Out in the Atlantic Ocean, six miles off the harbor entrance, and ten
miles from Portsmouth, is one of the strangest places existing, the
collection of crags and reefs known as the Isles of Shoals, their dim
and shadowy outline lying like a cloud along the edge of the horizon.
There are nine islands in the group, the chief being Appledore, rising
from the sea much like a hog's back, and hence the original name of
Hog Island. It covers about four hundred acres, and the whole group
does not have much over six hundred acres. Star Island is smaller;
Haley's or Smutty Nose, with Malaga and Cedar, are connected by a sort
of breakwater; and there are four little islets--Duck, White's,
Seavey's and Londoner's--and upon White Island is the lighthouse for
the group, with a revolving light of alternating red and white
flashes, elevated eighty-seven feet and visible fifteen miles at sea.
A covered way leads back over the crags from the tower to the
keeper's cottage. To this light there come answering signals from the
Whale's Back Light at the Piscataqua entrance, from solitary Boon
Island out at sea to the northward, and from the twin beacons of
Thatcher's Island off Cape Ann to the south. As darkness falls, one
after another these beacons blaze out as so many guiding stars across
the waters. One of the noted sayings of John Quincy Adams was that he
never saw these coast lights in the evening without recalling the
welcoming light which Columbus said he saw flashing from the shore,
when he discovered the New World.
"I lit the lamps in the lighthouse tower,
For the sun dropped down and the day was dead;
They shone like a brilliant clustered flower,
Two golden and five red."
The Isles of Shoals are a remarkable formation--rugged ledges of rock
out in the ocean bearing scarcely any vegetation; and on some of them
not a blade of grass is seen. Four islands stretching in a line make
the outside of the strange group--bare reefs, with water-worn, flinty
surfaces, against which the sea beats. Not a tree grew anywhere until
a little one was planted on Appledore, in front of the hotel, and
another dwarf was coaxed to grow in the little old graveyard on Star
Island. Their best vegetation was low huckleberry bushes, until
someone thought of gathering soil enough to make grass patches for a
cow or two. The utter desolation of these rocks, thus cast off
apparently from the rest of the world, can hardly be realized, yet
they have their admirers. Celia Thaxter, the poetess, was the daughter
of the White's Island lightkeeper, and to her glowing pen much of
their fame is due. She died on Appledore in 1894. The curious name of
these islands first appears in the log of their discoverer, Champlain,
who coasted along here in 1605. They were always prolific fishery
grounds, and the name seems to have been given them from "the shoaling
or schooling of the fish around them." In a deed from the Indians in
1629 they are called the Isles of Shoals. Captain John Smith visited
and described them in 1614, and with his customary audacity tried to
name them "Smith's Islands," but without success. The boundary-line
dividing Maine and New Hampshire passes through the group between Star
and Appledore. The peculiar grouping makes a good harbor between these
two, opening westward towards the mainland, and amply protected from
the sea by the smaller islands outside. These rugged crags resemble
the bald and rounded peaks of a sunken volcano thrust upward from the
sea, with this little harbor forming its crater. When Nathaniel
Hawthorne visited them, he wrote: "As much as anything else, it seems
as if some of the massive materials of the world remained superfluous
after the Creator had finished, and were carelessly thrown down here,
where the millionth part of them emerge from the sea, and in the
course of thousands of years have become partially bestrewn with a
little soil." Their savagery during violent storms, when surrounded by
surf and exposed to the ocean's wildest fury, becomes almost
overwhelming, and they actually seem to reel beneath the feet.
Star Island originally had a village of fishermen, until they were
sent away to make room for the summer hotel. It was the town of
Gosport, and its little church and tiny bell-tower are visible from
afar over the water. The original church was built of timbers from the
wreck of a Spanish vessel in 1685, and the present little stone church
is as old as the nineteenth century. It had several faithful pastors,
who were buried on the island, among them Rev. John Brook, of whom the
quaint historian Cotton Mather tells the anecdote illustrating the
efficacy of prayer: A child lay sick and so nearly dead those present
believed it had actually expired, "but Mr. Brook, perceiving some life
in it, goes to prayer, and in his prayer used this expression: 'Lord,
wilt thou not grant some sign before we leave prayer that thou wilt
spare and heal this child? We cannot leave thee till we have it.' The
child sneezed immediately." On the highest part of Star Island is the
broken monument to John Smith, put up by some of his admirers not long
ago, bearing the three Moslem heads representing the Turks he had
slain, but vandals have ruined it. The diminutive fort defending Star
Island in colonial times has been abandoned more than a century, and
nestling beneath it is the old graveyard, part of the walls remaining,
and a few dilapidated gravestones. All the original inhabitants of the
island are dead, their descendants scattered, and fashionable
pleasuring now dominates this reef and its restless waters.
As might be expected, a place like these islands was a favorite haunt
for pirates in the colonial days. Around them cruised Captain Kidd,
the notorious Blackbeard, and Hawkins, Phillips, Low, Ponad, and other
famous pirates, and in fact the ghost of one of Kidd's men is said to
still haunt Appledore. Many and bold were the gentry who in those days
hoisted the "Jolly Roger" flag, with its grinning skull and
cross-bones, and cruised in this picturesque region for glory and
plunder. It was near the route between Boston and the Provinces and to
Europe, and hence the valuable prey that allured them. Here sailed
Captain Teach of ferocious countenance, piercing black eyes and
enormous beard, who came to be familiarly known and feared as
"Blackbeard." He was said to be "in league with the Devil and the
Governor of North Carolina," and had an uncomfortable habit of firing
loaded pistols in the dark, without caring much who got hit. In fact,
it is recorded he once told his trusty crew he had to kill a man
occasionally merely to prove he was captain. He also kept a diary,
making characteristic entries, such as these: "Rum all out; our
company somewhat sober; rogues a-plotting; confusion among us; so I
looked for a prize." And this next day: "Took a prize with a great
deal of liquor on board; so kept the ship's company hot, and all went
well again." Blackbeard is supposed to have buried treasures on these
islands, and the fishermen tell how they have seen the ghost of his
mistress, gazing intently seaward, on a low, projecting point of White
Island, a tall and shapely figure wrapped in a long cloak. Blackbeard
ruled these waters until Lieutenant Maynard, with two armed sloops,
went after him, captured his ship, met him in single combat, and after
a hand-to-hand fight, in which both received fearful wounds, finally
pinned the pirate to the deck with his dagger, closing his interesting
career.
Captain Kidd, who sailed in these parts, was not so ferocious as
Blackbeard. It is said that at first he always swore-in his crew on
the Bible, but afterwards finding this interfered with business, he
buried his Bible in the sand. Captain Low captured a fishing-smack off
these islands, but disappointed of booty, had the crew flogged, and
then gave each man the alternative of being hanged or of three times
vigorously cursing old Cotton Mather, which latter, it is recorded,
"all did with alacrity." It is probable this punishment was inflicted
by the pirate because it was the custom of the Puritan clergymen,
when pirates were condemned, to have them brought into church, and as
a proper preliminary to the hanging, preach long and powerful sermons
to them on the enormity of their crimes and the torments awaiting in
the next world. This same Captain Low is said to have once captured a
Virginia vessel, and was so pleased with her captain that he invited
him to share a bowl of punch. The Virginian, however, demurred, having
scruples about drinking with a pirate, whereupon Low presented a
cocked pistol to his ear and a glass of punch to his mouth, pleasantly
remarking: "Either take one or the other." The captain took punch.
Another rover of the seas, Phillips, captured the Dolphin, a
fishing-vessel, and made all her crew turn pirates. John Fillmore, one
of them, started a mutiny, killed Phillips, and took the Dolphin back
to Boston. His great-great-grandson was President Millard Fillmore.
There was also at one time a famous woman pirate in this region--Anne
Bonney, an Irish girl from Cork, who fell in love with Captain
Rockham, a pirate, who was afterwards captured and hanged. Before the
capture she fought bravely, and, as she expressed it, "was one of the
last men left upon the deck." There was much that was fascinating in
the desperate careers of the lawless buccaneers who swept the New
England coasts in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. They
were for years masters of the ocean, and they even sent defiance to
the King himself:
"Go tell the King of England, go tell him thus from me,
Though he reigns king o'er all the land, I will reign king at sea."
All around the Isles of Shoals, when the sun sinks and twilight
comes--
"From the dim headlands many a lighthouse gleams,
The street lamps of the ocean."
Far away to the northeast a single white star appears eleven miles
off, on the solitary rock of Boon Island, out in mid-ocean, where not
a pound of soil exists, excepting what has been carried there. One of
the worst wrecks of modern times occurred on this rock before the
lighthouse was built. The "Nottingham," from London, was driven
ashore, the crew with difficulty gaining the island when the ship
broke up. They had no food; day by day their sufferings from cold and
hunger increased; the mainland was in full view and they built a raft
of pieces of wreck to try and get there, but it was swamped; they
signalled passing vessels, but could not attract attention. Gradually
they sank into hopelessness, but thought to make a final effort by
constructing another rude raft, on which two of them tried to reach
the shore. It too was wrecked, being afterwards found on the beach
with a dead man alongside. Then hope entirely failed them, and to
sustain life they became cannibals, living on the body of the ship's
carpenter, sparingly doled out to them by the captain. Eventually the
survivors were rescued, the wrecked raft being their preserver. When
it was found, the people on shore started a search for the builders,
and they were discovered and taken off the island, after twenty-four
days of starvation. Then the lighthouse was built on Boon Island, and
its steady white star gleams in nightly warning:
"Steadfast, serene, immovable, the same
Year after year, through all the silent night,
Burns on for evermore that quenchless flame,
Shines on that inextinguishable light!
"A new Prometheus chained upon the rock,
Still grasping in his hand the fire of Jove,
It does not hear the cry nor heed the shock,
But hails the mariner with words of love.
"'Sail on!' it says, 'sail on, ye stately ships!
And with your floating bridge the ocean span;
Be mine to guard this light from all eclipse;
Be yours to bring man nearer unto man!'"