“Following the shores of Long Island, they came first to Block Island, and thence to the harbor of Newport. Here they stayed fifteen days, most courteously received by the inhabitants. Among others, appeared two chiefs, gorgeously arrayed in painted deer-skins; kings, as Vezzerano calls them, with attendant gentlemen; while a party of squaws in a canoe, kept by their jealous lords at a safe distance, figure in the narrative as the queen and her maids. The Indian wardrobe had been taxed to its utmost to do the strangers honor,—coffee bracelets and wampum collars, lynx-skins, raccoon-skins, and faces bedaubed with gaudy colors.
“Again they spread their sails, and on the fifth of May bade farewell to the primitive hospitalities of Newport.”[67]
Wampum and coffee bracelets are gone out of fashion since then, the application of “gaudy colors” to faces, though not altogether done away with, is differently practised and to better effect, and squaws are no longer relegated by their jealous lords to separate and distant canoes; but the reputation for hospitality, so early won, Newport still retains, as many a traveller since Vezzerano has had occasion to testify. And still, when the early summer-tide announces the approach of strangers, her inhabitants, decking themselves in their best and bravest, go forth to welcome and to “courteously entreat” all new arrivals.
Again the mist lifts and reveals another picture. Two centuries have passed. The sachems and their squaws have vanished, and on the hill-slope where once their lodges stood a town has sprung up. Warehouses line the shores and wharves, at which lie whalers and merchantmen loading and discharging their cargoes. A large proportion of black faces appears among the passers-by in the streets, and many straight-skirted coats, broad-brimmed hats, gowns of sober hue and poke-bonnets of drab. Friends abound as well as negroes, not to mention Jews, Moravians, Presbyterians and “Six-Principle” and “Seven-Principle” Baptists; for, under the mild fostering of Roger Williams, Newport has become a city of refuge to religious malcontents of every persuasion. All the population, however, is not of like sobriety. A “rage of finery” distinguishes the aristocracy of the island, and silk-stockinged gentlemen, with scarlet coats and swords, silver-buckled shoes and lace ruffles, may be seen in abundance, exchanging stately greetings with ladies in brocades and hoops, as they pass to and fro between the decorous gambrel-roofed houses or lift the brazen knockers of the street-doors. It is a Saint’s-Day, and on the hill above, in a quaint edifice of white-painted wood, with Queen Anne’s royal crown and a gilded pennon on its spire, the Rev. Mr. Honeyman, missionary of the English Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, is conducting the service in Trinity Church. The sermon begins, but is interrupted by a messenger who hurries in with a letter which he hands to the divine in the pulpit. The clergyman reads it aloud to his audience, pronounces a rapid benediction, and “wardens, vestry, church and congregation” crowd to the ferry-wharf, off which lies a “pretty large ship,” just come to anchor. A boat rows to the shore, from which alights a gentleman of “middle stature, and an agreeable, pleasant and erect aspect,” wearing the canonicals of an English dean. He leads by the hand a lady; three other gentlemen follow in their company. The new arrival is George Berkeley, Dean of Derry, philosopher and scholar, who, on his way to Bermuda with the project of there planting an ideally perfect university, “for the instruction of the youth of America” (!), has chosen Rhode Island as a suitable vantage-point from which to organize and direct the new undertaking. His companions are his newly married wife and three “learned and elegant friends,” Sir John James, Richard Dalton and the artist Smibert. Not every Saint’s-Day brings such voyagers to Newport from over the sea. No wonder that Trinity Church services are interrupted, and that preacher and congregation crowd to the wharf to do the strangers honor!
The Berkeley party spent the first few months of their stay in the town of Newport, whence the Dean made short excursions to what Mrs. Berkeley terms “the Continent,” meaning the mainland opposite. Toward the close of their first summer, James, Dalton and Smibert removed to Boston, and the Berkeley family to a farm in the interior of the island, which the Dean had purchased and on which he had built a house. The house still exists, and is still known by the name of Whitehall, given it by its loyal owner in remembrance of the ancient palace of the kings of England.
The estate, which comprised less than a hundred acres, lies in a grassy valley to the south of Honeyman’s Hill, and about two miles back from what is now known as the “Second Beach.” It commands no “view” whatever. Dean Berkeley, when asked why he did not choose a site from which more could be seen, is said to have replied that “if a prospect were continually in view it would lose its charm.” His favorite walk was toward the sea, and he is supposed to have made an outdoor study of a rocky shelf, overhung by a cliff cornice, on the face of a hill-ridge fronting the beach, which shelf is still known as “Bishop Berkeley’s Rock.”