JOHN ALDEN AND MILES STANDISH
THEIR LAND
Duxbury, Duxberie, Duxborough, Ducksborrow: the early writers spelled it
as they pleased. But the Duxbury Light, Duxbury ships, and Duxbury
clam-flats have standardized the spelling for all time. This town,
across the harbor from Plymouth, where grants of land were settled by
Myles Standish, Elder Brewster, and John Alden, has been the home port
of notable ships and men. Merchant-ships, brigs, and schooners--the
Eliza Warwick and the Mary Chilton, the Oriole, the Lion, Boreas, and
Seadrift, the Triton, Mattakeeset, and the Hitty Tom,--these and
hundreds of sail besides were built here in the shipyards and manned by
Duxbury boys. Among the early men of Duxbury were Benjamin Church, who
captured Philip the Sachem; Major Judah Alden and Colonel Ichabod,
descendants of John Alden and Priscilla; Colonel Gamaliel Bradford and
Captain Gamaliel, his son; George Partridge, one of George Washington's
Congressmen; and Ezra Weston, the King Caesar of the shipyards.
At one end of the town used to be the Ezra Weston ropewalk; and not too
far away was the famous Duxbury Ordinary, the tavern where, in 1678, Mr.
Seabury the landlord had license to "sell liquors unto such sober-minded
naighbors, as hee shall think meet, so as he sell not less than the
quantie of a gallon att a time to one prson and not in smaller
quantities to the occationing of drunkenes." Mr. Seabury was evidently
to use his own judgment as to which "naighbors" were sufficiently
sober-minded to sustain the gallon.
But doubtless the oldest Duxbury settlers were the clams. The colonists
called them, first, "sandgapers," then clamps, then clambs, clambes,
slammes, and clammes. We surmise that the clam was not at first the
Pilgrims' favorite dish, when we read Mr. John Pory's account of his
visit to Plymouth in 1622. "Muskles and slammes they have all the yeare
long, which being the meanest of God's blessings here, and such as these
people fat their hogs with at low water, if ours upon any extremitie did
enjoy in the South Colonie, they would never complain of famine or want,
although they wanted bread." When we read this remark of Mr. Pory's, we
wonder how it happened that the Pilgrims were reduced at one time to
five grains of parched corn per meal per person. But suppose that you
yourself had never tasted a clamb at a clam-bake, and had never been
introduced to it in the right circumstances by the right people--would
it naturally occur to you to steam it, and discard its little neck, and
make a chowder of its straps? This would call for the strictly
pioneering spirit, especially if, in the words of an early explorer,
these clamps were ofttimes "as big as ye penny white loafe." In fact,
the only Pilgrim who at all adequately celebrates the clam is Edward
Winslow. "Indeed," says he, "had we not been in a place where divers
sort of shell-fish are, that may be taken with the hand, we must have
perished, unless God had raised up some unknown or extraordinary means
for our preservation." And to-day, in certain spots along the Duxbury
coast, from the Gurnet to the Nook, you may still find the descendants
of those early sandgapers drawing down their necks at your approach,
lest peradventure you take them with the hand.
Barbara and I explored Duxbury, not for clams, but for another sort of
oldest inhabitant, the trailing arbutus. We did not explain to Alexander
the object of our quiet trips to the woods, for it was the middle of
winter, and we felt that he might not sympathize with our simple-minded
quest. Of course, we did not expect to find flowers, but we thought that
we might find a root or two of mayflower from John Alden's land, to
transplant on our hill at home. We know that it does grow in Duxbury,
but we must have looked in all the wrong places. Like many other great
explorers, we found all sorts of things other than the thing we sought:
charming patches of checkerberry and mosses; blueberry bushes growing
where blueberries ought not to grow and arbutus ought; many pleasant
views of Captain Standish's tall monument on the Hill, but not one stiff
rusty leaf of a mayflower. Finally we decided to go to the present Mr.
John Alden and inquire.
We hail from a part of the country where you would no sooner ask a
person to direct you to his patch of trailing arbutus than you would ask
him the combination of his safe. We therefore planned to word our
question discreetly. "Do you know," we planned to say to Mr. John Alden,
"whether any mayflower, or trailing arbutus, ever used to grow in
Duxbury?"
That ought to give him a chance to tell us about contemporary
mayflowers, if he cared to, at the same time giving him plenty of leeway
if he preferred to dwell upon the past.
We were putting the finishing touches on our speech as we went up the
path to the old John Alden house, when a great touring-car, with an
Indiana number, went rocking past us up the uneven lane, and stopped.
"Can you tell us," said a gentleman, leaning out of the car and calling
back to us, "whether this house is open to visitors?"
"We don't know," said I, "but we know that Mr. John Alden lives here."
"I'll ask him," said the gentleman from Indiana; and he went to the
door.
"He says it's open to-day," reported our new guide in a moment, helping
his family out of the car, and giving the youngest child a big jump up
into his arms.
Barbara and I, abandoning trailing arbutus, merged ourselves with the
family group, and went in at the front door.
The little hallway is papered with the kind of paper you sometimes see
in houses where "George Washington spent the night"--gray, with
landscapes. But, in addition to the landscapes in this paper, there are
slender pillars in groups, a design that makes you think of a miniature
Alma Tadema picture, all in gray. This wall-paper is, of course, not as
old as the house, but it is old-fashioned enough to be interesting.
We threaded our way in single file around the door, into the hallway,
and our host invited us first to go upstairs.
The stairs go straight up beside the great chimney, very steep and
narrow, each stair twice as tall as a modern stair and half as deep. At
the top, we went around the slope of the chimney and into the rooms
above. Here, in these low square rooms, with the supporting beams still
showing the marks of the broad-axe, and the wide boards of the floor
attesting the size of timber-growth in the early days, we found a
perfect paradise of old-time furniture stored away. We were allowed to
stop and prowl among the old possessions. None of the things used by
Priscilla are here, of course; these are the accumulations of
generations that followed her.
[Illustration: John Alden's House, Duxbury, (1653)]
In the corner by the chimney, we saw a small wooden cradle, with its
wooden roof sloping in three sections over the top. On the wall hung an
old lantern made to hold a candle, the kind of "lanthorn" that might
have been used by Moon in "A Midsummer Night's Dream."
We were looking at the churn and the yarn-winder, when one of the ladies
called us to look at the strap-hinges on the door. These hinges,
handmade of iron, long and narrow and pennant-shaped, run out almost a
third of the way across the door. The iron latch, also hand-wrought, is
worn where the bar slips into the hasp, and the downward curve of the
lift of the latch is bent into a thin twisted shape. One of the doors, a
curious, three-paneled affair, is supposed to have been saved from a
former house of John Alden's.
The present house, built in 1653, was the place where John Alden spent
his later years. Here he lived to the age of eighty-nine, holding
important offices in Plymouth Colony up to the time of his death. He was
one of the eight Purchasers who bought from the Merchant Adventurers
their interest in the colony, after the expiration of seven years'
copartnership. And in paying the required sum of eighteen hundred
pounds, he, with Myles Standish and the other "Undertakers," must have
been very busy managing the Plymouth trade, and "fraighting the White
Angell, Frindship and others" with saxafrass, clapboards, and beaver.
They were a busy brood, those old-comers; and John Alden, whom Bradford
called "a hopfull young man," fulfilled the promise of his youth.
Ever since his death, his house has been lived in by Aldens. The present
John Alden is a Grand Army veteran, son of a veteran of the Civil War,
grandson of veterans of the Revolution, and grandfather of a veteran of
the World War.
He led us downstairs, and out to the large room where they used to do
their fireplace cooking. The fireplace is closed now, but the spirit of
the house is still one of comfort and hospitable good cheer. From its
windows you cannot quite see the place where Myles Standish lived; it is
too far away. But it is pleasant to know that the Captain and John Alden
were near neighbors, and that one of Myles Standish's sons married one
of the daughters of Priscilla. All of Priscilla's eleven children turned
out well; many of them were later called to "act in publick stations;"
and the old house has been the homestead of her descendants all these
years.
When we had signed our names in the big register, and turned to go,
Barbara said, "Do you know why the Aldens and Standishes left Plymouth
and came over here so far?"
"Why, they came over to settle it," said Mr. John Alden kindly; "to open
it up."
[Illustration: The Myles Standish Monument]
As we went out down the lane, we turned to take one more look at John
Alden's land. There, in the middle foreground, we saw the artist,
sketching busily.
"How did _you_ get here?" we asked in a breath.
"In the car. How did _you_ get here?"
"We walked," said Barbara with emphasis.
"Like to go the rest of the way by stage?" inquired the artist affably,
hoisting his sketching kit over his shoulder and pointing to the car at
the foot of the lane. "I'm going over to the Standish house next."
"Did you know," said Barbara dreamily to the artist, as she seated
herself in the car, "that the four most famous descendants of John Alden
and Priscilla were John Quincy Adams, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,
William Cullen Bryant, and Tom Thumb?"
"Barbara," said the artist gravely, "did you make that up?"
"No," said Barbara, clutching the seat as we went around the corner on
one wheel, "I looked it up."
Country over which you have just been prowling on foot looks very
different when viewed from a car. The blackberry tangles and wild
rose-bushes, through which we had waded on our way to the woods, were
now simply part of the scenery. And the Myles Standish monument, which
had been our mariner's needle, one of the necessities of life, was now
only a forsaken watch-tower, with a solitary figure on top of it against
the sky. We went careening up the side-road to the Standish house, which
was built in 1666, not by the captain himself, but by one of his sons.
It was closed. An old house, locked, with an open field around it and
the sea below; a perfect place for sketching, and the rising wind from
the sea. Barbara went softly up to the doorway and touched the rusty
latch. On one side of the doorstep was a lilac bush, and on the other a
wild birch.
[Illustration: The Standish House, Duxbury, (1666)]
This is probably the oldest of the gambrel-roofed houses on the harbor.
There is something very strong and homely about the pitch of the roof--a
balanced, firm old line, in splendid proportions with the huge chimney
and low walls. A weathered gambrel has a way of looking at home in the
fields, a sort of boulder-shape firmly settled. And the Standish house,
with its flat field-rock for a doorstep, looks like a very old settler
indeed.
For a long time we sat on the doorstep and watched the outline of
Plymouth Town across the harbor, and the white gulls flying, and the
crows. The son of Standish of Standish knew where to pitch a house.
Thoreau criticizes the Pilgrims for lacking the explorer's instinct.
They were not woodsmen, he says, nor, except spiritually, pioneers at
heart. He calls attention to the fact that it was long after the landing
before they explored the woods and ponds back of Plymouth, territory
"within the compass of an afternoon's ramble." "A party of emigrants to
California or Oregon," says he, "with no less work on their hands and
more hostile Indians, would do as much exploring the first afternoon,
and the Sieur de Champlain would have sought an interview with the
savages, and examined the country as far as the Connecticut, and made a
map of it, before Billington had climbed his tree."
Well, the Sieur de Champlain had not with him such little travelers as
Oceanus Hopkins and Peregrine White. After the deaths of the first
winter, every one of the few grown men left in the colony was needed for
immediate affairs. They could not afford to go exploring overmuch. With
the exception of the madcap Billingtons and one boy Crackston, they ran
very little risk of losing themselves in the woods. They went, as much
as possible by sea, to Kennebeck, to Boston, to all parts of Cape Cod.
But as to wandering through the woods on foot, that was done only for
good and warrantable reasons, not to see what they could see.
Yet even here we find a paradox. They were so thinned in numbers that
they had to be cautious, but in an emergency they knew how to be
perfectly reckless and perfectly adequate to the occasion. In March,
1623, when news came that their friend Massasoit was "like to die," they
knew that, if they were to be accounted loyal friends, they must follow
the Indian custom of paying a visit to the chief in his last days.
Therefore, Edward Winslow, with one Master John Hampden of London, and
the Indian Hobbomock for guide, set out on foot around across the Cape,
through what is now Eastham, to Mattapoisett, and thence to "Sowams,"
now the town of Warren, Rhode Island, the home of Massasoit. In spite of
the protests of Hobbomock, part of the journey through the woods was
made after nightfall, so eager were they to arrive before "Massassowat"
died. And the accurate Winslow records and translates for us a sentence
in Massasoit's own language, the very words of the great friendly
sachem: "Matta neen wonckanet namen, Winsnow!" that is to say, 'O
Winslow, I shall never see thee again.' Winslow tells us how he revived
Massasoit by giving him a "confection of comfortable conserves on the
point of my knife," and by performing other helpful offices, "which he
took marvelous kindly"; and how he then set out on his homeward journey,
after learning from the convalescent Massasoit of the plans of other
tribes to destroy the paleface colony. On Winslow's return trip through
the woods, the Indians themselves, he says, "demanded further how we
durst, being but two, come so far into the country. I answered, where
was true love, there was no fear."
They did explore. But their exploring was always for community purpose,
whether for "true love," or for parleys with the French and Dutch, or
for trade with Squanto's friends at Chatham, or for pasturage for their
"katle," or for fish.
We do not know how La Salle and De Soto and the Sieur de Champlain would
have looked upon the woods around Plymouth and the Cape. They would
probably have thought of them as suburbs of the Mississippi. But as we
sit on the Standish doorstep and glance out toward Plymouth, with the
harbor between us and the Duxbury woods behind, we realize that the
first settlers here were quite completely cut off from the shelter of
that comely fort on Burial Hill. There was something very hardy and
permanent about their pioneering, though there was always a reasonable
explanation for the risks they undertook. There were no heroics about
it. Their chronicler says simply, "now they must of necessitie goe to
their great lots; they could not other wise keep their katle." They did
not come over out of restlessness, or for adventure, or primarily for
exploring the new continent, at all. Mr. John Alden spoke in the
authentic colonial spirit. They came over to settle it--to open it up.