Madam La Tour sailed off at last with three laden ships to her husband, in spite of D’Aulnay’s dictum that “she was known to be the cause of all her husband’s contempt and rebellion, and therefore they could not let her go to him.” La Tour’s stronghold was captured shortly after “by assault and scalado” when he was absent, and his jewels, plate, and furniture to the amount of ten thousand pounds were seized, and his wife too; and she died in three weeks, of a broken heart, and “her little child and gentlewomen were sent to France.”
I think these Boston neighbors were entitled to a little harmless though exciting gossip two or three years later, when they learned that after D’Aulnay’s death the fascinating widower La Tour had promptly married Widow D’Aulnay, thus regaining his jewels and plate, and both had settled down to a long and peaceful life in Nova Scotia.
CHAPTER V.
A FEARFULL FEMALE TRAVAILLER.
In the autumn and winter of the year 1704, Madam Sarah Knight, a resident of Boston, made a journey on horseback from Boston to New York, and returned in the same manner. It was a journey difficult and perilous, “full of buggbears to a fearfull female travailler,” and which “startled a masculine courage,” but which was performed by this woman with the company and protection only of hired guides, the “Western Post,” or whatever chance traveller she might find journeying her way, at a time when brave men feared to travel through New England, and asked for public prayers in church before starting on a journey of twenty miles. She was probably the first woman who made such a journey, in such a manner, in this country.
Madam Knight was the daughter of Captain Kemble, of Boston, who was in 1656 set two hours in the public stocks as a punishment for his “lewd and unseemly behavior,” which consisted in his kissing his wife “publicquely” on the Sabbath Day, upon the doorstep of his house, when he had just returned from a voyage and absence of three years.
The diary which Madam kept on this eventful trip contains the names of no persons of great historical interest, though many of historical mention; but it is such a vivacious and sprightly picture of the customs of the time, and such a valuable description of localities as they then appeared, that it has an historical interest of its own, and is a welcome addition to the few diaries and records of the times which we possess.
Everything was not all serene and pleasant in the years 1704 and 1705 in New England. Events had occurred which could not have been cheerful for Madam Knight to think of when riding through the lonely Narragansett woods and along the shores of the Sound. News of the frightful Indian massacre at Deerfield had chilled the very hearts of the colonists. At Northampton shocking and most unexpected cruelties had been perpetrated by the red men. At Lancaster, not any too far from Boston, the Indians had been most obstreperous. We can imagine Madam Knight had no very pleasant thoughts of these horrors when she wrote her description of the red men whom she saw in such numbers in Connecticut. Bears and wolves, too, abounded in the lonely woods of Massachusetts and Connecticut. The howls of wolves were heard every night, and rewards were paid by New England towns for the heads of wolves that were killed, provided the heads were brought into town and nailed to the side of the meeting-house. Twenty-one years later than Madam Knight’s journey, in 1725, twenty bears were killed in one week in September, within two miles of Boston, so says the History of Roxbury; and all through the eighteenth century bears were hunted and killed in upper Narragansett. Hence “buggbears” were not the only bears to be dreaded on the lonely journey.
The year 1704 was memorable also because it gave birth to the first newspaper in the colonies, the Boston News-Letter. Only a few copies were printed each week, and each copy contained but four or five square feet of print, and the first number contained but one advertisement—that of the man who printed it.
When Madam Knight’s journal was published in New York by Mr. Theodore Dwight, in 1825, the editor knew nothing of the diarist, not even her family name; hence it was confidently believed by many that the journal was merely a clever and entertaining fiction. In 1852, however, Miss Caulkins published her history of the town of New London, and contradicted that belief, for she gave an account of the last days of Madam Knight, which were spent in Norwich and New London. Madam Knight’s daughter married the Colonel Livingston who is mentioned in the journal, and left no children. From a descendant of Mrs. Livingston’s administratrix, Mrs. Christopher, the manuscript of the journal was obtained for publication in 1825, it having been carefully preserved all those years. In Blackwood’s Magazine for the same year an article appeared, entitled Travelling in America, which reprinted nearly all of Madam Knight’s journal, and which showed a high appreciation of its literary and historical merits. In 1858 it was again printed by request in Littell’s Living Age, with some notes of Madam Knight’s life, chiefly compiled from Miss Caulkins’ History of New London, and again provoked much inquiry and discussion. Recently a large portion of the journal has been reprinted in the Library of American Literature, with many alterations, however, in the spelling, use of capitals, and punctuation, thus detracting much from the interest and quaintness of the work; and most unnecessarily, since it is perfectly easy to read and understand it as first printed, when, as the editor said, “the original orthography was carefully preserved for fear of introducing any unwarrantable modernism.”
The first edition is now seldom seen for sale, and being rare is consequently high-priced. The little shabby, salmon-colored copy of the book which I saw was made interesting by two manuscript accounts of Sarah Knight, which were inserted at the end of the book, and which are very valuable, since they give positive proof of the reality of the fair traveller, as well as additional facts of her life.