For the sun dropped down and the day was dead;
They shone like a brilliant clustered flower,
Two golden and five red."
The Isles of Shoals are a remarkable formation—rugged ledges of rock out in the ocean bearing scarcely any vegetation; and on some of them not a blade of grass is seen. Four islands stretching in a line make the outside of the strange group—bare reefs, with water-worn, flinty surfaces, against which the sea beats. Not a tree grew anywhere until a little one was planted on Appledore, in front of the hotel, and another dwarf was coaxed to grow in the little old graveyard on Star Island. Their best vegetation was low huckleberry bushes, until someone thought of gathering soil enough to make grass patches for a cow or two. The utter desolation of these rocks, thus cast off apparently from the rest of the world, can hardly be realized, yet they have their admirers. Celia Thaxter, the poetess, was the daughter of the White's Island lightkeeper, and to her glowing pen much of their fame is due. She died on Appledore in 1894. The curious name of these islands first appears in the log of their discoverer, Champlain, who coasted along here in 1605. They were always prolific fishery grounds, and the name seems to have been given them from "the shoaling or schooling of the fish around them." In a deed from the Indians in 1629 they are called the Isles of Shoals. Captain John Smith visited and described them in 1614, and with his customary audacity tried to name them "Smith's Islands," but without success. The boundary-line dividing Maine and New Hampshire passes through the group between Star and Appledore. The peculiar grouping makes a good harbor between these two, opening westward towards the mainland, and amply protected from the sea by the smaller islands outside. These rugged crags resemble the bald and rounded peaks of a sunken volcano thrust upward from the sea, with this little harbor forming its crater. When Nathaniel Hawthorne visited them, he wrote: "As much as anything else, 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." Their savagery during violent storms, when surrounded by surf and exposed to the ocean's wildest fury, becomes almost overwhelming, and they actually seem to reel beneath the feet.
Star Island originally had a village of fishermen, until they were sent away to make room for the summer hotel. It was the town of Gosport, and its little church and tiny bell-tower are visible from afar over the water. The original church was built of timbers from the wreck of a Spanish vessel in 1685, and the present little stone church is as old as the nineteenth century. It had several faithful pastors, who were buried on the island, among them Rev. John Brook, of whom the quaint historian Cotton Mather tells the anecdote illustrating the efficacy of prayer: A child lay sick and so nearly dead those present believed it had actually expired, "but Mr. Brook, perceiving some life in it, goes to prayer, and in his prayer used this expression: 'Lord, wilt thou not grant some sign before we leave prayer that thou wilt spare and heal this child? We cannot leave thee till we have it.' The child sneezed immediately." On the highest part of Star Island is the broken monument to John Smith, put up by some of his admirers not long ago, bearing the three Moslem heads representing the Turks he had slain, but vandals have ruined it. The diminutive fort defending Star Island in colonial times has been abandoned more than a century, and nestling beneath it is the old graveyard, part of the walls remaining, and a few dilapidated gravestones. All the original inhabitants of the island are dead, their descendants scattered, and fashionable pleasuring now dominates this reef and its restless waters.
As might be expected, a place like these islands was a favorite haunt for pirates in the colonial days. Around them cruised Captain Kidd, the notorious Blackbeard, and Hawkins, Phillips, Low, Ponad, and other famous pirates, and in fact the ghost of one of Kidd's men is said to still haunt Appledore. Many and bold were the gentry who in those days hoisted the "Jolly Roger" flag, with its grinning skull and cross-bones, and cruised in this picturesque region for glory and plunder. It was near the route between Boston and the Provinces and to Europe, and hence the valuable prey that allured them. Here sailed Captain Teach of ferocious countenance, piercing black eyes and enormous beard, who came to be familiarly known and feared as "Blackbeard." He was said to be "in league with the Devil and the Governor of North Carolina," and had an uncomfortable habit of firing loaded pistols in the dark, without caring much who got hit. In fact, it is recorded he once told his trusty crew he had to kill a man occasionally merely to prove he was captain. He also kept a diary, making characteristic entries, such as these: "Rum all out; our company somewhat sober; rogues a-plotting; confusion among us; so I looked for a prize." And this next day: "Took a prize with a great deal of liquor on board; so kept the ship's company hot, and all went well again." Blackbeard is supposed to have buried treasures on these islands, and the fishermen tell how they have seen the ghost of his mistress, gazing intently seaward, on a low, projecting point of White Island, a tall and shapely figure wrapped in a long cloak. Blackbeard ruled these waters until Lieutenant Maynard, with two armed sloops, went after him, captured his ship, met him in single combat, and after a hand-to-hand fight, in which both received fearful wounds, finally pinned the pirate to the deck with his dagger, closing his interesting career.
Captain Kidd, who sailed in these parts, was not so ferocious as Blackbeard. It is said that at first he always swore-in his crew on the Bible, but afterwards finding this interfered with business, he buried his Bible in the sand. Captain Low captured a fishing-smack off these islands, but disappointed of booty, had the crew flogged, and then gave each man the alternative of being hanged or of three times vigorously cursing old Cotton Mather, which latter, it is recorded, "all did with alacrity." It is probable this punishment was inflicted by the pirate because it was the custom of the Puritan clergymen, when pirates were condemned, to have them brought into church, and as a proper preliminary to the hanging, preach long and powerful sermons to them on the enormity of their crimes and the torments awaiting in the next world. This same Captain Low is said to have once captured a Virginia vessel, and was so pleased with her captain that he invited him to share a bowl of punch. The Virginian, however, demurred, having scruples about drinking with a pirate, whereupon Low presented a cocked pistol to his ear and a glass of punch to his mouth, pleasantly remarking: "Either take one or the other." The captain took punch. Another rover of the seas, Phillips, captured the Dolphin, a fishing-vessel, and made all her crew turn pirates. John Fillmore, one of them, started a mutiny, killed Phillips, and took the Dolphin back to Boston. His great-great-grandson was President Millard Fillmore. There was also at one time a famous woman pirate in this region—Anne Bonney, an Irish girl from Cork, who fell in love with Captain Rockham, a pirate, who was afterwards captured and hanged. Before the capture she fought bravely, and, as she expressed it, "was one of the last men left upon the deck." There was much that was fascinating in the desperate careers of the lawless buccaneers who swept the New England coasts in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. They were for years masters of the ocean, and they even sent 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."
All around the Isles of Shoals, when the sun sinks and twilight comes—