The adventurous climber pushed on. Soon he was assailed by thick clouds, through which he and his companions resolutely toiled upward. This slow and labored progress through entangling mists continued until within four miles of the summit, when Field emerged above them into a region of intense cold. Surmounting the immense pile of shattered rocks which constitute the spire, he at last stood upon the unclouded summit, with its vast landscape outspread beneath him, and the air so clear that the sea seemed not more than twenty miles distant. No doubt the daring explorer experienced all the triumph natural to his successful achievement. It is not difficult to imagine the exultation with which he planted his audacious foot upon the topmost crag, for, like Columbus, Cabot, Balboa, he, too, was a real discoverer. The Indians must have regarded him, who thus scornfully braved the vengeance of their god of terrors, as something more than man. I have often pictured him standing there, proudly erect, while the wonder-struck savages crouched humbly at his feet. Both, in their way, felt the presence of their God; but the white man would confront his as an equal, while the savage adored with his face in the dust.
The three men, after their first emotion of ecstasy, amazement, or fear, looked about them. For the moment the great carbuncle was forgotten. Field had chosen the best month of the twelve for his attempt, and now saw a vast and unknown region stretching away on the north and east to the shores of what he took for seas, but what were really only seas of vapor, heaped against the farthest horizons. He fancied he saw a great water to the north, which he judged to be a hundred miles broad, for no land was beyond it. He thought he descried the great Gulf of Canada to the east, and in the west the great lake out of which the river of Canada came. All these illusions are sufficiently familiar to mountain explorers; and it must not be forgotten that in Field’s day geographical knowledge of the interior of the country was indeed limited. In fact, he must have brought back with him the first accurate knowledge respecting the sources of those rivers flowing from the eastern slopes of the mountains. The great gulf on the north side of Mount Washington is truly declared to be such a precipice that they could scarce discern to the bottom; the great northern wilderness as “daunting terrible,” and clothed with “infinite thick woods.” Such is its aspect to-day.
The day must have been so far spent that Field had but little time in which to prosecute his search. He, however, found “store of Muscovy glass” and some crystals, which, supposing them to be diamonds, he carefully secured and brought away. These glittering masses, congealed, according to popular belief, like ice on the frozen regions of the mountains, gave them the name of the Crystal Hills—a name the most poetic, the most suggestive, and the most fitting that has been applied to the highest summits since the day they were first discovered by Englishmen.
Descending the mountain, Field rejoined his Indians, who were doubtless much astonished to see him return to them safe and sound; for, while he had been making the ascent, a furious tempest, sent, as these savages believed, to destroy the rash pale-face and his equally reckless companions, burst upon the mountain. He found them drying themselves by a fire of pine-knots; and, after a short halt, the party took their way down the mountain to the Indian village.
Before a month elapsed, Field, with five or six companions, made a second ascent; but the gem of inestimable value, by whose light one might read at night, continued to elude his pursuit. The search was not, however, abandoned. Others continued it. The marvellous story, as firmly believed as ever by the credulous, survived, in all its purity, to our own century, to be finally transmitted to immortality by Hawthorne’s tale of “The Great Carbuncle.” It may be said here that great influence was formerly attributed to this stone, which the learned in alchemy believed prevailed against the dangers of infection, and was a sure talisman to preserve its owner from peril by sea or by land.
A tradition is ten times a tradition when it has a fixed locality. Without this it is a myth, a mere vagabond of a tradition. Knowing this, I searched diligently for the spot where the great carbuncle, like the eye of a Cyclop, shed its red lustre far down the valley of the Saco; and if the little mountain tarn to-day known as Hermit Lake, over which the gaunt crags rise in austere grandeur, be not the place, then I am persuaded that further seeking would be unavailing. I cannot go so far as to say that it never existed.
What seems passing strange is that the feat performed by Field,[13] the fame of which spread throughout the colony, should have been nearly, if not wholly, forgotten before the lapse of a century. Robert Rogers, one of the most celebrated hunters of the White Mountains, subsequently a renowned partisan leader in the French and Indian wars, uses the following language concerning them:
“I cannot learn that any person was ever on the top of these mountains. I have been told by the Indians that they have often attempted it in vain, by reason of the change of air they met with, which I am inclined to believe, having ascended them myself ‘til the alteration of air was very perceptible; and even then I had not advanced half way up; the valleys below were then concealed from view by clouds.”
It is not precisely known when or how these granite peaks took the name of the White Mountains. We find them so designated in 1672 by Josselyn, who himself performed the feat of ascending the highest summit, of which a brief record is found in his “New England’s Rarities.” One cannot help saying of this book that either the author was a liar of the first magnitude, or else we have to regret the degeneracy of Nature, exhausted by her long travail; for this narrator gravely tells us of frogs which were as big as a child of a year old, and of poisonous serpents which the Indians caught with their bare hands, and ate alive with great gusto. These are rarities indeed.
The first mention I have met with of an Indian name for the White Mountains is in the narrative of John Gyles’s captivity, printed in Boston in 1736, saying: