a causeway of stone over to Malaga, where formerly the sea ran through. This Mr. Samuel Haley did at his own cost, expending part of a handsome fortune on the work. Into this little haven, we are told, many distressed vessels have put in and found safe anchorage. The chronicles, speaking by the pen of a fair islander, say old Mr. Haley, in building a wall, turned over a large flat stone, beneath which lay four bars of solid silver; with which, adds tradition, he began his sea mole. I should have thought, had this precious discovery gained currency, no stone would have been left unturned by the islanders, and that Haley's wall might have risen with magical celerity.

It is certain these islands were in former times the resort of freebooters, with such names as Dixy Bull, Low, and Argall (a licensed and titled buccaneer), who left the traces of their own lawlessness in the manner of life of the islanders. It was a convenient place in which to refit or obtain fresh provisions without the asking of troublesome questions.[111] The pirates could expect little booty from the fishermen, but they often picked them up at sea to replenish their crews.

In the year 1689 two noted buccaneers, Thomas Hawkins and Thomas Pound, cruised on the coast of New England, committing many depredations. The Bay colony determined on their capture, and dispatched an armed sloop called the Mary, Samuel Pease commander, which put to sea in October of that year. Hearing the pirates had been cruising at the mouth of Buzzard's Bay, Captain Pease made all sail in that direction. The Mary overhauled the outlaw off Wood's Hole. Pease ran down to her, hailed, and ordered her to heave to. The freebooter ran up a blood-red flag in defiance, when the Mary fired a shot athwart her forefoot, and again hailed, with a demand to strike her colors. Pound, who stood upon his quarter-deck, answered the hail with, "Come on, you dogs, and I will strike you." Waving his sword, his men poured a volley into the Mary, and the action for some time raged fiercely, no quarter being expected. Captain Pease at length carried his adversary by boarding, receiving wounds in the hand-to-hand conflict of which he died.

In 1723 the sloop Dolphin, of Cape Ann, was taken on the Banks by Phillips, a noted pirate. The able-bodied of the Dolphin were forced to join the pirate crew. Among the luckless fishermen was John Fillmore, of Ipswich. Phillips, to quiet their scruples, promised on his honor to set them at liberty at the end of three months. Finding no other hope of escape, for of course the liar and pirate never meant to keep his word, Fillmore, with the help of Edward Cheesman and an Indian, seizing his opportunity, killed three of the chief pirates, including Phillips, on the spot. The rest of the crew, made up in part of pressed men, submitted, and the captured vessel was brought into Boston by the conquerors on the 3d of May, 1724. John Fillmore, the quasi pirate, was the great-grandfather of Millard Fillmore, thirteenth President of the United States.

It is affirmed on the authority of Charles Chauncy that Low once captured some fishermen from the "Shoals." Disappointed, perhaps, in his expectation of booty, he first caused the captives to be barbarously flogged, and afterward required each of them three times to curse Parson Mather or be hanged. The prisoners did not reject the alternative.

No doubt these pirates had heard of the sermons Cotton Mather was in the habit of preaching before the execution of many of their confederates. In his time it was the custom to march condemned prisoners under a strong guard to some church on the Sabbath preceding the day on which they were to suffer. There, marshaled in the broad aisle, they listened to a discourse on the enormity of their crimes and the torments that awaited them in the other world, this being the manner in which the old divines administered the consolations of religion to such desperate malefactors.

New England could contribute a thick volume to the annals of piracy in the New World from the records of a hundred years subsequent to her settlement. The name of Kidd was long a bugbear with which to terrify wayward children into obedience, and the search for his treasure continues, as we have seen, to this day. Bradish, Bellamy, and Quelch sailed these seas like true followers of those dreaded rovers who swept the English coasts, and sent their defiance to the king himself:

"Go tell the King of England, go tell him thus from me,
Though he reigns king o'er all the land, I will reign king at sea."

They have still the ghost of a pirate on Appledore, one of Kidd's men. There has consequently been much seeking after treasure. The face of the spectre is "pale, and very dreadful" to behold; and its neck, it is averred, shows the livid mark of the hangman's noose. It answers to the name of "Old Bab." Once no islander could be found hardy enough to venture on Appledore after night-fall. I shrewdly suspect "Old Bab" to be in the pay of the Laightons.

In 1700, Rear-admiral Benbow was lying at Piscataqua, with nine of Kidd's pirates on board for transportation to England. Robert Bradenham, Kidd's surgeon, says the Earl of Bellomont, was the "obstinatest and most hardened of 'em all." In the year 1726 the pirates William Fly, Samuel Cole, and Henry Greenville were taken and put to death at Boston, after having been well preached to in Old Brattle Street by Dr. Colman. Fly, the captain, like a truculent knave, refused to come into church, and on the way to execution bore himself with great bravado. He jumped briskly into the cart with a nosegay in his hand, smiling and bowing to the spectators, as he passed along, with real or affected unconcern. At the gallows he showed the same obstinacy until his face was covered.[112]

The various legends relative to the corsairs, and the secreting of their ill-gotten gains among these rocks, would of themselves occupy a lengthy chapter; and the recital of the fearful sights and sounds which have confronted such as were hardy enough to seek for treasure would satisfy the most inveterate marvel-monger in the land.

BLACKBEARD, THE PIRATE.

Among others to whom it is said these islands were known was the celebrated Captain Teach, or Blackbeard, as he was often called. He is supposed to have buried immense treasure here, some of which, like Haley's ingots, has been dug up and appropriated by the islanders. On one of his cruises, while lying off the Scottish coast waiting for a rich trader, he was boarded by a stranger, who came off in a small boat from the shore. The new-comer demanded to be led before the pirate chief, in whose cabin he remained some time shut up. At length Teach appeared on deck with the stranger, whom he introduced to the crew as a comrade. The vessel they were expecting soon came in sight, and after a bloody conflict became the prize of Blackbeard. It was determined by the corsair to man and arm the captured vessel. The unknown had fought with undaunted bravery and address during the battle. He was given the command of the prize.

The stranger Scot was not long in gaining the bad eminence of being as good a pirate as his renowned commander. His crew thought him invincible, and followed where he led. At last, after his appetite for wealth had been satisfied by the rich booty of the Southern seas, he arrived on the coast of his native land. His boat was manned, and landed him on the beach near an humble dwelling, whence he soon returned, bearing in his arms the lifeless form of a woman.

The pirate ship immediately set sail for America, and in due time dropped her anchor in the road of the Isles of Shoals. Here the crew passed their time in secreting their riches and in carousal. The commander's portion was buried on an island apart from the rest. He roamed over the isles with his beautiful companion, forgetful, it would seem, of his fearful trade, until one morning a sail was seen standing in for the islands. All was now activity on board the pirate; but before getting under way the outlaw carried the maiden to the island where he had buried his treasure, and made her take a fearful oath to guard the spot from mortals until his return, were it not 'til doomsday. He then put to sea.

The strange sail proved to be a warlike vessel in search of the freebooter. A long and desperate battle ensued, in which the cruiser at last silenced her adversary's guns. The vessels were grappled for a last struggle, when a terrific explosion strewed the sea with the fragments of both. Stung to madness by defeat, knowing that if taken alive the gibbet awaited him, the rover had fired the magazine, involving friend and foe in a common fate.

A few mangled wretches succeeded in reaching the islands, only to perish miserably, one by one, from cold and hunger. The pirate's mistress remained true to her oath to the last, or until she also succumbed to want and exposure. By report, she has been seen more than once on White Island—a tall, shapely figure, wrapped in a long sea-cloak, her head and neck uncovered, except by a profusion of golden hair. Her face is described as exquisitely rounded, but pale and still as marble. She takes her stand on the verge of a low, projecting point, gazing fixedly out upon the ocean in an attitude of intense expectation. A former race of fishermen avouched that her ghost was doomed to haunt those rocks until the last trump shall sound, and that the ancient graves to be found on the islands were tenanted by Blackbeard's men.[113]

These islands were also the favorite haunt of smugglers.[114] Many a runlet of Canary has been "passed" here that never paid duty to king or Congress. It must have been a very paradise of free-traders, who, doubtless, had the sympathies of the inhabitants in their illicit traffic. "What a smuggler's isle!" was my mental ejaculation when I first set foot on Star Island; what a retreat for some Dirck Hatteraick or outlawed Jean Lafitte!

I rowed over to Smutty Nose in a wherry. The name has a rough significance. Looking at the islands at low tide, they present well-defined belts of color. First is the dark line of submerged rock-weed, which led some acute fisherman to hit off with effect the more popular name of Haley's Island; next comes a strip almost as green as the grass in the rocky pastures; above these again, shaded into browns or dingy yellows, the rocks appear of a tawny hue, and then blanched to a ghastly whiteness, a little relieved by dusky patches of green.

I remarked that the schooners of twenty or thirty tons' burden lying in the harbor were all at moorings, ready to run after a school of fish or away from a storm. It is only a few years since three of these vessels were blown from their moorings and stranded on the rocks of Smutty Nose and Appledore.

In 1635 the ship James, Captain Taylor, of Bristol, England, had a narrow escape from being wrecked here. After losing three anchors, she was with difficulty guided past the great rocks into the open sea. The curious reader will find the details quaintly set forth in the journal of Rev. Richard Mather, the ancestor of a celebrated family of New England divines.[115] She had on board a hundred passengers for the Massachusetts Colony.

While lying on our oars in this basin, where so many antique craft have been berthed, it is perhaps not amiss to allude to Thomas Morton, of Mount Wollaston,[116] alias Merry Mount. To do so it will not only be necessary to clamber up the crumbling side of the ship in which he was being sent a prisoner to England, but to surmount prejudices equally decrepit, that, like the spectre of "Old Bab," continue to appear long after they have been decently gibbeted. The incident derives a certain interest from the fact that Morton's was the first instance of banishment in the New England colonies. The only consequence of Thomas Morton, of Clifford's Inn, gent., is due to the effort to cast obloquy upon the Pilgrims.

In the year 1628 the ship Whale was riding at the Isles of Shoals, Morton having been seized by order of Plymouth Colony, and put on board for transportation to England. What manner of ship the Whale was may be gathered from Morton's own account of her. The master he calls "Mr. Weathercock," and the ship "a pitiful, weather-beaten craft," in which he was "in more danger than Jonah in the whale's belly."

The cause of Morton's banishment is often asserted to have been simply his licentious conduct, and what some have been pleased to call indulgence in such "hearty old English pastimes" as dancing about a May-pole, singing songs of no doubtful import, holding high wassail the while, like the mad, roystering rogues his followers were. The Pilgrim Fathers are indicted by a class of historians desirous of displaying to the world the intolerance of the "Plymouth Separatists," as distinguished from the liberality which marked the religious views of the settlers east of the Merrimac. Our forefathers, say they, did not come to the New World for religious liberty, but to fish and trade.

Morton's offense is stated by Governor Bradford, in his letters to the Council for New England and to Sir F. Gorges, to have been the selling of arms and ammunition to the Indians in such quantities as to endanger the safety of the infant plantations. He was arrested, and his association of Merry Mount broken up, after repeated and friendly efforts to dissuade him from this course had been met with insolence and bravado. It stands thus in Governor Bradford's letter-book:

"To the Honourable his Majesty's Council for New England, these, Right Honourable and our very good Lords:

"Necessity hath forced us, his Majesty's subjects of New England in general (after long patience), to take this course with this troublesome planter, Mr. Thomas Morton, whom we have sent unto your honours that you may be pleased to take that course with him which to your honourable wisdom shall seem fit; who hath been often admonished not to trade or truck with the Indians either pieces, powder, or shot, which yet he hath done, and duly makes provision to do, and could not be restrained, taking it in high scorn (as he speaks) that any here should controul therein. Now the general weakness of us his Majesty's subjects, the strength of the Indians, and at this time their great preparations to do some affront upon us, and the evil example which it gives unto others, and having no subordinate general government under your honours in this land to restrain such misdemeanours, causeth us to be troublesome to your Lordships to send this party unto you for remedy and redress hereof."

The letter to Sir F. Gorges[117] is in greater detail, but its length prevents its insertion with the foregoing extract. The Governor of New Plymouth makes a similar allegation with regard to the fishing ships. It is noticeable that all the plantations took part in this affair, Piscataqua, the Isles of Shoals, Edward Hilton, and others paying their proportion of the expense of sending Morton out of the country.

Morton's offense, therefore, was political and not religious, and his extradition a measure of self-preservation, an inexorable law in 1628 to that handful of settlers. If, at the end of nearly two centuries and a half, the Government those Pilgrims contributed to found deemed it necessary to the public safety to banish individuals from its borders, how, then, may we challenge this act of a few men who dwelt in a wilderness, and worshiped their God with the Bible in one hand and a musket in the other?

Morton defied the proclamation of the king promulgated in 1622, saying there was no penalty attached to it. Its terms forbade "any to trade to the portion of America called New England, being the whole breadth of the land between forty and forty-eight degrees of north latitude, excepting those of the Virginia Company, the plantation having been much injured by interlopers, who have injured the woods, damaged the harbors, trafficked with the savages, and even sold them weapons, and taught them the use thereof."[118]

Of the May-pole, which the Pilgrims regarded with grim discontent, Stubbes gives the manner in England of bringing it home from the woods.

"But," he says, "their cheefest jewell they bring home with greate veneration, as thus: they have twentie or fourtie yoke of oxen, every oxe havyng a sweete nosegaie of flowers tyed on the tippe of his hornes, and these oxen drawe home this Maie-poole, which is covered all over with flowers and hearbes, bounde rounde aboute with stringes from the top to the bottome, and sometyme painted with variable colours, with two or three hundred men, women, and children followyng it with great devotion. And thus beying reared up with handkercheifes and flagges streamyng on the toppe, they strawe the grounde aboute, binde green boughes about it, sett up Sommer haules, Bowers, and Arbours hard by. And then fall they to banquet and feast, to leape and dance aboute it, as the Heathen people did at the dedication of their idolles, whereof this is a perfect patterne, or rather the thynge itself."

SMUTTY NOSE.

Smutty Nose, the most verdant of the islands, was one of the earliest settled. The stranger for the first time feels something like soil beneath his feet. There is a wharf and a little landing-place, where a boat may be beached. When within Haley's little cove, I looked down into the water, and saw the perch (cunners) swimming lazily about. This was the only place where the old-time industry of the isles showed even a flake, so to speak, of its former greatness. There were a few men engaged in drying their fish near the landing. Clear weather with westerly winds is best for this purpose; dull or foggy weather spoils the fish.

HALEY DOCK AND HOMESTEAD.
(In the third House from the left the Wagner Murder was committed.)

At a little distance, shorn of some of its former adornments, is the homestead of Samuel Haley, who with his two sons and their families occupied the island many years ago. Not far off is the little family grave-yard of the Haleys, with the palings falling in decay, and the mounds overgrown with a tangle of rank grass. At one time, by his energy, Mr. Haley had made of his island a self-sustaining possession. Before the Revolution he had built a windmill, salt-works, and rope-walk; a bakehouse, brewery, distillery, blacksmith's and cooper's shops succeeded in the first year of peace—all going to decay within his lifetime. By all report of him, he was a good and humane man, and I hereby set up his prostrate grave-stone on my page:

"IN MEMORY OF MR. SAMUEL HALEY

Who died in the year 1811

Aged 84

He was a man of great Ingenuity

Industry Honor and Honesty, true to his

Country & A man who did A great

Public good in Building A

Dock & Receiving into his

Enclosure many a poor

Distressed Seaman & Fisherman

In distress of Weather."

A few steps farther on are the graves of fourteen shipwrecked mariners, marked by rude boulders. It is entered in the Gosport records: "1813, Jan. 14th, ship Sagunto stranded on Smutty Nose Isle; Jan. 15th, one man found; 16th, six men found; 21st, seven men found." The record sums up the number as twelve bodies found, whereas the total appears to be fourteen.

Although the ship Sagunto was not stranded on Smutty Nose Isle, the wreck of a ship, either Spanish or Portuguese, with all on board, remains a terrible fact but too well attested by these graves.[119] The horror of the event is deepened and strengthened by the simple word "Unknown." When this ship crashed and filled and went down, the Sagunto was lying, after a terrible buffeting, within a safe harbor.

It was in a blinding snow-storm, and a gale that strewed the shore from the Penobscot to Hatteras with wrecks, that a ship built of cedar and mahogany was thrown on these rocks. Not a living soul was left to tell the tale of that bitter January night. The ill-fated vessel was richly laden, no doubt, for boxes of raisins and almonds from Malaga drifted on shore the next morning. On a piece of the wreck that came in a silver watch of English make was found, with the letters "P. S." graven on the seals; and among the débris was a Spanish and part of an American ensign, for it was war-time then between England and the American States. The watch had stopped at exactly four o'clock, or when time ceased for those hapless Spaniards. There were also found some twenty letters, addressed south of New York. Conjecture said it was a Spanish ship from Cadiz, bound for Philadelphia.

This is the story of this little clump of graves, and of the wreck, to this day unknown. It has been told many times in prose and poetry, but not often truly. Samuel Haley had been quietly lying in his grave two years. The reader may or may not believe he found the frozen bodies of some of the crew next morning reclining on his wall. Here is a wild flower of island growth, of a handful cast upon these fading mounds:

"O sailors, did sweet eyes look after you
The day you sailed away from sunny Spain?
Bright eyes that followed fading ship and crew,
Melting in tender rain?"

I wondered that these fourteen the old sea had strangled and flung up here could rest so peacefully in ground unblessed by Holy Church. Perchance the spot has witnessed midnight mass, with incense and with missal: no doubt beads have been told, and a pater and ave said by pious pilgrims.

It is not pleasant to think that the island has become more widely known through the medium of an atrocious murder committed here in March, 1873. Formerly the islanders dated from some well-remembered wreck; now it is before or since the murder on Smutty Nose they reckon.

On the morning of March 6th the Norwegian who lives opposite Star Island, on Appledore, heard a cry for help. Going to the shore, he saw a woman standing on the rocks of Malaga in her night-dress. He crossed over and brought the poor creature to his cottage, when it appeared that her feet were frozen. She was half dead with fright and exposure, but told her tale as soon as she was able.

John Hontvet, a fisherman, occupied one of the three houses on Smutty Nose; the third counting from the little cove, as you look at it from Star Island. On the night of the 5th of March he was at Portsmouth, leaving three women—Mary, his wife; Annethe and Karen Christensen—at home. They went to bed as usual, Annethe with Mrs. Hontvet in the bedroom; Karen on a couch in the kitchen. It was a fine moonlight night, though cold, and there was snow on the ground.

Some time during the night a man entered the house, it is supposed for the purpose of robbery. He fastened the door between the kitchen, which he first entered, and the bedroom, thus isolating the sleeping women. Karen, having awoke, cried out, when she was attacked by the intruder with a chair. The noise having aroused the two women in the bedroom, Mary Hontvet jumped out of bed, forced open the door leading into the kitchen, and succeeded in getting hold of the wounded girl, Karen, whom she drew within her own chamber. All this took place in the dark. Mary then bade Annethe, her brother's wife, to jump out of the window, and she did so, but was too much terrified to go beyond the corner of the house. Mary, meanwhile, was holding the door of the kitchen against the attempts of their assailant to force it open. Foiled here, the villain left the house, and meeting the young wife, Annethe, was seen by Mary, in the clear moonlight, to deal her three terrible blows with an axe. But before she was struck down the girl had recognized her murderer, and shrieked out, "Louis, Louis!"

After this accursed deed the man went back to the house, and Mary also made her escape by the window. Karen was too badly hurt to follow. The clear-grit Norwegian woman ran first to the dock, but finding no boat there, hid herself among the rocks. She durst not shout, for fear the sound of her voice would bring the murderer to the spot. There she remained, like another Betty Moody, until sunrise, when she took courage and went across the sea-wall to Malaga and was rescued. I was told that when she fled, with rare presence of mind, she took her little dog under her arm, for fear it might prove her destruction.

It resulted that Louis Wagner, a Prussian, was arrested, tried for the murder, and condemned as guilty. The fatal recognition by Annethe, the figure seen with uplifted axe through the window by Mary, and the prisoner's absence from his lodgings on the night of the murder, pointed infallibly to him as the chief actor in this night of horrors. To have committed this crime he must have rowed from Portsmouth to the Islands and back again, on the night in question; no great feat for one of those hardy islanders, and Wagner was noted for muscular strength. It is said he was of a churlish disposition, and would seldom speak unless addressed, when he would answer shortly. He was not considered a bad fellow, but a poor companion.

I went to the house. Relic-hunters had left it in a sorry plight; taking away even the sashes of the windows, shelves, and every thing movable. Even the paper had been torn from the walls, and carried off for its blood-stains. Hontvet described, with the phlegm of his race, the appearance of the house on the morning of the tragedy: "Karen lay dere; Annethe lay here," he said. I saw they were preparing to make it habitable again: better burn it, say I.

We had a sun-dog at evening and a rainbow in the morning, full-arched, and rising out of the sea, a sure forerunner, say veteran observers, of foul weather. Says the quatrain of the forecastle:

"Rainbow in the morning,
Sailors take warning;
Rainbow at night,
Is the sailor's delight."

LEDGE OF ROCKS, SMUTTY NOSE.

I spent a quiet, breezy afternoon in exploring Appledore. The landing from the harbor side has to be made in some cleft of the rock, and is not practicable when there is a sea running. Passing by the cottage at the shore, I first went up the rocky declivity to the site of the abandoned settlement of so long ago. It may still be recognized by the cellars, rough stone walls, and fragments of bricks lying scattered about. Thistles, raspberry-bushes, and dwarf cherry-trees in fragrant bloom, were growing in the depressions which marked these broken hearth-stones of a forgotten people. The poisonous ivy, sometimes called mercury, so often found clinging to old walls, was here. Some country-folk pretend its potency is such that they who look on it are inoculated with the poison; a scratch, as I know to my cost, will suffice.

Here was a strip of green grass running along the harbor side, and, for the first time, the semblance of a road; I followed it until it lost itself among the rocks. A horse and a yoke of oxen were browsing by the way, and on a distant shelf of rock I saw a cow, much exaggerated in size, contentedly ruminative. Clumps of huckleberry and fragrant bayberry were frequent, with blackberry and other vines clustering above the surface rocks.

SOUTH-EAST END OF APPLEDORE, LOOKING SOUTH.

I am inclined to doubt whether, after all, the habitation of Appledore[120] was abandoned on account of the Indians, for Star Island, as has been remarked, could give no better security. Probably the landing had much to do with it. Without some moving cause the inhabitants would hardly have left Appledore and its verdure for the bald crags of Star Island. The choice of Appledore by the first settlers was probably due to its spring of pure water, the only one on the islands.

The year 1628 is the first in which we can locate actual settlers at the Shoals. Mr. Jeffrey and Mr. Burslem, then assessed two pounds for the expenses of Morton's affair, are supposed to have been living there. By 1640 the Rev. Mr. Hull, of Agamenticus, paid parochial visits to the Isles, and some time before 1661, says Dr. Morse, they had a meeting-house on Hog Island, though the service of the Church of England was the first performed there. The three brothers Cutt, of Wales, settled there about 1645, removing soon to the main-land, where they became distinguished. Antipas Maverick is mentioned as resident in 1647. Another settler whom the chronicles do not omit was William Pepperell, of Cornwall, England, father of the man of Louisburg, who was here about 1676. The removal of the brothers Cutt within two years, and of Pepperell and Gibbons after a brief residence, does not confirm the view that the islands at that early day possessed attractions to men of the better class sometimes claimed for them. Pepperell and Gibbons left the choice of a future residence to chance, with an indifference worthy a Bedouin of the Great Desert. Holding their staves between thumb and finger until perpendicularly poised, they let them fall, departing, the tradition avers, in the direction in which each pointed—Pepperell to Kittery, Gibbons to Muscongus.

The first woman mentioned who came to reside at Hog Island was Mrs. John Reynolds, and she came in defiance of an act of court prohibiting women from living on the islands. One of the Cutts, Richard by name, petitioned for her removal, together with the hogs and swine running at large on the island belonging to John Reynolds. The court, however, permitted her to remain during good behavior. This occurred in 1647. It gives a glimpse of what society must hitherto have been on the islands to call for such enactments. No wonder men of substance left the worse than barren rocks, and that right speedily.

DUCK ISLAND, FROM APPLEDORE.

I walked around the shores of Appledore, stopping to explore the chasms in my way. One of them I could liken to nothing but a coffin, it seemed so exactly fashioned to receive the hull of some unlucky ship. On some of the rocks I remarked impressions, as if made with the heel of a human foot. In the offing Duck Island showed its jagged teeth, around which the tide swelled and broke until it seemed frothing at the mouth.

Another Smith's monument is on the highest part of the island, all the others being within view from it. It is a rude cairn of rough stone, thrown together with little effort at regularity. The surface stones are overgrown with lichens, which add to its appearance of antiquity. It is known to have stood here rather more than a century, and is said to have been built by Captain John Smith himself. Howsoever the tradition may have originated, it is all we have, and are so fain to be content; but I marvel that so modest a man as Captain John should have said nothing about it in the book writ with his own hand. By some the monument has been believed to be a beacon built to mark the fishing-grounds.

Smith arrived at Monhegan in April, 1614, and was back again at Plymouth, England, on the 5th of August. He was one of those who came to "fish and trade," seeking out the habitations of the Indians for his purpose. There were no savages at the Isles.[121] Of his map Smith writes: "Although there be many things to be observed which the haste of other affairs did cause me to omit, for being sent more to get present commodities than knowledge by discoveries for any future good, I had not power to search as I would," etc. I should add, in passing, that Smith, who admits having seen the relation of Gosnold, does not allow him the credit of the name he gave to Martha's Vineyard, but speaks of it as Capawock.

LAIGHTON'S GRAVE.

One of the remarkable features of Appledore is the valley issuing from the cove, dividing the island in two. This ravine is a real curiosity, the great depression occurring where the hotel buildings are situated affording a snug cove on the west of the island. Just behind the house enough soil had accumulated to furnish a thriving and well-kept vegetable garden, evidently an object of solicitude to the proprietors. From the veranda of the hotel you may see the ocean on the east and the bay on the west. In Mr. Hawthorne's account of his visit here in 1852, he relates that in the same storm that overthrew Minot's Light, a great wave passed entirely through this valley; "and," he continues, "Laighton describes it when it came in from the sea as toppling over to the height of the cupola of his hotel. It roared and whitened through, from sea to sea, twenty feet abreast, rolling along huge rocks in its passage. It passed beneath his veranda, which stands on posts, and probably filled the valley completely. Would I had been here to see!"

When I came back to the harbor side, both wind and tide had risen. I was ferried across by a lad of not more than ten years. At times the swift current got the better and swept the boat to leeward, but he stoutly refused to give me the oars, the pride of an islander being involved in the matter. The little fellow flung his woolen cap to the bottom of the dory, his hair flying loosely in the wind as he bent to his task. After taking in more water than was for our comfort, he was at last obliged to accept my aid. These islanders are amphibious, brought up with "one foot on sea, one foot on shore." I doubt if half their lives are passed on terra firma.

Duck Island is for the sportsman. He will find there in proper season the canvas-back, mallard, teal, white-winged coot, sheldrake, etc. Few land, except gunners in pursuit of sea-fowl. I contented myself with sailing along its shores, watching the play of the surf and the gambols of a colony of small sea-gulls that seemed in peaceable possession. Duck Island proper has a cluster of wicked-looking ledges encircling it from south-west to south-east. The mariner should give it a wide berth. Its ill-shapen rocks project on all sides, and a reef makes out half a mile into the sea from the north-west. Shag and Mingo are two of its satellites. This island was resorted to by the Indians for the seals frequenting it.

I had observed lying above the landing on Star Island a queer-looking craft, which might with great propriety be called a shell. It consisted of a frame of slats neatly fitted together, over which a covering of tarred canvas had been stretched. I at first thought some Kanaka's canoe had found its way through the North-west Passage, and drifted in here; but Mr. Poor assured me it belonged on the islands, and was owned and sailed by Tom Leha, whose dwelling on Londoner's he pointed out. As Tom Leha was the Celtic skipper of the Creed, I had some speech of him. His boat, he said, was such as is used in the Shannon, where it is called the "saint's canoe," because first used by one of the Irish saints. It was a good surf-boat, light as a cork, and as buoyant.

One night Leha, with his wife and three children, arrived at the Shoals in his canoe, which a strong man might easily carry. No one knew whence they came. Their speech was unintelligible. There they were, and there they seemed inclined to remain. Your bona fide Shoaler likes not intruders. The islanders gave Leha and his a cold welcome, but this did not discompose him. He was faithful and industrious, and in time saved money enough to buy Londoner's. He waved his hand toward his island home, as if to say,

"An ill-favored thing, sir, but mine own."

LONDONER'S, FROM STAR ISLAND.

As seen from Star Island, Londoner's shows two rugged knobs connected by a narrower strip of shingle. It has its cove, and a reasonably good landing. Half-way between it and Star are hidden rocks over which the sea breaks. It was not occupied by its owner when I was there.

It was a lovely morning when I rowed over to White Island. Once clear of the harbor, I found outside what sailors call "an old sea," the relics of the late north-easter. But these wherries will live in any sea that runs on the New England coast. I have heard of the Bank fishermen being out in them for days together when their vessel could not lie at anchor in the tremendous swell.

White Island is now the most picturesque of the group, a distinction once conceded to Star. It owes this preference to its light-house, standing on a cliff at the east head of the isle, that rises full fifty feet out of water; at least it seemed so high to me as I lay underneath it in my little boat at low tide. Against this cliff the waves continually swelled, rushing into crannies, where I could hear them gurgling and soughing as if some monster were choking to death in their depths.

This is not so forbidding as Boon Island, but it is enough. The light-house was of brick, as I could see where the weather had worn off last year's coat of whitewash. It was not yet time for the tender to come and brighten it up again. The long gallery conducting from the keeper's cottage up to the tower was once torn away from its fastenings, and hurled into the deep gorge of the rocks which it spans. I saw nothing to hinder if the Atlantic had a mind again to play at bowls with it.

The island owes its name to the blanched appearance of its crags, little different in this respect from its fellows. At high tides the westward end is isolated from the rest, making two islands of it in appearance, but inseparable as the Siamese twins. The light-house is much visited in summer, especially by those of a romantic turn, and by those to whom its winding stairs, huge tanks of oil, and powerful Fresnel, possess the charm of novelty. By its side is the section of an earlier building, a reminiscence of the former state of the Isles. For many years the keeper of the light was Thomas B. Laighton, afterward proprietor of Appledore. On account of some political disappointment, he removed from Portsmouth to the Isles, making, it is said, a vow never again to set foot on the main-land. Fortune followed the would-be recluse against his will. As keeper of a boarding-house on Appledore, he is reported to have expressed little pleasure at the coming of visitors, even while receiving them with due hospitality. He was glad of congenial spirits, but loved not overmuch the stranger within his gates. His sons succeeded to their father at the Appledore. His daughter[122] has told with charming naiveté the story of the light-house, whose lamps she often trimmed and lighted with her own hands.

"I lit the lamps in the light-house tower,
For the sun dropped down and the day was dead;
They shone like a glorious clustered flower,
Two golden and five red."

In 1793 there were only eight light-houses within the jurisdiction of Massachusetts. Of these one was at the entrance of Nantucket, and another of Boston harbor. There were twin lights on the north point of Plymouth harbor, on Thatcher's Island, off Cape Ann, and at the northerly end of Plum Island, at the mouth of the Merrimac. The latter were not erected until 1787. They were of wood, so contrived as to be removed at pleasure, in order to conform to the shifting of the sand-bar on which they stood. The lights on Baker's Island, at the entrance of the port of Salem, were not built until 1798.

But neither compass, sextant, fixed and revolving lights, storm signals, careful soundings, buoys, nor beacons, with all the improvements in modern ship-building, have yet reduced traveling over the sea to the same certainty as traveling over the land. We commit ourselves to the mercy of Father Neptune just as fearfully as ever, and annually pay a costly tribute of lives for the privilege of traversing his dominions.

COVERED WAY AND LIGHT-HOUSE, WHITE ISLAND.

During the winter of 18—, so runs the story, the keeper of this light was a young islander, with a single assistant. For nearly a week north-easterly winds had prevailed, bringing in from the sea a cold, impenetrable haze, that enveloped the islands, and rendered it impossible to discern objects within a cable's length of the light-house. At the turn of the tide on the sixth day, the expected storm burst upon them with inconceivable fury. The sea grew blacker beneath the dead white of the falling snow. The waves, urged on by the gale, made a fair breach over the light-house rock, driving the keeper from his little dwelling to the tower for shelter.

The violence of the gale increased until midnight, when it began to lull. The spirits of the oppressed watchers rose as the storm abated. One made ready a smoking platter of fish and potatoes, while the other prepared to snatch a few moments' sleep. While thus occupied, a loud knock was heard at the door. It was repeated. The two men stood rooted to the spot. They knew no living thing except themselves was on the island; they knew nothing of mortal shape might approach it in such a fearful tempest. At a third knock the assistant, who was preparing their frugal meal, fell upon his knees, making the sign of the cross, and calling upon all the saints in the calendar for protection, like the good Catholic he was.

The keeper, who had time to recollect himself, advanced to the door and threw it open. On the outside stood a gigantic negro, of muscular frame, clothed in a few rags, the blood streaming from twenty gashes in his body and limbs. A brig had been cast away on the rocks a few rods distant from the light, and the intrepid black had ventured to attempt to gain the light-house.

WHITE ISLAND LIGHT.

The keeper ran to the spot. Peering into the darkness, he could discover the position of the vessel only by the flapping of her torn sails in the wind. The roar of the sea drowned every other sound. If the shipwrecked crew had cried for help, they could not have been heard. Availing himself of his knowledge of every inch of the shore, the keeper succeeded in gaining a projecting ledge, from which he attracted the attention of those on board the brig, and after many fruitless efforts a line was got to land. The wreck, as the keeper could now see, was driven in a little under the shelter of a projecting point. Moments were precious. He sought in vain for some projection on which he might fasten his rope. He did not hesitate, but wound it about his body, and fixed himself as firmly as he could in a crevice of the rock. Here, with his feet planted on the slippery ledge, where every sea that came in drenched him to the skin, the brave fellow stood fast until every man of the crew had been saved.

There is nothing that moves the imagination like a light-house. John Quincy Adams said when he saw one in the evening he was reminded of the light Columbus saw the night he discovered the New World. I have been moved to call them telegraph posts, standing along the coast, each flashing its spark from cape to headland, the almost commingling rays being golden threads of happy intelligence to all mariners. What a glorious vision it would be to see the kindling of each tower from Florida to Prima Vista, as the broad streets of the city are lighted, lamp by lamp!

Here ended my wanderings among these islands, seated like immortals in the midst of eternity. The strong south-westerly current bore me swiftly from the light-house rock. We hoisted sail, and laid the prow of our little bark for the river's mouth; but I leaned over the taffrail and looked back at the beacon-tower 'til it faded and was lost.

"Even at this distance I can see the tides,
Upheaving, break unheard along its base;
A speechless wrath that rises and subsides
In the white lip and tremor of the face.
"Sail on!" it says, "Sail on, ye stately ships!
And with your floating bridge the ocean span;
Be mine to guard this light from all eclipse,
Be yours to bring man nearer unto man.'"

---

WENTWORTH HOUSE, LITTLE HARBOR.

[CHAPTER XIII.]