George Berkeley, in England, had been pronouncing the age barren of every glorious theme. Perhaps to transcend this level he conceived a project of establishing a college in Bermuda for Indians and missionaries.[279] So he came over to Newport (1729) to buy American lands, and await or perhaps force a rise on them. The death of George I. had crossed his pious scheme by drying up his fountains. Newport was now a thriving town of 5,000 souls, the chief town in a colony of perhaps 18,000 inhabitants. It had an Episcopal church in which Berkeley sometimes preached, and to which he gave an organ. He had brought over with him a Scotch artist, John Smybert, and so the patron and his family, happy on the whole, though his glorious project had not fructified, came out of the canvas under Smybert’s pencil; and the picture went to Yale College, where we may see it now,[280] and afterwards so did his books, and the deed conveying his Newport farm,[281] when after two or three years he had gone back to England, a disappointed man.[282]
Not long afterwards another man with a mission ventured on a different project in the little colony. James Franklin, who had found it prudent to leave Massachusetts, when he told the august assembly that they did not do all they might to catch pirates, came to this nest of free-booters, and started a newspaper, the Rhode Island Gazette, the first in the colony, and saw it fail within a year.
When the Spanish war was coming on, in 1739, the plucky little colony put herself on a war footing. She built the “Tartar,” a war-sloop of 115 tons;[283] her merchants, the Wantons, the Malbones, and others, ran five privateers out to sea; and even her quakers found ways to help. Seven watch-towers were built along the coast, Fort George was garrisoned, and a battery frowned on Block Island.[284]
WILLIAM SHIRLEY.
This follows an engraving, “T. Hudson, pinxt.; J. McArdell, fecit,” reproduced in J. C. Smith’s Brit. Mezzotint Portraits, p. 896. Cf. Catal. Cab. Mass. Hist. Soc., p. 26; Mem. Hist. Boston, ii., frontispiece.
In Connecticut, on Saltonstall’s death in 1724, Joseph Talcott succeeded and held office during the rest of Belcher’s time.
BOSTON HARBOR, 1732.