"I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills from whence cometh my help," chants the psalmist. Ah, well, no one can say it better than that—except the hills themselves, which, with gentle majesty, look down affectionately upon the town at their feet.
CHAPTER III
SHIPBUILDING AT QUINCY
The first man-made craft which floated on the waters of what is now Fore River was probably a little dugout, a crude boat made by an Indian, who burned out the center of a pine log which he had felled by girdling with fire. After he had burned out as much as he could, he scraped out the rest with a stone tool called a "celt." The whole operation probably took one Indian three weeks. The Rivadavia which slid down the ways of the Fore River Shipbuilding Corporation in August, 1914, weighed 13,400 tons and had engaged the labor of 2000 men for fifty months.
Between these two extremes flutter all the great sisterhood of shallops, sloops, pinks, schooners, snows, the almost obsolete batteau and periagua, the gundelow with its picturesque lateen sail, and all the winged host that are now merely names in New England's maritime history.
We may not give in this limited space an account of the various vessels which have sailed down the green-sea aisles the last three hundred years. But of the very first, "a great and strong shallop" built by the Plymouth settlers for fishing, we must make brief mention, and of the Blessing of the Bay, the first seaworthy native craft to be built and launched on these shores—the pioneer of all New England commerce. Built by Governor Winthrop, he notes of her in his journal on August 31, 1631, that "the bark being of thirty tons went to sea." That is all he says, but from that significant moment the building of ships went on "gallantly," as was indeed to be expected in a country whose chief industry was fishing and which was so admirably surrounded by natural bays and harbors. In 1665 we hear of the Great and General Court of Massachusetts—which distinctive term is still applied to the Massachusetts Legislature—forbidding the cutting of any trees suitable for masts. The broad arrow of the King was marked on all white pines, twenty-four inches in diameter, three feet from the ground. Big ships and little ships swarmed into existence, and every South Shore town made shipbuilding history. The ketch, a two-masted vessel carrying from fifteen to twenty tons, carried on most of the coasting traffic, and occasionally ventured on a foreign voyage. When we recall that the best and cheapest ships of the latter half of the seventeenth century were built here in the new country, we realize that shipyards, ports, docks, proper laws and regulations, and the invigorating progress which marks any thriving industry flourished bravely up and down the whole New England coast.