[253] Point Judith is named from Judith Quincy, the wife of John Hull, coiner of the rare old pine-tree shillings of 1652.
[254] Beaver Tail is a peninsula at the southern extremity of Canonicut Island, so named from its marked resemblance, on the map, to the appendage of the beaver.
[255] Fort Adams is situated at the upper (northern) end of a point of land which helps to form the harbor of Newport; it also incloses a piece of water called Brenton's Cove.
[256] By our American Grace Darling, Miss Ida Lewis.
[257] Goat Island was the site of a colonial fortress. During the reign of King William, Colonel Romer advised the fortification of Rhode Island, which he says had never been done "by reason of the mean condition and refractoriness of the inhabitants." In 1744 the fort on Goat Island mounted twelve cannon. At the beginning of the Revolution General Lee, and afterward Colonel Knox, marked out defensive works; but they do not appear to have been executed when the British, on the same day that Washington crossed the Delaware, took possession of the island. The Whigs, in 1775, removed the cannon from the batteries in the harbor. Major L'Enfant, the engineer of West Point, was the author of Fort Wolcott.
[258] There should be added to the detail of maps given in the initial chapter that of Jerome Verrazani, in the College de Propaganda Fide, at Rome, of the supposed date of 1529. This map is described and discussed, together with the detail of Giovanni Verrazani's letter to Francis I., dated at Dieppe, July 8th, 1524, in "Verrazano, the Navigator," by J. C. Brevoort. A reduced copy of the map or "Planisphere" is there given. The author adopts the theory, not without plausibility, that Verrazani passed fifteen days at anchor in Narraganset Bay. As I have before said, there is something of fact in these early relations; but if tested by the only exact marks given (latitude, distances, and courses), they establish nothing.
[259] Harrison, the first architect of his day in New England, was the author of many of the older public buildings in Newport, Trinity Church and Redwood Library among others. He also designed King's Chapel, Boston, and did what he could to drag architecture out of the mire of Puritan ugliness and neglect.
[260] He owned, besides his house and garden in Boston, lands at Mount Wollaston, now Quincy, Massachusetts. Coddington is mentioned in Samuel Fuller's letter to Bradford, June, 1630. "Mrs. Cottington is dead," he also says.
[261] It may be found at length in Hutchinson, appendix, vol. ii. Governor Hutchinson was a relative of the schismatic Anne.
[262] This was called an appeal to the country. A judge would hardly, at the present day, permit such an expression in court.