University of Virginia Library

2. CHAPTER II.
THE YOUTHFUL ADVENTURES OF ISRAEL.

IMAGINATION will easily picture the rural day of the
youth of Israel. Let us pass on to a less immature
period.

It appears that he began his wanderings very early;
moreover, that ere, on just principles throwing off the
yoke off his king, Israel, on equally excusable grounds,
emancipated himself from his sire. He continued in the
enjoyment of parental love till the age of eighteen,
when, having formed an attachment for a neighbor's
daughter—for some reason, not deemed a suitable match
by his father—he was severely reprimanded, warned to
discontinue his visits, and threatened with some disgraceful
punishment in case he persisted. As the girl was not
only beautiful, but amiable—though, as will be seen,
rather weak—and her family as respectable as any, though
unfortunately but poor, Israel deemed his father's conduct
unreasonable and oppressive; particularly as it turned
out that he had taken secret means to thwart his son
with the girl's connections, if not with the girl herself,

so as to place almost insurmountable obstacles to an
eventual marriage. For it had not been the purpose of
Israel to marry at once, but at a future day, when prudence
should approve the step. So, oppressed by his
father, and bitterly disappointed in his love, the desperate
boy formed the determination to quit them both, for
another home and other friends.

It was on Sunday, while the family were gone to a
farmhouse church near by, that he packed up as much
of his clothing as might be contained in a handkerchief,
which, with a small quantity of provision, he hid in a
piece of woods in the rear of the house. He then returned,
and continued in the house till about nine in
the evening, when, pretending to go to bed, he passed
out of a back door, and hastened to the woods for his
bundle.

It was a sultry night in July; and that he might travel
with the more case on the succeeding day, he lay down
at the foot of a pine tree, reposing himself till an hour
before dawn, when, upon awaking, he heard the soft, prophetic
sighing of the pine, stirred by the first breath of
the morning. Like the leaflets of that evergreen, all the
fibres of his heart trembled within him; tears fell from
his eyes. But he thought of the tyranny of his father,
and what seemed to him the faithlessness of his love;
and shouldering his bundle, arose, and marched on.

His intention was to reach the new countries to the
northward and westward, lying between the Dutch settlements
on the Hudson, and the Yankee settlements on
the Housatonic. This was mainly to elude all search.

For the same reason, for the first ten or twelve miles,
shunning the public roads, he travelled through the woods;
for he knew that he would soon be missed and pursued.

He reached his destination in safety; hired out to a
farmer for a month through the harvest; then crossed
from the Hudson to the Connecticut. Meeting here with
an adventurer to the unknown regions lying about the
head waters of the latter river, he ascended with this
man in a canoe, paddling and pulling for many miles.
Here again he hired himself out for three months; at
the end of that time to receive for his wages, two hundred
acres of land lying in New Hampshire. The cheapness
of the land was not alone owing to the newness of
the country, but to the perils investing it. Not only
was it a wilderness abounding with wild beasts, but the
widely-scattered inhabitants were in continual dread of
being, at some unguarded moment, destroyed or made
captive by the Canadian savages, who, ever since the
French war, had improved every opportunity to make
forays across the defenceless frontier.

His employer proving false to his contract in the matter
of the land, and there being no law in the country
to force him to fulfil it, Israel—who, however brave-hearted,
and even much of a darc-devil upon a pinch, seems nevertheless
to have evinced, throughout many parts of his
career, a singular patience and mildness—was obliged
to look round for other means of livelihood than clearing
out a farm for himself in the wilderness. A party
of royal surveyors were at this period surveying the
unsettled regions bordering the Connecticut river to its

source. At fifteen shillings per month, he engaged himself
to this party as assistant chain-bearer, little thinking
that the day was to come when he should clank the king's
chains in a dungeon, even as now he trailed them a free
ranger of the woods. It was midwinter; the land was
surveyed upon snow-shoes. At the close of the day,
fires were kindled with dry hemlock, a hut thrown up,
and the party ate and slept.

Paid off at last, Israel bought a gun and ammunition,
and turned hunter. Deer, beaver, &c., were plenty. In
two or three months he had many skins to show. I suppose
it never entered his mind that he was thus qualifying
himself for a marksman of men. But thus were
tutored those wonderful shots who did such execution at
Bunker's Hill; these, the hunter-soldiers, whom Putnam
bade wait till the white of the enemy's eye was seen.

With the result of his hunting he purchased a hundred
acres of land, further down the river, toward the more
settled parts; built himself a log hut, and in two summers,
with his own hands, cleared thirty acres for sowing.
In the winter seasons he hunted and trapped. At the end
of the two years, he sold back his land—now much improved—to
the original owner, at an advance of fifty
pounds. He conveyed his cash and furs to Charlestown,
on the Connecticut (sometimes called No. 4), where he
trafficked them away for Indian blankets, pigments, and
other showy articles adapted to the business of a trader
among savages. It was now winter again. Putting his
goods on a hand-sled, he started towards Canada, a peddler
in the wilderness, stopping at wigwams instead of

cottages. One fancies that, had it been summer, Israel
would have travelled with a wheelbarrow, and so trundled
his wares through the primeval forests, with the same indifference
as porters roll their barrows over the flagging
of streets. In this way was bred that fearless self-reliance
and independence which conducted our forefathers to national
freedom.

This Canadian trip proved highly successful. Selling
his glittering goods at a great advance, he received in
exchange valuable peltries and furs at a corresponding
reduction. Returning to Charlestown, he disposed of his
return cargo again at a very fine profit. And now, with
a light heart and a heavy purse, he resolved to visit his
sweetheart and parents, of whom, for three years, he had
had no tidings.

They were not less astonished than delighted at his reappearance;
he had been numbered with the dead. But
his love still seemed strangely coy; willing, but yet somehow
mysteriously withheld. The old intrigues were still
on foot. Israel soon discovered, that though rejoiced to
welcome the return of the prodigal son—so some called
him—his father still remained inflexibly determined against
the match, and still inexplicably countermined his wooing.
With a dolorous heart he mildly yielded to what seemed
his fatality; and more intrepid in facing peril for himself,
than in endangering others by maintaining his rights
(for he was now one-and-twenty), resolved once more to
retreat, and quit his blue hills for the bluer billows.

A hermitage in the forest is the refuge of the narrow-minded
misanthrope; a hammock on the ocean is the

asylum for the generous distressed. The ocean brims
with natural griefs and tragedies; and into that watery
immensity of terror, man's private grief is lost like a
drop.

Travelling on foot to Providence, Rhode Island, Israel
shipped on board a sloop, bound with lime to the West
Indies. On the tenth day out, the vessel caught fire,
from water communicating with the lime. It was impossible
to extinguish the flames. The boat was hoisted out,
but owing to long exposure to the sun, it needed continual
bailing to keep it afloat. They had only time to
put in a firkin of butter and a ten-gallon keg of water.
Eight in number, the crew entrusted themselves to the
waves, in a leaky tub, many leagues from land. As the
boat swept under the burning bowsprit, Israel caught at
a fragment of the flying-jib, which sail had fallen down
the stay, owing to the charring, nigh the deck, of the rope
which hoisted it. Tanned with the smoke, and its edge
blackened with the fire, this bit of canvass helped them
bravely on their way. Thanks to kind Providence, on the
second day they were picked up by a Dutch ship, bound
from Eustatia to Holland. The castaways were humanely
received, and supplied with every necessary. At the end
of a week, while unsophisticated Israel was sitting in the
main-top, thinking what should befall him in Holland, and
wondering what sort of unsettled, wild country it was, and
whether there was any deer-shooting or beaver-trapping
there, lo! an American brig, bound from Piscataqua
to Antigua, comes in sight. The American took them
aboard, and conveyed them safely to her port. There

Israel shipped for Porto Rico; from thence, sailed to
Eustatia.

Other rovings ensued; until at last, entering on board
a Nantucket ship, he hunted the leviathan off the Western
Islands and on the coast of Africa, for sixteen months;
returning at length to Nantucket with a brimming hold.
From that island he sailed again on another whaling
voyage, extending, this time, into the great South Sea.
There, promoted to be harpooner, Israel, whose eye and
arm had been so improved by practice with his gun in
the wilderness, now further intensified his aim, by darting
the whale-lance; still, unwittingly, preparing himself for
the Bunker Hill rifle.

In this last voyage, our adventurer experienced to the
extreme all the hardships and privations of the whale-man's
life on a long voyage to distant and barbarous
waters—hardships and privations unknown at the present
day, when science has so greatly contributed, in manifold
ways, to lessen the sufferings, and add to the comforts of
seafaring men. Heartily sick of the ocean, and longing
once more for the bush, Israel, upon receiving his discharge
at Nantucket at the end of the voyage, hied
straight back for his mountain home.

But if hopes of his sweetheart winged his returning
flight, such hopes were not destined to be crowned with
fruition. The dear, false girl was another's.