TO MOUNT HOPE, AND BEYOND.
"La mattina al monte, e la sera al fonte."--_Italian Proverb._
Mohammed, it is said, on viewing the delicious and alluring situation of
Damascus, would not enter that city, but turned away with the
exclamation, "There is but one paradise for man, and I am determined to
have mine in the other world."
I started on my morning walk up the island just as the clocks were
striking eight. Spring comes in Newport very early and very verdant. The
bloom of orchard and of lilac greeted me. At every step I crushed the
perfume out of violets blossoming in the strip of greensward that
bordered the broad band of road. I often looked back upon the fortunate
city, mounting the green slopes and scattering itself among the quiet
fields. The last point of land was visible even down to Point Judith. A
faint roll of drums reached me from the fort. Good-bye to a pleasant
place! I felt, in turning away, that if Damascus had been like Newport,
I should have entered Damascus.
Distant about a mile from Newport is "Tonomy," or more properly
Miantonimo Hill. It is the highest elevation in the southern part of the
island, receiving its name as the seat of a sachem. Some remains of
field-works are seen on its slopes.[301]
Near the southern foot of Miantonimo Hill is the old Malbone place, the
site of a colonial mansion celebrated in its day as the finest in
Newport. It was destroyed by fire rather more than a century ago.
Tradition avers that Colonel Godfrey Malbone, seeing his house in
flames, ordered the table removed to the lawn, and coolly finished his
dinner there. It was a two-story stone-built house, which had cost the
owner a hundred thousand dollars.
Many are the dark, vague, and mysterious hints let fall from time to
time relative to the life of Malbone. As a merchant his ventures are
said to have been lawless even for his lawless age. His corsairs preyed
upon the commerce of Frenchman or Spaniard without regard for treaties.
Rum and slaves were the commodities in which the Newport of his time
trafficked largely. Smuggling was hardly deemed dishonorable in a
merchant. As confirming this easy condition of commercial virtue, a
writer mentions having seen in Malbone's garden the entrance of one of
those subterranean passages leading to the shore I have so often
unearthed.
During the French war of George II., Newport, from its beginning to the
year 1744, had armed and sent to sea more than a score of privateers. It
was called the nursery of corsairs. It was also called rich; and the
French, in planning its capture, facilitated by the information of a
resident French merchant, a spy, calculated on levying a heavy
contribution. "Perhaps we had better burn it, as a pernicious hole,
from the number of privateers there fitted out, as dangerous in peace as
in war; being a sort of freebooter, who confiscates _a tord et a
travers_," say they. These harsh expressions sound strangely unfamiliar
when contrasted with French panegyric of the next generation.
Edward G. Malbone, a natural son, belonged to a collateral branch of the
family.[302] Newport was the birthplace of this exquisite miniature
painter and most refined of men. This refinement appears in his works,
which are full of artistic grace and dainty delicacy. Little of his life
was passed here, though that little is much prized by all who know his
worth as a man. Allston and Malbone are said to have worked together in
Newport as pupils of Samuel King, beginning thus the friendship that so
long subsisted between them.
[Illustration: THE GLEN.]
About midway of the island, on the eastern shore, is The Glen, once more
frequented than at present. A line carried across the island from this
point would pass near the old farmstead, which was the quarters of the
British general, Prescott. It is on the west road leading by the most
direct route from Newport to Bristol Ferry.
[Illustration: A RHODE ISLAND WINDMILL.]
Colonel Barton, whose station was at Tiverton, conceived the idea of
releasing General Lee, then a prisoner, by securing General Prescott.
Having matured his plans, he crossed over to Warwick Neck, where he was
detained two days by a violent storm. With him were forty volunteers,
who manned five whale-boats. The enemy were then in possession of both
Canonicut and Prudence islands, with some shipping lying under the
little isle, called Hope, which is between Prudence and the western
shore of the bay.
[Illustration: WILLIAM BARTON.]
On the night of the 9th of July, 1711, every thing being favorable,
Barton informed his men for the first time where they were going. His
party embarked in their boats, rowing between Patience and Prudence in
order to elude the enemy's guard-boats. Meeting with no obstacle, they
coasted the west shore of Prudence, passed around the southern end, and
landed on Rhode Island. They then pushed on for Overing's house, where
they knew General Prescott was to be found.
The sentinel on duty was quickly seized and disarmed, and the house
surrounded. On entering General Prescott's chamber, Barton saw him
rising from his bed.
"Are you General Prescott?"
"Yes, sir."
"Then you are my prisoner."
The general was allowed to half dress himself, and was then conducted to
the boats. His aid, Major Barrington, had also been taken. Arrived at
the shore, General Prescott finished his toilet in the open air. Soon
after leaving the island the alarm was given in the British camp. "Sir,"
said Prescott to Barton, as they stepped ashore at Warwick Neck, "you
have made a d--d bold push to-night." The Americans had returned in just
six and a half hours from the time they set out.
While on his way to the American head-quarters, Prescott was
horse-whipped by an innkeeper whom he insulted. The situation of the
house from which he was carried off is easily distinguished by the pond
before it, whose overflow falls in a miniature cascade into the road.
Very little, if any, of the original building is remaining.
[Illustration: SILAS TALBOT.]
Talbot's achievement the next year was in carrying off a British armed
vessel, the _Pigot_, that guarded Seconnet Passage and the communication
between the islands and the main-land. With a few troops from the camp
at Providence he manned a small vessel and set sail. On coming near the
_Pigot_, Talbot caused his vessel to drift down upon her, when he
carried her by boarding. He took his prize successfully into Stonington.
The absence of forest-trees on the island gives it a general resemblance
to the rolling prairie of the West. The slopes are gracefully rounded as
the Vermont hills--ground-swells, over which the road rises or descends
in regular irregularity. Over this road that discarded vehicle, the
stage-coach, once rolled and lurched, and was more wondered at than the
train that now rattles along under the hills by the shore.
[Illustration: PRESCOTT'S HEAD-QUARTERS.]
It is said that Dexter Brown, "an enterprising man," set up a four-horse
stage-coach between Boston and Providence as early as 1772. When "well
regulated," it left Providence every Monday, and arrived in Boston on
Tuesday night; returning, it left Boston on Thursday, reaching
Providence on Friday night. The coach was chiefly patronized by people
who visited Newport for their health. On a long route, the change from
one coach into another, equally cramped, might not inaptly be said to
resemble an exchange of prisoners.
All travelers here have remarked on the productiveness of Rhode Island.
Its dairies and its poultry have always been celebrated. Orchards
bursting with blossoms somewhat relieved the bare aspect of the hills.
Fields of spinach and of clover varied the coloring of the pastures,
which were shaded off on cool slopes into the dark green of Kentucky
blue-grass. Groups of brown hay-ricks, left from the winter's store,
stood impaled in barn-yards. Flocks of geese waddled by the roadside.
Ox-teams, market-men, boys with droves of pigs, made the whole way a
pastoral. On lifting the eye from the yellow band of road a windmill
would be seen with its long arms beating the air. I liked to walk
through the green lanes that led up to them, and hold brief chat with
the boy or maid of the mill. I shall never look at one without thinking
of Don Quixote and of Sancho Panza. The lack of streams and water-power
is thus supplied by air-currents and wind-power. It is an ill wind
indeed that blows nobody good on Rhode Island.
[Illustration: AGRICULTURAL PROSPERITY.]
I have said nothing of the fish-market of the island, and that market is
of course centred in Newport. Dr. Dwight enumerates twenty-six different
species, to be found in their season. Sheep's-head, considered superior
to turbot, were sometimes caught off Hanging Rocks. Blackfish (tautog)
and scup, or scuppaug, are much esteemed. When I was last on the island,
the fishermen were emptying their seines of the scup, which were so
plenty as to be almost valueless, a string of fine fish, ready dressed,
bringing only twelve cents. The flesh of a tautog is very firm, and he
will live a long time out of water. The boats used here by fishermen
have the mast well forward, in the manner known to experts along shore
as the "Newport rig." Formerly they used "pinkeys," or Chebacco boats,
so called from a famous fishing precinct of Essex County, Massachusetts.
The quartz imbedded in the stone makes the roadside walls appear as if
splashed with whitewash. I saw few ledges from Newport to Lawton's
Valley. The stones brought up by the plow were all small and flat, but
at the upper end of the island I observed they were the round masses or
pebbles met with on the opposite main-land. There is also on the western
shore a coal vein of inferior quality. The dust from it mingles with
that of the road before you arrive at Bristol ferry.
I made a brief halt at the old grass-grown earth-work on the crest of
the hill overlooking Lawton's Valley. No wayfarer should lose the rare
views to be had here. The fort forms a throne from which the Queen of
Aquidneck, a voluptuous rather than virgin princess, a Cleopatra rather
than an Elizabeth, might behold her empire. At the foot of the hill is
the remarkable vale intersecting the island, sprinkled with cottages
among orchards; on the left, part of Canonicut and all of Prudence lie
outstretched along the sunny bay; farther north the steeples of Bristol
distinctly, and of Providence dimly, are seen; to the right Mount Hope,
Tiverton, and perhaps a faint spectral chimney or two at Fall River. The
long dark line on the water from the island to Tiverton is the stone
bridge.[303]
Turning to the southward is the battle-field of 1778, where Sullivan and
Greene fought with Pigot and Prescott, and where Lafayette, though he
had ridden from Boston in six hours, was not. This campaign, begun so
auspiciously, terminated ingloriously. New England had been aroused to
arms. Men of all ranks of society shouldered their firelocks and
marched. Volunteers from Newburyport, a company of the first merchants
of Salem, artillery and infantry corps from Boston, thronged the roads
to Sullivan's camp. It was a good and salutary lesson to the Americans,
not to put their faith in French appearances.[304]
[Illustration: FROM BUTTS'S HILL, LOOKING NORTH.]
When Coddington and his associates determined to remove from
Massachusetts, they meant to settle upon Long Island or in Delaware Bay.
While their vessel was making the dangerous passage around Cape Cod
without them, they came by land to Providence, where Mr. Williams
courteously entertained and afterward influenced them to settle upon the
Isle of Aquidneck. Plymouth having disclaimed jurisdiction over it, and
promised to look upon and assist them as loving neighbors, in March,
1637-'38, the exiles organized their political community upon the
northern end of the island. Sir H. Vane and Roger Williams were
instrumental in procuring Rhode Island from the Narraganset chieftains,
Miantonimo and Canonicus. By the next spring their numbers were so much
augmented that some of the settlers removed to the southern or western
shores. The island was divided into two townships--Portsmouth, which now
engrosses its upper half, and Newport. In 1644 they named it the Isle of
Rhodes, which was merely exchanging one pagan name for another.[305]
[Illustration: QUAKER HILL FROM BUTTS'S HILL, LOOKING SOUTH.]
Mount Hope is scarcely more than two hundred feet high, though in its
isolation it looks higher. It is commandingly situated on a point of
land on the eastern shore of Bristol Neck, giving its name to a broad
expanse of water that receives Taunton River in its course to the sea.
On the eastern side the hill is precipitous, vastly more so than Horse
Neck, down which the valiant Putnam urged his steed when pursued by
British dragoons. Down this declivity Philip is said to have rolled like
a cask when surprised by white enemies. Here, on the shores of Taunton
River, is the scene of those hand-to-hand encounters between settler and
savage in which the old historians are wont to mix up gunpowder with
religion so perplexedly. In those days the fall of a red chieftain on
the hunting-grounds of his fathers was hailed as a special providence.
Mount Hope was the sequel of Samoset's "Welcome, Englishmen."
[Illustration: BATTLE-GROUND OF AUGUST 29, 1778.]
By the river, in the forked branches of blasted sycamores, the fish-hawk
builds and broods. Their nests are made of dried eel-grass from the
shore interwoven with twigs. The shrill scream of the female at my
coming was answered by the cry of the male, who left his fishing out on
the river at the first signal of distress. An old traveler says this
bird sometimes seems to lie expanded on the water, he hovers so close to
it. Having by some attractive power drawn the fish within his reach, he
darts suddenly upon them. The charm he makes use of is supposed to be an
oil contained in a small bag in the body. In defense of his mate and her
young the bird seems to forget fear.
After many agreeable surprises already encountered, I was unprepared for
what I saw from the summit of Mount Hope. I felt it was good to be
there. Every town in Rhode Island is said to be visible. All the islands
dispersed about the bay are revealed at a glance. Glimmering in the
distance was Providence. On the farther shore of Mount Hope Bay, Fall
River appeared niched in the sheer side of a granite ledge. Here were
Warren and Bristol, there Warwick; and, far down the greater bay,
Newport was swathed in a hazy cloud. I had made a long walk, yet felt no
fatigue, on the top of Mount Hope.
[Illustration: KING PHILIP, FROM AN OLD PRINT.]
Near the brow of the hill Philip fixed his wigwam and held his dusky
court. He has had Irving for his biographer, Southey for his bard, and
Forrest for his ideal representative. In his own time he was the public
enemy whom any should slay; in ours he is considered as a martyr to the
idea of liberty--his idea of liberty not differing from that of Tell and
Toussaint, whom we call heroes.
Philip did not comprehend the religion of the whites, but as he
understood their policy he naturally distrusted their faith. When the
prophet Eliot preached to him, he went up to that good man, and, pulling
off a button from his doublet, said he valued his discourse as little as
the piece of "brass--the monster!" exclaims pious Cotton Mather.
Such hills as Mount Hope were the settlers' sun-dials, when clocks and
watches were luxuries known only to the wealthy few. The crest is a
green nipple, having quartz cropping out everywhere; in fact, the basis
of the hill is nearly a solid mass of quartz. Between the site of
Philip's wigwam and the shore, where the escarpment is fifty feet, is a
natural excavation, five or six feet from the ground, called "Philip's
Throne." A small grass-plot is before it, and at its foot trickles a
never-failing spring of water, known as "Philip's Spring."
The manner of Philip's death, as given in Church's history, is
considered authentic. Church's party crossed the ferry, and reached
Mount Hope about midnight. Detachments were placed in ambush at all the
avenues of escape. Captain Golding, with a number of picked men and a
guide, was ordered to assault the stronghold by break of day. One of
Philip's Indians having showed himself, Golding fired a volley into the
camp. The Indians then fled to the neighboring swamp, Philip the
foremost. Having gained the shore, he ran directly upon Church's
ambuscade. An Englishman snapped his gun at him without effect, when his
companion, one of Church's Indian soldiers, sent a bullet through the
heart of the chief. He fell on his face in the mud and water, with his
gun under him. After the fight was over, Church ordered the body to be
quartered and decapitated. The executioner was also an Indian, and
before he struck the body made a short speech to it. Philip's head was
taken to Plymouth in triumph, where, arriving on the very day the church
was keeping a solemn thanksgiving, in the words of Mather, "God sent 'em
in the head of a leviathan for a thanksgiving feast."
I made the ascent of Mount Hope from the south, where it is gradual; but
on the west, where I descended, I found it abrupt, and covered with a
grove of oak-trees sprinkled with stones among fern. With the exception
of a few tumble-down stone walls that cross it, and now and then a cow
quietly cropping the herbage, it is as wild as when it was the eyrie of
the proud-spirited chieftain, "the Last of the Wampanoags."
[Illustration: INSCRIPTION ON DIGHTON ROCK.]
At Bristol the railway will set you down opposite to Fall River, or by
returning to Bristol ferry you may take, on the Rhode Island side, the
rail for Dighton and its sculptured rock. This rock, which has puzzled
so many learned brains both of the Old World and the New, lies near the
eastern shore of Taunton River, opposite Dighton wharves.[306]
I wanted two things in Dighton--direction to the rock, and a skiff to
cross the river to it. An ancient builder of boats, very tall and very
lank, having his adze in his hand and his admeasurements chalked on the
toes of his boots, supplied me with both.
"What on airth do you want to look at that rock for?" he expostulated
rather than questioned. "I'd as lief look at the side of that house,"
pointing to his work-shop.
"You do not seem to value your archaeological remains overmuch," I
submitted.
"Bless you, I knew a gal born and brought up right in sight of that air
rock, who got married and went to Baltimore to live, without ever having
sot eyes on it. When she had staid there a spell she heard so much about
Dighton Rock, she came all the way back a purpose to see it. _Fee_-male
curiosity, you see, sir."
The river is half a mile broad at Dighton, with low, uninteresting
shores. The "Writing Rock," a large boulder of fine-grained greenstone,
is submerged either wholly or in part by the tidal flow, but when
uncovered presents a smooth face, slightly inclined toward the open
river. When so close as to lay hold of it, you are aware, of faint
impressions on its surface, yet these have become so nearly effaced by
the action of the tides and the chafing of drift ice as to be
fragmentary, and therefore disappointing. As is usual, the action of the
salt air has turned this, as other rocks by the shores, to a dusky red
color. Seventy years ago the characters or lines traced on the rock were
by actual measurement an inch in breadth by half an inch in depth, and
distinct enough to attract attention from the decks of passing vessels.
The rock is first mentioned, says Schoolcraft, in a sermon of Dr.
Danforth, of 1680. The river had then been frequented by white men for
sixty years. It is next alluded to in the dedication of a sermon to Sir
H. Ashurst by Cotton Mather, in these words: "Among the other
curiosities of New England one is that of a mighty rock, on a
perpendicular side whereof, by a river which at high tide covers part of
it, there are very deeply engraved, no man alive knows how or when,
about half a score lines near ten foot long and a foot and a half broad,
filled with strange characters, which would suggest as odd thoughts
about them that were here before us as there are odd shapes in that
elaborate monument, whereof you shall see the first line transcribed
here."
In the "Philosophical Transactions" of the Royal Society of London,
covering a period from 1700 to 1720, are several communications from
Cotton Mather, one of which (part iv., p. 112) is as follows:
"At Taunton, by the side of a tiding river, part in, part out of the
river, is a large Rock; on the perpendicular side of which, next to the
Stream, are seven or eight lines, about seven or eight foot long, and
about a foot wide, each of them ingraven with unaccountable characters,
not like any known character."[307]
Schoolcraft believed the work to have been performed by Indians.
Washington, who had some knowledge of their hieroglyphics, was of this
opinion. Dr. Belknap asserts that they were acquainted with sculpture,
and also instances their descriptive drawings on the bark of trees.
Sculptured rocks, of which the origin is unknown, have been found in
other locations in the United States. Since the unsettling of Norse
traditions, the characters on Dighton Rock are generally admitted to be
of Indian creation; but if the work of white men, it would strengthen
the theory of Verazzani's presence in these waters.
Another link of the supposed discovery by Northmen was the skeleton
exhumed about 1834 at Fall River. It was found in a sitting posture,
having a plate of brass upon its breast, with arrow-heads of the same
metal lying near, thin, flat, and of triangular shape. The arrows had
been contained within a quiver of bark, that fell in pieces when exposed
to the air. The most remarkable thing about the remains was a belt
encircling the body, composed of brass tubes four and a half inches in
length, the width of the belt, and placed close together longitudinally.
The breastplate, belt, and arrow-heads were considered so many evidences
that the skeleton was that of some Scandinavian who had died and been
buried here by the natives.
An antiquary would of course prize a dead Scandinavian more than many
living ones. These mouldering bones and corroded trinkets were not,
however, the key to Dighton Rock. The mode of sepulture was that
practiced by the natives of this continent. In Archer's account of
Gosnold's voyage he speaks of the Indians on the south of Cape Cod as
follows:
"This day there came unto the ship's side divers canoes, the Indians
appareled as aforesaid, with tobacco and pipes steeled with copper,
skins, artificial strings, and other trifles, to barter; one had hanging
about his neck a plate of rich copper, in length a foot, in breadth half
a foot, for a breastplate."
John Brereton, of the same voyage, tells us more of the Indians of the
Elizabeth Islands: "They have also great store of copper, some very red,
and some of a paler color; none of them but have chains, ear-rings, or
collars of this metal: they had some of their arrows herewith, much like
our broad arrow-heads, very workmanly made. Their chains are many hollow
pieces cemented together, each piece of the bigness of one of our reeds,
a finger in length, ten or twelve of them together on a string, which
they wear about their necks; their collars they wear about their bodies
like bandeliers, a handful broad, all hollow pieces like the other, but
somewhat shorter, four hundred pieces in a collar, very fine and evenly
set together." Were this evidence less positive, we know from Champlain
that the Indians would never have permitted the body of a stranger to
remain buried longer than was necessary to disinter and despoil it.
Verazzani's letter mentions the possession of copper trinkets by the
Indians.
About two miles and a half from Taunton Green is the Leonard Forge, the
oldest in America. The spot is exceedingly picturesque. The brook,
overhung by trees, which of yore turned the mill-wheel, glides beneath a
rustic bridge ere it tumbles over the dam and hurries on to meet the
river. James and Henry Leonard built the forge in 1652.
[Illustration: OLD LEONARD HOUSE, RAYNHAM.]
Near the spot is the site of the dwelling they occupied, one of the
distinctive old structures of its day. Philip lived in amity with the
Leonards, who made for him spear and arrow heads when he came to hunt at
the Fowling Pond, not far from the forge, where he had a hunting-lodge.
When he had resolved to strike the English, it is said he gave strict
orders not to hurt those Leonards, his good friends of the forge.
Tradition has it that his head was afterward kept in the house some
days.
My pilgrimage among the haunts of the Narragansets and Wampanoags of old
fame extended no farther. Setting my face again toward the sea, when on
board one of those floating hotels that ply between Fall River and New
York, I thought of the prediction I had cut from the Boston _Daily
Advertiser_ of just half a century ago: "We believe the time will not be
far distant when a steamboat will be provided to run regularly between
New York and Taunton River, to come to Fall River and Dighton, and
perhaps to the wharves in Taunton, a mile below the village. This route
from New York to Boston would in some respects be preferable to that
through Providence."
FOOTNOTES:
[301] It was the fortress of the British left wing. Two large and
elegant country houses at its base, included within the lines, were
occupied by the officers.
[302] He was the son of John, the son of Godfrey Malbone.
[303] The first bridge spanning what was known as Howland's Ferry was
completed in 1795. It was of wood, destroyed and swept to sea by a
storm; rebuilt, and again destroyed by worms. The present stone
structure was built in 1809-'10, and, though injured by the gale of
1815, stands firm.
[304] The battle was fought in the valley below Quaker, sometimes called
Meeting-house, Hill. Sullivan commanded in chief, though Greene is
entitled to a large share of the credit of repulsing the British attack.
It was a well-fought action. Pigot, by British accounts, had six
thousand regular troops. Lafayette was mad as a March hare at their
fighting without him.
[305] Lechford, writing between 1637 and 1641, says: "At the island
called Aquedney are about two hundred families. There was a church where
one Master Clark was elder: the place where the church was is called
Newport, but that church, I hear, is now dissolved. At the other end of
the island there is another town called Portsmouth, but no church. Those
of the island have a pretended civil government of their own erection
without the king's patent."
[306] To be exact, the shores adjacent to the rock are in the town of
Berkeley, formerly part of Dighton.
[307] A copy of the inscription, made by Professor Sewall, is deposited
in the Museum at Cambridge. There is another copy, by James Winthrop;
see plate in vol. iii., "Memoir American Academy," and description of
method of taking it, vol. ii., part ii., p. 126. Many others have been
taken, more or less imperfect; the best one recollected is in the hall
of the Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.
[Illustration: NEW LONDON IN 1813.]