 | New-England legends |  |
NEWBURYPORT.
Leaving Salem behind, the traveler passes
beautiful Beverly, the home of Lucy Larcom,
and whose beach is neighbor of the wonderful
singing one where the sands make mystical
music under foot, passes the little town which
Gail Hamilton renders interesting by living
there, passes Ipswich, the old Agawam, the
picture of an English village, in a dimple between
hills, and with the tides of its quiet
river curving about it, passes ancient Rowley,
and arrives at another historic and famous
town, whose rulers once changed its name to
Portland, but whose people scorned to do so
much as even to refuse the new name, but continued
to the present day to call it Newburyport.
Newburyport is in some external respects
not unlike the neighboring towns of note, but
in others she is a place by herself. Situated
on the Merrimack—the busiest river in the
world, and one of the loveliest, and whose
banks, owing to the configuration of the
coast, seem here, like the Nile banks, to run
out and push back the sea that it may have the
greater room to expand its beauty in—the
town has both a scenic and a social isolation
which has had a great deal to do with the
characteristics of its population. These characteristics,
with but one or two exceptions,
have been the same for all time, since time
began for Newburyport. It is true that the
municipality, which once petitioned General
Court to relieve it of the burden of the old
wandering negress Juniper, has so far improved
as now to be giving a pauper outside the almshouse
an allowance out of which he has built him
a cottage in an adjoining town, and bought him
some shares of railroad stock; but for the rest,
the place has known no change; it has not
varied from its dullness since the Embargo laid
a heavy hand upon it and the Great Fire scattered
ashes over it, and the people mind their
own business to-day just as thoroughly as
they did when they pronounced the verdict
upon the body of Elizabeth Hunt in 1693, “We
judge, according to our best light and contients,
that the death of said Elizabeth Hunt was
* * * by some soden stoping of her breath.”
Strangers come into town, stay a while, and depart,
leaving behind them some trail of romance
or of misbehavior—the citizen takes
small heed of them, and presently forgets them;
so rarely do they assimilate themselves with
the population, that the names there to-day are
the names to be found in the chronicles of
1635, and, unmixed with strange blood, generations
hand down a name till it comes to stand
for a trait. The people, too, have a singular
intelligence for a community not metropolitan,
possibly because, being a seafaring tribe, their
intercourse with foreign countries enlightens
them to an unusual degree. The town, except
for one religious revival that lasted forty
days, suspended business, drew up the shipping
in the dock, and absorbed master and mistress,
man and maid, has seldom been disturbed by
any undue contagion of popular feeling, has
seldom followed a fashion in politics unsuggested
by its own necessities, and has been in
fact as sufficient to itself as the dew of Eden.
The dissimilarity of its population from that of
other places is only illustrated by the story of a
sailor, impressed into the British Navy too
hurriedly to get the address of a friend, and
who, after tossing about the world for fifty
years, returned home and advertised for “an
old shipmate whom he desired to share a fortune
with.” Neither has the town ever been
a respecter of persons, but, democratic in the
true acceptation of the term, wealth is but
little accounted where almost every one is
comfortable, talent gives no more pre-eminence
than can be grasped by means of it, and if it
were the law now, as it was then, five leading
citizens would just as easily be arrested and
fined for being absent from town-meeting at
eight o'clock in the morning as they were in
1638. United to all this there is an extremely
independent way of thinking hereditary among
the people. In 1649 Thomas Scott paid a fine
of ten shillings rather than learn the catechism,
and was allowed to do so; a century later, Richard
Bartlet refused communion with a church
whose pastor wore a wig, asserting with assurance
that all who wore wigs, unless repenting before
death, would certainly be damned; not long
before, the Rev. John Tufts here struck a
death-blow at Puritanism by issuing a book of
twenty-seven psalm-tunes to be sung in public
worship, five tunes only having previously been
used; an act so stoutly contested as an inroad
of the Scarlet Woman—for, said his opponents,
"STANDING ON THE QUARTER-DECK, HE SUDDENLY TURNED AND ORDERED THE BRITISH FLAG TO BE STRUCK."
[Description: 693EAF. Page 025. In-line image. Two men face each other. One is pointing upwards with the index finger of his right hand. The other has unsheathed his sword, which he holds downward. In the background is a crowd of men. One of the men in the background is pulling on some of the ropes of the ship's rigging.] it is first singing by rule, then praying by rule,and then popery—that it was probably owing
to the persecutions of the long warfare that
subsequently the innovator left his parish in
dudgeon under a charge of indecent behavior;
and though none of the churches reached the
point attained by one some dozen miles away,
which voted, “This meeting, not having unity
with John Collins's testimony, desires him to be
silent till the Lord speak by him to the satisfaction
of the meeting,” yet there stands on
the record the instruction to a committee appointed
to deal with certain recusants, “to see
if something could not be said or done to draw
them to our communion again, and if we cannot
draw them by fair means, then to determine
what means to take with them.” Some one
once said that Newburyport was famous for its
piety and privateering, but in these instructions
the piety and privateering are oddly intermingled.
This same independence of thought
found notable expression when, in the early
days, Boston and Salem, alarmed at the incursions
of the Indians, proposed to the next settlements
the building of a stone wall eight
feet high to inclose them all, as a rampart
against the common foe; which proposition
Newburyport scouted with disdain, and declared
the wall should be a living one, made of men,
and forthwith built a garrison-house on her borders.
And it is the same quality that afterward
appeared when, some time previous
to the Boston tea-party, the first act of the
Revolution was signalized in Newburyport by
the confiscation of a cargo of tea under direction
of the town authorities; and that prompted
not a single British stamp was ever paid for or
used in Newburyport; and that, during all the
long and trying struggle of the Revolution, did
not allow a single town-school to be suspended.
The old town has no trivial history, as these
circumstances might intimate. Long before
the Revolution, at the popular uprising and the
imprisonment of Sir Edmund Andros, old Sam
Bartlet galloped off, so eager for the fray, that
“his long rusty sword, trailing on the ground,
left, as it came in contact with the stones in the
road, a stream of fire all the way.” It was Lieutenant
Jacques, of Newburyport, who put an
end to the war with the Norridgewock Indians,
by killing their ally and inciter, the French
Jesuit, Sebastian Rallè. Here Arnold's expedition
against Quebec encamped and recruited;
and here were built and manned not only the
privateers, that the better feeling of to-day calls
pirates, which raked British commerce to the
value of millions into this port, but the sloop
Wasp, which fought as fiercely as her namesake
fights, in three months capturing thirteen merchantmen,
engaging four ships-of-the-line and
finally, after a bitter struggle, going down with
all her men at the guns and all her colors flying.
It is still interesting to read of her exploits,
copied in the journal of the old Marine Insurance
rooms as the news came in day by day,
and to fancy the ardor and spirit with which
those lines were penned by hands long since
ashes; ardor and spirit universally shared,
since, before that brief career of valor, Newburyport
had on the 31st of May, anticipated
the Declaration of Independence, published on
the 19th of July following, by instructing the
Congress at Philadelphia that, if the Colonies
should be declared independent, “this town
will, with their lives and tortunes, support them
in the measure.” Here, too, was built the first
ship that ever displayed our flag upon the
Thames, a broom at her peak that day, after
Van Tromp's fashion, to tell the story of how
she had swept the seas. Nor is the town unfamiliar
with such daring deeds as that done,
during the Revolution, when a British transport
of four guns was observed in the bay veering
and tacking to and fro through the fog, as
if uncertain of her whereabouts, and, surmising
that she supposed herself in Boston Bay, Captain
Offin Boardman, with his men, went off in
a whaleboat and offered his services to pilot her
in, the offer being of course accepted, the ship
hove to, and Captain Offin Boardman presently
standing on the quarter-deck exchanging the
usual greetings with the master of the transport
while his companions mounted to his side;
that done, he suddenly turned and ordered the
British flag to be struck, his order was executed,
and, wholly overpowered in their surprise,
the crew and the transport were safely
carried over the bar and moored at the wharves
in Newburyport. Indeed, her history declares
the place to have been in other respects far in
advance of many of her contemporaries; she
had, not only the first of our ships upon the
Thames, but the first chain bridge in America,
as well as the first toll-bridge, initiated the first
insurance company, had the first incorporated
woolen mill, the first incorporated academy,
the first female high school, two of the first
members of the Anti-Slavery Society, which
numbered twelve in all, the first volunteer
company for the Revolution, the first volunteer
company against the Rebellion, the first bishop,
and the first graduate of Harvard—the last at a
time when sundry students guilty of misdemeanors
were publicly whipped by the president,
a punishment, whether unfortunately or
otherwise, now out of date in that institution, to
which Newburyport has given some presidents
and many professors. Washington, Lafayette,
Talleyrand, have all made some spot in the
town famous, one living here, one being entertained
here, and one performing his great sleeping-act
in a bed in the old Prince House. From
here Brissot went back to France to die on the
scaffold of the Girondists. Here Whitefield
died and lies entombed. Here Parson Milton,
that son of thunder, used to make his evening
family prayer a pattern for preachers: “O
Lord! keep us this night from the assassin, the
incendiary, and the devil, for Christ's sake,
amen.” Here the weighty jurist Theophilus
Parsons was born and bred; here John Quincy
Adams and Rufus King studied law; here
Cushing rose, and Garrison, and Gough; here
the great giver George Peabody once dwelt and
often came; here John Pierrepoint wrote his
best verses; here the artist Bricher first found
inspiration; here Harriet Livermore, that
ardent missionary of the East whom “Snowbound”
celebrates, was born; here the Lowells
sprung; hardly more than a gunshot off, on
one side, is the ancestral home of the Longfelows,
and, on the other, Whittier lives and
sings. Here, also, has been the home of various
inventors of renown; the compressibility
of water was here discovered; here steel engraving
by a simple and beautiful process was
invented; here the machine for making nails,
which had previously been painfully hammered
out one by one; here an instrument for measuring
the speed with which a ship goes through
the sea, and here a new span for timber bridges,
used now on most of our larger rivers, bridging
the Merrimack, Kennebec, Connecticut, and
Schuylkill; almost every mechanic, indeed, has
some fancy on which he spends his leisure, one
amusing himself with making the delicate calculations
necessary, and then just as delicately
burnishing brazen reflectors for telescopes, before
his heart was broken by those refractors
with which Safford and Tuttle (both connected
with the town) have swept the sky; another
occupying himself, to the neglect of business,
with the model of a machine in which all his
soul was rapt, and which, unknown to him, an
ancient had invented a couple of thousand
years ago, while others are busy with the
more useful low-water reporters, and with
those improvements in the manufacture of
tobacco which have all sprung from a son of
the town. It is in mechanics that Newburyport
has always excelled; her shipyards once
lined all the water-side there; shortly after
the Revolution, wishing to export lumber, and
having but few ships, she bound the lumber
together in firm rafts with a cavity in the
centre for provisions and possible shelter, and
furnishing them with secure though rude sailing
apparatus, consigned them to the winds
and waves, and after voyages of twenty-six
days they were registered in their ports on
the other side of the Atlantic; but before that
experiment her ships were, and they still are,
models to the whole world, for here were
launched those fleetest clippers that ever cut
the wave, the Dreadnaught and the Racer.
East Indiamen no longer ride at anchor in her
offing as they used to do; the bar of the Merrimack,
which once in about a hundred years
accumulates into such an insuperable obstacle
that the waters find a new channel, is a foe
they do not care to face when once piloted safely
over its white line; and, though many things
have been done with piers, and buoys, and a
breakwater built by Government and crushed
like a toy by the next storm, it still binds its
spell about Newburyport commerce. Possibly
if, by any other magic, the town could ever
grow sufficiently to require the filling up of the
flats, then the stream, inclosed in a narrower
and deeper channel, would find sufficient force
to drive before it the envious sands which now
the Cape Ann currents sweep into its mouth.
Nevertheless, the bar alone is not adequate
to account for the financial misfortunes of the
town; ships go up to New Orleans over much
more dangerous waters; and the Embargo of
the early part of the century bears by far the
greater responsibility. Then the great hulks
rotted at the wharves unused, with tar-barrels,
which the angry sailors called Madison's Night-caps,
inverted over the topmasts to save the
rigging, while their crews patrolled the streets
in riotous and hungry bands, and observed the
first anniversary of the Embargo Act with tolling
bells, minute-guns, flags at half-mast, and
a procession with muffled drums and crapes.
Perhaps it was owing to this state of feeling in
the town that the old slanders of her showing
blue-lights to the befogged enemy arose. Together
with the Embargo came the Great Fire;
every wooden town has suffered a conflagration,
and Newburyport has always been a prey
to the incendiary; but her celebrated fire broke
out on a spring night some sixty years ago,
when nearly every one was wrapped in the
first slumber, and spread with the speed of the
lightnings over a track of more than sixteen
acres, in the most compact and wealthy portion
of the town. Such an immense property was
destroyed that the whole place was impoverished;
many families were totally beggared;
people hurried to the scene from a dozen
miles away; women passed the buckets in the
ranks, and helpless crowds swung to and fro
in the thoroughfares. The spectacle is described
by an old chronicle as having been
terribly sublime; the wind, changing, blew
strongly, and drove the flames in fresh directions,
where they leaped in awful columns high
into the air, and stretched a sheet of fire from
street to street; the moon became obscured in
the murky atmosphere that hung above the
town, but the town itself was lighted as brilliantly
as by day, and the heat melted the
glass in the windows of houses not destroyed;
while the crash of falling walls, the roaring of
chimneys like distant thunder, the volumes of
flames wallowing upward from the ruins and
filling the air with a shower of fire into which
the birds fluttered and dropped, the weird reflection
in the river, the lowing of the cattle,
the cries of distress from the people, made the
scene cruelly memorable; and though afterward
that portion of the town was rebuilt
with brick, Newburyport never recovered from
the shock and loss. Some years subsequently
a boy of seventeen was convicted of another
arson and in spite of much exertion to the
contrary, expiated the penalty of the law. But
a flaming Nemesis fell upon the town, perhaps
for having allowed the boy's execution, and
ever since that time other incendiaries, emulous
of his example, have constantly made it
their victim; one, in particular, being so frequent
in his attempts, that on a windy or
stormy night the blaze was so sure to burst
forth that the citizens could not sleep in their
beds; he appeared to be the subject of a mania
for burning churches, almost all of the sixteen
in town having been fired, sometimes two together,
and on several occasions successfully;
and no dweller in Newburyport will easily forget
the night on which the old North Church
was burned, when every flake of the wild snowstorm
seemed to be a spark of fire, and more
than one superstitious wretch, plunging out
into the gale, could find no centre to the universal
glare, and shuddered with fright in
belief that the Day of Judgment had come at
last.
But one extraordinary thing or another is
always happening in Newburyport; if it is not
a fire, it is a gale; and if it is not a gale, it is
an earthquake. The situation of the town is
very fine. As you approach it by land, bleak
fields and lichened boulders warn you of the
inhospitable sea-coast; but once past their barrier,
and you are in the midst of gardens. The
town lies on a gentle hillside, with such slope
and gravelly bottom that an hour after the
heaviest rains its streets afford good walking.
Behind it lies an excellent glacial moraine and
a champaign country, shut in by low hills, and
once, most probably, the bed of the river. Its
adjacent territory is netted in rivers and rivulets;
the broad Merrimack, with its weird and
strange estuary, imprisoned by Plum Island;
the Artichoke, a succession of pools lying in
soft, semi-shadows beneath the overhanging
growth of beech and oak, and feathery elms
lighting the darker masses, each pool enfolded
in such wise that one sees no outlet, but slides
along with the slow tide, lifts a bough, and
slips into the next, where some white-stemmed
birch perhaps sends a perpetual rustle through
the slumberous air, a wild grape-vine climbs
from branch to branch, or an early reddening
tupelo shakes its gay mantle in the scattered
sun, and with its reflex in the dark transparency,
wakens one from half the sleepy spell
of the enchantment there; these streams, with
the Quascacunquen or Parker, the Little, Powwow,
Back, and Rowley rivers, with their
slender, but foaming black and white affluents,
all make it a place of meadows; and he who
desires to see a meadow in perfection, full of
emerald and golden tints, and claret shadows,
withdrawing into distance till lost in the sparkle
of the sea, must seek it here, where Heade
found material for his exquisite and dainty
marsh and meadow views.
The scenery around the town, it may thus be
imagined, is something of unusual beauty; on
one side are to be had the deciduous woods of
the Stackyard Gate, where the carriage-wheels
crackle through winding miles of fragrant
brake and fern, and on the other the stately
pines and hemlocks of Follymill, the air sweet
as an orange-grove with resinous perfume,
while the river-road to Haverhill, with West
Amesbury swathed in azure mist upon the opposite
hill, and sapphire reaches of the stream
unfolding one after another, is a series of raptures.
The people, well acquainted with the
their chief river; it is the scene of frolicking the
summer long, and in winter its black and iceedged
tides seem to be the only pulses of the
frozen town. To some the life upon this river
is only play, to others it is deadly earnest, for a
large portion of those who live along the banks
on the Water street, the most picturesque of
the highways, are fishermen and their house-holds,
familiar with all the dangers of the seas
—the babies there rocked in a dory, the men,
sooner or later, wrecked upon the Georges;
meanwhile the men mackerel all summer down
in the Bay of Chaleurs, pilot off and on the
coast dark nights and dreary days, run the bar
and the breakers with a storm following the
keel; many of them, as they advance in life,
leave their seafaring and settle down at shoe-making,
or buy a plot of land and farm it in
an untaught way, but just as many find their
last home in a grave rolled between two
waves.
When a storm comes up, and the fog-banks
sweep in from sea, hiding the ray of the twin
harbor-lights, and the rote upon the beach-which
every night is heard through the quiet
streets beating like a heart, swells into a sullen
and unbroken roar—when the shipyards are
afloat, the water running breast-high across
the wharves, the angry tides rising knee-deep
in the lower lanes, and the spray tossed over
the tops of the houses there whose foundations
begin to tremble and whose dwellers fly for
safety, then the well-sheltered people up in the
remote High street, where nothing is known of
the storm but the elms tossing their boughs
about, may have sorry fancies of some vessel
driving on Plum Island, of parting decks and of
unpitied cries in the horror of blackness and
breaker—may even hear the minute-guns in
pauses of the gale; but the stress of weather
falls upon the homes and hearts of these
watchers on the Water street, for to them each
swell and burst of the blast means danger to
their own roof and the life snatched from a
husband's or a father's lips. Mrs. E. Vale
Smith in her history of Newburyport makes
thrilling mention of these storms, with the
wrecks of the Primrose, the Pocahontas, the
Argus, and others, and every resident of the
place has had before his eyes the picture which
she draws of “the heavy moaning of the sea—
a bark vainly striving to clear the breakers—
blinding snow — a slippery deck — stiff and
glazed ropes — hoarse commands that the cruel
winds seize and carry far away from the ear of
the sailor—a crash of tons of falling water
beating in the hatches—shrieks which no man
heard, and ghastly corpses on the deceitful,
shifting sands, and the great ocean-cemetery
still holding in awful silence the lost bodies of
the dead.” Such things, of course, make the
place the home of romance, and Mr. George
Lunt, a poet of no mean pretensions and a
native of the town, has founded his novel of
“Eastford” on the incidents its daily life
affords.
Newburyport has also known the effects of
other convulsions of nature; a hailstorm, with
a deposit twelve inches in depth, is still spoken
of there, together with snowstorms tunneled
from door to door, a northeaster that blew the
spray of the sea a dozen miles inland and
loaded the orchard boughs with salt crystals,
and whirlwinds mighty enough to blow down
one meeting-house and to lift another with all
the people in it and set it in a different spot—
whirlwinds coming a quarter of a century too
soon, as, if they had but moved a meeting-house
there at a later day, a parish would not have
been so divided on the question of location as
straightway to become, one-half of them, Episcopalians
for whom Queen Anne endowed a
chapel. But worse than whirlwinds, storms,
fires, or the devastating yellow-fever that once
nearly decimated the place, were the earthquakes
that for more than a hundred years, at
one period, held high carnival there, and are
still occasionally felt. The first of these occurred
in 1638, on the noon of a summer day,
as the colonists, assembled in town-meeting,
were discussing their unfledged affairs. We
can well imagine their consternation, just three
years established, their houses built, woods
felled, fields largely cleared, and the June corn
just greenly springing up, to find that their encampment
on this spot, so rich in soil, so convenient
to the sea, so well guarded from the
Indian, had left them the prey to an enemy
whose terrors were so much worse than all
others in the degree in which they partook of
the dark, unknown, and infinite. It was not
long before another earthquake followed the
first, its trembling and vibration and sudden
shocks preceded, as that had been, by a roar
like the bursting of great guns, while birds forsook
their nests, dogs howled, and the whole
brute creation manifested the extreme of terror;
by-and-by there came one that lasted a week,
with six or eight shocks a day, then one where
the shocks were repeated for half an hour without
any cessation, and presently others where
the ground opened and left fissures a foot in
width, where sailors on the coast supposed their
vessels to have struck, the sea roared and
swelled, flashes of fire ran along the ground,
amazing noises were heard like peals and claps
of thunder, walls and chimneys fell, cellars
opened, floating islands were formed, springs
were made dry in one site and burst out in another,
and tons of fine white sand were thrown
up, which, being cast upon the coals, burnt like
brimstone. Various causes have been assigned
to these earthquakes, not the least absurd of
which was the supposition of a cave reaching
from the sea to the headwaters of the Merrimack,
filled with gases, into which the high
tides rushing made the occurrence of the
phenomena; but as they have always appeared
in connection with more tremendous disturbances
in other parts of the world, it is probable
that they are but the same pulsations of the
old earth's arteries, felt in Vesuvius or Peru
with more terrible effect. Although there have
been more than two hundred of these convulsions,
nobody was ever seriously injured by
their means, and so used to them did the people
become, that finally they are spoken of in
their records merely as “the earthquake,” as
one would speak of any natural event, of the
tide or of the moon. For the last century,
however, their outbursts have been of very infrequent
occurrence, and have nowise marred
the repose of the sweet old place, which now
and then awakens to storm or fever sufficient
to prevent stagnation, but for the most part
slumbers on serenely by its riverside, the ideal
of a large and ancient country-town, peaceful
enough, and almost beautiful enough, for Paradise.
| New-England legends | |