SECOND JOURNEY
I.
LEGENDS OF THE CRYSTAL HILLS.
My lord, I will hoist saile; and all the wind
My bark can beare shall hasten me to find
A great new world.—Sir W. Davenant.
WHEN Cabot, in the Mathew, of Bristol, was sailing by the New England coast, and the amazed savage beheld a pyramid of white sails rising, like a cloud, out of the sea, the navigator saw from the deck of his ship, rising out of the land, a cluster of lofty summits cut like a cameo on the northern sky.
The Indian left his tradition of the marvellous apparition, which he at first believed to be a mass of trees wrapped in faded foliage, drifting slowly at the caprice of the waves; but, as he gazed, fire streamed from the strange object, a cloud shut it from his view, and a peal like distant thunder was wafted on the breeze to his startled ears. That peal announced the doom of his race. He was looking at the first ship.
Succeeding navigators, Italians, Portuguese, French, English—a roll of famous names—sailed these seas, and, in their turn, hailed the distant summits. They became the great distinguishing landmarks of this corner of the New World. They are found on all the maps traced by the early geographers from the relations of the discoverers themselves. Having thus found form and substance, they also found a name—the Mountains of St. John.
Ships multiplied. Men of strange garb, speech, complexion, erected their habitations along the coast, the unresisting Indian never dreaming that the thin line which the sea had cast up would speedily rise to an inundation destined to sweep him from the face of the earth. Then began that steady advance, slow at first, gathering momentum with the years, before which he recoiled step by step, and finally disappeared forever. His destiny was accomplished. To-day only mountains and streams transmit to us the certainty that he ever did exist. They are his monument, his lament, his eternal accusation.
The White Mountains stood for the Indian not only as an image, but as the actual dwelling-place of Omnipotence. His dreaded Manitou, whose voice was the thunder, whose anger the lightning, and on whose face no mortal could look and live, was the counterpart of the terrible Thor, the Icelandic god, throned in a palace of ice among frozen and inaccessible mountain peaks, over which he could be heard urging his loud chariot amid the rage of the tempest. Frost and fire, plague and famine were the terrific natural agents common to the Indian and to the Norse mythology; and to his god of terrors the Indian conjurer addressed his prayers, his incantations, and his propitiatory offerings, when some calamity had befallen or threatened his tribe. But to cross the boundary which separated him from the abiding-place of the Manitou! plant his audacious foot within the region from which Nature shrunk back affrighted! Not all the wealth he believed the mountain hoarded would have tempted him to brave the swift and terrible vengeance of the justly offended, all-powerful Manitou. So far, then, as he was concerned, the mountain remained inviolate, inviolable, as a kind of hell, filled with the despairing shrieks of those who in an evil hour transgressed the limits sacred to immortals.[11]
As a pendant to this superstition, in which their deity is with simple grandeur throned on the highest mountain peak, it is curious to remember the Indian tradition of the Deluge; for, like so many peoples, they had their tradition, coming from a remote time, and having strong family resemblance with that of more enlightened nations. According to it, all the inhabitants of the earth were drowned, except one Powaw and his wife, who were preserved by climbing to the top of the White Mountains, and who were the progenitors of the subsequent races of man. The Powaw took with him a hare, which, upon the subsiding of the waters, he freed, as Noah did the dove, seeing in its prolonged absence the assurance that he and his companion might safely descend to earth. The likeness of this tradition with the story of Deucalion, and Pyrrha, his wife, as related by Ovid, is very striking. One does not easily consent to refer it to accident alone.