The Project Gutenberg eBook of Among the Isles of Shoals
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.
Title: Among the Isles of Shoals
Author: Celia Thaxter
Release date: November 29, 2025 [eBook #77366]
Language: English
Original publication: Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1873
Credits: Steve Mattern and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AMONG THE ISLES OF SHOALS ***
[Illustration: WHITE ISLAND, LOOKING SOUTHWEST FROM APPLEDORE.]
_Among the Isles of Shoals._
BY CELIA THAXTER.
With Illustrations.
[Illustration]
“Only to hear and see the far-off sparkling brine.”
TENNYSON.
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
COPYRIGHT, 1873, BY JAMES R. OSGOOD & COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1901, BY ROLAND THAXTER
COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY ROLAND THAXTER AND JOHN THAXTER
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
[Illustration]
WHITE ISLAND, LOOKING SOUTHWEST
FROM APPLEDORE _Frontispiece._
TRAP DIKE, APPLEDORE Page 18
WHITE ISLAND “ 120
VIEW FROM THE SOUTHEASTERN
POINT OF APPLEDORE “ 180
[Illustration]
It is with reluctance that I suffer these fragmentary and inadequate
sketches of the Isles of Shoals to appear in book form. Except that
some account of the place, however slight, is so incessantly called for
by people who throng these islands in summer, I should hardly venture
to offer to the public so imperfect a chronicle, of which the most that
can be said is, that it is, perhaps, better than nothing.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
AMONG THE ISLES OF SHOALS.
In a series of papers published not many years ago, Herman Melville
made the world acquainted with the “Encantadas,” or Enchanted Islands,
which he describes as lying directly under the equator, off the coast
of South America, and of which he says: “It is to be doubted whether
any spot of earth can, in desolateness, furnish a parallel to this
group.” But their dark volcanic crags and melancholy beaches can
hardly seem more desolate than do the low bleached rocks of the Isles
of Shoals to eyes that behold them for the first time. Very sad they
look, stern, bleak, and unpromising, yet are they enchanted islands in
a better sense of the word than are the great Galapagos of which Mr.
Melville discourses so delightfully.
There is a strange charm about them, an indescribable influence in
their atmosphere, hardly to be explained, but universally acknowledged.
People forget the hurry and worry and fret of life after living there
awhile, and, to an imaginative mind, all things become dreamy as they
were to the lotus-eaters, to whom
“The gushing of the wave
Far, far away did seem to mourn and rave
On alien shores.”
The eternal sound of the sea on every side has a tendency to wear
away the edge of human thought and perception; sharp outlines become
blurred and softened like a sketch in charcoal; nothing appeals to the
mind with the same distinctness as on the mainland, amid the rush and
stir of people and things, and the excitements of social life. This
was strikingly illustrated during the late war, which, while it wrung
the heart of the whole country, and stirred the blood of every man,
woman, and child on the continent, left the handful of human beings
upon these lonely rocks almost untouched. The echoes of woe and terror
were so faint and far they seemed to lose their significance among the
many-voiced waters they crossed, and reached at last the indifferent
ears they sought with no more force than a spent wave.
Nine miles of the Atlantic Ocean intervene between these islands and
the nearest point of the coast of New Hampshire; but from this nearest
point the coast-line recedes gradually, in dim and dimmer distance, to
Cape Ann, in Massachusetts, twenty-one miles away at the southwest, and
to Cape Neddock, in Maine, sixteen miles distant in the northeast (in
clear weather another cape is faintly distinguishable beyond this),
and about one third of the great horizon is filled by this beautiful,
undulating line of land, which, under the touch of atmospheric change,
is almost as plastic as the clouds, and wears a new aspect with every
turn of wind and weather.
Sailing out from Portsmouth Harbor with a fair wind from the
northwest, the Isles of Shoals lie straight before you, nine miles
away,--ill-defined and cloudy shapes, faintly discernible in the
distance. A word about the origin of this name, “Isles of Shoals.” They
are supposed to have been so called, not because the ragged reefs run
out beneath the water in all directions, ready to wreck and destroy,
but because of the “shoaling,” or “schooling,” of fish about them,
which, in the mackerel and herring seasons, is remarkable. As you
approach they separate, and show each its own peculiar characteristics,
and you perceive that there are six islands if the tide is low; but if
it is high, there are eight, and would be nine, but that a breakwater
connects two of them. Appledore, called for many years Hog Island,
from its rude resemblance to a hog’s back rising from the water, when
seen from out at sea, is the largest and most regular in shape. From
afar, it looks smoothly rounded, like a gradually sloping elevation,
the greatest height of which is only seventy-five feet above high-water
mark. A little valley in which are situated the buildings belonging to
the house of entertainment, which is the only habitation, divides its
four hundred acres into two unequal portions. Next, almost within a
stone’s throw, is Haley’s Island, or “Smutty-nose,” so christened by
passing sailors, with a grim sense of humor, from a long black point
of rock stretching out to the southeast, upon which many a ship has
laid her bones. This island is low and flat, and contains a greater
depth of soil than the others. At low tide, Cedar and Malaga are both
connected with it,--the latter permanently by a breakwater,--the whole
comprising about one hundred acres. Star Island contains one hundred
and fifty acres, and lies a quarter of a mile southwest of Smutty-nose.
Toward its northern end are clustered the houses of the little village
of Gosport, with a tiny church crowning the highest rock. Not quite
a mile southwest from Star, White Island lifts a lighthouse for a
warning. This is the most picturesque of the group, and forms, with
Seavey’s Island, at low water, a double island, with an area of some
twenty acres. Most westerly lies Londoner’s, an irregular rock with a
bit of beach, upon which all the shells about the cluster seem to be
thrown. Two miles northeast from Appledore, Duck Island thrusts out its
lurking ledges on all sides beneath the water, one of them running half
a mile to the northwest. This is the most dangerous of the islands,
and, being the most remote, is the only one visited to any great degree
by the shy sea-fowl that are nearly banished by civilization. Yet even
now, at low tide, those long black ledges are often whitened by the
dazzling plumage of gulls whose exquisite and stainless purity rivals
the new-fallen snow. The ledges run toward the west and north; but
at the east and south the shore is bolder, and Shag and Mingo Rocks,
where, during or after storms, the sea breaks with magnificent effect,
lie isolated by a narrow channel from the main granite fragment. A
very round rock west of Londoner’s, perversely called “Square,” and
Anderson’s Rock, off the southeast end of Smutty-nose, complete the
catalogue.
Smutty-nose and Appledore are almost united by a reef, bare at low
tide, though a large vessel can pass between them even then. Off the
landing at White Island the Devil’s Rock rolls an incessant breaker,
and makes an attempt to reach the shore perilous in any but the
serenest weather. Between Londoner’s and Star is another, hardly bare
at low tide; a perpetual danger, for it lies directly in the path of
most of the sailing vessels, and many a schooner has been “brought up
all standing” by this unexpected obstacle. Another rock, about four
miles east of Appledore, rejoices in the significant title of the “Old
Harry.” Old Harry is deeply sunk beneath the surface, and never betrays
himself except in great storms, when an awful white spray rises afar
off, and the Shoalers know how tremendous are the breakers that send it
skyward.
The names of the towns, Appledore, Gosport, and, along the coast,
Portsmouth, Newcastle, Rye, Ipswich, Portland, Bangor, Newbury,
Amesbury, Salisbury, and many more, are all borrowed from towns on, or
not far from, the coasts of England and Wales, as may be seen from the
maps of those countries. Salisbury Beach fronts our islands. Amesbury
lies farther inland, but the gentle outline of Po Hill, in that town,
is the last eminence of any importance on the southern end of the coast
line.
The dividing line between Maine and New Hampshire passes through the
group, giving Appledore, Smutty-nose, and Duck Islands to Maine, and
the rest to New Hampshire; but their allegiance to either is a matter
of small importance, the few inhabitants troubling themselves but
little about what State they belong to. Till within a few years no
taxes were required of them, and they enjoyed immunity from this and
various other earthly ills as completely as the gulls and loons that
shared their dwelling-place.
Swept by every wind that blows, and beaten by the bitter brine for
unknown ages, well may the Isles of Shoals be barren, bleak, and bare.
At first sight nothing can be more rough and inhospitable than they
appear. The incessant influences of wind and sun, rain, snow, frost,
and spray, have so bleached the tops of the rocks, that they look
hoary as if with age, though in the summer-time a gracious greenness
of vegetation breaks here and there the stern outlines, and softens
somewhat their rugged aspect. Yet so forbidding are their shores,
it seems scarcely worth while to land upon them,--mere heaps of
tumbling granite in the wide and lonely sea,--when all the smiling,
“sapphire-spangled marriage-ring of the land” lies ready to woo the
voyager back again, and welcome his returning prow with pleasant
sights and sounds and scents that the wild wastes of water never know.
But to the human creature who has eyes that will see and ears that will
hear, nature appeals with such a novel charm, that the luxurious beauty
of the land is half forgotten before one is aware. Its sweet gardens,
full of color and perfume, its rich woods and softly swelling hills,
its placid waters, and fields and flowery meadows, are no longer dear
and desirable; for the wonderful sound of the sea dulls the memory
of all past impressions, and seems to fulfil and satisfy all present
needs. Landing for the first time, the stranger is struck only by the
sadness of the place,--the vast loneliness; for there are not even
trees to whisper with familiar voices,--nothing but sky and sea and
rocks. But the very wildness and desolation reveal a strange beauty to
him. Let him wait till evening comes,
“With sunset purple soothing all the waste,”
and he will find himself slowly succumbing to the subtile charm of that
sea atmosphere. He sleeps with all the waves of the Atlantic murmuring
in his ears, and wakes to the freshness of a summer morning; and it
seems as if morning were made for the first time. For the world is
like a new-blown rose, and in the heart of it he stands, with only
the caressing music of the water to break the utter silence, unless,
perhaps, a song-sparrow pours out its blissful warble like an embodied
joy. The sea is rosy, and the sky; the line of land is radiant; the
scattered sails glow with the delicious color that touches so tenderly
the bare, bleak rocks. These are lovelier than sky or sea or distant
sails, or graceful gulls’ wings reddened with the dawn; nothing takes
color so beautifully as the bleached granite; the shadows are delicate,
and the fine, hard outlines are glorified and softened beneath the
fresh first blush of sunrise. All things are speckless and spotless;
there is no dust, no noise, nothing but peace in the sweet air and
on the quiet sea. The day goes on; the rose changes to mellow gold,
the gold to clear, white daylight, and the sea is sparkling again. A
breeze ripples the surface, and wherever it touches the color deepens.
A seine-boat passes, with the tawny net heaped in the stern, and the
scarlet shirts of the rowers brilliant against the blue. Pleasantly
their voices come across the water, breaking the stillness. The
fishing-boats steal to and fro, silent, with glittering sails; the
gulls wheel lazily; the far-off coasters glide rapidly along the
horizon; the mirage steals down the coast-line, and seems to remove it
leagues away. And what if it were to slip down the slope of the world
and disappear entirely? You think, in a half-dream, you would not care.
Many troubles, cares, perplexities, vexations, lurk behind that far,
faint line for you. Why should you be bothered any more?
“Let us alone. Time driveth onward fast,
And in a little while our lips are dumb.”
And so the waves, with their lulling murmur, do their work, and you are
soothed into repose and transient forgetfulness.
The natives, or persons who have been brought up here, find it almost
as difficult to tear themselves away from the islands as do the Swiss
to leave their mountains. From a civilized race’s point of view, this
is a curious instance of human perversity, since it is not good for
men to live their whole lives through in such remote and solitary
places. Nobody hears of people dying of homesickness for New York, or
Albany, or Maine, or California, or any place on the broad continent;
but to wild and lonely spots like these isles humanity clings with
an intense and abiding affection. No other place is able to furnish
the inhabitants of the Shoals with sufficient air for their capacious
lungs; there is never scope enough elsewhere; there is no horizon;
they must have sea-room. On shore it is to them as if all the trees
and houses crowded against the windows to suffocation; and I know a
youth who, when at the age of thirteen he made his first visit to
the mainland, descended to the cellar of the house in which he found
himself, in the not over-populous city of Portsmouth, and spent the few
hours of his stay sitting dejectedly upon a wood-pile, in mute protest
against the condition of things in general, and the pressure of human
society in particular.
Each island has its peculiar characteristics, as I said before, and no
two are alike, though all are of the same coarse granite, mixed with
masses and seams of quartz and feldspar and gneiss and mica-slate,
and interspersed with dikes of trap running in all directions. Upon
Appledore, for the most part, the trap runs from north to south, while
the veins of quartz and feldspar run from east to west. Sometimes the
narrow white quartz veins intersect the dark trap, in parallel lines,
now wavering, and now perfectly straight, and showing a surface like
that of some vast piece of inlaid work. Each island presents its
boldest shore to the east, to breast the whole force of the great
Atlantic, which every year assails the iron cliffs and headlands with
the same ponderous fury, yet leaves upon them so little trace of its
immense power,--though at White Island, on the top of a precipitous
rock called “The Head,” which is nearly fifty feet high, lies a bowlder
weighing fifteen tons, tossed there from below by the breakers. The
shores are seldom very bold, but on the east they are often very
striking with their rifts and chasms, and roughly piled gorges, and
square quarries of stone, and stairways cut as if by human hands.
The trap rock, softer than the granite, is worn away in many places,
leaving bare perpendicular walls fifteen or twenty feet high. The
largest trap dike upon Appledore runs across the island from northeast
to southwest, disappears in the sea, and reappears upon Smutty-nose,
a quarter of a mile distant in a straight line. In some places, the
geologist will tell you, certain deep scratches in the solid rock
mean that here the glacier ground its way across in the world’s
earlier ages. Frequently the trap rock is honeycombed in a curious
fashion,--filled with small holes on the surface, as if drops of
water falling for years in the same spots had worn these smooth round
hollows. This always happens close to the water, and only in the trap
rock, and looks as if it might be the result of the flying spray which,
in winter and toward spring, when the northwest gales blow sometimes
for three weeks steadily day and night, beats continually upon the
shore.
[Illustration: TRAP DIKE, APPLEDORE.]
The coast-line varies, of course, with high or low tide. At low water
the shores are much more forbidding than at high tide, for a broad band
of dark sea-weed girdles each island, and gives a sullen aspect to the
whole group. But in calm days, when the moon is full and the tides are
so low that it sometimes seems as if the sea were being drained away on
purpose to show to eager eyes what lies beneath the lowest ebb, banks
of golden green and brown moss thickly clustered on the moist ledges
are exposed, and the water is cut by the ruffled edges of the kelps
that grow in brown and shining forests on every side. At sunrise or
sunset the effect of the long rays slanting across these masses of rich
color is very beautiful. But at high tide the shores are most charming;
every little cove and inlet is filled with the music of the waves,
and their life, light, color, and sparkle. Who shall describe that
wonderful noise of the sea among the rocks, to me the most suggestive
of all the sounds in nature? Each island, every isolated rock, has its
own peculiar rote, and ears made delicate by listening, in great and
frequent peril, can distinguish the bearings of each in a dense fog.
The threatening speech of Duck Island’s ledges, the swing of the wave
over Halfway Rock, the touch of the ripples on the beach at Londoner’s,
the long and lazy breaker that is forever rolling below the lighthouse
at White Island,--all are familiar and distinct, and indicate to the
islander his whereabouts almost as clearly as if the sun shone brightly
and no shrouding mist were striving to mock and to mislead him.
There are no beaches of any considerable size along the circle of
these shores, and except in two narrow fissures, one on Malaga and
one on Star, only a few feet wide at their widest, there is no fine,
clean sand, such as lies sparkling on the coast at Rye, opposite, and
shows, faintly glimmering, white in the far distance. The dock at
Smutty-nose is filled with coarse sand and mud, like the little basin
of the “Upper Cove” on Appledore; and the largest beach on Star, of
the same character, is covered with a stratum of fish-bones several
feet deep,--by no means a pleasantly fragrant pavement. Roughly
rounded pebbles, not beautiful with warmth of color like those on the
Cohasset beaches, but a cold, hard combination of gray granite and
dark trap, are heaped in the coves. Indian arrowheads of jasper and
flint have been found among them. Now and then a smoother bit consists
of a coarse gravel, which, if you examine, you will find to be
principally composed of shells ground fine by the waves, a fascinating
mixture of blue and purple mussels, lined with the rainbow tints of
mother-of-pearl, and fragments of golden and ruddy snail-shells, and
striped and colored cockles; with here and there a piece of transparent
quartz, white or rosy, or of opaque feldspar, faintly straw-colored,
or of dull-purple porphyry stone, all clean and moist with the
odorous brine. Upon Appledore and the little islets undevastated by
civilization these tiny coves are the most delightful places in the
world, lovely with their fringe of weeds, thistles, and mullein-stalks
drawn clearly against the sky at the upper edge of the slope, and
below, their mosaic of stone and shell and sea-wrack, tangles of kelp
and driftwood,--a mass of warm neutral tints,--with brown, green, and
crimson mosses, and a few golden snail-shells lying on the many-tinted
gravel, where the indolent ripples lapse in delicious murmurs. There
are few shells more delicate than the variegated snails and cockles
and stout whelks that sparsely strew the beaches, but these few are
exceedingly beautiful, and more precious from their rarity. Two kinds
of pure white spiral shells, not quite an inch long, are occasionally
found, and cause one to wonder how they can be rolled together with the
heavy pebbles by the breakers and not be annihilated.
After the dark blue mussel-shells have lain long on shore in sun and
rain, they take a curious satin sheen, lovely to behold, and the
larger kind, shedding their coat of brown varnish, are colored like
the eastern sky in clear winter sunsets, a rosy purple, with pearly
linings streaked with iridescent hues. The driftwood is always full
of suggestions:--a broken oar; a bit of spar with a ragged end of
rope-yarn attached; a section of a mast hurriedly chopped, telling
of a tragedy too well known on the awful sea; a water-worn buoy, or
flakes of rich brown bark, which have been peacefully floated down
the rivers of Maine and out on the wide sea, to land at last here
and gladden firesides so remote from the deep green wood where they
grew; pine-cones, with their spicy fragrance yet lingering about
them; apples, green spruce twigs, a shingle, with some carpenter’s
half-obliterated calculations pencilled upon it; a child’s roughly
carved boat; drowned butterflies, beetles, birds; dead boughs of ragged
fir-trees completely draped with the long, shining ribbon-grass that
grows in brackish water near river mouths. The last, after lying awhile
in the wind and sun, present a weird appearance, for the narrow ribbons
are dried and bleached as white as chalk, and shiver and shudder with
every wind that blows. It used to be a great delight to hold such a
bough aloft, and watch all the long, delicate pennons and streamers
fly trembling out on the breeze. Beyond high-water mark all things
in the course of time take a uniform gray color from the weather;
wood, shells, stones, deposited by some great tide or storm, and left
undisturbed for months, chocolate-colored bark and yellow shingle and
gray stone are not to be distinguished one from another, except by
their shape. Of course all white things grow whiter, and shells already
colorless become as pure as snow. Sometimes the slabs and blocks of
wood that float ashore have drifted so long that they are water-logged,
and covered with a rich growth of mosses, barnacles, and wondrous
sea-creatures. Sometimes they are completely riddled by the pholas, and
the hardest shells are pierced smoothly through and through by these
soft worms.
But as a child I was never without apprehension when examining the
drift, for I feared to find some too dreadful token of disaster. After
the steamer Bohemian was wrecked (off Halifax, I think) a few years
ago, bales of her costly cargo of silks and rich stuffs and pieces
of the wreck were strewn along the coast even to Cape Ann; and upon
Rye Beach, among other things, two boots came on shore. They were not
mates, and each contained a human foot. That must have been a grewsome
discovery to him who picked them up.
There are not many of these quiet coves. In general a confusion reigns
as if an earthquake had rent and split the coasts, and tumbled the
masses in chaotic heaps. On Appledore and the larger islands the
interior is rather smoother, though nowhere will you find many rods
of plain walking. Slopes of greenness alternate with the long white
ledges, and here and there are bits of swampy ground and little
valleys where the turf is short, and the sheep love to browse, and
the mushrooms grow in August and September. There are no trees
except, perhaps, a few balm-of-gilead trees on Star and a small elm
on Appledore, which has been struggling with the bleakness of the
situation some twenty years. It is very probable that the islands were
wooded many years ago with spruce and pine perhaps,--a rugged growth.
I am certain that cedars grew there, for I found on the highest part
of Smutty-nose Point, deep down in a crevice in the rocks, a piece of
a root of cedar-wood, which, though perfectly preserved, bore marks of
great age, being worn as smooth as glass with the raindrops that had
penetrated to its hiding-place. There are a few bushes, browsed down
by the sheep, with maple, poplar, and birch leaves; and I have seen
the crumbling remains of the stump of some large tree in the principal
gorge or valley at Appledore. The oldest inhabitants remember quite an
orchard on Smutty-nose. In the following note (for which I am indebted
to Mr. T. B. Fox) from “Christopher Leavitt’s Voyage into New England”
in the year 1623, it appears that there were trees, though not of the
kind the voyagers wished to see. He says: “The first place I set my
foot upon in New England was the Isles of Shoulds. We could see not
one good timber tree, or so much good ground as to make a garden. Good
fishing-place for six ships,” he goes on to say, “not more for want of
good storage rooms. Harbor indifferent good. No savages at all.” That
was two hundred and forty-six years ago. In the Rev. Jedediah Morse’s
journal of a mission to the Shoals in August, 1800, he says, referring
to the wretched state of the inhabitants of Star Island at that time,
“All the trees, and the bushes even, have been consumed, and they have
cut up, dried, and burned many acres of the sward, leaving only naked
rocks where formerly there was the finest pasturage for cows.” The
bushes have never grown again on Star; but Appledore, wherever there is
soil enough to hold a root, is overgrown with huckleberry and bayberry
bushes, the glossy green leaves of the latter yielding a wholesome,
aromatic fragrance, which accords well with the fresh and healthy
sea-odors. Blackberry, raspberry, wild currant, and gooseberry bushes
also flourish; there are clumps of elder and sumach, woodbine and the
poison ivy, shrubs of wild-cherry and shadbush, and even one little
wild apple-tree that yearly bears a few large, bright blossoms.
It is curious to note the varieties of plants, wild-flowers, and
grasses on this island alone. There are six different ferns, and many
delicate flowers bloom in the spring, whose faces it is a continual
surprise to find looking up at you from the rough ground, among the
rocks. Every flower seems twice as beautiful under these circumstances;
and it is a fact that the salt air and a peculiar richness in the soil
give a luxuriance of growth and a depth of color not found elsewhere.
“Is that willow-weed” (or whatever it may be)? “I never saw any so
bright!” is a remark often heard from strangers visiting the islands
for the first time. The pale-pink herb-robert, for instance, blushes
with a tint almost as deep as a damask rose, and as for the wild-roses,
I heard some one say they were as “bright as red carnations.” In the
spring the anemones are stained with purple and pink and yellow in a
way that makes their sisters of the mainland seem pallid beside them;
and the violets are wonderful,--the blue ones so large and dark, and
the delicately-veined white ones rich with creamy fragrance.
The calyx of the shadbush-flower is dyed with purple, almost crimson,
and the color runs into the milky whiteness of the petals. The little
pimpernel (when it has anything but salt gravel to grow in, for it
runs fairly into the sea) is clear vermilion, and the pearly eyebright
is violet on the edges; the shy celandine glows golden in its shady
clefts, and the spotted jewel-weed is as rich and splendid as a flower
in Doctor Rappacini’s famous garden. Sometimes it is as if the order
of nature were set aside in this spot; for you find the eyebright and
pimpernel and white violets growing side by side until the frost comes
in November; often October passes with no sign of frost, and the autumn
lingers later than elsewhere. I have even seen the iris and wild-rose
and golden-rod and aster in blossom together, as if, not having the
example of the world before their eyes, they followed their own sweet
will, and bloomed when they took the fancy. As for garden flowers, when
you plant them in this soil they fairly run mad with color. People
say, “Do give me some seeds of these wonderful flowers”; and they
sow them in their gardens on the mainland, and they come up decorous,
commonplace, and pale, like their sisters in the same soil. The little
spot of earth on which they grow at the island is like a mass of
jewels. Who shall describe the pansies, richly streaked with burning
gold; the dark velvet coreopsis and the nasturtium; the larkspurs, blue
and brilliant as lapis-lazuli; the “ardent marigolds,” that flame like
mimic suns? The sweet-peas are of a deep, bright rose-color, and their
odor is like rich wine, too sweet almost to be borne, except when the
pure fragrance of mignonette is added,--such mignonette as never grows
on shore. Why should the poppies blaze in such imperial scarlet? What
quality is hidden in this thin soil, which so transfigures all the
familiar flowers with fresh beauty? I have heard it said that it is the
crumbled rock which so enriches the earth, but I do not know.
If a flock of sheep and various cows did not browse over Appledore
incessantly, it would be a little wilderness of wild-flowers in the
summer; they love the soil and climate, and put forth all their
strength and loveliness. And every year or two a new kind appears, of
which the seed has been brought by some bird, or, perhaps, shaken
out of a bundle of hay. Last summer, for the first time, I found the
purple polygala growing in a meadowy piece of turf on the south side
of the island. Columbines and the fragrant ground-nut, helianthus, and
various other plants, grow only on Duck Island; and it is singular
that the little potentilla, which I am told grows elsewhere only on
mountain-sides, is found here on all the islands. At Smutty-nose
alone certain plants of the wicked-looking henbane (_Hyoscyamus
niger_) flourish, and, on Londoner’s only, there spreads at the top
of the beach a large sea-lungwort (_Mertensia maritima_). At Star the
crooked little ways between the houses are lined with tall plants of
the poisonous hemlock (the _Conium_ that made the death-draught of
Socrates), which flourishes amain, and is the only green thing out of
the small walled enclosures, except the grass and the burdocks; for the
cows and the children devastate the ground.
Appledore is altogether the most agreeable in its aspect of all the
islands, being the largest, and having a greater variety of surface
than the rest. Its southern portion is full of interest, from the
traces of vanished humanity which one beholds at every step; for the
ground in some places is undermined with ancient graves, and the ruined
cellars of houses wherein men and women lived more than a century ago
are scattered here and there to the number of seventy and more. The
men and women are dust and ashes; but here are the stones they squared
and laid; here are the thresholds over which so many feet have passed.
The pale green and lilac and golden lichens have overgrown and effaced
all traces of their footsteps on the door-stones; but here they passed
in and out,--old and young, little feet of children, heavy tramp of
stalwart fishermen, lighter tread of women, painful and uncertain steps
of age. Pleasant it is to think of the brown and swarthy fisherman,
the father, standing on such a threshold, and with the keen glance all
seafaring men possess sweeping the wide horizon for signs of fair or
foul weather; or the mother, sitting in the sun on the step, nursing
her baby, perhaps, or mending a net, or spinning,--for the women here
were famous spinners, and on Star Island yet are women who have not
forgotten the art. Pleasanter still to think of some slender girl at
twilight lingering with reluctant feet, and wistful eyes that search
the dusky sea for a returning sail whose glimmer is sweeter than
moonlight or starlight to her sight,--lingering still, though her
mother calls within and the dew falls with the falling night. I love
to people these solitudes again, and think that those who lived here
centuries ago were decent, God-fearing folk, most of them,--for so
tradition says;[A] though in later years they fell into evil ways, and
drank “fire-water,” and came to grief. And all the pictures over which
I dream are set in this framework of the sea, that sparkled and sang,
or frowned and threatened, in the ages that are gone as it does to-day,
and will continue to smile and threaten when we who listen to it and
love it and fear it now are dust and ashes in our turn.
[A] “The character and habits of the original settlers for industry,
intelligence, and pure morals have acquired for them great respect in
the estimation of posterity.”--_Williamson’s History of Maine._
Some of the cellars are double, as if two families had built together;
some are distinctly marked; in others the stones have partly fallen
in; all are more or less overgrown with lichens, and thick, short turf
creeps everywhere in and about them. Sometimes garlands of woodbine
drape the walls, and poison-ivy clasps and knots itself about the
rocks; clumps of sweet flowering-elder cluster in the corners, or
graceful, stag-horned sumachs, or raspberry bushes with ruddy fruit.
Wild spiked thistles spread, and tall mullein-stalks stand like
sentinels on guard over the desolation. Beautiful it is to see the
delicate herb-robert’s rosy flowers among the rough heaps of rocks,
like a tender afterthought where all is hard and stern.
It is a part of the religious belief of the Shoalers, that the ruinous
cairn on the summit of Appledore was built by the famous John Smith
and his men when they discovered the islands in the year 1614; and I
will not be so heretical as to doubt the fact, though it seems just as
likely that it was set up by fishermen and sailors as a landmark. At
any rate, nobody knows when it was not there, and it is perfectly safe
to imagine any origin for it. I never could be precisely certain of the
site of the first meeting-house on this island, “built (of brick) at a
very early period, possibly the first in the province,” says Williamson
in his “History of Maine.” Probably there was no cellar beneath it, and
the slight underpinning has been scattered and obliterated by time,--a
fate which many of the houses must have shared in like manner. When man
has vanished, Nature strives to restore her original order of things,
and she smooths away gradually all traces of his work with the broad
hands of her changing seasons. The men who built the Pyramids felt
this; but will not the world spin long enough to level their masonry
with the desolate sands? Neither is there any sign of the foundation
of that “Academy” to which “even gentlemen from some of the principal
towns on the sea-coast sent their sons for literary instruction,”--I
quote again from Williamson. How like a dream it seems, looking now at
these deserted rocks, that so much happened here in the years that are
gone! The connection of Spain with these islands always had a great
fascination for me; it is curious that the brightest and gayest of
lands, all aglow with sunshine and so rich with southern beauty, should
be in any way linked with this place, so remote and desolate. “In 1730,
and afterwards, three or four ships used to load at the Shoals with
winter and spring merchantable fish for Bilboa in Spain.” What wondrous
craft must have navigated these waters,--lazy, lumbering old ships,
with quaintly carved figure-heads, and high-peaked sterns and prows,
and heavy draperies of weather-beaten sails, picturesque and charming
to behold, and well enough for the sparkling Mediterranean, but not the
sort of build to battle with the Atlantic breakers, as several wrecks
of vessels caught in the terrible gales and driven upon the pitiless
ledges might testify! The ship Sagunto, it is said, met her destruction
here as late as the year 1813; and there are faint echoes of other
disasters of the kind, but the names of other ships have not come down
to us. One wrecked on Appledore left only a quantity of broad silver
pieces sprinkled about the rocks to tell of the calamity. A fisherman
from Star, paddling over in his dory to explore the coves and chasms
for driftwood (for the island was uninhabited at the time), came
suddenly upon the glittering coins. His amazement was boundless. After
filling his pockets, a sudden terror possessed him; he began to have
a suspicion that something uncanny lurked at the bottom of such good
fortune (for the superstition of the natives is very great), and fled
home to tell his neighbors, who came in a body and made short work of
the process of gathering the rest of the treasure. Occasionally, since
that time, coins have been found about the southeast point, whereon the
unknown vessel struck and was completely destroyed. Of course Captain
Kidd, “as he sailed,” is supposed to have made the locality one of his
many hiding-places. I remember being awed when a child at the story
of how a certain old black Dinah, an inhabitant of Portsmouth, came
out to Appledore, then entirely divested of human abodes, and alone,
with only a divining-rod for company, passed several days and nights
wandering over the island, muttering to herself, with her divining-rod
carefully balanced in her skinny hands. Robert Kidd’s buried treasure,
if it existed, never signalled from below to that mystic rod, and the
old negress returned empty-handed; but what a picture she must have
made wandering there in the loneliness, by sunlight, or moonlight,
or starlight, with her weird figure, her dark face, her garments
fluttering in the wind, and the awful rod in her hand!
On Star Island, I have been told, a little three-legged black pot
full of gold and silver pieces was dug up not very many years ago;
and it is certainly true that Mr. Samuel Haley, who lived upon and
owned Smutty-nose, in building a wall, turned over a large, flat stone
beneath which lay four bars of solid silver. He must have been a fine,
energetic old fellow, that Samuel Haley. With this treasure, says
tradition again, he built, at great trouble and expense, the sea-wall
which connects Smutty-nose with Malaga, and makes a safe harbor for
distressed mariners in stormy weather. (This name Malaga, by the way,
is a very distinct token of the Spaniards.) Not only did Haley build
the sea-wall, but he erected salt-works which “manufactured excellent
salt for the curing of fish,” and stretched a ropewalk over the
uneven ground to the extent of two hundred and seventy feet, and set
up windmills to catch with their wide wings all the winds that blew,
that he might grind his own corn and wheat, and live as independently
as possible of his fellow-men; for that is one of the first things a
settler on the Isles of Shoals finds it necessary to learn. He planted
a little orchard where the soil was deepest, and with much cherishing
care contrived to coax his cherry-trees into abundant fruitfulness, and
in every way made the most of the few advantages of the place. The old
square house which he built upon his island, and which still stands,
had, long ago, a broad balcony running the whole length of the house
beneath the second-story windows. This being in a ruinous condition, I
never dared venture out upon it; but a large, square lookout, with a
stout railing, which he built on the top of the house, remained till
within a few years; and I found it a charming place to linger in on
still days, and watch the sky and the sea and the vessels, and the play
of color over the bright face of the world. Looking from that airy
station years ago, I used to think how many times he had sat there with
his spy-glass, scanning the horizon and all within it, while the wind
ruffled his gray hair and the sun shone pleasantly across his calm old
face. Many years of his useful, happy life he lived there, and left
behind him a beloved and honorable name. His descendants, still living
upon Star, are among the best people in the village. A young girl
bearing his name was lately married to one of the youthful fishermen.
Star Island might well be proud of such a girl, so modest and sweet,
and pretty too, slender and straight, dark-haired, brown-eyed,--as
picturesque a creature as one would wish to see, with a delicate rose
in her cheek and a clear light of intelligence in her eyes. Considering
her, and remembering this ancient ancestor of hers, I thought she
came honestly by her gentle, self-reliant expression, and her fine
bearing, full of unconscious dignity and grace. The old man’s quaint
epitaph speaks of his humanity in “receiving into his enclosure many
a poor, distressed seaman and fisherman in distress of weather.” “In
distress of weather!” One must live in such a place fully to comprehend
the meaning of the words. It was his custom every night to put in
his bedroom window, over the broad balcony facing the southeast, a
light which burned all night,--a little act of thoughtfulness which
speaks volumes. I think the lighthouse could not have been kindled at
that time, but I am not sure. There is much uncertainty with regard
to dates and records of those old times. Mr. Haley is said to have
died in 1811, but I have always heard that he was living when the
Sagunto was wrecked upon his island, which happened, according to the
Gosport records, in 1813. This is the entry: “Ship Sagunto stranded
on Smotinose Isle Jany 14^{th} 1813 Jany 15^{th} one man found, Jany
16^{th} 6 men found 21--7 the Number of men yet found Belonging to
said ship twelve.” I am inclined to think the writer made a mistake in
his date as well as his spelling and arithmetic, for it is an accepted
tradition that Mr. Haley found and buried the dead crew of that ship,
and I have always heard it spoken of as a simple fact. On that stormy
January night, runs the story, he placed the light as usual in his
chamber window, and I dare say prayed in his good heart that no vessel
might be wandering near this dangerous place, tossed helpless on the
raging sea in the thick darkness and bitter cold and blinding snow. But
that night the great ship Sagunto drove, crashing, full upon the fatal
southeast point, in sight of the tiny spark that burned peacefully,
unwavering, in that quiet chamber. Her costly timbers of mahogany and
cedar-wood were splintered on the sharp teeth of those inexorable
rocks; her cargo of dried fruits and nuts and bales of broadcloth and
gold and silver, was tossed about the shore, and part of her crew were
thrown alive upon it. Some of them saw the light, and crawled toward
it benumbed with cold and spent with fatigue and terror. The roaring
of the storm bore away their faint cries of distress; the old man
slept on quietly, with his family about him, sheltered, safe; while a
stone’s-throw from his door these sailors strove and agonized to reach
that friendly light. Two of them gained the stone-wall in front of the
house, but their ebbing strength would not allow them to climb over;
they threw themselves upon it, and perished miserably, with safety,
warmth, and comfort so close at hand! In the morning, when the tumult
was somewhat hushed, and underneath the sullen sky rolled the more
sullen sea in long, deliberate waves, the old man looked out in the
early light across the waste of snow, and on the wall lay--something
that broke the familiar outline, though all was smooth with the pure,
soft snow. He must put on coat and cap, and go and find out what this
strange thing might be. Ah, that was a sight for his pitying eyes under
the cold and leaden light of that unrelenting morning! He summoned his
sons and his men. Quickly the alarm was given, and there was confusion
and excitement as the islanders, hurriedly gathering, tried if it were
possible yet to save some life amid the wreck. But it was too late;
every soul was lost. Fourteen bodies were found at that time, strewn
all the way between the wall and that southeast point where the vessel
had gone to pieces. The following summer the skeleton of another was
discovered among some bushes near the shore. The imagination lingers
over those poor drowned sailors; strives to figure what each man was
like, what might have been the musical name of each (for all names in
Spanish should be musical, with a reminiscence of flute and guitar in
them); dwells on the dark-olive faces and jet-black hair, the graceful
foreign dress,--curious short jackets, perhaps, with bits of bright
embroidery that loving hands had worked for them, all stained and
tarnished by the brine. No doubt some of them wore about their necks a
cross or amulet, with an image of the “Blessed Virgin” or the “Son of
God,” that so they might be saved from just such a fate as this; and
maybe some one among these sailor-men carried against his heart a lock
of hair, dark and lustrous before the washing of the cold waves dulled
the brightness of its beauty. Fourteen shallow graves were quarried
for the unknown dead in the iron earth, and there they lie, with him
who buried them a little above in the same grassy slope. Here is his
epitaph:--
“In memory of Mr. Samuel Haley
Who died in the year 1811
Aged 84
He was a man of great Ingenuity
Industry Honor and Honesty, true to his
Country & A man who did A great
Publik good in Building A
Dock & Receiving into his
Enclosure many a poor
Distressed Seaman & Fisherman
In distress of Weather.”
A few steps from their resting-place the low wall on which the two
unfortunates were found frozen is falling into ruin. The glossy green
leaves of the bayberry-bushes crowd here and there about it, in odorous
ranks on either side, and sweetly the warm blush of the wild-rose glows
against its cool gray stones. Leaning upon it in summer afternoons,
when the wind is quiet and there steals up a fragrance and fresh murmur
from the incoming tide, when the slowly mellowing light lies tranquil
over the placid sea, enriching everything it touches with infinite
beauty,--waves and rocks that kill and destroy, blossoming roses and
lonely graves,--a wistful sadness colors all one’s thoughts. Afar off
the lazy waters sing and smile about that white point, shimmering
in the brilliant atmosphere. How peaceful it is! How innocent and
unconscious is the whole face of this awful and beautiful nature! But,
listening to the blissful murmur of the tide, one can but think with
what another voice that tide spoke when it ground the ship to atoms and
roared with sullen thunder about those dying men.
There is no inscription on the rough boulders at the head and foot
of these graves. A few more years, and all trace of them will be
obliterated. Already the stones lean this way and that, and are half
buried in the rank grass. Soon will they be entirely forgotten; the
old, old world forgets so much! And it is sown thick with graves from
pole to pole.
“These islands bore some of the first footprints of New-England
Christianity and civilization. They were for a long time the abode of
intelligence, refinement, and virtue, but were afterwards abandoned
to a state of semi-barbarism.” The first intelligence of the place
comes to us from the year 1614, when John Smith is supposed to have
discovered them. The next date is of the landing of Christopher
Leavitt, in 1623. In 1645, three brothers, Robert, John, and Richard
Cutts, emigrated from Wales, and on their way to the continent paused
at the Isles of Shoals, and, finding them so pleasant, made their
settlement here. Williamson mentions particularly Richard Gibson,
from Topsham, England, and various other men from England and Wales.
Many people speedily joined the little colony, which grew yearly
more prosperous. In 1650, the Rev. John Brock came to live among the
islanders, and remained with them twelve years. All that we hear of
this man is so fine, he is represented as having been so faithful,
zealous, intelligent, and humane, that it is no wonder the community
flourished while he sat at the helm. It was said of him, “He dwells as
near Heaven as any man upon earth.” Cotton Mather thus quaintly praises
him: “He was a good _grammarian_, chiefly in this, that he still _spoke
the truth from his heart_. He was a good _logician_, chiefly in this,
that he _presented himself unto God with a reasonable service_. He was
a good _arithmetician_, chiefly in this, that he _so numbered his days
as to apply his heart unto wisdom_. He was a good _astronomer_, chiefly
in this, _that his conversation was in Heaven_.... So much belonged to
this _good man_, that so _learned a life_ may well be judged worthy of
being a _written one_.” After him came a long procession of the clergy,
good, bad, and indifferent, up to the present time, when “divine
service,” so-called, has seemed a mere burlesque as it has been often
carried on in the little church at Star.
Last summer I was shown a quaint little book entitled “The Fisherman’s
Calling. A brief essay to Serve the Great Interests of Religion
among our Fishermen. By Cotton Mather, D. D. Boston in New England.
Printed: Sold by T. Green. 1712,” and I found the following incident
connected with Mr. Brock’s ministry at the Shoals: “To Illustrate and
Demonstrate the Providence of God our Saviour over the Business of
fishermen, I will entertain you with Two short Modern Histories.” Then
follows an account of some Romish priests upon some isles belonging to
Scotland, who endeavored to draw the poor fishermen over to popery.
The other is this: “When our Mr. Brock lived on the Isles of Shoals,
he brought the Fishermen into an agreement that besides the Lord’s
Day they would spend one day of every month together in the worship
of the Glorious Lord. A certain day which by their Agreement belonged
unto the Exercises of Religion being arrived, they came to Mr. Brock,
and asked him, that they might put by their meeting and go a Fishing,
because they had Lost many Days by the Foulness of the weather. He,
seeing that without and against his consent they resolved upon doing
what they asked of him, replied, ‘If you will go away I say unto you,
‘Catch Fish if you can!’ But as for you that will tarry, and worship
our Lord Jesus Christ this day, I will pray unto Him for you that you
may afterwards take fish till you are weary.’ Thirty men went away
from the meeting and Five tarried. The thirty that went away from the
meeting with all their Craft could catch but four Fishes. The Five
which tarried went forth afterwards and _they_ took _five Hundred_. The
Fishermen were after this Readier to hearken unto the Voice of their
Teacher.”
If virtue were often its own reward after a fashion like this, in what
a well-conducted world we should live! Doubtless the reckless islanders
needed the force of all the moral suasion good Mr. Brock could bring
to bear upon them; too much law and order they could not have; but I
like better this story of the stout old fisherman who in church so
unexpectedly answered his pastor’s thrilling exhortation, “Supposing,
my brethren, that any of you should be overtaken in the bay by a
northeast storm, your hearts trembling with fear, and nothing but death
before, whither would your thoughts turn? what would you do?”--with the
instant inspiration of common-sense, “I’d hoist the foresail and scud
away for Squam!”
The first church on Star was built principally of timbers from the
wrecks of Spanish ships, but it has been partially burned and rebuilt
twice. Various rough characters, given over to hard drinking, and
consequently lawless living, have joined the colony within the last ten
years, and made the place the scene of continually recurring fires. On
going down to Appledore one spring I was surprised at the daily and
nightly jangling of the dull bell at Star,--a dissonant sound borne
wildly on the stormy wind to our dwelling. “What is Star Island ringing
for?” I kept asking, and was as often answered, “O, it’s only Sam Blake
setting his house on fire!”--the object being to obtain the insurance
thereupon.
On the Massachusetts records there is a paragraph to the effect that,
in the year 1653, Philip Babb, of Hog Island, was appointed constable
for all the islands of Shoals, Star Island excepted. To Philip Babb we
shall have occasion to refer again. “In May, 1661,” says Williamson,
“being places of note and great resort, the General Court incorporated
the islands into a town called Appledore, and invested it with the
powers and privileges of other towns.” There were then about forty
families on Hog Island, but between that time and the year 1670 these
removed to Star Island and joined the settlement there. This they were
induced to do partly through fear of the Indians, who frequented Duck
Island, and thence made plundering excursions upon them, carrying
off their women while they were absent fishing, and doing a variety
of harm; but, as it is expressly stated that people living on the
mainland sent their children to school at Appledore that they might
be safe from the Indians, the statement of their depredations at the
Shoals is perplexing. Probably the savages camped on Duck to carry on
their craft of porpoise-fishing, which to this day they still pursue
among the islands on the eastern coast of Maine. Star Island seemed
a place of greater safety; and probably the greater advantages of
landing and the convenience of a wide cove at the entrance of the
village, with a little harbor wherein the fishing-craft might anchor
with some security, were also inducements. William Pepperell, a native
of Cornwall, England, emigrated to the place in the year 1676, and
lived there upwards of twenty years, and carried on a large fishery.
“He was the father of Sir William Pepperell, the most famous man Maine
ever produced.” For more than a century previous to the Revolutionary
War there were at the Shoals from three to six hundred inhabitants,
and the little settlement flourished steadily. They had their church
and school-house, and a court-house; and the usual municipal officers
were annually chosen, and the town records regularly kept. From three
to four thousand quintals of fish were yearly caught and cured by the
islanders; and, beside their trade with Spain, large quantities of fish
were also carried to Portsmouth, for the West India market. In 1671
the islands belonged to John Mason and Sir Ferdinando Gorges. This
man always greatly interested me. He must have been a person of great
force of character, strong, clear-headed, full of fire and energy. He
was appointed governor-general of New England in 1637. Williamson has
much to say of him: “He and Sir Walter Raleigh, whose acquaintance
was familiar, possessing minds equally elastic and adventurous,
turned their thoughts at an early period of life towards the American
hemisphere.” And the historian thus goes on lamenting over him: “Fame
and wealth, so often the idols of superior intellects, were the
prominent objects of this aspiring man. Constant and sincere in his
friendships, he might have had extensively the estimation of others,
had not selfishness been the centre of all his efforts. His life and
name, though by no means free from blemishes, have just claims to the
grateful recollections of the Eastern Americans and their posterity.”
From 1640 to 1775, says a report to the “Society for Propagating the
Gospel among the Indians and Others in North America,” the church at
the Shoals was in a flourishing condition, and had a succession of
ministers,--Messrs. Hull, Brock, Belcher, Moody, Tucke, and Shaw, all
of whom were good and faithful men; two, Brock and Tucke, being men
of learning and ability, with peculiarities of talent and character
admirably fitting them for their work on these islands. Tucke was
the only one who closed his life and ministry at the Shoals. He was
a graduate of Harvard College of the class of 1723, was ordained
at the Shoals July 20, 1732, and died there August 12, 1773,--his
ministry thus covering more than forty years. His salary in 1771 was
paid in merchantable fish, a quintal to a man, when there were on
the Shoals from ninety to one hundred men, and a quintal of fish was
worth a guinea. His grave was accidentally discovered in 1800, and
the Hon. Dudley Atkins Tyng, who interested himself most charitably
and indefatigably for the good of these islands, placed over it a
slab of stone, with an inscription which still remains to tell of the
fine qualities of the man whose dust it covers; but year by year the
raindrops with delicate touches wear away the deeply cut letters, for
the stone lies horizontal; even now they are scarcely legible, and soon
the words of praise and appreciation will exist only in the memory of
a few of the older inhabitants.
At the time of Mr. Tucke’s death the prosperity of the Shoals was at
its height. But in less than thirty years after his death a most woful
condition of things was inaugurated.
The settlement flourished till the breaking out of the war, when it
was found to be entirely at the mercy of the English, and obliged
to furnish them with recruits and supplies. The inhabitants were
therefore ordered by the government to quit the islands; and as their
trade was probably broken up and their property exposed, most of them
complied with the order, and settled in the neighboring seaport towns,
where their descendants may be found to this day. Some of the people
settled in Salem, and the Mr. White so mysteriously murdered there
many years ago was born at Appledore. Those who remained, with a few
exceptions, were among the most ignorant and degraded of the people,
and they went rapidly down into untold depths of misery. “They burned
the meeting-house, and gave themselves up to quarrelling, profanity,
and drunkenness, till they became almost barbarians”; or, as Mr.
Morse expresses it, “were given up to work all manner of wickedness
with greediness.” In no place of the size has there been a greater
absorption of “rum” since the world was made. Mr. Reuben Moody, a
theological student, lived at the Shoals for a few months in the year
1822, and his description of the condition of things at that time is
frightful. He had no place to open a school; one of the islanders
provided him with a room, fire, etc., giving as a reason for his
enthusiastic furtherance of Mr. Moody’s plans, that his children made
such a disturbance at home that he couldn’t sleep in the daytime. An
extract from Mr. Moody’s journal affords an idea of the morals of the
inhabitants at this period:--
“May 1^{st}. I yet continue to witness the Heaven-daring impieties
of this people. Yesterday my heart was shocked at seeing a man about
seventy years of age, as devoid of reason as a maniac, giving way to
his passions; striving to express himself in more blasphemous language
than he had the ability to utter; and, being unable to express the
malice of his heart in words, he would _run at_ every one he saw. All
was tumult and confusion,--men and women with tar-brushes, clenched
fists, and stones; one female who had an infant but eight days old,
with a stone in her hand and an oath on her tongue, threatened to dash
out the brains of her antagonists.... After I arrived among them some
of them dispersed, some led their wives into the house, others drove
them off, and a calm succeeded.”
In another part of the journal is an account of an old man who lived
alone and drank forty gallons of rum in twelve months,--some horrible
old Caliban, no doubt. This hideous madness of drunkenness was the
great trouble at the Shoals; and though time has modified, it has
not eliminated the apparently hereditary bane whose antidote is not
yet discovered. The misuse of strong drink still proves a whirlpool
more awful than the worst terrors of the pitiless ocean that hems the
islanders in.
As may be seen from Mr. Moody’s journal, the clergy had a hard time
of it among the heathen at the Isles of Shoals; but they persevered,
and many brave women at different times have gone among the people to
teach the school and reclaim the little children from wretchedness
and ignorance. Miss Peabody, of Newburyport, who came to live with
them in 1823, did wonders for them during the three years of her stay.
She taught the school, visited the families, and on Sundays read to
such audiences as she could collect, took seven of the poorer female
children to live with her at the parsonage, instructed all who would
learn in the arts of carding, spinning, weaving, knitting, sewing,
braiding mats, etc. Truly she remembered what “Satan finds for idle
hands to do,” and kept all her charges busy and consequently happy.
All honor to her memory! she was a wise and faithful servant. There is
still an affectionate remembrance of her among the present inhabitants,
whose mothers she helped out of their degradation into a better life. I
saw in one of the houses, not long ago, a sampler blackened by age, but
carefully preserved in a frame; and was told that the dead grandmother
of the family had made it when a little girl, under Miss Peabody’s
supervision. In 1835 the Rev. Origen Smith went to live at Star, and
remained perhaps ten years, doing much good among the people. He nearly
succeeded in banishing the great demoralizer, liquor, and restored law
and order. He is reverently remembered by the islanders. In 1855 an
excellent man by the name of Mason occupied the post of minister for
the islanders, and from his report to the “Society for Propagating the
Gospel among the Indians and Others in North America” I make a few
extracts. He says: “The kind of business which the people pursue, and
by which they subsist, affects unfavorably their habits, physical,
social, and religious. Family discipline is neglected, domestic
arrangements very imperfect, much time, apparently wasted, is spent
in watching for favorable indications to pursue their calling.... A
bad moral influence is excited by a portion of the transient visitors
to the Shoals during the summer months.” This is very true. He speaks
of the people’s appreciation of the efforts made in their behalf; and
says that they raised subscriptions among themselves for lighting the
parsonage, and for fuel for the singing-school (which, by the way, was
a most excellent institution), and mentions their surprising him by
putting into the back kitchen of the parsonage a barrel of fine flour,
a bucket of sugar, a leg of bacon, etc. “Their deep poverty abounded
unto the riches of their liberality,” he says; and this little act
shows that they were far from being indifferent or ungrateful. They
were really attached to Mr. Mason, and it is a pity he could not have
remained with them.
Within the last few years they have been trying bravely to help
themselves, and they persevere with their annual fair to obtain
money to pay the teacher who saves their little children from utter
ignorance; and many of them show a growing ambition in fitting up
their houses and making their families more comfortable. Of late, the
fires before referred to, kindled in drunken madness by the islanders
themselves, or by the reckless few who have joined the settlement,
have swept away nearly all the old houses, which have been replaced by
smart new buildings, painted white, with green blinds, and with modern
improvements, so that yearly the village grows less picturesque,--which
is a charm one can afford to lose, when the external smartness is
indicative of better living among the people. Twenty years ago Star
Island Cove was charming, with its tumble-down fish-houses, and ancient
cottages with low, shelving roofs, and porches covered with the golden
lichen that so loves to embroider old weather-worn wood. Now there
is not a vestige of those dilapidated buildings to be seen; almost
everything is white and square and new; and they have even cleaned out
the cove, and removed the great accumulation of fish-bones which made
the beach so curious.
The old town records are quaint and interesting, and the spelling and
modes of expression so peculiar that I have copied a few. Mr. John
Muchamore was the moderator of a meeting called “March ye 7th day,
1748. By a Legall town meeting of ye Free holders and Inhabitence of
gosport, dewly quallefide to vote for Tiding men Collers of fish,
Corders of wood. Addition to ye minister’s sallery Mr John Tucke, 100
lbs old tenor.”
In 1755, it was “Agred in town meating that if any person shall spelth
[split] any fish above hie water marck and leave their heads and son
bones [sound-bones] their, shall pay ten lbs new tenor to the town, and
any that is above now their, they that have them their, shall have them
below hie warter in fortinets time or pay the same.” In another place
“it is agreed at ton meating evry person that is are kow [has a cow]
shall carry them of at 15 day of may, keep them their til the 15 day of
October or pay 20 shillings lawful money.” And “if any person that have
any hogs, If they do any damg, hom [whom] they do the damg to shall
keep the hog for sattisfaxeon.”
The cows seem to have given a great deal of trouble. Here is one more
extract on the subject:--
“This is a Leagel vot by the ton meeting, that if any presson or
pressons shall leave their Cowks out after the fifteenth day of May
and they do any Dameg, they shall be taken up and the owner of the kow
shall pay teen shillings old tenor to the kow constabel and one half he
shall have and the other shall give to the pour of the place.
“MR DAINEL RANDEL
“_Kow Constabel_.”
“On March 11^{th} 1762. A genarel free Voot past amongst the inhabents
that every fall of the year when Mr Rev^{d.} John Tucke has his wood to
Carry home evary men will not com that is abel to com shall pay forty
shillings ould tenor.”
But the most delightfully preposterous entry is this:--
“March 12^{th} 1769. A genarel free voot past amongst the inhabents to
cus [cause] tow men to go to the Rev^d Mr John Tucke to hear wether he
was willing to take one Quental of fish each man, or to take the price
of Quental in ould tenor which he answered this that he thought it was
easer to pay the fish than the money which he consented to taik the
fish for the year insuing.”
“On March ye 25 1771. ”then their was a meating called and it was
_gurned_ until the 23^{rd} day of apirel.
“MR DEEKEN WILLAM MUCHMORE
“_Moderator_.”
Among the “offorsers” of “Gospored” were, besides “Moderator” and “Town
Clarke,” “Seelekt meen,” “Counstauble,” “Tidon meen” (Tithing-men),
“Coulears of fish,”--“Coulear” meaning, I suppose, culler, or person
appointed to select fish,--and “Sealers of Whood,” oftener expressed
corders of wood.
In 1845 we read that Asa Caswell was chosen highway “sovair.”
Very ancient tradition says that the method of courtship at the Isles
of Shoals was after this fashion: If a youth fell in love with a maid,
he lay in wait till she passed by, and then pelted her with stones,
after the manner of our friends of Marblehead; so that if a fair
Shoaler found herself the centre of a volley of missiles, she might
be sure that an ardent admirer was expressing himself with decision
certainly, if not with tact! If she turned, and exhibited any curiosity
as to the point of the compass whence the bombardment proceeded, her
doubts were dispelled by another shower; but if she went on her way in
maiden meditation, then was her swain in despair, and life, as is usual
in such cases, became a burden to him.
Within my remembrance an occasional cabbage-party made an agreeable
variety in the life of the villagers. I never saw one, but have heard
them described. Instead of regaling the guests with wine and ices, pork
and cabbage were the principal refreshments offered them; and if the
cabbage came out of the garden of a neighbor, the spice of wickedness
lent zest to the entertainment,--stolen fruit being always the sweetest.
It would seem strange that, while they live in so healthy a place,
where the atmosphere is absolutely perfect in its purity, they should
have suffered so much from ill health, and that so many should have
died of consumption,--the very disease for the cure of which physicians
send invalids hither. The reasons are soon told. The first and most
important is this: that, as nearly as they could, they have in past
years hermetically sealed their houses, so that the air of heaven
should not penetrate within. An open window, especially at night, they
would have looked upon as madness,--a temptation of Providence; and
during the winter they have deliberately poisoned themselves with every
breath, like two thirds of the rest of the world. I have seen a little
room containing a whole family, fishing-boots and all, bed, furniture,
cooking-stove in full blast, and an oil lamp with a wick so high that
the deadly smoke rose steadily, filling the air with what Browning
might call “filthiest gloom,” and mingling with the incense of ancient
tobacco-pipes smoked by both sexes (for nearly all the old women used
to smoke); every crack and cranny was stopped; and if, by any chance,
the door opened for an instant, out rushed a fume in comparison with
which the gusts from the lake of Tartarus might be imagined sweet. Shut
in that deadly air, a part of the family slept, sometimes all. What
wonder that their chests were hollow, their faces haggard, and that
apathy settled upon them! Then their food was hardly selected with
reference to health, saleratus and pork forming two of the principal
ingredients in their daily fare. Within a few years past they have
probably improved in these respects. Fifteen years ago I was passing a
window one morning, at which a little child two years old was sitting,
tied into a high chair before a table drawn close to the window, eating
his breakfast alone in his glory. In his stout little fist he grasped
a large iron spoon, and fed himself from a plate of beans swimming in
fat, and with the pork cut up in squares for his better convenience.
By the side of the plate stood a tin mug of bitter-strong black coffee
sweetened with molasses. I spoke to his mother within; “Ar’n’t you
afraid such strong coffee will kill your baby?” “O no,” she answered,
and held it to his lips. “There, drink that,” she said, “that’ll make
you hold your head up!” The poor child died before he grew to be a man,
and all the family have fallen victims to consumption.
Very few of the old people are left at the present time, and the
village is very like other fishing-villages along the coast. Most of
the peculiar characteristics of the race are lost in the present
generation of young women, who are addicted to the use of hoops and
water-falls, and young men, who condescend to spoil their good looks
by dyeing their handsome blond beards with the fashionable mixture
which inevitably produces a lustre like stove-blacking. But there are
sensible fellows among them, fine specimens of the hardy New England
fisherman, Saxon-bearded, broad-shouldered, deep-chested, and bronzed
with shade on shade of ruddy brown. The neutral blues and grays of
the salt-water make perfect backgrounds for the pictures these men
are continually showing one in their life about the boats. Nothing
can be more satisfactory than the blendings and contrasts of color
and the picturesque effect of the general aspect of the natives in
their element. The eye is often struck with the richness of the color
of some rough hand, glowing with mingled red, brown, and orange,
against the gray-blue water, as it grasps an oar, perhaps, or pulls
in a rope. It is strange that the sun and wind, which give such fine
tints to the complexions of the lords of creation, should leave such
hideous traces on the faces of women. When they are exposed to the
same salt wind and clear sunshine they take the hue of dried fish, and
become objects for men and angels to weep over. To see a _bona fide_
Shoaler “sail a boat” (when the craft is a real boat and no tub) is
an experience. The vessel obeys his hand at the rudder as a trained
horse a touch on the rein, and seems to bow at the flash of his eye,
turning on her heel and running up into the wind, “luffing” to lean
again on the other tack,--obedient, graceful, perfectly beautiful,
yielding to breeze and to billow, yet swayed throughout by a stronger
and more imperative law. The men become strongly attached to their
boats, which seem to have a sort of human interest for them,--and no
wonder. They lead a life of the greatest hardship and exposure, during
the winter especially, setting their trawls fifteen or twenty miles to
the eastward of the islands, drawing them next day if the stormy winds
and waves will permit, and taking the fish to Portsmouth to sell. It is
desperately hard work, trawling at this season, with the bitter wind
blowing in their teeth, and the flying spray freezing upon everything
it touches,--boats, masts, sails, decks, clothes completely cased in
ice, and fish frozen solid as soon as taken from the water. The inborn
politeness of these fishermen to stranger-women is something delightful
to witness. I remember once landing in Portsmouth, and being obliged to
cross three or four schooners just in (with their freight of frozen
fish lying open-mouthed in a solid mass on deck) to reach the wharf. No
courtly gentlemen could have displayed more beautiful behavior than did
these rough fellows, all pressing forward, with real grace,--because
the feeling which prompted them was a true and lofty feeling,--to help
me over the tangle of ropes and sails and anchors to a safe footing on
shore. There is a ledge forty-five miles east of the islands, called
Jeffrey’s Ledge, where the Shoalers go for spring fishing. During a
northeast storm in May, part of the little fleet came reeling in before
the gale; and, not daring to trust themselves to beat up into the
harbor (a poor shelter at best), round the rocky reefs and ledges, the
fishermen anchored under the lee of Appledore, and there rode out the
storm. They were in continual peril; for, had their cables chafed apart
with the shock and strain of the billows among which they plunged, or
had their anchors dragged (which might have been expected, the bottom
of the sea between the islands and the mainland being composed of mud,
while all outside is rough and rocky), they would have inevitably been
driven to their destruction on the opposite coast. It was not pleasant
to watch them as the early twilight shut down over the vast, weltering
desolation of the sea, to see the slender masts waving helplessly from
one side to another,--sometimes almost horizontal, as the hulls turned
heavily this way and that, and the long breakers rolled in endless
succession against them. They saw the lights in our windows a half-mile
away; and we, in the warm, bright, quiet room, sitting by a fire that
danced and shone, fed with bits of wreck such as they might scatter
on Rye Beach before morning, could hardly think of anything else than
the misery of those poor fellows, wet, cold, hungry, sleepless, full
of anxiety till the morning should break and the wind should lull. No
boat could reach them through the terrible commotion of waves. But they
rode through the night in safety, and the morning brought relief. One
brave little schooner “toughed it out” on the distant ledge, and her
captain told me that no one could stand on board of her; the pressure
of the wind down on her decks was so great that she shuddered from stem
to stern, and he feared she would shake to pieces, for she was old and
not very seaworthy. Some of the men had wives and children watching
them from lighted windows at Star. What a fearful night for them! They
could not tell from hour to hour, through the thick darkness, if yet
the cables held; they could not see till daybreak whether the sea had
swallowed up their treasures. I wonder the wives were not white-haired
when the sun rose, and showed them those little specks yet rolling in
the breakers! The women are excessively timid about the water, more so
than landswomen. Having the terror and might of the ocean continually
encircling them, they become more impressed with it and distrust it,
knowing it so well. Very few accidents happen, however: the islanders
are a cautious people. Years ago, when the white sails of their little
fleet of whale-boats used to flutter out of the sheltered bight and
stand out to the fishing-grounds in the bay, how many eyes followed
them in the early light, and watched them in the distance through
the day, till, toward sunset, they spread their wings to fly back
with the evening wind! How pathetic the gathering of women on the
headlands, when out of the sky swept the squall that sent the small
boats staggering before it, and blinded the eyes, already drowned in
tears, with sudden rain that hid sky and sea and boats from their eager
gaze! What wringing of hands, what despairing cries, which the wild
wind bore away while it caught and fluttered the homely draperies and
unfastened the locks of maid and mother, to blow them about their pale
faces and anxious eyes! Now no longer the little fleet goes forth; for
the greater part of the islanders have stout schooners, and go trawling
with profit, if not with pleasure. A few solitaries fish in small
dories and earn a slender livelihood thereby.
The sea helps these poor people by bringing fuel to their very doors;
the waves continually deposit driftwood in every fissure of the rocks.
But sad, anxious lives they have led, especially the women, many of
whom have grown old before their time with hard work and bitter cares,
with hewing of wood and drawing of water, turning of fish on the flakes
to dry in the sun, endless household work, and the cares of maternity,
while their lords lounged about the rocks in their scarlet shirts in
the sun, or “held up the walls of the meeting-house,” as one expressed
it, with their brawny shoulders. I never saw such wrecks of humanity as
some of the old women of Star Island, who have long since gone to their
rest. In my childhood I caught glimpses of them occasionally, their
lean brown shapes crouching over the fire, with black pipes in their
sunken mouths, and hollow eyes, “of no use now but to gather brine,”
and rough, gray, straggling locks: despoiled and hopeless visions, it
seemed as if youth and joy would never have been theirs.
A WOMAN OF STAR ISLAND.
ISLES OF SHOALS, 1844.
Over the embers she sits,
Close at the edge of the grave,
With her hollow eyes like pits,
And her mouth like a sunken cave.
Her short black pipe held tight
Her withered lips between,
She rocks in the flickering light
Her figure bent and lean.
She turns the fish no more
That dry on the flakes in the sun;
No wood she drags to the door,
Nor water,--her labor is done.
She cares not for oath or blow,
She is past all hope or fear;
There is nothing she cares to know,
There is nothing hateful or dear.
Deep wrong have the bitter years
Wrought her, both body and soul.
Life has been seasoned with tears;
But saw not God the whole?
O wreck in woman’s shape!
Were you ever gracious and sweet?
Did youth’s enchantment drape
This horror, from head to feet?
Have dewy eyes looked out
From these hollow pits forlorn?
Played smiles the mouth about
Of shy, still rapture born?
Yea, once. But long ago
Has evil ground away
All beauty. The salt winds blow
On no sorrier sight to-day.
Trodden utterly out
Is every spark of hope.
There is only left her, a doubt,
A gesture, half-conscious, a grope
In the awful dark for a Touch
That never yet failed a soul.
Is not God tender to such?
Hath he not seen the whole?
The local pronunciation of the Shoalers is very peculiar, and a shrewd
sense of humor is one of their leading characteristics. Could De
Quincey have lived among them, I think he might have been tempted to
write an essay on swearing as a fine art, for it has reached a pitch
hardly short of sublimity in this favored spot. They seemed to have a
genius for it, and some of them really devoted their best powers to its
cultivation. The language was taxed to furnish them with prodigious
forms of speech wherewith to express the slightest emotion of pain,
anger, or amusement; and though the blood of the listener was sometimes
chilled in his veins, overhearing their unhesitating profanity, the
prevailing sentiment was likely to be one of amazement mingled with
intense amusement,--the whole thing was so grotesque and monstrous,
and their choice of words so comical, and generally so very much to the
point.
The real Shoals phraseology existing in past years was something not
to be described; it is impossible by any process known to science to
convey an idea of the intonations of their speech, quite different from
Yankee drawl or sailor-talk, and perfectly unique in itself. Why they
should have called a swallow a “swallick” and a sparrow a “sparrick”
I never could understand; or what they mean by calling a great gale
or tempest a “Tan toaster.” Anything that ends in _y_ or _e_ they
still pronounce _ay_ with great breadth; for instance, “Benny” is
Bennaye; “Billy” Billay, and so on. A man by the name of Beebe, the
modern “missionary,” was always spoken of as Beebay, when he was not
called by a less respectful title. Their sense of fun showed itself
in the nicknames with which they designated any person possessing the
slightest peculiarity. For instance, twenty years ago a minister of the
Methodist persuasion came to live among them; his wife was unreasonably
tall and thin. With the utmost promptitude and decision the irreverent
christened her “Legs,” and never spoke of her by any other name.
“Laigs has gone to Portsmouth,” or “Laigs has got a new gown,” etc.
A spinster of very dark complexion was called “Scip,” an abbreviation
of Scipio, a name supposed to appertain particularly to the colored
race. Another was called “Squint,” because of a defect in the power of
vision; and not only were they spoken of by these names, but called
so to their faces habitually. One man earned for himself the title of
“Brag,” so that no one ever thought of calling him by his real name;
his wife was Mrs. Brag; and constant use so robbed these names of their
offensiveness that the bearers not only heard them with equanimity,
but would hardly have known themselves by their true ones. A most
worthy Norwegian took up his abode for a brief space among them a few
years ago. His name was Ingebertsen. Now, to expect any Shoaler would
trouble himself to utter such a name as that was beyond all reason. At
once they called him “Carpenter,” apropos of nothing at all, for he
never had been a carpenter. But the name was the first that occurred to
them, and sufficiently easy of utterance. It was “Carpenter,” and “Mis’
Carpenter,” and “them Carpenter children,” and the name still clings
to fine old Ingebertsen and his family. Grandparents are addressed as
Grans and Gwammaye, Grans being an abbreviation of grandsire. “Tell
yer grans his dinner’s ready,” calls some woman from a cottage door.
One old man, too lazy almost to live, was called “Hing”; one of two
brothers “Bunker,” the other “Shothead”; an ancient scold was called
“Zeke,” another “Sir Polly,” and so on indefinitely. In pleasant
weather sometimes the younger women would paddle from one island to
another “making calls.” If any old “Grans” perceived them, loafing at
his door in the sun, “It’s going to storm! the women begin to flit!” he
would cry, as if they were a flock of coots. A woman, describing how
slightly her house was put together, said, “Lor’, ’twan’t never built,
’twas only hove together.” “I don’ know whe’r or no it’s best or no to
go fishin’ whiles mornin’,” says some rough fellow, meditating upon
the state of winds and waters. Of his boat another says with pride,
“_She’s_ a pretty piece of wood!” and another, “She strikes a sea and
comes down like a pillow,” describing her smooth sailing. Some one,
relating the way the civil authorities used to take political matters
into their own hands, said that “if a man didn’t vote as they wanted
him to, they took him and hove him up agin the meetin’ us,” by way of
bringing him to his senses. Two boys in bitter contention have been
heard calling each other “nasty-faced chowderheads,” as if the force of
language could no further go. “I’m dryer than a graven image,” a man
says when he is thirsty. But it is impossible to give an idea of their
common speech leaving out the profanity which makes it so startling.
Some comical stories are told of the behavior of officers of the law
in certain emergencies. On one occasion two men attacked each other in
the cove which served as the Plaza, the grand square of the village,
the general lounging-place. A comrade in a state of excitement ran
to inform the one policeman, who straightway repaired to the scene
of battle. There were the combatants raging like wild beasts, while
the whole community looked on aghast. What was to be done? Evidently
something, and at once. The policeman looked about him, considering. As
for interfering with that fearful twain, it was out of the question.
His eye fell upon a poor old man who leaned against a fish-house
enjoying the scene. A happy thought struck him! He dashed down upon the
ancient and unoffending spectator, and hurled him to the ground with
such force that he broke his collar-bone. Then, I suppose, he retired,
serene in the proud consciousness of having done his duty, and of
having been fully equal to the occasion.
Two of the chief magistrates of the place had a deadly feud, entirely
personal, which had smouldered between them for years. One day the
stronger of the two quietly “arrested” the weaker, tied him hand and
foot with ropes, “hove” him into his whale-boat, and sailed off with
him in triumph to the land. Arrived at the city of Portsmouth, he
conducted him to jail, delivered him over to the jailer with much
satisfaction, crying, “There! There he is! Take him and lock him up!
He’s a poor pris’ner. Don’t you give him nothin’ t’ eat!” and returned
rejoicing to the bosom of his family. It being Thanksgiving Day, the
jailer is said to have taken the prisoner at once into his house, and,
instead of locking him up, gave him, according to his own account, “one
of the best Thanksgiving dinners he ever ate.”
Nearly all the Shoalers have a singular gait, contracted from the
effort to keep their equilibrium while standing in boats, and from
the unavoidable gymnastics which any attempt at locomotion among the
rocks renders necessary. Some stiff-jointed old men have been known to
leap wildly from broad stone to stone on the smooth, flat pavements
of Portsmouth town, finding it out of the question to walk evenly and
decorously along the straight and easy way. This is no fable. Such is
the force of habit. Most of the men are more or less round-shouldered,
and seldom row upright, with head erect and shoulders thrown back.
They stoop so much over the fish-tables--cleaning, splitting, salting,
packing--that they acquire a permanent habit of stooping.
Twenty years ago, an old man by the name of Peter was alive on Star
Island. He was said to be a hundred years old; and anything more
grisly, in the shape of humanity, it has never been my lot to behold;
so lean and brown and ancient, he might have been Methuselah, for no
one knew how long he had lived on this rolling planet. Years before he
died he used to paddle across to our lighthouse, in placid summer days,
and, scanning him with a child’s curiosity, I wondered how he kept
alive. A few white hairs clung to his yellow crown, and his pale eyes,
“where the very blue had turned to white,” looked vacantly and wearily
out, as if trying faintly to see the end of the things of this world.
Somebody, probably old Nabbaye, in whose cottage he lived, always
scoured him with soft soap before he started on his voyage, and in
consequence a most preternatural shine overspread his blank forehead.
His under jaw had a disagreeably suggestive habit of dropping, he was
so feeble and so old, poor wretch! Yet would he brighten with a faint
attempt at a smile when bread and meat were put into his hands, and
say, over and over again, “Ye’re a Christian, ma’am; thank ye, ma’am,
thank ye,” thrust all that was given him, no matter what, between his
one upper garment--a checked shirt--and his bare skin, and then, by way
of expressing his gratitude, would strike up a dolorous quaver of--
“Over the water and over the lea
And over the water to Charlie,”
in a voice as querulous as a Scotch bagpipe.
Old Nabbaye, and Bennaye, her husband, with whom Peter lived, were a
queer old couple. Nabbaye had a stubbly and unequal growth of sparse
gray hair upon her chin, which gave her a most grim and terrible
aspect, as I remember her, with the grizzled locks standing out about
her head like one of the Furies. Yet she was a good enough old woman,
kind to Peter and Bennaye, and kept her bit of a cottage tidy as might
be. I well remember the grit of the shining sand on her scoured floor
beneath my childish footsteps. The family climbed at night by a ladder
up into a loft, which their little flock of fowls shared with them,
to sleep. Going by the house one evening, some one heard Nabbaye call
aloud to Bennaye up aloft, “Come, Bennaye, fetch me down them heens’
aigs!” To which Bennaye made answer, “I can’t find no aigs! I’ve looked
een the bed and een under the bed, and I can’t find no aigs!”
Till Bennaye grew very feeble, every summer night he paddled abroad
in his dory to fish for hake, and lonely he looked, tossing among
the waves, when our boat bore down and passed him with a hail which
he faintly returned, as we plunged lightly through the track of the
moonlight, young and happy, rejoicing in the beauty of the night, while
poor Bennaye only counted his gains in the grisly hake he caught, nor
considered the rubies the lighthouse scattered on the waves, or how the
moon sprinkled down silver before him. He did not mind the touch of
the balmy wind that blew across his weather-beaten face with the same
sweet greeting that so gladdened us, but fished and fished, watching
his line through the short summer night, and, when a blush of dawn
stole up in the east among the stars, wound up his tackle, took his
oars, and paddled home to Nabbaye with his booty,--his “fare of fish”
as the natives have it. Hake-fishing after this picturesque and tedious
fashion is done away with now; the islands are girdled with trawls,
which catch more fish in one night than could be obtained in a week’s
hard labor by hand.
When the dust of Bennaye and Nabbaye was mingled in the thin earth that
scarce can cover the multitude of the dead on Star Island, a youthful
couple, in whom I took great interest, occupied their little house. The
woman was remarkably handsome, with a beautiful head and masses of rich
black hair, a face regular as the face of a Greek statue, with eyes
that sparkled and cheeks that glowed,--a beauty she soon exchanged for
haggard and hollow looks. As their children were born they asked my
advice on the christening of each, and, being youthful and romantic, I
suggested Frederick as a sounding title for the first-born boy. Taylor
being the reigning President, his name was instantly added, and the
child was always addressed by his whole name. Going by the house one
day, my ears were assailed by a sharp outcry: “Frederick Taylor, if you
don’t come into the house this minute, I’ll slat your head off!” The
tender mother borrowed her expression from the fishermen, who disengage
mackerel and other delicate-gilled fish by “slatting” them off the hook.
All this family have gone, and the house in which they lived has fallen
to ruin; only the cellar remains, just such a rude hollow as those
scattered over Appledore.
The people along the coast rather look down upon the Shoalers as being
beyond the bounds of civilization. A young islander was expressing
his opinion on some matter to a native of Rye, who answered him with
great scorn: “You don’t know nothin’ about it! What do _you_ know?
_You_ never see an apple-tree all blowed out.” A Shoaler, walking with
some friends along a road in Rye, excited inextinguishable laughter by
clutching his companion’s sleeve as a toad hopped innocently across the
way, and crying: “Mr. Berraye, what kind of a bug do you call that?
D--d if I ever see such a bug as that, Mr. Berraye!” in a comical
terror. There are neither frogs nor toads at the Shoals. “Set right
down and help yourselves,” said an old fellow at whose door some guests
from the Shoals appeared at dinner-time. “Eat all you can. I ain’t got
no manners; the girl’s got the manners, and she ain’t to hum.”
One old Shoaler, long since gone to another world, was a laughable and
curious character. A man more wonderfully fulfilling the word “homely”
in the Yankee sense, I never saw. He had the largest, most misshapen
cheek-bones ever constructed, an illimitable upper lip, teeth that
should not be mentioned, and small, watery eyes. Skin and hair and eyes
and mouth were of the same pasty yellow, and that grotesque head was
set on a little, thin, and shambling body. He used to be head singer
at the church, and “pitched the tune” by whistling when the parson
had read the hymn. Then all who could joined in the singing, which
must have been remarkable, to say the least. So great a power of brag
is seldom found in one human being as that which permeated him from
top to toe, and found vent in stories of personal prowess and bravery
unexampled in history. He used to tell a story of his encounter with
thirteen “Spanish grandeers” in New Orleans, he having been a sailor
a great part of his life. He was innocently peering into a theatre,
when the “grandeers” fell upon him out of the exceeding pride of their
hearts. “Wall, sir, I turned, and I laid six o’ them grandeers to the
right and seven to the left, and then I put her for the old brig, and I
heerd no more on ’em!”
He considered himself unequalled as a musician, and would sing you
ballad after ballad, sitting bent forward with his arms on his knees,
and his wrinkled eyelids screwed tight together, grinding out the tune
with a quiet steadiness of purpose that seemed to betoken no end to his
capacities. Ballads of love and of war he sang,--the exploits of “Brave
Wolf,” or, as he pronounced it, “Brahn Wolf,” and one famous song of a
naval battle, of which only two lines remain in my memory;--
“With sixteen brass nineteens the Lion did growl,
With nineteen brass twenties the Tiger did howl.”
At the close of each verse he invariably dropped his voice, and said,
instead of sung, the last word, which had a most abrupt and surprising
effect, to which a listener never could become accustomed. The immortal
ballad of Lord Bateman he had remodelled with beautiful variations
of his own. The name of the coy maiden, the Turk’s only daughter,
Sophia, was Susan Fryan, according to his version, and Lord Bateman
was metamorphosed into Lord Bakum. When Susan Fryan crosses the sea to
Lord Bakum’s castle and knocks so loud that the gates do ring, he makes
the bold young porter, who was so ready for to let her in, go to his
master, who sits feasting with a new bride, and say:--
“Seven long years have I tended your gate, sir,
Seven long years out of twenty-three,
But so fair a creetur as now stands waitin’
Never before with my eyes did see.
“O, she has rings on every finger,
And round her middle if she’s one she has three;
O, I’m sure she’s got more good gold about her
Than would buy your bride and her companie!”
The enjoyment with which he gave this song was delightful to witness.
Of the many he used to sing, one was a doleful story of how a youth of
high degree fell in love with his mother’s fair waiting-woman, Betsy,
who was in consequence immediately transported to foreign lands. But
alas for her lover!--
“Then he fell sick and like to have died;
His mother round his sick-bed cried,
But all her crying it was in vain,
For Betsy was a-ploughing the raging main!”
The word “main” was brought out with startling effect. Another song
about a miller and his sons I only half remember:--
“The miller he called his oldest son,
Saying, ‘Now my glass it is almost run,
If I to you the mill relate,
What toll do you _re_sign to take?’
“The son replied: ‘My name is Jack,
And out of a bushel I’ll take a peck.’
‘Go, go, you fool!’ the old man cried,
And called the next to his bedside.
“The second said: ‘My name is Ralph,
And out of a bushel I’ll take a half.’
‘Go, go, you fool!’ the old man cried,
And called the next to his bedside.
“The youngest said: ‘My name is Paul,
And out of a bushel I’ll take it all!’
‘You are my son!’ the old man cried,
And _shot_ up his eyes and died in peace.”
The manner in which this last verse was delivered was inimitable, the
“died in peace” being spoken with great satisfaction. The singer had an
ancient violin, which he used to hug under his wizened chin, and from
which he drew such dismal tones as never before were heard on sea or
land. He had no more idea of playing than one of the codfish he daily
split and salted, yet he christened with pride all the shrieks and
wails he drew out of the wretched instrument with various high-sounding
titles. After he had entertained his audience for a while with these
aimless sounds, he was wont to say, “Wall, now I’ll give yer Prince
Esterhazy’s March,” and forthwith began again precisely the same
intolerable squeak.
After he died, other stars in the musical world appeared in the
horizon, but none equalled him. They all seemed to think it necessary
to shut their eyes and squirm like nothing human during the process
of singing a song, and they “pitched the tune” so high that no human
voice ever could hope to reach it in safety. “Tew high, Bill, tew
high,” one would say to the singer, with slow solemnity; so Bill tried
again. “Tew high again, Bill, tew high.” “Wull, _you_ strike it, Obed,”
Bill would say in despair; and Obed would “strike,” and hit exactly
the same impossible altitude, whereat Bill would slap his knee, and
cry in glad surprise, “D--d if he ain’t got it!” and forth, with catch
Obed and launch on his perilous flight, and grow red in the face with
the mighty effort of getting up there, and remaining there through the
intricacies and variations of the melody. One could but wonder whence
these queer tunes came,--how they were created; some of them reminded
one of the creaking and groaning of windlasses and masts, the rattling
of rowlocks, the whistling of winds among cordage, yet with less of
music in them than these natural sounds. The songs of the sailors
heaving up the anchor are really beautiful often, the wild chant that
rises sometimes into a grand chorus, all the strong voices borne out on
the wind in the cry of
“Yo ho, the roaring river!”
But these Shoals performances are lacking in any charm, except that of
the broadest fun.
The process of dunning, which made the Shoals fish so famous a century
ago, is almost a lost art, though the chief fisherman at Star still
“duns” a few yearly. A real dunfish is handsome, cut in transparent
strips, the color of brown sherry wine. The process is a tedious
one: the fish are piled in the storehouse and undergo a period of
“sweating” after the first drying, then are carried out into sun and
wind, dried again slightly, and again piled in the warehouse, and so on
till the process is complete. Drying fish in the common fashion is more
difficult than might be imagined: it is necessary to watch and tend
them continually as they lie on the picturesque “flakes,” and if they
are exposed at too early a stage to a sun too hot they burn as surely
as a loaf of bread in an intemperate oven, only the burning does not
crisp, but liquefies their substance.
For the last ten years fish have been caught about the Shoals by
trawl and seine in such quantities that they are thinning fast, and
the trade bids fair to be much less lucrative before many years have
elapsed. The process of drawing the trawl is very picturesque and
interesting, watched from the rocks or from the boat itself. The buoy
being drawn in, then follow the baited hooks one after another. First,
perhaps, a rockling shows his bright head above water; a pull, and in
he comes flapping, with brilliant red fins distended, gaping mouth,
indigo-colored eyes, and richly mottled skin: a few futile somersets,
and he subsides into slimy dejection. Next, perhaps, a big whelk is
tossed into the boat; then a leaden-gray haddock, with its dark stripe
of color on each side; then, perhaps, follow a few bare hooks; then
a hake, with horrid, cavernous mouth; then a large purple star-fish,
or a clattering crab; then a ling,--a yellow-brown, wide-mouthed piece
of ugliness never eaten here, but highly esteemed on the coast of
Scotland; then more cod or haddock, or perhaps a lobster, bristling
with indignation at the novel situation in which he finds himself;
then a cusk, long, smooth, compact, and dark; then a catfish. Of all
fiends commend me to the catfish as the most fiendish! Black as night,
with thick and hideous skin, which looks a dull, mouldy green beneath
the water, a head shaped as much like a cat’s as a fish’s head can
be, in which the devil’s own eyes seem to glow with a dull, malicious
gleam,--and such a mouth! What terrible expressions these cold
creatures carry to and fro in the vast, dim spaces of the sea! All fish
have a more or less imbecile and wobegone aspect; but this one looks
absolutely evil, and Schiller might well say of him that he “grins
through the grate of his spiky teeth,” and sharp and deadly are they;
every man looks out for his boots when a catfish comes tumbling in, for
they bite through leather, flesh, and bones. They seize a ballast-stone
between their jaws, and their teeth snap and fly in all directions. I
have seen them bite the long blade of a sharp knife so fiercely, that,
when it was lifted and held aloft, they kept their furious gripe, and
dangled, flapping all their clumsy weight, hanging by their teeth to
the blade. Sculpins abound, and are a nuisance on the trawls. Ugly and
grotesque as are the full-grown fish, there is nothing among the finny
tribe more dainty, more quaint and delicate, than the baby sculpin.
Sometimes in a pool of crystal water one comes upon him unawares,--a
fairy creature, the color of a blush-rose, striped and freaked and
pied with silver and gleaming green, hanging in the almost invisible
water as a bird in air, with broad, transparent fins suffused with a
faint pink color, stretched wide like wings to upbear the supple form.
The curious head is only strange, not hideous as yet, and one gazes
marvelling at all the beauty lavished on a thing of so little worth.
Wolf-fish, first cousins to the catfish, are found also on the trawls;
and dog-fish, with pointed snouts and sand-paper skins, abound to
such an extent as to drive away everything else sometimes. Sand-dabs,
a kind of flounder, fasten their sluggish bodies to the hooks, and a
few beautiful red fish, called bream, are occasionally found; also a
few blue-fish and sharks; frequently halibut,--though these latter
are generally caught on trawls which are made especially for them.
Sometimes is caught on a trawl a monstrous creature of horrible aspect,
called the nurse-fish,--an immense fish weighing twelve hundred pounds,
with a skin like a nutmeg-grater, and no teeth,--a kind of sucker,
hence its name. I asked a Shoaler what the nurse-fish looked like, and
he answered promptly, “Like the Devil!” One weighing twelve hundred
pounds has “two barrels of liver,” as the natives phrase it, which is
very valuable for the oil it contains. One of the fishermen described a
creature which they call mud-eel,--a foot and a half long, with a mouth
like a rat, and two teeth. The bite of this water-snake is poisonous,
the islanders aver, and tell a story of a man bitten by one at Mount
Desert last year, “who did not live long enough to get to the doctor.”
They bite at the hooks on the trawl, and are drawn up in a lump of mud,
and the men cut the ropes and mangle their lines to get rid of them.
Huge sunfish are sometimes harpooned, lying on the top of the water,--a
lump of flesh like cocoanut meat encased in a skin like rubber cloth,
with a most dim and abject hint of a face, absurdly disproportionate
to the size of the body, roughly outlined on the edge. Sword-fish are
also harpooned, weighing eight hundred pounds and upward; they are very
delicate food. A sword-fish swimming leaves a wake a mile long on a
calm day, and bewilders the imagination into a belief in sea-serpents.
There’s a legend that a torpedo was caught here once upon a time; and
the thrasher, fox-shark, or sea-fox occasionally alarms the fisherman
with his tremendous flexible tail, that reaches “from the gunnel to
the mainmast-top” when the creature comes to the surface. Also they
tell of skip-jacks that sprang on board their boats at night when
they were hake-fishing,--“little things about as large as mice, long
and slender, with beaks like birds.” Sometimes a huge horse-mackerel
flounders in and drives ashore on a ledge, for the gulls to scream
over for weeks. Mackerel, herring, porgies, and shiners used to abound
before the seines so thinned them. Bonito and blue-fish and dog-fish
help drive away the more valuable varieties. It is a lovely sight
to see a herring-net drawn in, especially by moonlight, when every
fish hangs like a long silver drop from the close-set meshes. Perch
are found in inexhaustible quantities about the rocks, and lump or
butter fish are sometimes caught; pollock are very plentiful,--smooth,
graceful, slender creatures! It is fascinating to watch them turning
somersets in the water close to the shore in full tides, or following a
boat at sunset, and breaking the molten gold of the sea’s surface with
silver-sparkling fin and tail. The rudder-fish is sometimes found, and
alewives and menhaden. Whales are more or less plentiful in summer,
“spouting their foam-fountains in the sea.” Beautiful is the sparkling
column of water rising suddenly afar off and falling noiselessly back
again. Not long ago a whale twisted his tail in the cable of the
schooner Vesper, lying to the eastward of the Shoals, and towed the
vessel several miles, at the rate of twenty knots an hour, with the
water boiling all over her from stem to stern!
Last winter some of the Shoalers were drawing a trawl between the
Shoals and Boone Island, fifteen miles to the eastward. As they drew in
the line and relieved each hook of its burden, lo! a horror was lifted
half above the surface,--part of a human body, which dropped off the
hooks and was gone, while they shuddered, and stared at each other,
aghast at the hideous sight.
Porpoises are seen at all seasons. I never saw one near enough to
gain a knowledge of its expression, but it always seemed to me that
these fish led a more hilarious life than the greater part of their
race, and I think they must carry less dejected countenances than
most of the inhabitants of the sea. They frisk so delightfully on
the surface, and ponderously plunge over and over with such apparent
gayety and satisfaction! I remember being out one moonless summer
night beyond the lighthouse island, in a little boat filled with gay
young people. The sea was like oil, the air was thick and warm, no
star broke the upper darkness, only now and then the lighthouse threw
its jewelled track along the water, and through the dense air its long
rays stretched above, turning solemnly, like the luminous spokes of a
gigantic wheel, as the lamps slowly revolved. There had been much talk
and song and laughter, much playing with the warm waves (or rather
smooth undulations of the sea, for there wasn’t a breath of wind to
make a ripple), which broke at a touch into pale-green, phosphorescent
fire. Beautiful arms, made bare to the shoulder, thrust down into
the liquid darkness, shone flaming silver and gold; from the fingers
playing beneath, fire seemed to stream; emerald sparks clung to the
damp draperies; and a splashing oar-blade half revealed sweet faces and
bright young eyes. Suddenly a pause came in talk and song and laughter,
and in the unaccustomed silence we seemed to be waiting for something.
At once out of the darkness came a slow, tremendous sigh that made
us shiver in the soft air, as if all the woe and terror of the sea
were condensed in that immense and awful breath; and we took our oars
and pulled homeward, with the weird fires flashing from our bows and
oar-blades. “Only a porpoise blowing,” said the initiated, when we told
our tale. It may have been “only a porpoise blowing”; but the leviathan
himself could hardly have made a more prodigious sound.
* * * * *
Within the lovely limits of summer it is beautiful to live almost
anywhere; most beautiful where the ocean meets the land; and here
particularly, where all the varying splendor of the sea encompasses
the place, and the ceaseless changing of the tides brings continual
refreshment into the life of every day. But summer is late and slow to
come; and long after the mainland has begun to bloom and smile beneath
the influence of spring, the bitter northwest winds still sweep the
cold, green water about these rocks, and tear its surface into long
and glittering waves from morning till night, and from night till
morning, through many weeks. No leaf breaks the frozen soil, and no
bud swells on the shaggy bushes that clothe the slopes. But if summer
is a laggard in her coming, she makes up for it by the loveliness of
her lingering into autumn; for when the pride of trees and flowers is
despoiled by frost on shore, the little gardens here are glowing at
their brightest, and day after day of mellow splendor drops like a
benediction from the hand of God. In the early mornings in September
the mists draw away from the depths of inland valleys, and rise into
the lucid western sky,--tall columns and towers of cloud, solid,
compact, superb; their pure, white, shining heads uplifted into the
ether, solemn, stately, and still, till some wandering breeze disturbs
their perfect outline, and they melt about the heavens in scattered
fragments as the day goes on. Then there are mornings when “all in
the blue, unclouded weather” the coast-line comes out so distinctly
that houses, trees, bits of white beach, are clearly visible, and with
a glass, moving forms of carriages and cattle are distinguishable
nine miles away. In the transparent air the peaks of Mounts Madison,
Washington, and Jefferson are seen distinctly at a distance of one
hundred miles. In the early light even the green color of the trees
is perceptible on the Rye shore. All through these quiet days the air
is full of wandering thistle-down, the inland golden-rod waves its
plumes, and close by the water’s edge, in rocky clefts, its seaside
sister blossoms in gorgeous color; the rose-haws redden, the iris
unlocks its shining caskets, and casts its closely packed seeds about,
gray berries cluster on the bayberry-bushes, the sweet life-everlasting
sends out its wonderful, delicious fragrance, and the pale asters
spread their flowers in many-tinted sprays. Through October and into
November the fair, mild weather lasts. At the first breath of October,
the hillside at Appledore fires up with the living crimson of the
huckleberry-bushes, as if a blazing torch had been applied to it; the
slanting light at sunrise and sunset makes a wonderful glory across
it. The sky deepens its blue; beneath it the brilliant sea glows into
violet, and flashes into splendid purple where the “tide-rip,” or
eddying winds, make long streaks across its surface (poets are not
wrong who talk of “purple seas,”) the air is clear and sparkling,
the lovely summer haze withdraws, all things take a crisp and tender
outline, and the cry of the curlew and the plover is doubly sweet
through the pure, cool air. Then sunsets burn in clear and tranquil
skies, or flame in piled magnificence of clouds. Some night a long
bar lies, like a smouldering brand, along the horizon, deep carmine
where the sun has touched it; and out of that bar breaks a sudden
gale before morning, and a fine fury and tumult begins to rage. Then
comes the fitful weather,--wild winds and hurrying waves, low, scudding
clouds, tremendous rains that shut out everything; and the rocks lie
weltering between the sea and sky, with the brief fire of the leaves
quenched and swept away on the hillside,--only rushing wind and
streaming water everywhere, as if a second deluge were flooding the
world.
After such a rain comes a gale from the southeast to sweep the sky
clear,--a gale so furious that it blows the sails straight out of the
bolt-ropes, if any vessel is so unfortunate as to be caught in it with
a rag of canvas aloft; and the coast is strewn with the wrecks of such
craft as happen to be caught on the lee shore, for
“Anchors drag, and topmasts lap,”
and nothing can hold against this terrible, blind fury. It is appalling
to listen to the shriek of such a wind, even though one is safe upon a
rock that cannot move; and more dreadful is it to see the destruction
one cannot lift a finger to avert.
As the air grows colder, curious atmospheric effects become visible. At
the first biting cold the distant mainland has the appearance of being
taken off its feet, as it were,--the line shrunken and distorted,
detached from the water at both ends: it is as if one looked under it
and saw the sky beyond. Then, on bright mornings with a brisk wind,
little wafts of mist rise between the quick, short waves, and melt away
before noon. At some periods of intense cold these mists, which are
never in banks like fog, rise in irregular, whirling columns reaching
to the clouds,--shadowy phantoms, torn and wild, that stalk past
like Ossian’s ghosts, solemnly and noiselessly throughout the bitter
day. When the sun drops down behind these weird processions, with a
dark-red, lurid light, it is like a vast conflagration, wonderful and
terrible to see. The columns, that strike and fall athwart the island,
sweep against the windows with a sound like sand, and lie on the ground
in ridges, like fine, sharp hail; yet the heavens are clear, the
heavily rolling sea dark-green and white, and, between the breaking
crests, the misty columns stream toward the sky.
Sometimes a totally different vapor, like cold, black smoke, rolls
out from the land, and flows over the sea to an unknown distance,
swallowing up the islands on its way. Its approach is hideous to
witness. “It’s all thick o’ black vapor,” some islander announces,
coming in from out of doors; just as they say, “It’s all thick o’ white
foam,” when the sudden squall tears the sea into fringes of spray.
In December the colors seem to fade out of the world, and utter
ungraciousness prevails. The great, cool, whispering, delicious sea,
that encircled us with a thousand caresses the beautiful summer
through, turns slowly our sullen and inveterate enemy; leaden it lies
beneath a sky like tin, and rolls its “white, cold, heavy-plunging
foam” against a shore of iron. Each island wears its chalk-white
girdle of ice between the rising and falling tides (edged with black
at low-water, where the lowest-growing seaweed is exposed), making the
stern bare rocks above more forbidding by their contrast with its stark
whiteness,--and the whiteness of salt-water ice is ghastly. Nothing
stirs abroad, except perhaps
“A lonely sea-bird crosses,
With one waft of wing,”
your view, as you gaze from some spray-incrusted window; or you behold
the weather-beaten schooners creeping along the blurred coast-line from
Cape Elizabeth and the northern ports of Maine towards Cape Ann, laden
with lumber or lime, and sometimes, rarely, with hay or provisions.
After winter has fairly set in, the lonely dwellers at the Isles of
Shoals find life quite as much as they can manage, being so entirely
thrown upon their own resources that it requires all the philosophy
at their disposal to answer the demand. In the village, where several
families make a little community, there should be various human
interests outside each separate fireside; but of their mode of life
I know little. Upon three of the islands live isolated families, cut
off by the “always wind-obeying deep” from each other and from the
mainland, sometimes for weeks together, when the gales are fiercest,
with no letters nor intercourse with any living thing. Some sullen day
in December the snow begins to fall, and the last touch of desolation
is laid upon the scene; there is nothing any more but white snow
and dark water, hemmed in by a murky horizon; and nothing moves or
sounds within its circle but the sea harshly assailing the shore, and
the chill wind that sweeps across. Toward night the wind begins to
rise, the snow whirls and drifts, and clings wherever it can find a
resting-place; and though so much is blown away, yet there is enough
left to smother up the rock and make it almost impossible to move about
on it. The drifts sometimes are very deep in the hollows; one winter,
sixteen sheep were buried in a drift, in which they remained a week,
and, strange to say, only one was dead when they were discovered. One
goes to sleep in the muffled roar of the storm, and wakes to find
it still raging with senseless fury; all day it continues; towards
night the curtain of falling flakes withdraws, a faint light shows
westward; slowly the clouds roll together, the lift grows bright with
pale, clear blue over the land, the wind has hauled to the northwest,
and the storm is at an end. When the clouds are swept away by the
besom of the pitiless northwest, how the stars glitter in the frosty
sky! What wondrous streamers of northern lights flare through the
winter darkness! I have seen the sky at midnight crimson and emerald
and orange and blue in palpitating sheets along the whole northern
half of the heavens, or rosy to the zenith, or belted with a bar of
solid yellow light from east to west, as if the world were a basket,
and it the golden handle thereto. The weather becomes of the first
importance to the dwellers on the rock; the changes of the sky and sea,
the flitting of the coasters to and fro, the visits of the sea-fowl,
sunrise and sunset, the changing moon, the northern lights, the
constellations that wheel in splendor through the winter night,--all
are noted with a love and careful scrutiny that is seldom given by
people living in populous places. One grows accustomed to the aspect
of the constellations, and they seem like the faces of old friends
looking down out of the awful blackness; and when in summer the great
Orion disappears, how it is missed out of the sky! I remember the
delight with which we caught a glimpse of the planet Mercury, in March,
1868, following close at the heels of the sinking sun, redly shining in
the reddened horizon,--a stranger mysterious and utterly unknown before.
For these things make our world: there are no lectures, operas,
concerts, theatres, no music of any kind, except what the waves may
whisper in rarely gentle moods; no galleries of wonders like the
Natural History rooms, in which it is so fascinating to wander; no
streets, shops, carriages, no postman, no neighbors, not a door-bell
within the compass of the place! Never was life so exempt from
interruptions. The eight or ten small schooners that carry on winter
fishing, flying to and fro through foam and squall to set and haul
in their trawls, at rare intervals bring a mail,--an accumulation of
letters, magazines, and newspapers that it requires a long time to plod
through. This is the greatest excitement of the long winters; and no
one can truly appreciate the delight of letters till he has lived where
he can hear from his friends only once in a month.
But the best balanced human mind is prone to lose its elasticity, and
stagnate, in this isolation. One learns immediately the value of work
to keep one’s wits clear, cheerful, and steady; just as much real work
of the body as it can bear without weariness being always beneficent,
but here indispensable. And in this matter women have the advantage of
men, who are condemned to fold their hands when their tasks are done.
No woman need ever have a vacant minute,--there are so many pleasant,
useful things which she may, and had better do. Blessed be the man
who invented knitting! (I never heard that a woman invented this or
any other art.) It is the most charming and picturesque of quiet
occupations, leaving the knitter free to read aloud, or talk, or think,
while steadily and surely beneath the flying fingers the comfortable
stocking grows.
No one can dream what a charm there is in taking care of pets,
singing-birds, plants, etc., with such advantages of solitude; how
every leaf and bud and flower is pored over, and admired, and loved! A
whole conservatory, flushed with azaleas, and brilliant with forests
of camellias and every precious exotic that blooms, could not impart
so much delight as I have known a single rose to give, unfolding in
the bleak bitterness of a day in February, when this side of the
planet seemed to have arrived at its culmination of hopelessness, with
the Isles of Shoals the most hopeless speck upon its surface. One
gets close to the heart of these things; they are almost as precious
as Picciola to the prisoner, and yield a fresh and constant joy,
such as the pleasure-seeking inhabitants of cities could not find in
their whole round of shifting diversions. With a bright and cheerful
interior, open fires, books, and pictures, windows full of thrifty
blossoming plants and climbing vines, a family of singing-birds, plenty
of work, and a clear head and quiet conscience, it would go hard if
one could not be happy even in such loneliness. Books, of course, are
inestimable. Nowhere does one follow a play of Shakespeare’s with
greater zest, for it brings the whole world, which you need, about
you; doubly precious the deep thoughts wise men have given to help
us,--doubly sweet the songs of all the poets; for nothing comes between
to distract you.
One realizes how hard it was for Robinson Crusoe to keep the record of
his lonely days; for even in a family of eight or nine the succession
is kept with difficulty. I recollect that, after an unusually busy
Saturday, when household work was done, and lessons said, and the
family were looking forward to Sunday and merited leisure, at sunset
came a young Star-Islander on some errand to our door. One said to him,
“Well, Jud, how many fish have they caught to-day at Star?” Jud looked
askance and answered, like one who did not wish to be trifled with, “We
don’t go a-fishing Sundays!” So we had lost our Sunday, thinking it
was Saturday; and next day began the usual business, with no break of
refreshing rest between.
Though the thermometer says that here it is twelve degrees warmer in
winter than on the mainland, the difference is hardly perceptible,--the
situation is so bleak, while the winds of the north and west bite like
demons, with all the bitter breath of the snowy continent condensed in
their deadly chill. Easterly and southerly gales are milder; we have
no east winds such as sadden humanity on shore; they are tempered to
gentleness by some mysterious means. Sometimes there are periods of
cold which, though not intense (the mercury seldom falling lower than
11° above zero), are of such long duration that the fish are killed in
the sea. This happens frequently with perch, the dead bodies of which
strew the shores and float on the water in masses. Sometimes ice forms
in the mouth of the Piscataqua River, which, continually broken into
unequal blocks by the rushing tide and the immense pressure of the
outer ocean, fills the space between the islands and the shore, so that
it is very difficult to force a boat through. The few schooners moored
about the islands become so loaded with ice that sometimes they sink;
every plunge into the assailing waves adds a fresh crust, infinitely
thin; but in twenty-four hours enough accumulates to sink the vessel;
and it is part of the day’s work in the coldest weather to beat off the
ice,--and hard work it is. Every time the bowsprit dips under, the man
who sits astride it is immersed to his waist in the freezing water,
as he beats at the bow to free the laboring craft. I cannot imagine a
harder life than the sailors lead in winter in the coasting-vessels
that stream in endless processions to and fro along the shore; and
they seem to be the hardest set of people under the sun,--so rough and
reckless that they are not pleasant even at a distance. Sometimes they
land here. A crew of thirteen or fourteen came on shore last winter;
they might have been the ghosts of the men who manned the picaroons
that used to swarm in these seas. A more piratical-looking set could
not well be imagined. They roamed about, and glared in at the windows
with weather-beaten, brutal faces, and eyes that showed traces of
whiskey, ugly and unmistakable.
No other visitors break the solitude of Appledore, except neighbors
from Star once in a while; if any one is sick, they send, perhaps, for
medicine or milk; or they bring some rare fish; or if any one dies,
and they cannot reach the mainland, they come to get a coffin made. I
never shall forget one long, dreary, drizzly northeast storm, when two
men rowed across from Star to Appledore on this errand. A little child
had died, and they could not sail to the mainland, and had no means
to construct a coffin among themselves. All day I watched the making
of that little chrysalis; and at night the last nail was driven in,
and it lay across a bench in the midst of the litter of the workshop,
and a curious stillness seemed to emanate from the senseless boards.
I went back to the house and gathered a handful of scarlet geranium,
and returned with it through the rain. The brilliant blossoms were
sprinkled with glittering drops. I laid them in the little coffin,
while the wind wailed so sorrowfully outside, and the rain poured
against the windows. Two men came through the mist and storm, and one
swung the light little shell to his shoulder, and they carried it away,
and the gathering darkness shut down and hid them as they tossed
among the waves. I never saw the little girl, but where they buried
her I know: the lighthouse shines close by, and every night the quiet,
constant ray steals to her grave and softly touches it, as if to say,
with a caress, “Sleep well! Be thankful you are spared so much that I
see humanity endure, fixed here forever where I stand!”
It is exhilarating, spite of the intense cold, to wake to the
brightness the northwest gale always brings, after the hopeless smother
of a prolonged snow-storm. The sea is deep indigo, whitened with
flashing waves all over the surface; the sky is speckless; no cloud
passes across it the whole day long; and the sun sets red and clear,
without any abatement of the wind. The spray flying on the western
shore for a moment is rosy as the sinking sun shines through, but for
a moment only,--and again there is nothing but the ghastly whiteness
of the salt-water ice, the cold, gray rock, the sullen, foaming brine,
the unrelenting heavens, and the sharp wind cutting like a knife. All
night long it roars beneath the hollow sky,--roars still at sunrise.
Again the day passes precisely like the one gone before; the sun lies
in a glare of quicksilver on the western water, sinks again in the
red west to rise on just such another day; and thus goes on, for
weeks sometimes, with an exasperating pertinacity that would try the
most philosophical patience. There comes a time when just that glare
of quicksilver on the water is not to be endured a minute longer.
During this period no boat goes to or comes from the mainland, and the
prisoners on the rock are cut off from all intercourse with their kind.
Abroad, only the cattle move, crowding into the sunniest corners, and
stupidly chewing the cud; and the hens and ducks, that chatter and
cackle and cheerfully crow in spite of fate and the northwest gale.
The dauntless and graceful gulls soar on their strong pinions over the
drift cast up about the coves. Sometimes flocks of snow-buntings wheel
about the house and pierce the loud breathing of the wind with sweet,
wild cries. And often the spectral arctic owl may be seen on a height,
sitting upright, like a column of snow, its large, round head slowly
turning from left to right, ever on the alert, watching for the rats
that plague the settlement almost as grievously as they did Hamelin
town, in Brunswick, five hundred years ago.
How the rats came here first is not known; probably some old ship
imported them. They live partly on mussels, the shells of which lie in
heaps about their holes, as the violet-lined fresh-water shells lie
about the nests of the muskrats on the mainland. They burrow among the
rocks close to the shore, in favorable spots, and, somewhat like the
moles, make subterranean galleries, whence they issue at low tide, and,
stealing to the crevices of seaweed-curtained rocks, they fall upon
and dislodge any unfortunate crabs they may find, and kill and devour
them. Many a rat has caught a Tartar in this perilous kind of hunting,
has been dragged into the sea and killed,--drowned in the clutches of
the crab he sought to devour; for the strength of these shell-fish is
something astonishing.
Several snowy owls haunt the islands the whole winter long. I have
never heard them cry like other owls; when disturbed or angry, they
make a sound like a watchman’s rattle, very loud and harsh, or they
whistle with intense shrillness, like a human being. Their habitual
silence adds to their ghostliness; and when at noonday they sit, high
up, snow-white above the snow-drifts, blinking their pale yellow eyes
in the sun, they are weird indeed. One night in March I saw one perched
upon a rock between me and the “last remains of sunset dimly burning”
in the west, his curious outline drawn black against the redness of the
sky, his large head bent forward, and the whole aspect meditative and
most human in its expression. I longed to go out and sit beside him and
talk to him in the twilight, to ask of him the story of his life, or,
if he would have permitted it, to watch him without a word. The plumage
of this creature is wonderfully beautiful,--white, with scattered spots
like little flecks of tawny cloud,--and his black beak and talons are
powerful and sharp as iron; he might literally grapple his friend, or
his enemy, with hooks of steel. As he is clothed in a mass of down,
his outlines are so soft that he is like an enormous snowflake while
flying; and he is a sight worth seeing when he stretches wide his broad
wings, and sweeps down on his prey, silent and swift, with an unerring
aim, and bears it off to the highest rock he can find, to devour it. In
the summer one finds frequently upon the heights a little, solid ball
of silvery fur and pure white bones, washed and bleached by the rain
and sun; it is the rat’s skin and skeleton in a compact bundle, which
the owl rejects after having swallowed it.
Some quieter day, on the edge of a southerly wind, perhaps, boats go
out over the gray, sad water after sea-fowl,--the murres that swim
in little companies, keeping just out of reach of shot, and are so
spiteful that they beat the boat with their beaks, when wounded, in
impotent rage, till they are despatched with an oar or another shot; or
kittiwakes,--exquisite creatures like living forms of snow and cloud
in color, with beaks and feet of dull gold,--that come when you wave a
white handkerchief, and flutter almost within reach of your hand; or
oldwives, called by the natives _scoldenores_, with clean white caps;
or clumsy eider-ducks, or coots, or mergansers, or whatever they may
find. Black ducks, of course, are often shot. Their jet-black, shining
plumage is splendidly handsome, set off with the broad, flame-colored
beak. Little auks, stormy-petrels, loons, grebes, lords-and-ladies,
sea-pigeons, sea-parrots, various guillemots, and all sorts of gulls
abound. Sometimes an eagle sweeps over; gannets pay occasional visits;
the great blue heron is often seen in autumn and spring. One of the
most striking birds is the cormorant, called here “shag”; from it
the rock at Duck Island takes its name. It used to be an object of
almost awful interest to me when I beheld it perched upon White Island
Head,--a solemn figure, high and dark against the clouds. Once, while
living on that island, in the thickest of a great storm in autumn, when
we seemed to be set between two contending armies, deafened by the
continuous cannonading of breakers, and lashed and beaten by winds
and waters till it was almost impossible to hear ourselves speak, we
became aware of another sound, which pierced to our ears, bringing a
sudden terror lest it should be the voices of human beings. Opening the
window a little, what a wild combination of sounds came shrieking in!
A large flock of wild geese had settled for safety upon the rock, and
completely surrounded us,--agitated, clamorous, weary. We might have
secured any number of them, but it would have been a shameful thing.
We were glad, indeed, that they should share our little foothold in
that chaos, and they flew away unhurt when the tempest lulled. I was a
very young child when this happened, but I never can forget that autumn
night,--it seemed so wonderful and pitiful that those storm-beaten
birds should have come crying to our rock; and the strange, wild
chorus that swept in when the window was pried open a little took so
strong a hold upon my imagination that I shall hear it as long as I
live. The lighthouse, so beneficent to mankind, is the destroyer of
birds,--of land birds particularly, though in thick weather sea-birds
are occasionally bewildered into breaking their heads against the
glass, plunging forward headlong towards the light, just as the frail
moth of summer evenings madly seeks its death in the candle’s blaze.
Sometimes in autumn, always in spring, when birds are migrating, they
are destroyed in such quantities by this means that it is painful to
reflect upon. The keeper living at the island three years ago told me
that he picked up three hundred and seventy-five in one morning at the
foot of the lighthouse, all dead. They fly with such force against the
glass that their beaks are often splintered. The keeper said he found
the destruction greatest in hazy weather, and he thought “they struck a
ray at a great distance and followed it up.” Many a May morning have I
wandered about the rock at the foot of the tower mourning over a little
apron brimful of sparrows, swallows, thrushes, robins, fire-winged
blackbirds, many-colored warblers and fly-catchers, beautifully clothed
yellow-birds, nuthatches, catbirds, even the purple finch and scarlet
tanager and golden oriole, and many more beside,--enough to break the
heart of a small child to think of! Once a great eagle flew against
the lantern and shivered the glass. That was before I lived there; but
after we came, two gulls cracked one of the large, clear panes, one
stormy night.
The sea-birds are comparatively few and shy at this time; but I
remember when they were plentiful enough, when on Duck Island in
summer the “medrakes,” or tern, made rude nests on the beach, and the
little yellow gulls, just out of the eggs, ran tumbling about among
the stones, hiding their foolish heads in every crack and cranny, and,
like the ostrich, imagining themselves safe so long as they could not
see the danger. And even now the sandpipers build in numbers on the
islands, and the young birds, which look like tiny tufts of fog, run
about among the bayberry-bushes, with sweet, scared piping. They are
exquisitely beautiful and delicate, covered with a down just like
gray mist, with brilliant black eyes, and slender, graceful legs
that make one think of grass-stems. And here the loons congregate in
spring and autumn. These birds seem to me the most human and at the
same time the most demoniac of their kind. I learned to imitate their
different cries; they are wonderful! At one time the loon language was
so familiar that I could almost always summon a considerable flock by
going down to the water and assuming the neighborly and conversational
tone which they generally use: after calling a few minutes, first a
far-off voice responded, then other voices answered him, and when this
was kept up a while, half a dozen birds would come sailing in. It was
the most delightful little party imaginable; so comical were they, so
entertaining, that it was impossible not to laugh aloud,--and they
could laugh too, in a way which chilled the marrow of one’s bones.
They always laugh, when shot at, if they are missed; as the Shoalers
say, “They laugh like a warrior.” But their long, wild, melancholy cry
before a storm is the most awful note I ever heard from a bird. It is
so sad, so hopeless,--a clear, high shriek, shaken, as it drops into
silence, into broken notes that make you think of the fluttering of a
pennon in the wind,--a shudder of sound. They invariably utter this cry
before a storm.
Between the gales from all points of the compass, that
“’twixt the green sea and the azured vault
Set roaring war,”
some day there falls a dead calm; the whole expanse of the ocean is
like a mirror; there’s not a whisper of a wave, not a sigh from any
wind about the world,--an awful, breathless pause prevails. Then if
a loon swims into the motionless little bights about the island, and
raises his weird cry, the silent rocks re-echo the unearthly tone, and
it seems as if the creature were in league with the mysterious forces
that are so soon to turn this deathly stillness into confusion and
dismay. All through the day the ominous quiet lasts; in the afternoon,
while yet the sea is glassy, a curious undertone of mournful sound can
be perceived,--not fitful,--a steady moan such as the wind makes over
the mouth of an empty jar. Then the islanders say, “Do you hear Hog
Island crying? Now look out for a storm!” No one knows how that low
moaning is produced, or why Appledore, of all the islands, should alone
lament before the tempest. Through its gorges, perhaps, some current
of wind sighs with that hollow cry. Yet the sea could hardly keep its
unruffled surface were a wind abroad sufficient to draw out the boding
sound. Such a calm preceded the storm which destroyed the Minot’s Ledge
Lighthouse in 1849. I never knew such silence. Though the sun blazed
without a cloud, the sky and sea were utterly wan and colorless, and
before sunset the mysterious tone began to vibrate in the breezeless
air. “Hog Island’s crying!” said the islanders. One could but think
of the Ancient Mariner, as the angry sun went down in a brassy glare,
and still no ripple broke the calm. But with the twilight gathered the
waiting wind, slowly and steadily; and before morning the shock of the
breakers was like the incessant thundering of heavy guns; the solid
rock perceptibly trembled; windows shook, and glass and china rattled
in the house. It is impossible to describe the confusion, the tumult,
the rush and roar and thunder of waves and wind overwhelming those
rocks,--the whole Atlantic rushing headlong to cast itself upon them.
It was very exciting: the most timid among us lost all sense of fear.
Before the next night the sea had made a breach through the valley on
Appledore, in which the houses stand,--a thing that never had happened
within the memory of the oldest inhabitant. The waves piled in from
the eastward (where Old Harry was tossing the breakers sky-high),--a
maddened troop of giants, sweeping everything before them,--and
followed one another, white as milk, through the valley from east to
west, strewing the space with boulders from a solid wall six feet high
and as many thick, which ran across the top of the beach, and which
one tremendous wave toppled over like a child’s fence of blocks. Kelp
and sea-weed were piled in banks high up along the shore, and strewed
the doorsteps; and thousands of the hideous creatures known among the
Shoalers as sea-mice, a holothurian (a livid, shapeless mass of torpid
life), were scattered in all directions. While the storm was at its
height, it was impossible to do anything but watch it through windows
beaten by the blinding spray which burst in flying clouds all over
the island, drenching every inch of the soil in foaming brine. In the
coves the “yeasty surges” were churned into yellow masses of foam, that
blew across in trembling flakes, and clung wherever they lit, leaving
a hoary scum of salt when dry, which remained till sweet, fair water
dropped out of the clouds to wash it all away. It was long before the
sea went down; and, days after the sun began to shine, the fringe of
spray still leaped skyward from the eastern shore, and Shag and Mingo
Rocks at Duck Island tossed their distant clouds of snow against the
blue.
After the wind subsided, it was curious to examine the effects of the
breakers on the eastern shore, where huge masses of rock were struck
off from the cliffs, and flung among the wild heaps of scattered
boulders, to add to the already hopeless confusion of the gorges. The
eastern aspects of the islands change somewhat every year or two from
this cause; and, indeed, over all their surfaces continual change
goes on from the action of the weather. Under the hammer and chisel
of frost and heat, masses of stone are detached and fall from the
edges of cliffs, whole ledges become disintegrated, the rock cracks
in smooth, thin sheets, and, once loosened, the whole mass can be
pulled out, sheet by sheet. Twenty years ago those subtle, irresistible
tools of the weather had cracked off a large mass of rock from a ledge
on the slope of a gentle declivity. I could just lay my hand in the
space then: now three men can walk abreast between the ledge and the
detached mass; and nothing has touched it save heat and cold. The whole
aspect of the rocks is infinitely aged. I never can see the beautiful
salutation of sunrise upon their hoary fronts, without thinking how
many millions of times they have answered to that delicate touch.
On Boone Island,--a low, dangerous rock fifteen miles east of the
Shoals,--the sea has even greater opportunities of destruction, the
island is so low. Once, after a stormy night, the lighthouse-keeper
told me the family found a great stone, weighing half a ton, in the
back entry, which Father Neptune had deposited there,--his card, with
his compliments!
Often tremendous breakers encompass the islands when the surface of the
sea is perfectly calm and the weather serene and still,--the results
of great storms far out at sea. A “long swell” swings indolently, and
the ponderous waves roll in as if tired and half asleep, to burst
into clouds of splendor against the cliffs. Very different is their
hurried, eager breaking when the shoulder of a gale compels them. There
is no sound more gentle, more slumberous, than the distant roll of
these billows,--
“The rolling sea resounding soft,”
as Spenser has it. The rush of a fully alive and closely pursued
breaker is, at a distance, precisely like that which a rocket makes,
sweeping headlong upward through the air; but the other is a long and
peaceful sigh, a dreamy, lulling, beautiful sound, which produces a
Lethean forgetfulness of care and pain, makes all earthly ill seem
unreal, and it is as if one wandered
“In dreamful wastes, where footless fancies dwell.”
It requires a strong effort to emerge from this lotus-eating state of
mind. O, lovely it is, on sunny afternoons to sit high up in a crevice
of the rock and look down on the living magnificence of breakers such
as made music about us after the Minot’s Ledge storm,--to watch them
gather, one after another,
“Cliffs of emerald topped with snow,
That lift and lift, and then let go
A great white avalanche of thunder,”
which makes the solid earth tremble, and you, clinging to the moist
rock, feel like a little cockle-shell! If you are out of the reach of
the heavy fall of spray, the fine salt mist will still stream about
you, and salute your cheek with the healthful freshness of the brine,
make your hair damp, and encrust your eyebrows with salt. While you
sit watching the shifting splendor, uprises at once a higher cloud
than usual; and across it springs a sudden rainbow, like a beautiful
thought beyond the reach of human expression. High over your head the
white gulls soar, gathering the sunshine in the snowy hollows of their
wings. As you look up to them floating in the fathomless blue, there
is something awful in the purity of that arch beneath their wings, in
light or shade, as the broad pinions move with stately grace. There
is no bird so white,--nor swan, nor dove, nor mystic ibis: about the
ocean-marges there is no dust to soil their perfect snow, and no stormy
wind can ruffle their delicate plumes,--the beautiful, happy creatures!
One never tires of watching them. Again and again appears the rainbow
with lovely colors melting into each other and vanishing, to appear
again at the next upspringing of the spray. On the horizon the white
sails shine; and far and wide spreads the blue of the sea, with nothing
between you and the eastern continent across its vast, calm plain.
[Illustration: WHITE ISLAND.]
I well remember my first sight of White Island, where we took up our
abode on leaving the mainland. I was scarcely five years old; but from
the upper windows of our dwelling in Portsmouth, I had been shown the
clustered masts of ships lying at the wharves along the Piscataqua
River, faintly outlined against the sky, and, baby as I was, even then
I was drawn, with a vague longing, seaward. How delightful was that
long, first sail to the Isles of Shoals! How pleasant the unaccustomed
sound of the incessant ripple against the boat-side, the sight of the
wide water and limitless sky, the warmth of the broad sunshine that
made us blink like young sandpipers as we sat in triumph, perched
among the household goods with which the little craft was laden! It
was at sunset in autumn that we were set ashore on that loneliest,
lovely rock, where the lighthouse looked down on us like some tall,
black-capped giant, and filled me with awe and wonder. At its base a
few goats were grouped on the rock, standing out dark against the red
sky as I looked up at them. The stars were beginning to twinkle; the
wind blew cold, charged with the sea’s sweetness; the sound of many
waters half bewildered me. Some one began to light the lamps in the
tower. Rich red and golden, they swung round in mid-air; everything was
strange and fascinating and new. We entered the quaint little old
stone cottage that was for six years our home. How curious it seemed,
with its low, whitewashed ceiling and deep window-seats, showing the
great thickness of the walls made to withstand the breakers, with
whose force we soon grew acquainted! A blissful home the little house
became to the children who entered it that quiet evening and slept
for the first time lulled by the murmur of the encircling sea. I do
not think a happier triad ever existed than we were, living in that
profound isolation. It takes so little to make a healthy child happy;
and we never wearied of our few resources. True, the winters seemed
as long as a whole year to our little minds, but they were pleasant,
nevertheless. Into the deep window-seats we climbed, and with pennies
(for which we had no other use) made round holes in the thick frost,
breathing on them till they were warm, and peeped out at the bright,
fierce, windy weather, watching the vessels scudding over the intensely
dark blue sea, all “feather-white” where the short waves broke hissing
in the cold, and the sea-fowl soaring aloft or tossing on the water;
or, in calmer days, we saw how the stealthy Star-Islander paddled among
the ledges, or lay for hours stretched on the wet sea-weed, with his
gun, watching for wild-fowl. Sometimes the round head of a seal moved
about among the kelp-covered rocks. A few are seen every winter, and
are occasionally shot; but they are shyer and more alert even than the
birds.
We were forced to lay in stores of all sorts in the autumn, as if we
were fitting out a ship for an Arctic expedition. The lower story of
the lighthouse was hung with mutton and beef, and the store-room packed
with provisions.
In the long, covered walk that bridged the gorge between the lighthouse
and the house, we played in stormy days; and every evening it was a
fresh excitement to watch the lighting of the lamps, and think how far
the lighthouse sent its rays, and how many hearts it gladdened with
assurance of safety. As I grew older I was allowed to kindle the lamps
sometimes myself. That was indeed a pleasure. So little a creature as
I might do that much for the great world! But by the fireside our best
pleasure lay,--with plants and singing birds and books and playthings
and loving care and kindness the cold and stormy season wore itself at
last away, and died into the summer calm. We hardly saw a human face
beside our own all winter; but with the spring came manifold life to
our lonely dwelling,--human life among other forms. Our neighbors
from Star rowed across; the pilot-boat from Portsmouth steered over,
and brought us letters, newspapers, magazines, and told us the news
of months. The faint echoes from the far-off world hardly touched us
little ones. We listened to the talk of our elders. “Winfield Scott and
Santa Anna!” “The war in Mexico!” “The famine in Ireland!” It all meant
nothing to us. We heard the reading aloud of details of the famine,
and saw tears in the eyes of the reader, and were vaguely sorry; but
the fate of Red Riding-Hood was much more near and dreadful to us. We
waited for the spring with an eager longing; the advent of the growing
grass, the birds and flowers and insect life, the soft skies and softer
winds, the everlasting beauty of the thousand tender tints that clothed
the world,--these things brought us unspeakable bliss. To the heart of
Nature one must needs be drawn in such a life; and very soon I learned
how richly she repays in deep refreshment the reverent love of her
worshipper. With the first warm days we built our little mountains of
wet gravel on the beach, and danced after the sandpipers at the edge
of the foam, shouted to the gossiping kittiwakes that fluttered above,
or watched the pranks of the burgomaster gull, or cried to the crying
loons. The gannet’s long, white wings stretched overhead, perhaps, or
the dusky shag made a sudden shadow in mid-air, or we startled on some
lonely ledge the great blue heron that flew off, trailing legs and
wings, stork-like, against the clouds. Or, in the sunshine on the bare
rocks, we cut from the broad, brown leaves of the slippery, varnished
kelps, grotesque shapes of man and bird and beast that withered in the
wind and blew away; or we fashioned rude boats from bits of driftwood,
manned them with a weird crew of kelpies, and set them adrift on the
great deep, to float we cared not whither.
We played with the empty limpet-shells; they were mottled gray and
brown, like the song-sparrow’s breast. We launched fleets of purple
mussel-shells on the still pools in the rocks, left by the tide,--pools
that were like bits of fallen rainbow with the wealth of the sea, with
tints of delicate sea-weeds, crimson and green and ruddy brown and
violet; where wandered the pearly eolis with rosy spines and fairy
horns; and the large, round sea-urchins, like a boss upon a shield,
were fastened here and there on the rock at the bottom, putting out
from their green, prickly spikes transparent tentacles to seek their
invisible food. Rosy and lilac star-fish clung to the sides; in some
dark nook, perhaps, a holothure unfolded its perfect ferns, a lovely,
warm buff color, delicate as frost-work; little forests of coralline
moss grew up in stillness, gold-colored shells crept about, and now
and then flashed the silver-darting fins of slender minnows. The
dimmest recesses were haunts of sea-anemones that opened wide their
starry flowers to the flowing tide, or drew themselves together, and
hung in large, half-transparent drops, like clusters of some strange,
amber-colored fruit, along the crevices as the water ebbed away.
Sometimes we were cruel enough to capture a female lobster hiding in
a deep cleft, with her millions of mottled eggs; or we laughed to see
the hermit-crabs challenge each other, and come out and fight a deadly
battle till the stronger overcame, and, turning the weaker topsy-turvy,
possessed himself of his ampler cockle-shell, and scuttled off with it
triumphant. Or, pulling all together, we dragged up the long kelps, or
devil’s-aprons; their roots were almost always fastened about large,
living mussels; these we unclasped, carrying the mussels home to be
cooked; fried in crumbs or batter, they were as good as oysters. We
picked out from the kelp-roots a kind of star-fish which we called
sea-spider; the moment we touched it an extraordinary process began.
One by one it disjointed all its sections,--whether from fear or anger
we knew not; but it threw itself away, bit by bit, until nothing was
left of it save the little, round body whence the legs had sprung!
With crab and limpet, with grasshopper and cricket, we were friends
and neighbors, and we were never tired of watching the land-spiders
that possessed the place. Their webs covered every window-pane to
the lighthouse top, and they rebuilt them as fast as they were swept
down. One variety lived among the round gray stones on the beach,
just above high-water mark, and spun no webs at all. Large and black,
they speckled the light stones, swarming in the hot sun; at the first
footfall they vanished beneath the pebbles.
All the cracks in the rocks were draped with swinging veils like the
window-panes. How often have we marvelled at them, after a fog or a
heavy fall of dew, in the early morning, when every slender thread was
strung with glittering drops,--the whole symmetrical web a wonder of
shining jewels trembling in the breeze! Tennyson’s lines,
“The cobweb woven across the cannon’s throat
Shall shake its threaded tears in the wind no more,”
always bring back to my mind the memory of those delicate, spangled
draperies, more beautiful than any mortal loom could weave, that
curtained the rocks at White Island and “shook their threaded tears” in
every wind.
Sometimes we saw the bats wheel through the summer dusk, and in
profoundly silent evenings heard, from the lighthouse top, their
shrill, small cries, their voices sharper and finer than needle-points.
One day I found one clinging to the under side of a shutter,--a soft,
dun-colored, downy lump. I took it in my hand, and in an instant it
changed to a hideous little demon, and its fierce white teeth met
in the palm of my hand. So much fury in so small a beast I never
encountered, and I was glad enough to give him his liberty without more
ado.
A kind of sandhopper about an inch long, that infested the beach, was
a great source of amusement. Lifting the stranded sea-weed that marked
the high-water line, we always startled a gray and brown cloud of them
from beneath it, leaping away, like tiny kangaroos, out of sight. In
storms these were driven into the house, forcing their way through
every crack and cranny till they strewed the floors,--the sea so
encircled us! Dying immediately upon leaving the water from which they
fled, they turned from a clear brown, or what Mr. Kingsley would call
a “pellucid gray,” to bright brick-color, like a boiled lobster, and
many a time I have swept them up in ruddy heaps; they looked like bits
of coral.
I remember in the spring kneeling on the ground to seek the first
blades of grass that pricked through the soil, and bringing them into
the house to study and wonder over. Better than a shop full of toys
they were to me! Whence came their color? How did they draw their
sweet, refreshing tint from the brown earth, or the limpid air, or
the white light? Chemistry was not at hand to answer me, and all her
wisdom would not have dispelled the wonder. Later the little scarlet
pimpernel charmed me. It seemed more than a flower; it was like a human
thing. I knew it by its homely name of poor-man’s weather-glass. It
was so much wiser than I, for, when the sky was yet without a cloud,
softly it clasped its small red petals together, folding its golden
heart in safety from the shower that was sure to come! How could it
know so much? Here is a question science cannot answer. The pimpernel
grows everywhere about the islands, in every cleft and cranny where
a suspicion of sustenance for its slender root can lodge; and it is
one of the most exquisite of flowers, so rich in color, so quaint
and dainty in its method of growth. I never knew its silent warning
fail. I wondered much how every flower knew what to do and to be;
why the morning-glory didn’t forget sometimes, and bear a cluster of
elder-bloom, or the elder hang out pennons of gold and purple like the
iris, or the golden-rod suddenly blaze out a scarlet plume, the color
of the pimpernel, was a mystery to my childish thought. And why did the
sweet wild primrose wait till after sunset to unclose its pale yellow
buds; why did it unlock its treasure of rich perfume to the night
alone? Few flowers bloomed for me upon the lonesome rock; but I made
the most of all I had, and neither knew of nor desired more. Ah, how
beautiful they were! Tiny stars of crimson sorrel threaded on their
long brown stems; the blackberry blossoms in bridal white; the surprise
of the blue-eyed grass; the crowfoot flowers, like drops of yellow
gold spilt about among the short grass and over the moss; the rich,
blue-purple beach-pea, the sweet, spiked germander, and the homely,
delightful yarrow that grows thickly on all the islands. Sometimes its
broad clusters of dull white bloom are stained a lovely reddish-purple,
as if with the light of sunset. I never saw it colored so elsewhere.
Quantities of slender, wide-spreading mustard-bushes grew about
the house; their delicate flowers were like fragrant golden clouds.
Dandelions, buttercups, and clover were not denied to us; though we
had no daisies nor violets nor wild roses, no asters, but gorgeous
spikes of golden-rod, and wonderful wild morning-glories, whose long,
pale, ivory buds I used to find in the twilight, glimmering among the
dark leaves, waiting for the touch of dawn to unfold and become each
an exquisite incarnate blush,--the perfect color of a South Sea shell.
They ran wild, knotting and twisting about the rocks, and smothering
the loose boulders in the gorges with lush green leaves and pink
blossoms.
Many a summer morning have I crept out of the still house before any
one was awake, and, wrapping myself closely from the chill wind of
dawn, climbed to the top of the high cliff called the Head to watch
the sunrise. Pale grew the lighthouse flame before the broadening day
as, nestled in a crevice at the cliff’s edge, I watched the shadows
draw away and morning break. Facing the east and south, with all the
Atlantic before me, what happiness was mine as the deepening rose-color
flushed the delicate cloudflocks that dappled the sky, where the gulls
soared, rosy too, while the calm sea blushed beneath. Or perhaps it
was a cloudless sunrise with a sky of orange-red, and the sea-line
silver-blue against it, peaceful as heaven. Infinite variety of beauty
always awaited me, and filled me with an absorbing, unreasoning joy
such as makes the song-sparrow sing,--a sense of perfect bliss. Coming
back in the sunshine, the morning-glories would lift up their faces,
all awake, to my adoring gaze. Like countless rosy trumpets sometimes
I thought they were, tossed everywhere about the rocks, turned up to
the sky, or drooping toward the ground, or looking east, west, north,
south, in silent loveliness. It seemed as if they had gathered the
peace of the golden morning in their still depths even as my heart had
gathered it.
In some of those matchless summer mornings when I went out to milk the
little dun cow, it was hardly possible to go farther than the doorstep,
for pure wonder, as I looked abroad at the sea lying still, like a
vast, round mirror, the tide drawn away from the rich brown rocks, a
sail or two asleep in the calm, not a sound abroad except a few bird
voices; dew lying like jewel-dust sifted over everything,--diamond
and ruby, sapphire, topaz, and amethyst, flashing out of the emerald
deeps of the tufted grass or from the bending tops. Looking over to
the mainland, I could dimly discern in the level sunshine the depths
of glowing green woods faintly revealed in the distance, fold beyond
fold of hill and valley thickly clothed with the summer’s splendor.
But my handful of grass was more precious to me than miles of green
fields, and I was led to consider every blade where there were so few.
Not long ago I had watched them piercing the ground toward the light;
now, how strong in their slender grace were these stems, how perfect
the poise of the heavy heads that waved with such harmony of movement
in the faintest breeze! And I noticed at mid-day when the dew was dry,
where the tall, blossoming spears stood in graceful companies that,
before they grew purple, brown, and ripe, when they began to blossom,
they put out first a downy ring of pollen in tiny, yellow rays, held by
an almost invisible thread, which stood out like an aureole from each
slow-waving head,--a fairy-like effect. On Seavey’s Island (united to
ours by a narrow beach covered at high tide with contending waves) grew
one single root of fern, the only one within the circle of my little
world. It was safe in a deep cleft, but I was in perpetual anxiety lest
my little cow, going there daily to pasture, should leave her cropping
of the grass and eat it up some day. Poor little cow! One night she did
not come home to be milked as usual, and on going to seek her we found
she had caught one foot in a crevice and twisted her hoof entirely off!
That was a calamity; for we were forced to summon our neighbors and
have her killed on the spot.
I had a scrap of garden, literally not more than a yard square, wherein
grew only African marigolds, rich in color as barbaric gold. I knew
nothing of John Keats at that time,--poor Keats, “who told Severn that
he thought his intensest pleasure in life had been to watch the growth
of flowers,”--but I am sure he never felt their beauty more devoutly
than the little, half-savage being who knelt, like a fire-worshipper,
to watch the unfolding of those golden disks. When, later, the “brave
new world” of poets was opened to me, with what power those glowing
lines of his went straight to my heart,
“Open afresh your rounds of starry folds,
Ye ardent marigolds!”
All flowers had for me such human interest, they were so dear and
precious, I hardly liked to gather them, and when they were withered,
I carried them all to one place and laid them tenderly together, and
never liked to pass the spot where they were hidden.
Once or twice every year came the black, lumbering old “oil-schooner”
that brought supplies for the lighthouse, and the inspector, who
gravely examined everything, to see if all was in order. He left stacks
of clear red and white glass chimneys for the lamps, and several
doe-skins for polishing the great, silver-lined copper reflectors,
large bundles of wicks, and various pairs of scissors for trimming
them, heavy black casks of ill-perfumed whale-oil, and other things,
which were all stowed in the round, dimly-lighted rooms of the tower.
Very awe-struck, we children always crept into corners, and whispered
and watched the intruders till they embarked in their ancient, clumsy
vessel, and, hoisting their dark, weather-stained sails, bore slowly
away again. About ten years ago that old white lighthouse was taken
away, and a new, perpendicular brick tower built in its place. The
lantern, with its fifteen lamps, ten golden and five red, gave place
to Fresnel’s powerful single burner, or, rather, three burners in one,
enclosed in its case of prisms. The old lighthouse was by far the most
picturesque; but perhaps the new one is more effective, the light
being, undoubtedly, more powerful.
Often, in pleasant days, the head of the family sailed away to visit
the other islands, sometimes taking the children with him, oftener
going alone, frequently not returning till after dark. The landing
at White Island is so dangerous that the greatest care is requisite,
if there is any sea running, to get ashore in safety. Two long and
very solid timbers about three feet apart are laid from the boat-house
to low-water mark, and between those timbers the boat’s bow must be
accurately steered; if she goes to the right or the left, woe to her
crew unless the sea is calm! Safely lodged in the slip, as it is
called, she is drawn up into the boat-house by a capstan, and fastened
securely. The lighthouse gave no ray to the dark rock below it;
sending its beams far out to sea, it left us at its foot in greater
darkness for its lofty light. So when the boat was out late, in soft,
moonless summer nights, I used to light a lantern, and, going down to
the water’s edge, take my station between the timbers of the slip,
and, with the lantern at my feet, sit waiting in the darkness, quite
content, knowing my little star was watched for, and that the safety of
the boat depended in a great measure upon it. How sweet the summer wind
blew, how softly plashed the water round me, how refreshing was the
odor of the sparkling brine! High above, the lighthouse rays streamed
out into the humid dark, and the cottage windows were ruddy from the
glow within. I felt so much a part of the Lord’s universe, I was no
more afraid of the dark than the waves or winds; but I was glad to
hear at last the creaking of the mast and the rattling of the rowlocks
as the boat approached; and, while yet she was far off, the lighthouse
touched her one large sail into sight, so that I knew she was nearing
me, and shouted, listening for the reply that came so blithely back to
me over the water.
Unafraid, too, we watched the summer tempests, and listened to the
deep, melodious thunder rolling away over the rain-calmed ocean. The
lightning played over the iron rods that ran from the lighthouse-top
down into the sea. Where it lay on the sharp ridgepole of the long,
covered walk that spanned the gorge, the strange fire ran up the spikes
that were set at equal distances, and burnt like pale flame from their
tips. It was fine indeed from the lighthouse itself to watch the storm
come rushing over the sea and ingulf us in our helplessness. How the
rain weltered down over the great panes of plate glass,--floods of
sweet, fresh water that poured off the rocks and mingled with the
bitter brine. I wondered why the fresh floods never made the salt
sea any sweeter. Those pale flames that we beheld burning from the
spikes of the lightning-rod, I suppose were identical with the St.
Elmo’s fire that I have since seen described as haunting the spars of
ships in thunder-storms. And here I am reminded of a story told by
some gentlemen visiting Appledore sixteen or eighteen years ago. They
started from Portsmouth for the Shoals in a whaleboat, one evening in
summer, with a native Star-Islander, Richard Randall by name, to manage
the boat. They had sailed about half the distance, when they were
surprised at seeing a large ball of fire, like a rising moon, rolling
toward them over the sea from the south. They watched it eagerly as it
bore down upon them, and, veering off, went east of them at some little
distance, and then passed astern, and there, of course, they expected
to lose sight of it; but while they were marvelling and speculating,
it altered its course, and suddenly began to near them, coming back
upon its track against the wind and steadily following in their wake.
This was too much for the native Shoaler. He took off his jacket and
turned it inside out to exorcise the fiend, and lo, the apparition most
certainly disappeared! We heard the excited account of the strange
gentlemen and witnessed the holy horror of the boatman on the occasion;
but no one could imagine what had set the globe of fire rolling
across the sea. Some one suggested that it might be an exhalation, a
phosphorescent light, from the decaying body of some dead fish; but in
that case it must have been taken in tow by some living finny creature,
else how could it have sailed straight “into the teeth of the wind”? It
was never satisfactorily accounted for, and must remain a mystery.
One autumn at White Island our little boat had been to Portsmouth for
provisions, etc. With the spy-glass we watched her returning, beating
against the head wind. The day was bright, but there had been a storm
at sea, and the breakers rolled and roared about us. The process of
“beating” is so tedious that, though the boat had started in the
morning, the sun was sending long yellow light from the west before it
reached the island. There was no cessation in those resistless billows
that rolled from the Devil’s Rock upon the slip; but still the little
craft sailed on, striving to reach the landing. The hand at the tiller
was firm, but a huge wave swept suddenly in, swerving the boat to the
left of the slip, and in a moment she was overturned and flung upon
the rocks, and her only occupant tossed high upon the beach, safe
except for a few bruises; but what a moment of terror it was for us
all, who saw and could not save! All the freight was lost except a roll
of iron wire and a barrel of walnuts. These were spread on the floor
of an unoccupied eastern chamber in the cottage to dry. And they did
dry; but before they were gathered up came a terrible storm from the
southeast. It raved and tore at lighthouse and cottage; the sea broke
into the windows of that eastern chamber where the walnuts lay, and
washed them out till they came dancing down the stairs in briny foam!
The sea broke the windows of the house several times during our stay
at the lighthouse. Everything shook so violently from the concussion
of the breakers, that dishes on the closet shelves fell to the floor,
and one member of the family was at first always made sea-sick in
storms, by the tremor and deafening confusion. One night when, from
the southeast, the very soul of chaos seemed to have been let loose
upon the world, the whole ponderous “walk” (the covered bridge that
connected the house and lighthouse) was carried thundering down the
gorge and dragged out into the raging sea.
It was a distressing situation for us,--cut off from the precious light
that must be kept alive; for the breakers were tearing through the
gorge so that no living thing could climb across. But the tide could
not resist the mighty impulse that drew it down; it was forced to obey
the still voice that bade it ebb; all swollen and raging and towering
as it was, slowly and surely, at the appointed time, it sank away from
our rock, so that, between the billows that still strove to clutch
at the white, silent, golden-crowned tower, one could creep across,
and scale the height, and wind up the machinery that kept the great
clustered light revolving till the gray daylight broke to extinguish it.
I often wondered how it was possible for the sea-birds to live through
such storms as these. But, when one could see at all, the gulls were
always soaring, in the wildest tumult, and the stormy petrels half
flying, half swimming in the hollows of the waves.
Would it were possible to describe the beauty of the calm that followed
such tempests! The long lines of silver foam that streaked the tranquil
blue, the “tender-curving lines of creamy spray” along the shore,
the clear-washed sky, the peaceful yellow light, the mellow breakers
murmuring slumberously!
Of all the storms our childish eyes watched with delighted awe, one
thunder-storm remains fixed in my memory. Late in an August afternoon
it rolled its awful clouds to the zenith, and, after the tumult had
subsided, spread its lightened vapors in an under-roof of gray over
all the sky. Presently this solemn gray lid was lifted at its western
edge, and an insufferable splendor streamed across the world from
the sinking sun. The whole heaven was in a blaze of scarlet, across
which sprang a rainbow unbroken to the topmost clouds, “with its seven
perfect colors chorded in a triumph” against the flaming background;
the sea answered the sky’s rich blush, and the gray rocks lay drowned
in melancholy purple. I hid my face from the glory,--it was too much to
bear. Ever I longed to _speak_ these things that made life so sweet,
to speak the wind, the cloud, the bird’s flight, the sea’s murmur. A
vain longing! I might as well have sighed for the mighty pencil of
Michael Angelo to wield in my impotent child’s hand. Better to “hush
and bless one’s self with silence”; but ever the wish grew. Facing the
July sunsets, deep red and golden through and through, or watching the
summer northern lights,--battalions of brilliant streamers advancing
and retreating, shooting upward to the zenith, and glowing like fiery
veils before the stars; or when the fog-bow spanned the silver mist of
morning, or the earth and sea lay shimmering in a golden haze of noon;
in storm or calm, by day or night, the manifold aspects of Nature held
me and swayed all my thoughts until it was impossible to be silent any
longer, and I was fain to mingle my voice with her myriad voices, only
aspiring to be in accord with the Infinite harmony, however feeble and
broken the notes might be.
* * * * *
It has been my good fortune to witness but few wrecks at the Shoals.
The disasters of which we hear faintly from the past were many and
dreadful; but since the building of the lighthouse on White Island,
and also on Boone Island (which seems like a neighbor, though fifteen
miles distant), the danger of the place is much lessened. A resident
of Star Island told me of a wreck which took place forty-seven years
ago, during a heavy storm from the eastward. It blew so that all the
doors in the house opened as fast as they shut them, and in the night
a vessel drove against “Hog Island Head,” which fronts the village
on Star. She went to pieces utterly. In the morning the islanders
perceived the beach at Londoners heaped with some kind of drift; they
could not make out what it was, but, as soon as the sea subsided, went
to examine and found a mass of oranges and picture-frames, with which
the vessel had been freighted. Not a soul was saved. “She struck with
such force that she drove a large spike out of her forefoot” into a
crevice in the rock, which was plainly to be seen till a few years
ago. My informant also told me that she remembered the wreck of the
Sagunto, in 1813; that the beaches were strewn with “almond-nuts”
long after; and that she picked up curiously embroidered vests and
“work-bags” in all directions along the shores.
During a storm in 1839, while living at White Island, we were startled
by the heavy booming of guns through the roar of the tempest,--a sound
that drew nearer and nearer, till at last, through a sudden break in
the mist and spray, we saw the heavily rolling hull of a large vessel
driving by, to her sure destruction, toward the coast. It was as if the
wind had torn the vapor apart on purpose to show us this piteous sight;
and I well remember the hand on my shoulder which held me firmly,
shuddering child that I was, and forced me to look in spite of myself.
What a day of pain it was! how dreadful the sound of those signal-guns,
and how much more dreadful the certainty, when they ceased, that
all was over! We learned afterward that it was the brig Pocahontas,
homeward bound from Spain, and that the vessel and all her crew were
lost. In later years a few coasters and fishermen have gone ashore at
the islands, generally upon the hidden ledges at Duck. Many of these
have been loaded with lime,--a most perilous freight; for as soon as
the water touches it there is a double danger; and between fire and
water there is little chance of escape.
I wish I could recall the graphic language of a Star Islander who
described to me a wreck of this kind. The islanders saw at sunrise, one
bitter winter day, a schooner ashore among the dreadful ledges at Duck
Island, and, though the wind blew half a gale, they took their boats
and ran down toward her before the northwester. Smoke and steam and
spray and flame were rising from her and about her when they reached
the spot. Only one man was found alive. From the davits, hanging head
downward, was the lifeless body of a fair-haired boy of sixteen or
thereabouts. The breakers swept him to and fro, and, drawing away,
left his long yellow hair dripping with the freezing brine. The mate’s
story was that he had gone to unfasten the boat which hung at the
stern, that a sea had struck him, and he had fallen headforemost with
his feet entangled in the ropes of the davits. He was the only son of
his mother, who was a widow. They carried his body home to that most
unhappy mother. The vessel was a total loss, with all on board, except
the mate.
One winter night at Appledore when it was blowing very hard northwest,
with a clear sky, we were wakened by a violent knocking at the door.
So unaccustomed a sound, at that time of night too, was enough to
startle us all, and very much amazed we were. The door was opened to
admit four or five shipwrecked men, whose hands, feet, and ears were
all frozen stiff,--pitiable objects they were indeed. Their vessel had
struck full on York Ledge, a rock lying off the coast of Maine far east
of us, and they had taken to the boat and strove to make a landing on
the coast; but the wind blew off shore so fiercely they failed in their
attempt, their hands became useless from the cold, they dropped their
oars, and, half steering with one of the seats of the boat, managed
to reach Appledore, more dead than alive. They were obliged to remain
there several days before finding an opportunity of going on shore, the
gale was so furious. Next morning, in the glare of the winter sunshine,
we saw their vessel, still with all sail set, standing upright upon
the ledge,--a white column looming far away. One of the most hideous
experiences I have heard befell a young Norwegian now living at the
Shoals. He and a young companion came out from Portsmouth to set their
trawl, in the winter fishing, two years ago. Before they reached the
island, came a sudden squall of wind and snow, chilling and blinding.
In a few moments they knew not where they were, and the wind continued
to sweep them away. Presently they found themselves under the lee of
White Island Head; they threw out the road-lines of their trawl, in
desperate hope that they might hold the boat till the squall abated.
The keepers at the lighthouse saw the poor fellows, but were powerless
to help them. Alas! the road-lines soon broke, and the little boat was
swept off again, they knew not whither. Night came down upon them,
tossed on that terrible black sea; the snow ceased, the clouds flew
before the deadly cold northwest wind, the thermometer sank below zero.
One of the men died before morning; the other, alone with the dead man,
was still driven on and on before the pitiless gale. He had no cap nor
mittens; had lost both. He bailed the boat incessantly, for the sea
broke over him the livelong time. He told me the story himself. He
looked down at the awful face of his dead friend and thought “how soon
he should be like him”; but still he never ceased bailing,--it was all
he could do. Before night he passed Cape Cod and knew it as he rushed
by. Another unspeakably awful night, and the gale abated no whit. Next
morning he was almost gone from cold, fatigue, and hunger. His eyes
were so swollen he could hardly see; but afar off, shining whiter than
silver in the sun, the sails of a large schooner appeared at the edge
of the fearful wilderness. He managed to hoist a bit of old canvas on
an oar. He was then not far from Holmes’ Hole, nearly two hundred miles
from the Shoals! The schooner saw it and bore down for him, but the
sea was running so high that he expected to be swamped every instant.
As she swept past, they threw from the deck a rope with a loop at the
end, tied with a bow-line knot that would not slip. It caught him over
the head, and clutching it at his throat with both hands, in an instant
he found himself in the sea among the ice-cold, furious waves, drawn
toward the vessel with all the strength of her crew. Just before he
emerged, he heard the captain shout, “We’ve lost him!” Ah the bitter
moment! For a horrible fear struck through him that they might lose
their hold an instant on the rope, and then he knew it would be all
over. But they saved him. The boat with the dead man in it, all alone,
went tossing, heaven knows where.
The great equinoctial gale of September 8, 1869, was very severe at the
islands. One schooner went ashore on Cannon Point at Appledore, and
was a complete wreck, though no lives were lost. She was lying in “The
Roads,” between Star and Appledore, safely moored, her crew supposed;
but she dragged moorings, anchors, everything with which they strove
to save her, and crashed on the rocks, breaking up like an eggshell.
Various buildings were blown down; windows at Appledore were blown in,
in some cases sash and all, in others the glass was smashed as if the
wind had thrust an arm through.
At about seven o’clock in the evening a great copper-colored arch
spanned the black sky from west to east. The gale was then at its
height. After that lurid bow dissolved, flying northward in wild,
scattered fragments, the wind abated, and we began to take breath
again. A man at Star, on the edge of the storm, rowed out in his dory
to make more secure a larger boat moored at a little distance. Down
came the hurricane and caught him, and whirled him away like a dead
leaf on the surface of the sea. He gave himself up for lost, of course;
so did his friends. But he fastened himself with ropes to the inside of
the boat, and, tossing from billow to billow, bailed for dear life the
whole night long. Toward morning, the wind lulling very considerably,
he was carried along the coast of Maine, and landed in York, a short
distance from his father’s home, and quietly walked into the house and
joined the family at breakfast; then took the cars for Portsmouth, and
astounded the whole Shoals settlement by appearing in the steamer
Appledore in time for dinner. Everybody supposed him, without a shadow
of doubt, to be at the bottom of the sea.
Boone Island is the forlornest place that can be imagined. The Isles of
Shoals, barren as they are, seem like Gardens of Eden in comparison. I
chanced to hear last summer of a person who had been born and brought
up there; he described the loneliness as something absolutely fearful,
and declared it had pursued him all through his life. He lived there
till fourteen or fifteen years old, when his family moved to York.
While living on the island he discovered some human remains which
had lain there thirty years. A carpenter and his assistants, having
finished some building, were capsized in getting off, and all were
drowned, except the master. One body floated to Plum Island at the
mouth of the Merrimack; the others the master secured, made a box for
them,--all alone the while,--and buried them in a cleft and covered
them with stones. These stones the sea washed away, and, thirty years
after they were buried, the boy found the bones, which were removed
to York and there buried again. It was on board a steamer bound to
Bangor, that the man told his story. Boone Island Light was shining
in the distance. He spoke with bitterness of his life in that terrible
solitude, and of “the loneliness which had pursued him ever since.”
All his relatives were dead, he said, and he had no human tie in the
wide world except his wife. He ended by anathematizing all islands,
and, vanishing into the darkness, was not to be found again; nor did
his name or any trace of him transpire, though he was sought for in the
morning all about the vessel.
One of the most shocking stories of shipwreck I remember to have heard
is that of the Nottingham Galley, wrecked on this island in the year
1710. There is a narrative of this shipwreck existing, written by
“John Deane, then commander of said Galley, but for many years after
his Majesty’s consul for the ports of Flanders, residing at Ostend,”
printed in 1762. The ship, of one hundred and twenty tons, carrying
ten guns, with a crew of fourteen men, loaded partly in England and
partly in Ireland, and sailed for Boston on the 25th of September,
1710. She made land on the 11th of December, and was wrecked on that
fatal rock. At first the unhappy crew “treated each other with kindness
and condolence, and prayed to God for relief.” The only things saved
from the wreck were a bit of canvas and half a cheese. The men made
a triangular tent of the bit of canvas, and all lay close together
beneath it, sideways; none could turn without the general concurrence:
they turned once in two hours upon public notice. They had no fire,
and lived upon kelp and rockweed, and mussels, three a day to a man.
Starvation and suffering soon produced a curious loss of memory. The
fourth day the cook died. When they had been there upwards of a week,
they saw three sails in the southwest, but no boat came near them.
They built a rude boat of such materials as they could gather from
the wreck, but she was lost in launching. One of the men, a Swede, is
particularly mentioned; he seems to have been full of energy; with
help from the others he built a raft; in launching this they overset
it. Again they saw a sail, this time coming out from the Piscataqua
River; it was soon out of sight. The Swede was determined to make
an effort to reach the shore, and persuaded another man to make the
attempt with him. At sunset they were seen half-way to the land; the
raft was found on shore with the body of one man; the Swede was never
seen more. A hide was thrown on the rocks at Boone Island by the sea;
this the poor sailors ate raw, minced. About the end of December the
carpenter died, and, driven to madness by hunger, they devoured the
flesh of their dead comrade. The captain, being the strongest of the
party, dragged the body away and hid it, and dealt small portions of it
daily to the men. Immediately their dispositions underwent a horrible
change. They became fierce and reckless, and were the most pitiable
objects of despair, when, on January 4th, 1711, they were discovered
and taken off. It was evening when they entered the Piscataqua River,
and eight o’clock when they landed. Discovering a house through the
darkness, the master rushed into it, frightening the gentlewoman and
children desperately, and, making his way to the kitchen, snatched
the pot wherein some food was cooking off the fire, and began to eat
voraciously. This old record mentions John Plaisted and John Wentworth
as being most “forward in benevolence” to these poor fellows.
When visiting the island for the first time, a few years ago, I was
shown the shallow gorge where the unfortunates tried to shelter
themselves. It was the serenest of summer days; everything smiled and
shone as I stood looking down into that rocky hollow. Near by the
lighthouse sprang--a splendid piece of masonry--over a hundred feet
into the air, to hold its warning aloft. About its base some gentle
thought had caused morning-glories to climb and unfold their violet,
white, and rosy bells against the smooth, dark stone. I thought I had
never seen flowers so beautiful. There was hardly a handful of grass
on the island, hardly soil enough to hold a root; therefore it seemed
the more wonderful to behold this lovely apparition. With my mind full
of the story of the Nottingham Galley, I looked at the delicate bells,
the cool green leaves, the whole airy grace of the wandering vines, and
it was as if a hand were stretched out to pluck me away from the awful
questions never to be answered this side the grave, that pressed so
heavily while I thought how poor humanity had here suffered the utmost
misery that it is possible to endure.
The aspect of this island from the Shoals is very striking, so lonely
it lies on the eastern horizon, its tall lighthouse like a slender
column against the sky. It is easily mistaken for the smokestack of a
steamer by unaccustomed eyes, and sometimes the watcher most familiar
with its appearance can hardly distinguish it from the distant white
sails that steal by it, to and fro. Sometimes it looms colossal in the
mirage of summer; in winter it lies blurred and ghostly at the edge of
chilly sea and pallid sky. In the sad, strange light of winter sunsets,
its faithful star blazes suddenly from the darkening east, and sends a
friendly ray across to its neighbor at the Shoals, waiting as it also
waits, ice-bound, storm-swept, and solitary, for gentler days to come.
And “winter’s rains and ruins” have an end at last.
In the latter part of February, after ten days perhaps of the
northwester, bringing across to the islands all the chill of the
snow-covered hills of the continent, some happy evening it dies into
a reasonable breeze, and, while the sun sets, you climb the snowy
height, and sweep with your eyes the whole circle of the horizon, with
nothing to impede the view. Ah! how sad it looks in the dying light!
Star Island close by with its silent little village and the sails of
belated fishing-boats hurrying in over the dark water to the moorings;
White Island afar off “kindling its great red star”; on every side the
long, bleached points of granite stretching out into the sea, so cold
and bleak; the line of coast, sad purple; and the few schooners leaden
and gray in the distance. Yet there is a hopeful glow where the sun
went down, suggestive of the spring; and before the ruddy sweetness
of the western sky the melancholy east is flushed with violet, and up
into the delicious color rolls a gradual moon, mellow and golden as in
harvest-time, while high above her the great star Jupiter begins to
glitter clear. On such an evening some subtle influence of the coming
spring steals to the heart, and eyes that have watched the winter skies
so patiently grow wistful with the thought of summer days to come.
On shore in these last weeks of winter one becomes aware, by various
delicate tokens, of the beautiful change at hand,--by the deepening
of the golden willow wands into a more living color, and by their
silvery buds, which in favored spots burst the brown sheaths; by the
reddening of bare maple-trees, as if with promise of future crimson
flowers; by the sweet cry of the returning bluebird; by the alders at
the river’s edge. If the season is mild, the catkins begin to unwind
their tawny tresses in the first weeks of March. But here are no trees,
and no bluebirds come till April. Perhaps some day the delightful
clangor of the wild geese is heard, and looking upward, lo! the long,
floating ribbon streaming northward across the sky. What joy they bring
to hearts so weary with waiting! Truly a wondrous content is shaken
down with their wild clamors out of the cloudy heights, and a courage
and vigor lurk in these strong voices that touch the listener with
something better than gladness, while he traces eagerly the wavering
lines that seek the north with steady, measured flight.
Gradually the bitter winds abate; early in March the first flocks of
crows arrive, and they soar finely above the coves, and perch on the
flukes of stranded anchors or the tops of kellock-sticks that lie
about the water’s edge. They are most welcome, for they are never
seen in winter; and pleasant it is to watch them beating their black,
ragged pinions in the blue, while the gulls swim on beyond them
serenely, shining still whiter for their sable color. No other birds
come till about the 27th of March, and then all at once the islands
are alive with song-sparrows, and these sing from morning till night
so beautifully that dull and weary indeed must be the mortal who can
resist the charm of their fresh music. There is a matchless sweetness
and good cheer in this brave bird. The nightingale singing with its
breast against a thorn may be divine; yet would I turn away from its
tender melody to listen to the fresh, cheerful, healthy song of this
dauntless and happy little creature. They come in flocks to be fed
every morning the whole summer long, tame and charming, with their
warm brown and gray feathers, striped and freaked with wood-color,
and little brown knots at each pretty throat! They build their nests,
and remain till the snow falls; frequently they remain all winter;
sometimes they come into the house for shelter; once one fluttered in
and entered the canaries’ cage voluntarily, and stayed there singing
like a voice from heaven all winter. Robins and blackbirds appear with
the sparrows; a few blackbirds build and remain; the robins, finding
no trees, flit across to the mainland. Yellow-birds and kingbirds
occasionally build here, but very rarely. By the first of April the
snow is gone, and our bit of earth is free from that dead white mask.
How lovely then the gentle neutral tints of tawny intervals of dead
grass and brown bushes and varying stone appear, set in the living sea!
There is hardly a square foot of the bare rock that isn’t precious for
its soft coloring; and freshly beautiful are the uncovered lichens that
with patient fingering have ornamented the rough surfaces with their
wonderful embroideries. They flourish with the greatest vigor by the
sea; whole houses at Star used to be covered with the orange-colored
variety, and I have noticed the same thing in the pretty fishing
village of Newcastle and on some of the old buildings by the river-side
in sleepy Portsmouth city. Through April the weather softens daily,
and by the 20th come gray, quiet days with mild northeast wind; in the
hollows the grass has greened, and now the gentle color seems to brim
over and spread out upon the ground in faint and fainter gradations.
A refreshing odor springs from the moist earth, from the short, sweet
turf which the cattle crop so gladly,--a musky fragrance unlike that
of inland pastures; and with this is mingled the pure sea-breeze,--a
most reviving combination. The turfy gorges, boulder-strewn and still,
remind one of Alexander Smith’s descriptions of his summer in Skye, of
those quiet, lonely glens,--just such a grassy carpet was spread in
their hollows. By the 23d of April come the first swallow and flocks of
martins, golden-winged and downy woodpeckers, the tiny, ruby-crowned
wren, and troops of many other kinds of birds; kingfishers that perch
on stranded kellocks, little nuthatches that peck among the shingles
for hidden spiders, and gladden the morning with sweet, quaint cries,
so busy and bright and friendly! All these tarry only awhile in their
passage to the mainland.
But though the birds come and the sky has relented and grown tender
with its melting clouds, the weather in New England has a fashion of
leaping back into midwinter in the space of an hour, and all at once
comes half a hurricane from the northwest, charged with the breath of
all the remaining snow-heaps on the far mountain ranges,--a “white-sea
roarin’ wind” that takes you back to January. In the afternoon,
through the cold, transparent heaven, a pale half-moon glides slowly
over; there is a splendor of wild clouds at sunset, dusk heaps with
scarlet fringes, scattered flecks of flame in a clear crimson air above
the fallen sun; then cold moonlight over the black sea, with the flash
and gleam of white waves the whole night long.
But the potent spirit of the spring triumphs at last. When the sun in
its journey north passes a certain group of lofty pine-trees standing
out distinctly against the sky on Breakfast Hill in Greenland, New
Hampshire, which lies midway in the coast line, then the Shoalers are
happy in the conviction that there will be “settled weather”; and they
put no trust in any relenting of the elements before that time. After
this there soon come days when to be alive is quite enough joy,--days
when it is bliss only to watch and feel how
“God renews
His ancient rapture,”--
days when the sea lies, colored like a turquoise, blue and still, and
from the south a band of warm, gray-purple haze steals down on the
horizon like an encircling arm about the happy world. The lightest
film encroaches upon the sea, only made perceptible by the shimmering
of far-off sails. A kind of bloom, inexpressibly lovely, softens over
the white canvas of nearer vessels, like a delicate veil. There is a
fascination in the motion of these slender schooners, a wondrous grace,
as they glide before a gentle wind, slowly bowing, bending, turning,
with curving canvas just filled with the breeze, and shadows falling
soft from sail to sail. They are all so picturesque, so suggestive,
from the small, tanned spritsail some young islander spreads to flit
to and fro among the rocks and ledges, to the stately column of canvas
that bears the great ship round the world. The variety of their
aspects is endless and ever beautiful, whether you watch them from the
lighthouse-top, dreaming afar on the horizon, or at the water’s edge;
whether they are drowned in the flood of sunshine on the waves, or
glide darkly through the track of the moonlight, or fly toward you full
of promise, wing and wing, like some magnificent bird, or steal away
reddening in the sunset as if to
“Sink with all you love below the verge.”
I know nothing sadder than their aspect in the light of the winter
sunsets, as they vanish in the cold east, blushing for a fleeting
moment, sweetly, faintly, under the last touch of the dropping day.
To a child’s imagination they are all full of charm and of mystery,
freighted with heavenly dreams. “The thoughts of youth are long, long
thoughts,” and the watching of the sails filled the lonely, lovely
summer days of one young Shoaler with joy enough and to spare. How
many pictures linger in my mind,--splendid, stately apparitions of
full-rigged, slender schooners, passing very near early in the breezy
mornings of spring, every inch of canvas in a blaze of white light,
and the whole vessel alive from keel to topmast. And well I remember
on soft May evenings how they came dropping down from Cape Ann, while
the sunset, streaming through low bars of cloud, just touched them with
pale gold, and made them half luminous and altogether lovely; and how
the fog clung in silver strips to the dark, wet sails of vessels lying
becalmed when all the air about was clear and free from mist; how the
mackerel fleet surrounded the islands, five hundred craft sometimes
between the islands and the coast, so that one might almost walk on
shore from deck to deck. It was wonderful to wake on some midsummer
morning and find the sea gray-green, like translucent chrysoprase, and
the somewhat stormy sunrise painting the sails bright flame-color as
they flew before the warm, wild wind that blew strongly from the south.
At night, sometimes, in a glory of moonlight, a vessel passed close
in with all sail set, and only just air enough to fill the canvas,
enough murmur from the full tide to drown the sound of her movement,--a
beautiful ghost stealing softly by, and passing in mysterious light
beyond the glimmering headland out of sight. Here was suggestion enough
for a night full of visions! Then the scudding of sails before a
storm,--how they came rushing in from the far, dim sea-line, racing by
to Portsmouth Harbor, close-reefed, or under darkened mainsail and jib
only, leaping over the long swell, and plunging their sharp bowsprits
into a cloud of snowy spray at every leap! Then when the storm had
spent itself, how beautiful to see them stealing tranquilly forth
from the river’s mouth, flocking seaward again, shining white in the
peaceful morning sunshine! Watching them in all their endless variety,
coming and going, dreaming, drifting, or flying, many a time these
quaint old rhymes occurred to me:--
“Ships, ships, I will descrie you
Amidst the main,
I will come and try you
What you are protecting,
And projecting,
What’s your end and aim?
Some go abroad for merchandise and trading,
Another stays to keep his country from invading,
A third is coming home with rich and wealthy lading.
Halloo! my fancie, whither wilt thou go?”
As the winter is doubly hard, so are the gentler seasons doubly sweet
and delightful, when one is shut out with them, as it were, and forced
to observe all their changes and peculiarities, with so few human
interests to interrupt one’s intercourse with nature. The rainy days
in May at the Isles of Shoals have seemed to me more lovely than the
sunshine in Paradise could be, so charming it was to walk in the warm
showers over our island, and note all the mosses and lichens drenched
and bright with the moisture, thick, sweet buds on the bayberry bushes,
rich green leaves unfolding here and there among the tangled vines,
and bright anemones growing up between. The lovely eyebright glimmers
everywhere. The rain, if it continues for several days, bleaches the
sea-weed about the shores to a lighter and more golden brown, the sea
is gray, and the sky lowers; but all these neutral tints are gentle
and refreshing. The coasters rock lazily on the long swell toward Cape
Ann, dim through low-hanging clouds; clearly the sandpipers call, and
always the song-sparrows freshly surprise you with their outburst
of cheerful music. In the last weeks of May comes a period of balmy
days, with a gentle, incessant southwest wind, the sea a wonderful
gray-blue, with the faint, impalpable haze lying over sails, islands,
sea, and coast. A brooding warmth is everywhere. The sky is cloudless,
but opaque,--a kind of milky effect in the atmosphere, through which
the sun is seen as through smoked glass, and long before it sets one
can bear to look at the crimson ball slow sinking in the rich, red
west; and the moon is like copper, throwing no light on the water. The
islanders call this a “smoky sou’wester.” Now come delicious twilights,
with silence broken only by mysterious murmurs from the waves, and
sweet, full cries from the sandpipers fluttering about their nests
on the margin of the beaches,--tender, happy notes that thrill the
balmy air, and echo softly about the silent, moonlit coves. Sails in
this twilight atmosphere gather the dusk within their folds; if the
warm wind is blowing softly, there is enchantment in the sound of the
lazily-flapping canvas and in the long creak of the mast. A human voice
borne through this breathing wind comes like a waft of music faintly
heard across the water. The mornings now are exquisite, the delicate
flush of the sunrise through this beautiful haze is indescribable. The
island is indeed like
“A precious stone set in the silver sea,”
so freshly green, so flower-strewn and fragrant, so musical with
birds, and with the continual caressing of summer waves. Now and then
a bobolink pays us a flying visit, and, tilting on a blackberry spray,
pours out his intoxicating song; some morning is heard the fairy
bugling of an oriole; a scarlet tanager honors the place with half a
day’s sojourn, to be the wonder of all eyes; but commonly the swallows
hold it in undisputed possession. The air is woven through and through
with the gleam of their burnished wings and their clear, happy cries.
They are so tame, knowing how well they are beloved, that they gather
on the window-sills, twittering and fluttering, gay and graceful,
turning their heads this way and that, eying you askance without a
trace of fear. All day they build their nests about the eaves, nor heed
how loving eyes do watch their charming toil. Walking abroad in these
pleasant evenings, many a little sparrow’s nest one finds low down in
the bayberry-bushes,--smooth, brown cups of woven grass, wherein lie
the five speckled eggs, each full of silent music, each dumb miracle
waiting for the finger of God to wake, to be alive, to drink the
sunshine and the breeze, to fill the air with blissful sound. At the
water’s edge one finds the long ledges covered with barnacles, and from
each rough shell a tiny, brown, filmy hand is thrust out, opening and
shutting in gladness beneath the coming tide, feeling the freshness
of the flowing water. The shore teems with life in manifold forms. As
the darkness gathers, the ripples begin to break in pale flame against
the rocks; if the tide is low enough, it is charming to steal down in
the shadow, and, drawing aside the curtain of coarse sea-weed that
drapes the face of some smooth rock, to write on the surface beneath:
the strange fire follows your finger; and there is your name in weird
flame, all alive, quivering and trembling, and finally fading and
disappearing. In a still pool you drop a stone or touch the water
with your hand: instantly a thousand stars break out and burn and
vanish in a moment! It used to be a pleasant thing to bring a piece of
drift-wood, water-soaked, and shaggy with fine seaweed, up from the
shore, and from some dark corner suddenly sweep my hand across it: a
sheet of white flame followed, startling the beholder.
June is of course the most delightful month here, everything is yet
so fresh; later the hot sun dries and scorches the thin soil, and
partially destroys the little vegetation which finds room upon the
island. But through this month the ground is beautiful with starry,
purple stonewort; like little suns the blossoms of the lion’s-foot
shine in the thinnest of the soil; herb-robert blossoms; the slender
arenaria steals up among the bushes, lifting a little white flower
to the sun; here and there the sorrel lies in crimson stains; in wet
places sturdy clumps of fern unroll their golden green with splendid
vigor of growth; sundew and partridge-berry creep at their feet;
and from the swamp the rushes rise in ranks, like a faint, green
vapor, slowly, day by day. The few wild-cherry bushes have each its
inevitable caterpillars’ nest; one can but wonder how caterpillars and
canker-worms find their way across the water. The presence of green
snakes on these rocks may be explained by their having been found
coiled on a piece of drift-wood many miles out at sea. Bees find their
way out from the land in companies, seeking the white clover-blossoms
that rise in cool, creamy, fragrant globes through the dark leaves
and grass. The clover here is peculiarly rich. Many varieties of
butterflies abound, the handsome moth of the American silkworm among
them. One night in June, at sunset, we were kindling the lamps in the
lighthouse, and because it was so mild and still outside, the little
iron door of the lantern was left open. No breeze came in to stir
the flame that quivered in the centre of each shining reflector, but
presently glided through the door the pale-green, exquisite Luna moth,
with its wonderful crescents, its lines of velvet brown, and long under
wings drawn out like the tail of a swallow. It sailed slowly round and
round the dome above the lamps at first, but soon became agitated, and
would have dashed itself against the flames but that I caught it. What
a marvel it was! I never dreamed of the existence of so beautiful a
creature. Titania herself could not have been more interesting to me.
In the quiet little coves troops of butterflies are often seen,
anchored for the night, clinging to the thistle-blossoms to be safe
from assailing winds. Crickets are never heard here till after the 1st
of August. On the mainland they begin, about the 28th of May, a sad
and gentle autumnal undertone, which from that time accompanies the
jubilant chorus of summer in a gradual _crescendo_, till finally the
days pass on to no other music save their sweet, melancholy chirrup.
In August comes the ruby-throated humming-bird, and several pairs
flutter about the little gardens for weeks. By the 1st of July the wild
roses blossom, and every bit of swampy ground is alive with the waving
flags of the iris, each flower of which is full of exquisite variety
of tint and shade of gold and violet. All over the island patches of
it diversify the surface, set like amethysts in the rich greens and
browns of turf and mossy spaces. Through the tangle of leaves and
grasses the spikes of golden-rod make their way upward slowly day by
day, to be ready at the first beckoning of Autumn’s finger to light
their torches and join the fair procession; the green hollows are
filled with blossoming elder, white as a lake of milk; the pimpernel is
awake; and the heavy, stout stalks of the mulleins uprear their woolly
buds, that soon will break into squares of pallid gold. The world is at
high tide of delight. Along the coast-line the mirage races in flowing
undulations of heat, changing the hill ranges into a solid wall, to
dissolve them, and again reunite them into clusters of gigantic towers
and battlements; trees, spires, chimneys, lighthouses become roofs and
minarets and domes of some stately city of the clouds, and these melt
in their turn, and the whole coast shrinks away to the merest line
on the horizon immeasurably removed. Each of these changes, and the
various aspects of their little world, are of inestimable value to the
lonely children living always in that solitude. Nothing is too slight
to be precious: the flashing of an oar-blade in the morning light;
the twinkling of a gull’s wings afar off, like a star in the yellow
sunshine of the drowsy summer afternoon; the water-spout waltzing
away before the wild wind that cleaves the sea from the advancing
thunder-cloud; the distant showers that march about the horizon,
trailing their dusky fringes of falling rain over sea and land; every
phase of the great thunder-storms that make glorious the weeks of
July and August, from the first floating film of cloud that rises in
the sky till the scattered fragments of the storm stream eastward to
form a background for the rainbow,--all these things are of the utmost
importance to dwellers at the Isles of Shoals. There is something
especially delightful in the perfumes which stream across the sea after
showers, like a heavenly greeting from the land: scents of hay and of
clover, spice of pine woods, balm of flowers come floating over the
cool waves on the wings of the west wind, and touch one like a breath
from Paradise. Few sounds from the shore reach the islands; the booming
of guns is audible, and sometimes, when the wind is west, the air is
pierced with distant car-whistles, so very remote, however, that they
are hardly to be recognized except by a practised ear.
* * * * *
There is a superstition among the islanders that Philip Babb, or
some evil-minded descendant of his, still haunts Appledore; and no
consideration would induce the more timid to walk alone after dark
over a certain shingly beach on that island, at the top of a cove
bearing Babb’s name,--for there the uneasy spirit is oftenest seen. He
is supposed to have been so desperately wicked when alive that there is
no rest for him in his grave. His dress is a coarse, striped butcher’s
frock, with a leather belt, to which is attached a sheath containing
a ghostly knife, sharp and glittering, which it is his delight to
brandish in the face of terrified humanity. One of the Shoalers is
perfectly certain that he and Babb have met, and he shudders with real
horror, recalling the meeting. This is his story. It was after sunset
(of course), and he was coming round the corner of a work-shop, when
he saw a wild and dreadful figure advancing toward him; his first
thought was that some one wished to make him the victim of a practical
joke, and he called out something to the effect that he “wasn’t
afraid”; but the thing came near with ghastly face and hollow eyes,
and, assuming a fiendish expression, took out the knife from its belt
and flourished it in the face of the Shoaler, who fled to the house
and entered breathless, calling for the person who he supposed had
tried to frighten him. That person was quietly eating his supper; and
when the poor fellow saw him he was so much agitated that he nearly
fainted, and his belief in Babb was fixed more firmly than ever. One
spring night some one was sitting on the broad piazza at sunset; it
was calm and mild; the sea murmured a little; birds twittered softly;
there was hardly a waft of wind in the still atmosphere. Glancing
toward Babb’s Cove, he saw a figure slowly crossing the shingle to
the path which led to the house. After watching it a moment he called
to it, but there was no reply; again he called, still no answer; but
the dark figure came slowly on; and then he reflected that he had
heard no step on the loose shingle that was wont to give back every
footfall, and, somewhat puzzled, he slowly descended the steps of the
piazza and went to meet it. It was not so dark but that he could see
the face and recognize the butcher’s frock and leather belt of Babb,
but he was not prepared for the devilish expression of malice in that
hollow face, and, spite of his prosaic turn of mind, he was chilled to
the marrow at the sight. The white stripes in the frock gleamed like
phosphorescent light, so did the awful eyes. Again he called aloud,
“Who are you? What do you want?” and still advanced, when suddenly the
shape grew indistinct, first thick and cloudy, then thin, dissolving
quite away, and, much amazed, he turned and went back to the house,
perplexed and thoroughly dissatisfied. These tales I tell as they were
told to me. I never saw Babb, nor ever could, I think. The whole Babb
family are buried in the valley of Appledore where the houses stand,
and till this year a bowling-alley stood upon the spot, and all the
balls rolled over the bones of all the Babbs; that may have been one
reason why the head of the family was so restless; since the last
equinoctial gale blew the building down, perhaps he may rest more
peacefully. Babb’s is, I believe, the only real ghost that haunts the
islands; though in the loft at the parsonage on Star (a mere creep-hole
under the eaves, unattainable by any steps or ladder) there is, in
windy weather, the most extraordinary combination of sounds, as if
two bluff old fellows were swearing at each other, gruffly, harshly,
continually, with a perseverance worthy of a better cause. Really, it
is a most disagreeable racket! A lean, brown, hollow-eyed old woman
from Star used to tell how her daughter-in-law died, in a way that took
the color out of childish cheeks to hear; for the dying woman thought
the ghosts were scratching for her outside, against the house. “‘Ma’y
Hahner’” (Mary Hannah), “she said to me, a whisperin’, says she, ‘Who’s
that scratching, tearing the house down underneath the window?’ ‘No,
it ain’t nothin’,’ says I; ‘Ma’y Hahner, there ain’t nobody a tearin’
the house down underneath the winder.’ ‘Yes, yes, there is,’ says she,
‘there is! I hear ’em scratching, scratching, tearing the house down
underneath the winder!’ And then I know’d Ma’y Hahner was goin’ to die,
and so she did afore mornin’.”
There is a superstition here and along the coast to this effect. A
man gathering drift-wood or whatever it may be, sees a spade stuck
in the ground as if inviting him to dig. He isn’t quite ready, goes
and empties his basket first, then comes back to investigate, and lo!
there’s nothing there, and he is tormented the rest of his life with
the thought that probably untold wealth lay beneath that spade, which
he might have possessed had he only been wise enough to seize the
treasure when it offered itself. A certain man named William Mace,
living at Star, long, long ago, swore that he had had this experience;
and there’s a dim tradition that another person, seeing the spade,
passed by about his business, but hastening back, arrived just in time
to see the last of the sinking tool, and to perceive also a golden
flat-iron disappearing into the earth. This he seized, but no human
power could extricate it from the ground, and he was forced to let go
his hold and see it sink out of his longing ken.
Some young people, camping on the south side of Appledore, one summer,
among the ancient graves, dug up a skeleton; the bones crumbled to
dust, but the skull remained intact, and I kept it for a long time.
The Shoalers shook their heads. “Hog Island would have no ‘luck’ while
that skull remained above ground.” It had lain so long in the earth
that it was no more repulsive than a bit of stone, yet a nameless dread
invested it. At last I took it in my hands and pored over it till the
shudder passed away forever, and then I was never weary of studying
it. Sitting by the driftwood blaze late into the still autumn nights
alone at my desk, it kept me company,--a vase of brilliant flowers on
one side, the skull on the other, and the shaded lamp between, equally
lighting both. A curious head it was, thick as an Ethiop’s, with no
space above the eyes, high above the ears, and heavy behind them. But
O, those hollows where the eyes once looked out, beholding the same sea
and sky we see to-day! Those great, melancholy, empty hollows,--what
sort of creature gazed from them? Cunning and malice, anger and hate,
may have burned within them in sullen flame; who shall say if any
beauty ever illumined them? If hate smouldered here, did love ever look
out and transfigure the poor, dull face? did any spark from the far
heaven even brighten it? any touch of lofty thought or aspiration turn
the clay to fire? And when, so many years ago, this being glided away
from behind these awful windows and left them empty for ever and ever,
did he find what in his life here he could not have possessed, with
this head, which he did not make, and therefore was not responsible
for? Many and many a question I put silently to the silent casket which
had held a human soul; there was no sound to answer me save only the
great, gentle whisper of the sea without the windows, and now and then
a sigh from the autumn wind. There came to me a sense of the pathos of
the infinite patience of humanity, waiting so helplessly and blindly
for the unravelling of the riddle that has troubled every thoughtful
soul since the beginning of time. Little roots of plants were clasped
about the temples. Behind the right ear were three indentations, as if
made by some sharp instrument, suggesting foul play. An Indian tomahawk
might have made those marks, or a pirate’s cutlass: who can say? What
matter is it now? I kept the relic for months, till it crumbled so fast
when I daily dusted it that I feared it would disappear entirely; so I
carried it quietly back and laid it in the grave from which it had been
taken, wondering, as I drew the shallow earth over it, who had stood
round about when it was buried for the first time, centuries ago; what
manner of people, and were they afraid or sorry. But there was no voice
to answer me.
I have before me a weird, romantic legend of these islands, in a
time-stained, battered newspaper of forty years ago. I regret that it
is too long to be given entire, for the unknown writer tells his story
well. He came to the Shoals for the benefit of his failing health, and
remained there late into the autumn of 1826, “in the family of a worthy
fisherman.” He dilates upon the pleasure he found in the loneliness
of the place, “the vast solitude of the sea; no one who has not known
it can imbibe the faintest idea of it.” “From the hour I learned
the truth,” he says, “that all which lives must die, the thought of
dissolution has haunted me;--the falling of a leaf, a gray hair, or a
faded cheek, has power to chill me. But here in the recesses of these
eternal rocks, with only a cloudless sky above and an ocean before me,
for the first time in my life have I shaken off the fear of death and
believed myself immortal.”
He tells his strange story in this way: “It was one of those awfully
still mornings which cloud-gazeers will remember as characterizing
the autumn months. There was not a single vapor-wreath to dim the
intense blue of the sky, or a breath to ruffle the almost motionless
repose of the great deep; even the sunlight fell seemingly with
stiller brightness on the surface of it.” He stood on a low, long
point fronting the east, with the cliffs behind him, gazing out upon
the calm, when suddenly he became aware of a figure standing near him.
It was a woman wrapped closely in a dark sea-cloak, with a profusion
of light hair flowing loosely over her shoulders. Fair as a lily and
as still, she stood with her eyes fixed on the far distance, without
a motion, without a sound. “Thinking her one of the inhabitants of a
neighboring island who was watching for the return of a fishing-boat,
or perhaps a lover, I did not immediately address her; but seeing
no appearance of any vessel, at length accosted her with, ‘Well, my
pretty maiden, do you see anything of him?’ She turned instantly, and
fixing on me the largest and most melancholy blue eyes I ever beheld,
said quietly, ‘He _will_ come again.’” Then she disappeared round a
jutting rock and left him marvelling, and though he had come to the
island (which was evidently Appledore) for a forenoon’s stroll, he was
desirous to get back again to Star and his own quarters after this
interruption. Fairly at home again, he was inclined to look upon his
adventure as a dream, a mere delusion arising from his illness, but
concluded to seek in his surroundings something to substantiate, or
remove the idea. Finding nothing,--no woman on the island resembling
the one he had met,--and “hearing of no circumstance which might
corroborate the unaccountable impression,” he resolved to go again to
the same spot. This time it blew half a gale; the fishermen in vain
endeavored to dissuade him. He was so intensely anxious to be assured
of the truth or fiction of the impression of the day before, that he
could not refrain, and launched his boat, “which sprang strongly upon
the whitened waters,” and, unfurling his one sail, he rounded a point
and was soon safely sheltered in a small cove on the leeward side of
the island, probably Babb’s Cove.
Then he leaped the chasms and made his way to the scene of his
bewilderment. The sea was rolling over the low point; the spot where
he had stood the day before, “was a chaos of tumult, yet even then I
could have sworn that I heard with the same deep distinctness, the
quiet words of the maiden, ‘He _will_ come again,’ and then a low,
remotely-ringing laughter. All the latent superstition of my nature
rose up over me, overwhelming as the waves upon the rocks.” After that,
day after day, when the weather would permit, he visited the desolate
place, to find the golden-haired ghost, and often she stood beside him,
“silent as when I first saw her, except to say, as then, ‘He _will_
come again,’ and these words came upon the mind rather than upon the
ear. I was conscious of them rather then heard them,--it was all like a
dream, a mysterious intuition. I observed that the shells never crashed
beneath her footsteps, nor did her garments rustle. In the bright,
awful calm of noon and in the rush of the storm there was the same
heavy stillness over her. When the winds were so furious that I could
scarcely stand in their sweep, the light hair lay upon the forehead
of the maiden without lifting a fibre. Her great blue eyeballs never
moved in their sockets, and always shone with the same fixed, unearthly
gleam. The motion of her person was imperceptible; I knew that she was
here, and that she was gone.”
[Illustration: VIEW FROM THE SOUTHEASTERN POINT OF APPLEDORE.]
So sweet a ghost was hardly a salutary influence in the life of our
invalid. She “held him with her glittering eye” till he grew quite
beside himself. This is so good a description I cannot choose but quote
it: “The last time I stood with her, was just at the evening of a
tranquil day. It was a lovely sunset. A few gold-edged clouds crowned
the hills of the distant continent, and the sun had gone down behind
them. The ocean lay blushing beneath the blushes of the sky, and even
the ancient rocks seemed smiling in the glance of the departing day.
Peace, deep peace was the pervading power. The waters, lapsing among
the caverns, spoke of it, and it was visible in the silent motion of
the small boats, which, loosening their white sails in the cove of
Star Island, passed slowly out, one by one, to the night-fishing.” In
the glow of sunset he fancied the ghost grew rosy and human. In the
mellow light her cold eyes seemed to soften. But he became suddenly so
overpowered with terror that “kneeling in shuddering fearfulness, he
swore never more to look upon that spot, and never did again.”
Going back to Star he met his old fisherman, who without noticing his
agitation, told him quietly that he knew where he had been and what
he had seen; that he himself had seen her, and proceeded to furnish
him with the following facts. At the time of the first settlement,
the islands were infested by pirates,--the bold Captain Teach, called
Blackbeard, being one of the most notorious. One of Teach’s comrades,
a Captain Scot, brought this lovely lady hither. They buried immense
treasure on the islands; that of Scot was buried on an island apart
from the rest. Before they departed on a voyage, “to plunder, slash,
and slay,” (in which, by the way, they were involved in one awful doom
by the blowing up of a powder magazine), the maiden was carried to the
island where her pirate lover’s treasure was hidden, and made to swear
with horrible rites that until his return, if it were not till the day
of judgment, she would guard it from the search of all mortals. So
there she paces still, according to our story-teller. Would I had met
this lily-fair ghost! Is it she, I wonder, who laments like a Banshee
before the tempests, wailing through the gorges at Appledore, “He will
_not_ come again”? Perhaps it was she who frightened a merry party of
people at Duck Island, whither they had betaken themselves for a day’s
pleasure a few summers ago. In the centre of the low island stood a
deserted shanty which some strange fishermen had built there several
years before, and left empty, tenanted only by the mournful winds. It
was blown down the September following. It was a rude hut with two
rough rooms and one square window, or rather opening for a window, for
sash or glass there was none. One of our party proposed going to look
after the boats, as the breeze freshened and blew directly upon the
cove where we had landed. We were gathered on the eastern end of the
island when he returned, and, kneeling on the withered grass where we
were grouped, he said suddenly, “Do you know what I have seen? Coming
back from the boats, I faced the fish-house, and as I neared it I saw
some one watching me from the window. Of course I thought it was one
of you, but when I was near enough to have recognized it, I perceived
it to be the strange countenance of a woman, wan as death; a face
young, yet with a look in it of infinite age. Old! it was older than
the Sphinx in the desert! It looked as if it had been watching and
waiting for me since the beginning of time. I walked straight into the
hut. There wasn’t a vestige of a human being there; it was absolutely
empty.” All the warmth and brightness of the summer day could hardly
prevent a chill from creeping into our veins as we listened to this
calmly delivered statement, and we actually sent a boat back to
Appledore for a large yacht to take us home, for the wind rose fast and
“gurly grew the sea,” and we half expected the wan woman would come and
carry our companion off bodily before our eyes.
Since writing these imperfect sketches of the Shoals it has become
an historical fact for the records of the State of New Hampshire that
the town of Gosport has disappeared, is obliterated from the face of
the earth, nearly all the inhabitants having been bought out, that the
place might be converted into a summer resort. Upon Appledore a large
house of entertainment has been extending its capabilities for many
years, and the future of the Shoals as a famous watering-place may be
considered certain.
The slight sprinkling of inhabitants yet remaining on Smutty-nose and
elsewhere, who seem inclined to make of the place a permanent home, are
principally Swedes and Norwegians; and a fine, self-respecting race
they are, so thrifty, cleanly, well-mannered, and generally excellent
that one can hardly say enough in their praise. It is to be hoped that
a little rill from the tide of emigration which yearly sets from those
countries toward America may finally people the unoccupied portions of
the Shoals with a colony that will be a credit to New England.
[Illustration]
=Transcriber’s Notes=
Perceived typographical errors have been silently corrected.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation and compound words have been maintained
as printed.
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AMONG THE ISLES OF SHOALS ***
Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions will
be renamed.
Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright
law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works,
so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United
States without permission and without paying copyright
royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part
of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG™
concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark,
and may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following
the terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use
of the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for
copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is very
easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation
of derivative works, reports, performances and research. Project
Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and printed and given away—you may
do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks not protected
by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark
license, especially commercial redistribution.
START: FULL LICENSE
THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
To protect the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting the free
distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase “Project
Gutenberg”), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full
Project Gutenberg™ License available with this file or online at
www.gutenberg.org/license.
Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg™
electronic works
1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg™
electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or
destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in your
possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a
Project Gutenberg™ electronic work and you do not agree to be bound
by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person
or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
1.B. “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark. It may only be
used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few
things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See
paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works if you follow the terms of this
agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg™
electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.
1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (“the
Foundation” or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection
of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works. Nearly all the individual
works in the collection are in the public domain in the United
States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in the
United States and you are located in the United States, we do not
claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing,
displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as
all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope
that you will support the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting
free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg™
works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the
Project Gutenberg™ name associated with the work. You can easily
comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the
same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg™ License when
you share it without charge with others.
1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are
in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States,
check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this
agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing,
distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any
other Project Gutenberg™ work. The Foundation makes no
representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any
country other than the United States.
1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other
immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg™ License must appear
prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg™ work (any work
on which the phrase “Project Gutenberg” appears, or with which the
phrase “Project Gutenberg” is associated) is accessed, displayed,
performed, viewed, copied or distributed:
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you
are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws
of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is
derived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not
contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the
copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in
the United States without paying any fees or charges. If you are
redistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase “Project
Gutenberg” associated with or appearing on the work, you must comply
either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or
obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project Gutenberg™
trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is posted
with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any
additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms
will be linked to the Project Gutenberg™ License for all works
posted with the permission of the copyright holder found at the
beginning of this work.
1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg™
License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg™.
1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
Gutenberg™ License.
1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including
any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access
to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg™ work in a format
other than “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other format used in the official
version posted on the official Project Gutenberg™ website
(www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense
to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means
of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original “Plain
Vanilla ASCII” or other form. Any alternate format must include the
full Project Gutenberg™ License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg™ works
unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
access to or distributing Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
provided that:
• You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
the use of Project Gutenberg™ works calculated using the method
you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is owed
to the owner of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark, but he has
agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments must be paid
within 60 days following each date on which you prepare (or are
legally required to prepare) your periodic tax returns. Royalty
payments should be clearly marked as such and sent to the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the address specified in
Section 4, “Information about donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation.”
• You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg™
License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all
copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and discontinue
all use of and all access to other copies of Project Gutenberg™
works.
• You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of
any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days of
receipt of the work.
• You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
distribution of Project Gutenberg™ works.
1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project
Gutenberg™ electronic work or group of works on different terms than
are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing
from the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the manager of
the Project Gutenberg™ trademark. Contact the Foundation as set
forth in Section 3 below.
1.F.
1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating the Project
Gutenberg™ collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg™
electronic works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may
contain “Defects,” such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate
or corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or
other medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or
cannot be read by your equipment.
1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the “Right
of Replacement or Refund” described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
Gutenberg™ trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
Gutenberg™ electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
DAMAGE.
1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you
received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium
with your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you
with the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in
lieu of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the person
or entity providing it to you may choose to give you a second
opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If
the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing
without further opportunities to fix the problem.
1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you ‘AS-IS’, WITH NO
OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT
LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of
damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement
violates the law of the state applicable to this agreement, the
agreement shall be interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or
limitation permitted by the applicable state law. The invalidity or
unenforceability of any provision of this agreement shall not void the
remaining provisions.
1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
providing copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in
accordance with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the
production, promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg™
electronic works, harmless from all liability, costs and expenses,
including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of
the following which you do or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this
or any Project Gutenberg™ work, (b) alteration, modification, or
additions or deletions to any Project Gutenberg™ work, and (c) any
Defect you cause.
Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg™
Project Gutenberg™ is synonymous with the free distribution of
electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of
computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It
exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations
from people in all walks of life.
Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg™’s
goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg™ collection will
remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
and permanent future for Project Gutenberg™ and future
generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help, see
Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at www.gutenberg.org.
Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non-profit
501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
Revenue Service. The Foundation’s EIN or federal tax identification
number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent permitted by
U.S. federal laws and your state’s laws.
The Foundation’s business office is located at 809 North 1500 West,
Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact links and up
to date contact information can be found at the Foundation’s website
and official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact
Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation
Project Gutenberg™ depends upon and cannot survive without widespread
public support and donations to carry out its mission of
increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
freely distributed in machine-readable form accessible by the widest
array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations
($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
status with the IRS.
The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations
where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To SEND
DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any particular state
visit www.gutenberg.org/donate.
While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
approach us with offers to donate.
International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
Please check the Project Gutenberg web pages for current donation
methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other
ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations. To
donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate.
Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project
Gutenberg™ concept of a library of electronic works that could be
freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and
distributed Project Gutenberg™ eBooks with only a loose network of
volunteer support.
Project Gutenberg™ eBooks are often created from several printed
editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright in
the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not
necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper
edition.
Most people start at our website which has the main PG search
facility: www.gutenberg.org.
This website includes information about Project Gutenberg™,
including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
