2. OLDPORT WHARVES.
EVERY one who comes to a wharf feels an
impulse to follow it down, and look from
the end. There is a fascination about it. It is
the point of contact between land and sea. A
bridge evades the water, and unites land with
land, as if there were no obstacle. But a wharf
seeks the water, and grasps it with a solid hand.
It is the sign of a lasting friendship; once extended,
there it remains; the water embraces it,
takes it into its tumultuous bosom at high tide,
leaves it in peace at ebb, rushes back to it eagerly
again, plays with it in sunshine, surges round it in
storm, almost crushing the massive thing. But
the pledge once given is never withdrawn. Buildings
may rise and fall, but a solid wharf is almost
indestructible. Even if it seems destroyed, its
materials are all there. This shore might be
swept away, these piers be submerged or dashed
asunder, still every brick and stone would remain.
Half the wharves of Oldport were ruined in the
great storm of 1815. Yet not one of them has
stirred from the place where it lay; its foundations
have only spread more widely and firmly;
they are a part of the very pavement of the harbor,
submarine mountain ranges, on one of which
yonder schooner now lies aground. Thus the wild
ocean only punished itself, and has been embarrassed
for half a century, like many another mad
profligate, by the wrecks of what it ruined.
Yet the surges are wont to deal very tenderly
with these wharves. In summer the sea decks
them with floating weeds, and studs them with an
armor of shells. In the winter it surrounds them
with a smoother mail of ice, and the detached
piles stand white and gleaming, like the out-door
palace of a Russian queen. How softly and
eagerly this coming tide swirls round them! All
day the fishes haunt their shadows; all night the
phosphorescent water glimmers by them, and
washes with long, refluent waves along their sides,
decking their blackness with a spray of stars.
Water seems the natural outlet and discharge
for every landscape, and when we have followed
down this artificial promontory, a wharf, and have
seen the waves on three sides of us, we have taken
the first step toward circumnavigating the globe.
This is our last
terra firma. One step farther, and
there is no possible foothold but a deck, which tilts
and totters beneath our feet. A wharf, therefore, is
properly neutral ground for all. It is a silent hospitality,
understood by all nations. It is in some
sort a thing of universal ownership. Having once
built it, you must grant its use to every one; it is
no trespass to land upon any man's wharf.
The sea, like other beautiful savage creatures,
derives most of its charm from its reserves of untamed
power. When a wild animal is subdued to
abjectness, all its interest is gone. The ocean is
never thus humiliated. So slight an advance of
its waves would overwhelm us, if only the restraining
power once should fail, and the water
keep on rising! Even here, in these safe haunts
of commerce, we deal with the same salt tide
which I myself have seen ascend above these
piers, and which within half a century drowned a
whole family in their home upon our Long Wharf.
It is still the same ungoverned ocean which, twice
in every twenty-four hours, reasserts its right of
way, and stops only where it will. At Monckton,
on the Bay of Fundy, the wharves are built forty
feet high, and at ebb-tide you may look down on
the schooners lying aground upon the mud below.
In six hours they will be floating at your side.
But the motions of the tide are as resistless
whether its rise be six feet or forty; as in the
lazy stretching of the caged lion's paw you can
see all the terrors of his spring.
Our principal wharf, the oldest in the town, has
lately been doubled in size, and quite transformed
in shape, by an importation of broad acres from
the country. It is now what is called "made
land," — a manufacture which has grown so easy
that I daily expect to see some enterprising contractor
set up endwise a bar of railroad iron, and
construct a new planet at its summit, which shall
presently go spinning off into space and be called
an asteroid. There are some people whom it
would be pleasant to colonize in that way; but
meanwhile the unchanged southern side of the pier
seems pleasanter, with its boat-builders' shops,
all facing sunward, — a cheerful haunt upon a
winter's day. On the early maps this wharf appears
as "Queen-Hithe," a name more graceful
than its present cognomen. "Hithe " or "Hythe"
signifies a small harbor, and is the final syllable
of many English names, as of Lambeth. Hythe
is also one of those Cinque-Ports of which the
Duke of Wellington was warden. This wharf was
probably still familiarly called Queen-Hithe in
1781, when Washington and Rochambeau walked
its length bareheaded between the ranks of French
soldiers; and it doubtless bore that name when
Dean Berkeley arrived in 1729, and the Rev. Mr.
Honyman and all his flock closed hastily their
prayer-books, and hastened to the landing to
receive their guest. But it had lost this name ere
the days, yet remembered by aged men, when the
Long Wharf became a market. Beeves were then
driven thither and tethered, while each hungry
applicant marked with a piece of chalk upon the
creature's side the desired cut; when a sufficient
portion had been thus secured, the sentence of
death was issued. Fancy the chalk a live coal, or
the beast endowed with human consciousness, and
no Indian, or Inquisitorial tortures could have been
more fearful.
It is like visiting the houses at Pompeii, to
enter the strange little black warehouses which
cover some of our smaller wharves. They are so
old and so small it seems as if some race of pyg-mies must have built them. Though they are
two or three stories high, with steep gambrel-roofs,
and heavily timbered, their rooms are yet so low
that a man six feet high can hardly stand upright
beneath the great cross-beams. There is a row of
these structures, for instance, described on a map
of 1762 as "the old buildings on Lopez' Wharf,"
and to these another century has probably brought
very little change. Lopez was a Portuguese Jew,
who came to this place, with several hundred
others, after the Lisbon earthquake of 1755. He is
said to have owned eighty square-rigged vessels in
this port, from which not one such craft now sails.
His little counting-room is in the second story of
the building; its wall-timbers are of oak, and are
still sound; the few remaining planks are grained
to resemble rosewood and mahogany; the fragments
of wall-paper are of English make. In the cross-beam,
just above your head, are the pigeon-holes
once devoted to different vessels, whose names are
still recorded above them on faded paper, — "Ship
Cleopatra," "Brig Juno," and the like. Many of
these vessels measured less than two hundred tons,
and it seems as if their owner had built his ships
to match the size of his counting-room.
A sterner tradition clings around an old building
on a remoter wharf; for men have but lately
died who had seen slaves pass within its doors for
confinement. The wharf in those days appertained
to a distillery, an establishment then constantly
connected with the slave-trade, rum being sent to
Africa, and human beings brought back. Occasionally
a cargo was landed here, instead of being
sent to the West Indies or to South Carolina, and
this building was fitted up for their temporary
quarters. It is but some twenty-five feet square,
and must be less than thirty feet in height, yet it
is divided into three stories, of which the lowest
was used for other purposes, and the two upper
were reserved for slaves. There are still to be
seen the barred partitions and latticed door, making
half the second floor into a sort of cage, while
the agent's room appears to have occupied the
other half. A similar latticed door — just such as
I have seen in Southern slave-pens — secures the
foot of the upper stairway. The whole small attic
constitutes a single room, with a couple of windows,
and two additional breathing-holes, two feet square,
opening on the yard. It makes one sick to think
of the poor creatures who may once have griped
those bars with their hands, or have glared with
eager eyes between them; and it makes me recall
with delight the day when I once wrenched away
the stocks and chains from the floor of a pen like
this, on the St. Mary's River in Florida. It is almost
forty years since this distillery became a mill,
and sixty since the slave-trade was abolished. The
date "1803" is scrawled upon the door of the cage,
— the very year when the port of Charleston was
reopened for slaves, just before the traffic ceased.
A few years more, and such horrors will seem as
remote a memory in South Carolina, thank God!
as in Rhode Island.
Other wharves are occupied by mast-yards, places
that seem like play-rooms for grown men, crammed
fuller than any old garret with those odds and ends
in which the youthful soul delights. There are
planks and spars and timber, broken rudders, rusty
anchors, coils of rope, bales of sail-cloth, heaps of
blocks, piles of chain-cable, great iron tar-kettles
like antique helmets, strange machines for steaming
planks, inexplicable little chimneys, engines
that seem like dwarf-locomotives, windlasses that
apparently turn nothing, and incipient canals that
lead nowhere. For in these yards there seems no
particular difference between land and water; the
tide comes and goes anywhere, and nobody minds
it; boats are drawn up among burdocks and ambrosia,
and the platform on which you stand suddenly
proves to be something afloat. Vessels are
hauled upon the ways, each side of the wharf, their
poor ribs pitiably unclothed, ready for a cumbrous
mantua-making of oak and iron. On one side,
within a floating boom, lies a fleet of masts and
unhewn logs, tethered uneasily, like a herd of captive
sea-monsters, rocking in the ripples. A vast
shed, that has doubtless looked ready to fall for
these dozen years, spreads over half the entrance
to the wharf, and is filled with spars, knee-timber,
and planks of fragrant wood; its uprights are
festooned with all manner of great hawsers and
smaller ropes, and its dim loft is piled with empty
casks and idle sails. The sun always seems to
shine in a ship-yard; there are apt to be more
loungers than laborers, and this gives a pleasant
air of repose; the neighboring water softens all
harsher sounds, the foot treads upon an elastic
carpet of embedded chips, and pleasant resinous
odors are in the air.
Then there are wharves quite abandoned by
commerce, and given over to small tenements,
filled with families so abundant that they might
dispel the fears of those alarmists who suspect
that children are ceasing to be born. Shrill voices
resound there — American or Irish, as the case
may be — through the summer noontides; and
the domestic clothes-line forever stretches across
the paths where imported slaves once trod, or
rich merchandise lay piled. Some of these
abodes are nestled in the corners of houses once
stately, with large windows and carven doorways.
Others occupy separate buildings, almost always of
black, unpainted wood, sometimes with the long,
sloping roof of Massachusetts, oftener with the
quaint "gambrel" of Rhode Island. From the
busiest point of our main street, I can show you a
single cottage, with low gables, projecting eaves,
and sheltering sweetbrier, that seems as if it must
have strayed hither, a century or two ago, out of
some English lane.
Some of the more secluded wharves appear
wholly deserted by men and women, and are tenanted
alone by rats and boys, — two amphibious
races; either can swim anywhere, or scramble and
penetrate everywhere. The boys launch some
abandoned skiff, and, with an oar for a sail and
another for a rudder, pass from wharf to wharf;
nor would it be surprising if the bright-eyed rats
were to take similar passage on a shingle. Yet,
after all, the human juveniles are the more sagacious
brood. It is strange that people should go
to Europe, and seek the society of potentates less
imposing, when home can endow them with the
occasional privilege of a nod from an American
boy. In these sequestered haunts, I frequently
meet some urchin three feet high who carries
with him an air of consummate worldly experience
that completely overpowers me, and I seem
to shrink to the dimensions of Tom Thumb. Before
his calm and terrible glance all disguises fail.
You may put on a bold and careless air, and affect
to overlook him as you pass; but it is like assuming
to ignore the existence of the Pope of Rome,
or of the London Times. He knows better. Grown
men are never very formidable; they are shy and
shamefaced themselves, usually preoccupied, and
not very observing. If they see a man loitering
about, without visible aim, they class him as a
mild imbecile, and let him go; but boys are
nature's detectives, and one does not so easily
evade their scrutinizing eyes. I know full well
that, while I study their ways, they are noting
mine through a clearer lens, and are probably taking
my measure far better than I take theirs. One
instinctively shrinks from making a sketch or
memorandum while they are by; and if caught in
the act, one fondly hopes to pass for some harmless
speculator in real estate, whose pencillings may
be only a matter of habit, like those casual sums
in compound interest which are usually to be found
scrawled on the margins of the daily papers in
Boston reading-rooms.
Our wharves are almost all connected by intricate
by-ways among the buildings; and one almost
wishes to be a pirate or a smuggler, for the pleasure
of eluding the officers of justice through such seductive
paths. It is, perhaps, to counteract this
perilous fascination that our new police-office has
been established on a wharf. You will see its
brick tower rising not ungracefully, as you enter
the inner harbor; it looks the better for being almost
windowless, though beauty was not the aim
of the omission. A curious stranger is said to
have asked one of our city fathers the reason of
this peculiarity. "No use in windows," said the
experienced official sadly; "the boys would only
break 'em." It seems very unjust to assert that
there is no subordination in our American society;
the citizens show deference to the police, and the
police to the boys.
The ancient aspect of these wharves extends
itself sometimes to the vessels which lie moored
beside them. At yonder pier, for instance, has
lain for thirteen years a decaying bark, which was
suspected of being engaged in the slave-trade.
She was run ashore and abandoned on Block
Island, in the winter of 1854, and was afterwards
brought in here. Her purchaser was offered eight
thousand dollars for his bargain, but refused it;
and here the vessel has remained, paying annual
wharf dues and charges, till she is worthless. She
lies chained at the wharf, and the tide rises and
falls within her, thus furnishing a convenient
bathing-house for the children, who also find a
perpetual gymnasium in the broken shrouds that
dangle from her masts. Turner, when he painted
his "slave-ship," could have asked no better model.
There is no name upon the stern, and it exhibits
merely a carved eagle, with the wings clipped and
the head knocked off. Only the lower masts remain,
which are of a dismal black, as are the tops
and mizzen cross-trees. Within the bulwarks, on
each side, stand rows of black blocks, to which
the shrouds were once attached; these blocks are
called by sailors "dead-eyes," and each stands in
weird mockery, with its three ominous holes, like
so many human skulls before some palace in Dahomey.
Other blocks like these swing more ominously
yet at the ends of the shrouds, that still
hang suspended, waving and creaking and jostling
in the wind. Each year the ropes decay, and soon
the repulsive pendants will be gone. Not so with
the iron belaying-pins, a few of which still stand
around the mast, so rusted into the iron fife-rail
that even the persevering industry of the children
cannot wrench them out. It seems as if some
guilty stain must cling to their sides, and hold
them in. By one of those fitnesses which fortune
often adjusts, but which seem incredible in art,
the wharf is now used on one side for the storage
of slate, and the hulk is approached through an
avenue of gravestones. I never find myself in
that neighborhood but my steps instinctively seek
that condemned vessel, whether by day, when she
makes a dark foreground for the white yachts and
the summer waves, or by night, when the storm
breaks over her desolate deck.
If we follow northward from "Queen-Hithe"
along the shore, we pass into a region where the
ancient wharves of commerce, ruined in 1815,
have never been rebuilt; and only slender pathways
for pleasure voyagers now stretch above the
submerged foundations. Once the court end of
the town, then its commercial centre, it is now
divided between the tenements of fishermen and
the summer homes of city households. Still the
great old houses remain, with mahogany stairways,
carved wainscoting, and painted tiles; the sea has
encroached upon their gardens, and only boats like
mine approach where English dukes and French
courtiers once landed. At the head of yonder
private wharf, in that spacious and still cheerful
abode, dwelt the beautiful Robinson sisterhood, —
the three Quaker belles of Revolutionary days,
the memory of whose loves might lend romance
to this neighborhood forever. One of these
maidens was asked in marriage by a captain in
the English army, and was banished by her family
to the Narragansett shore, under a flag of truce, to
avoid him; her lover was afterward killed by a
cannon-ball, in his tent, and she died unwedded.
Another was sought by two aspirants, who came
in the same ship to woo her, the one from Philadelphia,
the other from New York. She refused
them both, and they sailed southward together;
but, the wind proving adverse, they returned, and
one lingered till he won her hand. Still another
lover was forced into a vessel by his friends, to
tear him from the enchanted neighborhood; while
sailing past the house, he suddenly threw himself
into the water, — it must have been about where
the end of the wharf now rests, — that he might
be rescued, and carried, a passive Leander, into
yonder door. The house was first the head-quarters
of the English commander, then of the French;
and the sentinels of De Noailles once trod where
now croquet-balls form the heaviest ordnance.
Peaceful and untitled guests now throng in summer
where St. Vincents and Northumberlands
once rustled and glittered; and there is nothing to
recall those brilliant days except the painted tiles
on the chimney, where there is a choice society of
coquettes and beaux, priests and conjurers, beggars
and dancers, and every wig and hoop dates back
to the days of Queen Anne.
Sometimes when I stand upon this pier by night,
and look across the calm black water, so still, perhaps,
that the starry reflections seem to drop
through it in prolonged javelins of light instead
of resting on the surface, and the opposite light-house spreads its cloth of gold across the bay, —
I can imagine that I discern the French and English
vessels just weighing anchor; I see De
Lauzun and De Noailles embarking, and catch
the last sheen upon their lace, the last glitter of
their swords. It vanishes, and I see only the
lighthouse gleam, and the dark masts of a sunken
ship across the neighboring island. Those motionless
spars have, after all, a nearer interest, and, as
I saw them sink, I will tell their tale.
That vessel came in here one day last August,
a stately, full-sailed bark; nor was it known, till
she had anchored, that she was a mass of imprisoned
fire below. She was the "Trajan," from
Rockland, bound to New Orleans with a cargo of
lime, which took fire in a gale of wind, being wet
with sea-water as the vessel rolled. The captain
and crew retreated to the deck, and made the
hatches fast, leaving even their clothing and provisions
below. They remained on deck, after
reaching this harbor, till the planks grew too hot
beneath their feet, and the water came boiling
from the pumps. Then the vessel was towed into
a depth of five fathoms, to be scuttled and sunk.
I watched her go down. Early impressions from
"Peter Parley" had portrayed the sinking of a
vessel as a frightful plunge, endangering all around,
like a maelstrom. The actual process was merely
a subsidence so calm and gentle that a child might
have stood upon the deck till it sank beneath him,
and then might have floated away. Instead of a
convulsion, it was something stately and very pathetic
to the imagination. The bark remained almost level,
the bows a little higher than the stern;
and her breath appeared to be surrendered in a
series of pulsations, as if every gasp of the lungs
admitted more of the suffocating wave. After each
long heave, she went visibly a few inches deeper,
and then paused. The face of the benign Emperor,
her namesake, was on the stern; first sank
the carven beard, then the rather mutilated nose,
then the white and staring eyes, that gazed blankly
over the engulfing waves. The figure-head was
Trajan again, at full length, with the costume of an
Indian hunter, and the face of a Roman sage; this
image lingered longer, and then vanished, like
Victor Hugo's Gilliatt, by cruel gradations. Meanwhile
the gilded name upon the taffrail had slowly
disappeared also; but even when the ripples began
to meet across her deck, still her descent was
calm. As the water gained, the hidden fire was
extinguished, and the smoke, at first densely rising,
grew rapidly less. Yet when it had stopped altogether,
and all but the top of the cabin had disappeared,
there came a new ebullition of steam,
like a hot spring, throwing itself several feet in
air, and then ceasing.
As the vessel went down, several beams and
planks came springing endwise up the hatchway,
like liberated men. But nothing had a stranger
look to me than some great black casks which had
been left on deck. These, as the water floated
them, seemed to stir and wake, and to become
gifted with life, and then got into motion and wallowed
heavily about, like hippopotami or any unwieldy
and bewildered beasts. At last the most
enterprising of them slid somehow to the bulwark,
and, after several clumsy efforts, shouldered itself
over; then others bounced out, eagerly following,
as sheep leap a wall, and then they all went bobbing
away, over the dancing waves. For the wind
blew fresh meanwhile, and there were some twenty
sail-boats lying-to with reefed sails by the wreck,
like so many sea-birds; and when the loose stuff
began to be washed from the deck, they all took
wing at once, to save whatever could be picked up,
— since at such times, as at a conflagration on land,
every little thing seems to assume a value, — and
at last one young fellow steered boldly up to
the sinking ship itself, sprang upon the vanishing
taffrail for one instant, as if resolved to be the last
on board, and then pushed off again. I never
saw anything seem so extinguished out of the
universe as that great vessel, which had towered
so colossal above my little boat; it was impossible
to imagine that she was all there yet, beneath the
foaming and indifferent waves. No effort has yet
been made to raise her; and a dead eagle seems to
have more in common with the living bird than
has now this submerged and decaying hulk with
the white and winged creature that came sailing
into our harbor on that summer day.
It shows what conversational resources are
always at hand in a seaport town, that the boat-man
with whom I first happened to visit this
burning vessel had been thrice at sea on ships
similarly destroyed, and could give all the particulars
of their fate. I know no class of uneducated
men whose talk is so apt to be worth hearing as
that of sailors. Even apart from their personal
adventures and their glimpses at foreign lands,
they have made observations of nature which are
far more careful and minute than those of farmers,
because the very lives of sailors are always at risk.
Their voyages have also made them sociable and
fond of talk, while the pursuits of most men
tend to make them silent; and their constant
changes of scene, though not touching them very
deeply, have really given a certain enlargement to
their minds. A quiet demeanor in a seaport town
proves nothing; the most inconspicuous man may
have the most thrilling career to look back upon.
With what a superb familiarity do these men treat
this habitable globe! Cape Horn and the Cape
of Good Hope are in their phrase but the West
Cape and the East Cape, merely two familiar
portals of their wonted home. With what undisguised
contempt they speak of the enthusiasm
displayed over the ocean yacht-race! That any
man should boast of crossing the Atlantic in a
schooner of two hundred tons, in presence of
those who have more than once reached the Indian
Ocean in a fishing-smack of fifty, and have
beaten in the homeward race the ships in whose
company they sailed! It is not many years since
there was here a fishing-skipper, whose surname
was "Daredevil," and who sailed from this port to
all parts of the world, on sealing voyages, in a
sloop so small that she was popularly said to go
under water when she got outside the lights, and
never to reappear until she reached her port.
And not only those who sail on long voyages,
but even our local pilots and fishermen, still lead
an adventurous and untamed life, less softened
than any other by the appliances of modern days.
In their undecked boats they hover day and night
along these stormy coasts, and at any hour the
beating of the long-roll upon the beach may call
their full manhood into action. Cowardice is
sifted and crushed out from among them by a
pressure so constant; and they are withal truthful
and steady in their ways, with few vices and many
virtues. They are born poor, and remain poor, for
their work is hard, with more blanks than prizes;
but their life is a life for a man, and though it
makes them prematurely old, yet their old age
comes peacefully and well. In almost all pursuits
the advance of years brings something forlorn.
It is not merely that the body decays, but that
men grow isolated and are pushed aside; there is
no common interest between age and youth. The
old farmer leads a lonely existence, and ceases to
meet his compeers except on Sunday; nobody
consults him; his experience has been monotonous,
and his age is apt to grow unsocial. The
old mechanic finds his tools and his methods superseded
by those of younger men. But the
superannuated fisherman graduates into an oracle;
the longer he lives, the greater the dignity of his
experience; he remembers the great storm, the
great tide, the great catch, the great shipwreck;
and on all emergencies his counsel has weight.
He still busies himself about the boats too, and
still sails on sunny days to show the youngsters
the best fishing-ground. When too infirm for
even this, he can at least sun himself beside the
landing, and, dreaming over inexhaustible memories,
watch the bark of his own life go down.
