Ascending now the river toward New London, wind, tide, or steam shall sweep us under the granite battlements of Fort Trumbull, on the one side, and the grassy mounds of Fort Griswold on the other.[310] Near the latter is standing a monument commemorating the infamy of Benedict Arnold and the heroism of a handful of brave men sacrificed to what is called the chances of war.
NEW LONDON LIGHT.
New London is seen straggling up the side of a steep and rocky hill, dominated by three pointed steeples. Descending from the crest, its principal street opens like the mouth of a tunnel at the water-side into a broad space, always its market-place and chief landing. Other avenues follow the natural shelf above the shore, or find their way deviously as streams might down the hill-side. The glory of New London is in its trees, though in some streets they stand so thick as to exclude the sunlight, and oppress the wayfarer with the feeling of walking in a church-yard.
The destruction of New London by Arnold's command, in 1781, has left little that is suggestive of its beginning. Its English settlement goes no farther back than 1646. In that year and the next a band of pioneers from the Massachusetts colony, among whom was John Winthrop, Jun.,[311] built their cottages, and made these wilds echo with the sounds of their industry.
Old London and Father Thames are repeated in New England, because, as these honest settlers avow, they loved the old names as much as they disliked the barbaric sounds of the aboriginal ones, though the latter were always typical of some salient characteristic. They settled upon the fair Mohegan, in the country of the Pequots, a race fierce and warlike, who in 1637 had made a death-grapple of it with the pale-faces, and had been blotted out from among the red nations. Pequot was the name of the harbor, changed in 1658 to New London.