Nooks and Corners of the New England Coast

by Samuel Adams Drake

Glover and his regiment conferred lasting honor on this old town by the sea. As soon as it had been determined to fit out armed vessels, Washington intrusted the details to Glover, and ordered the regiment to Beverly, where these amphibians first equipped and then manned the privateers. The regiment signalized itself at Long Island and at Trenton, and ought to have a monument on the highest point of land in Marblehead, with the names of its heroes inscribed in bronze. General Glover was long an invalid from the effects of disease contracted in the army, dying in 1797.[165] He had been a shoe-maker, and is, I imagine, the person referred to in the following extract from the memoirs of Madame Riedesel:

"Some of the generals who accompanied us were shoe-makers; and upon their halting days they made boots for our officers, and also mended nicely the shoes of our soldiers. One of our officers had worn his boots entirely into shreds. He saw that an American general had on a good pair, and said to him, jestingly, 'I will gladly give you a guinea for them.' Immediately the general alighted from his horse, took the guinea, gave up his boots, and put on the badly-worn ones of the officer, and again mounted his horse." General Glover's house is still standing on Glover Square. I made, as every body must make, in Marblehead, a pilgrimage to Oakum Bay, a classic precinct, and to the humble abode of Benjamin Ireson, whom Whittier has made immortal. Questionless the poet has done more to make Marblehead known than all the historians and magazine-writers put together, though the notoriety is little relished there. The facts were sufficiently dramatic as they existed; but Mr. Whittier has taken a poet's license, and arranged them to his fancy. Old Flood Ireson suffered in the flesh, and his memory has been pilloried in verse for a crime he did not commit. Nevertheless, I doubt that the people of Marblehead forget that Pegasus has wings, and can no more amble at the historian's slow place than he can thrive on bran and water.

It is not many years since Ireson was alive, broken in spirit under the obloquy of his hideous ride. Later in life he followed shore-fishing, and was once blown off to sea, where he was providentially picked up by a coaster bound to some Eastern port. I do not think he could have declared his right name, for sailors are superstitious folk, and he would have been accounted a Jonah in any ship that sailed these seas. His wherry having been cut adrift, was found, and Old Flood Ireson was believed to have gone to the bottom of the bay, when, to the genuine astonishment of his townsmen, he appeared one day plodding wearily along the streets. Some charitable souls gave him another wherry, but the boys followed the old man about as he cried his fish with their cruel shouts of,

"I, Flood Ireson, for leaving a wrack,
Was blowed out to sea, and couldn't get back."

There is book authority for the terrible aspect of the vengeance of the fish-wives of Marblehead, so picturesquely portrayed in the poet's lines. Increase Mather, in a letter to Mr. Cotton, 23d of Fifth month, 1677, mentions an instance of rage against two Eastern Indians, then prisoners at Marblehead: "Sabbath-day was sennight, the women at Marblehead, as they came out of the meeting-house, fell upon two Indians that were brought in as captives, and, in a tumultuous way, very barbarously murdered them. Doubtless, if the Indians hear of it, the captives among them will be served accordingly." This episode recalls the rage of the fish-women of Paris during the Reign of Terror, those unsexed and pitiless viragos of La Halle.

I could discover little of the old Marblehead dialect, once so distinctive that even the better class were not free from it. It is true a few old people still retain in their conversation the savor of it; but it is dying out. Your true Marbleheader would say, "barn in a burn" for "born in a barn." His speech was thick and guttural; only an occasional word falling familiarly on the unaccustomed ear. All the world over he was known so soon as he opened his mouth. The idiom may have been the outgrowth of the place, or perchance a reminiscence of the speech of old-time fishermen, grounded, as I apprehend, more in the long custom of an illiterate people than any supposed relationship with our English mother-tongue. Whittier was acquainted with the jargon, and the question is open to the philologist.

There is a legend about the cove near Ireson's of a "screeching woman" done to death by pirates a century and a half or more past—a shadowy memorial of the fact of their presence here so long ago. They brought her on shore from their ship, and murdered her. On each anniversary of her death, says the legend, the town was thrilled to its marrow by the unearthly outcries of the pirates' victim. Many believed the story, while not a few had heard the screams. Chief-justice Story was among those who asserted that they had listened to those midnight cries of fear.