Part V.
There, you have my story exactly as it is related, on winter evenings, to impress ideas of wisdom on the minds of the young Norwegians. Between the wife of Gudbrand and the wife of Peter the Graybeard they must choose, at their own risk and peril.
'The choice is an easy one,' says an amiable lady-friend of mine, who has just become a grandmother. 'Gudbrand's wife is the one to imitate, not only on account of her prudence, but for her worth. You men are much more amusing than you fancy: when your own self-esteem is at stake, you love truth and justice about as much as bats love a glare of light. The greatest enjoyment these gentlemen experience is in pardoning us when they are guilty, and in generously offering to overlook our errors when they alone are in the wrong. The wisest thing we can do is to let them talk, and to pretend to believe them. That is the way to tame these proud, magnificent creatures, and, by pursuing the plan perseveringly, one may lead them about by the nose, like Italian oxen.
'But, aunty,' says a fair young thing beside us, 'one can't keep quiet all the time. Not to yield when you're not in the wrong, is a right.'
'And when you're wrong, my dear niece, to yield is a royal pleasure. What woman ever abandoned this exalted privilege? We are all somewhat akin to that amiable lady who, when all other arguments had been exhausted, crushed her husband with a magnificent look, as she said,—
'"Sir, I give you my word of honor that I am in the right."
'What could he reply? Can one contradict the veracity of one's own wife? And what is strength fit for if not to yield to weakness? The poor husband hung his head, and did not utter another word. But to keep still is not to acknowledge defeat, and silence is not peace!'
'Madame,' says a young married woman, 'it seems to me that there is no choice left; when a woman loves her husband all is easy; it is a pleasure to think and act as he does.'
'Yes, my child, that is the secret of the comedy. Every one knows it, but no one avails herself of it. So long as even the last glow of the honey-moon illuminates the chamber of a young couple, all goes along of itself. So long as the husband hastens to anticipate every wish, we have merit and sense enough to let him do it. But at a later moment, the scene changes. How, then, are we to retain our sway? Youth and beauty decay, and the charm of wit and intelligence is not sufficient. In order to remain mistresses of our homes, we must practice the most divine of all the virtues—gentleness—a blind, dumb, deaf gentleness of demeanor, that pardons everything for the sake of pardoning.'
To love a great deal,—to love unconditionally, so as to be loved a little in return,—that is the whole moral of the story of Gudbrand.
The Huguenot Families In America.
II.
The brave Admiral Coligny first conceived the plan of a colony in America for the safety of his persecuted Huguenot brethren of France. Such an enterprise was undertaken as early as the year 1555, with two vessels, having on board mechanics, laborers, and gentlemen, and a few ministers of the Reformed faith. They entered the great river which the Portuguese had already named Rio Janeiro, and built a fort, calling it 'Coligny.' Here they sought a new country, where they might adore God in freedom. Unforeseen difficulties, however, discouraged these bold Frenchmen, and the pious expedition failed, some dispersing in different directions, while others regained the shores of France with great difficulty. A second attempt was also unsuccessful. Coligny, in 1562, obtained permission from Charles IX. to found a Protestant colony in Florida. Two ships left Dieppe with emigrants, and, reaching the American shores, entered a large, deep river called Port Royal, which name it still retains, and is, by coincidence, the spot recently captured by the United States forces.[6] Fort Charles, in honor of the reigning king of France, was built near by, and in a fertile land of flowers, fruits, and singing birds. The country itself was called Carolina. Reduced to the most cruel extremities of famine and death, the remaining colonists returned to Europe.
Still undismayed by these two disastrous attempts, Coligny, the Huguenot leader, dispatched a third expedition of three vessels to our shores, making another attempt near the mouth of the St. John's River (Fort Caroline). Philip II. was then on the throne, and would not brook the heresy of the Huguenots, or Calvinism, in his American provinces. Priests, soldiers, and Jesuits were dispatched to Florida, where the new settlers, 'Frenchmen and Lutherans,' were destroyed in blood. Such was the melancholy issue of the earliest attempts to establish a Huguenot or Protestant settlement in North America. And nearly one hundred years before it was occupied by the English, Carolina, for an instant, as it were, was occupied by a band of Christian colonists, but, through the remorseless spirit of religious persecution, again fell under the dominion of the uncivilized savages. We refer to these earliest efforts as proper to the general historical connection of our subject, although not absolutely necessary to its investigation.
At the commencement of the seventeenth century, England, on her own behalf, took up the generous plans of Coligny. Possessing twelve colonies in America, when the edict of Nantes was revoked, that nation resolved here to offer peaceful homes to persecuted Huguenots from France. This mercy she had extended to them in England and Ireland; now her inviting American colonies were thrown open for the same generous purpose. Even before that insane and fatal measure of Louis XIV., the Revocation, and especially after the fall of brave La Rochelle, numerous Protestant fugitives, mostly from the western provinces of France, had already emigrated, for safety, to British America. In 1662 the French government made it a crime for the ship-owners of Rochelle to convey emigrants to any country or dependency of Great Britain. The fine for such an offence was ten livres to the king, nine hundred for charitable objects, three hundred to the palace chapel, one hundred for prisoners, and five hundred to the mendicant monks. One sea-captain, Brunet, was accused of having favored the escape of thirty-six young men, and condemned to return them within a year, or to furnish a legal certificate of their death, on pain of one thousand livres, with exemplary punishment.[7] It is imagined that these young voluntary Huguenot exiles emigrated to Massachusetts, from the fact that the same year when this strange cause was tried in France, Jean Touton, a French doctor, requested from the authorities of that colony the privilege of sojourning there. This favor was immediately granted; and from that period Boston possessed establishments formed by Huguenots, which attracted new emigrants.
In 1679, Elie Nean, the head of an eminent family from the principality of Soubise, in Saintonge, reached that city. This refugee, sailing afterwards in his own merchant vessel for the island of Jamaica, was captured by a privateer, carried back to France, confined in the galleys, and only restored to his liberty through the intercession of Lord Portland.
One of the first acts of the Boston Huguenots was to settle a minister, giving him forty pounds a year, and increasing his salary afterwards. Surrounded by the savages on every side, they erected a fort, the traces of which, it is said, can still be seen, and now overgrown with roses, currant bushes, and other shrubbery. Mrs. Sigourney, herself the wife of a Huguenot descendant, during a visit to this time-honored spot, wrote the beautiful lines,—
'Green vine, that mantlest in thy fresh embrace
Yon old gray rock, I hear that thou with them
Didst brave the ocean surge.
Say, drank thus from
The dews of Languedoc? or slow uncoiled
An infant fibre 'mid the faithful mold
Of smiling Roussillon? Didst thou shrink
From the fierce footsteps of fighting unto death
At fair Rochelle?
Hast thou no tale for me?'
Their fort did not render the French settlers safe from the murderous assaults of savage enemies. A.W. Johnson, with his three children, were massacred here by them; his wife was a sister of Mr. Andrew Sigourney, one of the earliest Huguenots. After this murderous attack the French Protestants deserted their forest home, repairing to Boston in 1696, where vestiges of their industry and agricultural taste long remained; to this day many of the pears retain their French names, and the region is celebrated for its excellence and variety of this delicious fruit. The Huguenots erected a church at Boston in 1686, and ten years afterwards received as pastor a refugee minister from France, named Diaillé.[8] The Rev. M. Lawrie is also mentioned as one of their pastors. But from official records we learn more of the Rev. Daniel Boudet, A.M. He was a native of France, born in 1652, and studied theology at Geneva. On the revocation, he fled to England, receiving holy orders from the Lord Bishop of London. In the summer of 1686 he accompanied the Huguenot emigrants to Massachusetts; and Cotton Mather speaks of him as a faithful minister 'to the French congregation at New Oxford, in the Nipmog (Indian) counties.' This was New Oxford, near Boston. He labored for eight years, 'propagating the Christian faith,' both among the French and the Indians. He complains, as we do in our day, of the progress of the sale of rum among the savages,'without order or measure' (July 6, 1691). We shall learn more of him at New Rochelle, where he removed, probably, in 1695, and could preach to both English and French emigrants. Soon after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, Joseph Dudley, with other proprietors, introduced into Massachusetts thirty French Protestant families, settling them on the easternmost part of the 'Oxford tract.'[9]
Massachusetts, peopled in part by the rigid Protestant Dissenters, naturally favored these new victims, persecuted by a church still more odious to them than that of England. Their sympathies were deeply excited by the arrival of the French exiles. The destitute were liberally relieved, the towns of Massachusetts making collections for this purpose, and also furnishing them with large tracts of land to cultivate. In 1686 the colony at Oxford thus received a noble grant of 11,000 acres; and other provinces followed the liberal example. Every traveler through New England has seen 'Faneuil Hall,' which has been called the 'Cradle of Liberty,' and where so many assemblages for the general good have been held. This noble edifice was presented to Boston, for patriotic purposes, by the son of a Huguenot.
Much of our knowledge concerning the Huguenots of New York has been obtained from the documentary papers at Albany. Some of the families, before the revocation, as early as the year 1625, reached the spot where the great metropolis now stands, then a Dutch settlement. The first birth in New Amsterdam, of European parents, was a daughter of George Jansen de Rapelje, of a Huguenot family which fled to Holland after the St. Bartholomew's massacre, and thence sailed for America. Her name was Sarah. Her father was a Walloon from the confines of France and Belgium, and settling on Long Island, at the Waal-bogt, or Walloon's Bay, became the father of that settlement. In 1639 his brother, Antonie Jansen de Rapelje, obtained a grant of one hundred 'morgens,' or nearly two hundred acres of land, opposite Coney Island, and commenced the settlement of Gravesend. Here most numerous and respectable descendants of this Walloon are met with to this day. Jansen de Rapelje, as he was called, was a man of gigantic strength and stature, and reputed to be a Moor by birth. This report, probably, arose from his adjunct of De Salee, the name under which his patent was granted; but it was a mistake; he was a native Walloon, and this suffix to his name, we doubt not, was derived from the river Saale, in France, and not Salee, or Fez, the old piratical town of Morocco. For many years after the Dutch dynasty, his farm at Gravesend continued to be known as Anthony Jansen's Bowery. The third brother of this family, William Jansen de Rapelje, was among the earliest settlers of Long Island and founders of Brooklyn. Singularly, the descendants of Antonie have dropped the Rapelje, and retained the name of Jansen, or Johnson, as they are more commonly called. On the contrary, George's family have left off Jansen, and are now known as Rapelje or Rapelyea.
Most of the Huguenots who went to Ulster, N.Y., at first sought deliverance from persecutions among the Germans, and thence sailed for America. Ascending the Hudson, these emigrants landed at Wiltonyck, now Kingston, and were welcomed by the Hollanders, who had prepared the way in this wilderness for the enjoyment of civil and religious liberty. Here was a Reformed Dutch church, and Hermanus Blomm, its pastor, commissioned by the Classis of Amsterdam to preach 'both on water and on the land, and in all the neighborhood, but principally in Esopus.' This region, selected by the French Protestants for their future land, was like their own delightful native France for great natural beauties. Towards the east and west flowed the waters of the noble ever-rolling Hudson, while on the north the Shamangunk Mountains, the loftiest of our Fishkill monarchs, looked like pillars upon which the arch of heaven there rested. No streams can charm the eye more than those which enrich this region,—the Rosendale, far from the interior, the Walkill, with its rapid little falls, 'the foaming, rushing, warsteed-like' Esopus Creek, with the dashing, romantic Saugerties, fresh from the mountain-side. Both the Dutch and the French emigrants followed these beautiful rivers towards the south, and made their earliest settlements there. On these quiet and retired banks their ashes repose. Hallowed be their memories, virtues, and piety! In those regions thousands of their descendants now enjoy the rich and glorious patrimony which have followed their industry and frugality.
In the year 1663, the savages attacked Kingston and massacred a part of its inhabitants, slaying twenty-four, and took forty-five prisoners. The dominie, Blomin, escaped, and has left a description of the tragical event.[10] 'There lay,' he writes, 'the burnt and slaughtered bodies, together with those wounded by bullets and axes. The last agonies and the moans and lamentations were dreadful to hear.... The houses were converted into heaps of stones, so that I might say with Micah, "We are made desolate;" and with Jeremiah, "A piteous wail may go forth in his distress." With Paul I say, "Brothers, pray for us." I have every evening, during a whole month, offered up prayers with the congregation, on the four points of our fort, under the blue sky.... Many heathen have been slain, and full twenty-two of our people have been delivered out of their hands by our arms. The Lord our God will again bless our arms, and grant that the foxes who have endeavored to lay waste the vineyard of the Lord shall be destroyed.'
Among the prisoners were Catharine Le Fever, the wife of Louis Dubois, with three of their children. These were Huguenots; and a friendly Indian gave information where they could be found. The pursuers were directed to follow the Rondout, the Walkill, and then a third stream; and a small, bold band, with their knapsacks, rifles, and dogs, undertook the perilous journey. Towards evening, Dubois, in advance of the party, discovered the Indians within a few feet of him, and one was in the act of drawing his bow, but, missing its string, from fear or surprise, the Huguenot sprang forward and killed him with his sword, but without any alarm. The party then resolved to delay the attack until dark; at which hour the savages were preparing for slaughter one of their unfortunate captives, which was none other than the missing wife of Dubois himself. She had already been placed upon the funeral pile, and at this trying moment was singing a martyr's psalm, the strains of which had often cheered the pious Huguenots in days of the rack and bloody trials. The sacred notes moved the Indians, and they made signs to continue them, which she did, fortunately, until the approach of her deliverers. 'White man's dogs! white man's dogs!' was the first cry which alarmed the cruel foes. They fled instantly, taking their prisoners with them. Dubois calling his wife by name, she was soon restored to her anxious friends, with the other captives. At the moment of their rescue, the prisoners were preparing for the bloody sacrifice to savage cruelty, and singing the beautiful psalm of the 'Babylonish Captives.' Heaven heard those strains, and the deliverance came. During this fearful expedition the Ulster Huguenots first discovered the rich lowlands of Paltz.
This was the section which they selected for their homes, distant some eighty-five miles from New York, along the west shores of the Hudson, and extending from six to ten miles in the interior. It was called New Paltz, and its patent obtained from Gov. Andreas; twelve of their brethren were religiously selected by the emigrants as the Patentees, and known by the appellation of the 'Duzine,' or the twelve patentees, and these were regarded as the patriarchs in this little Christian community. A list of the original purchasers has been preserved, and were as follows: Louis Dubois, Christian Dian, since Walter Deyo, Abraham Asbroucq, now spelt Hasbrouck, Andros Le Fever, often Le Febre and Le Febore, John Brook, said to have been changed into Hasbrouck, Peter Dian, or Deyo, Louis Bevier, Anthony Cuspell, Abraham Du Bois, Hugo Freir, Isaac Dubois, Simon Le Fever.
A copy of this agreement with the Indians still exists, and the antiquarian may find it among the State records at Albany. It is a curious document, with the signatures of both parties, the patentees' written in the antique French character, with the hieroglyphic marks of the Indians. A few Indian goods—kettles, axes, beads, bars of lead, powder, casks of wine, blankets, needles, awls, and a 'clean pipe'—were the insignificant articles given, about two centuries ago, for these lands, now proverbially rich, and worth millions of dollars. The treaty was mutually executed, according to the records from which we quote, on the 20th of May, 1677.
The patentees immediately took possession of their newly-acquired property, their first conveyances being three wagons, which would be rare curiosities in our day. The wheels were very low, shaped like old-fashioned spinning-wheels, with short spokes, wide rim, and without any iron. The settlers were three days on their way from Kingston to New Paltz, a distance of only sixteen miles. The place of their first encampment is still known by the name of 'Tri Cor,' or three cars, in honor of these earliest conveyances. Soon, however, they selected a more elevated site, on the banks of the beautiful Walkill, where the village now stands. Log houses were erected not far apart, for mutual defence, and afterwards stone edifices, with port-holes, some of which still remain.