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ROB OF THE BOWL:
A LEGEND OF ST. INIGOE'S.
BY THE AUTHOR OF "SWALLOW BARN," "HORSE-SHOE ROBINSON," &c.
_Daniel._ Quot homines tot sententiae.
_Martin._ And what is that?
_Daniel._ 'Tis Greek, and argues difference of opinion.
_John Woodvil._
IN TWO VOLUMES.
VOL. I.
PHILADELPHIA:
LEA & BLANCHARD.
SUCCESSORS TO CAREY & CO.
1838.
Entered according to the act of Congress, in the year 1838, by
LEA & BLANCHARD,
In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States,
in and for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.
I. ASHMEAD AND CO., PRINTERS.
PREFACE.
The tale related in the following pages refers to a period in the
history of Maryland, which has heretofore been involved in great
obscurity,--many of the most important records connected with it having
been lost to public inspection in forgotten repositories, where they
have crumbled away under the touch of time. To the persevering research
of the accomplished Librarian of the State--a gentleman whose
dauntless, antiquarian zeal and liberal scholarship are only surpassed
by the enlightened judgment with which he discharges the functions of
his office--we are indebted for the rescue of the remnant of these
memorials of by-gone days, from the oblivion to which the carelessness
of former generations had consigned them. Many were irrecoverable; and
it was the fate of the gentleman referred to, to see them fall into
dust at the moment that the long estranged light first glanced upon
them.
To some of those which have been saved from this wreck, the author is
indebted for no small portion of the materials of his story. In his
endeavour to illustrate these passages in the annals of the state, it
is proper for him to say that he has aimed to perform his task with
historical fidelity. If he has set in harsher lights than may be deemed
charitable some of the actors in these scenes, or portrayed in
lineaments of disparagement or extenuation, beyond their deserts, the
partisans on either side in that war of intolerance which disfigured
the epoch of this tale, it was apart from his purpose. As a native of
the state he feels a prompt sensibility to the fame of her Catholic
founders, and, though differing from them in his faith, cherishes the
remembrance of their noble endeavours to establish religious freedom,
with the affection due to what he believes the most wisely planned and
honestly executed scheme of society which at that era, at least, was to
be found in the annals of mankind. In the temper inspired by this
sentiment, these volumes have been given to the public, and are now
respectfully inscribed to THE STATE OF MARYLAND, by one who takes the
deepest interest in whatever concerns her present happiness or ancient
renown.
THE AUTHOR.
BALTIMORE, Dec. 1, 1838.
ROB OF THE BOWL.
A LEGEND OF ST. INIGOES.
CHAPTER I.
No more thy glassy brook reflects the day,
But choked with sedges, works its weedy way;
Along thy glades a solitary guest,
The hollow-sounding bittern guards its nest;
Amidst thy desert walks the lapwing flies,
And tires their echoes with unvaried cries.
Sunk are thy bowers in shapeless ruin all,
And the long grass o'ertops the mould'ring wall.
THE DESERTED VILLAGE.
It is now more than one hundred and forty-four years since the ancient
capital of Maryland was shorn of its honours, by the removal of the
public offices, and, along with them, the public functionaries, to
Annapolis. The date of this removal, I think, is recorded as of the
year of grace sixteen hundred and ninety-four. The port of St. Mary's,
up to that epoch, from the first settlement of the province,
comprehending rather more than three score years, had been the seat of
the Lord Proprietary's government. This little city had grown up in
hard-favoured times, which had their due effect in leaving upon it the
visible tokens of a stunted vegetation: it waxed gnarled and crooked,
as it perked itself upward through the thorny troubles of its
existence, and might be likened to the black jack, which yet retains a
foothold in this region,--a scrubby, tough and hardy mignon of the
forest, whose elder day of crabbed luxuriance affords a sour comment
upon the nurture of its youth.
Geographers are aware that the city of St. Mary's stood on the left
bank of the river which now bears the same name (though of old it was
called St. George's,) and which flows into the Potomac at the southern
extremity of the state of Maryland, on the western side of the
Chesapeake Bay, at a short distance westward from Point Lookout: but
the very spot where the old city stood is known only to a few,--for the
traces of the early residence of the Proprietary government have nearly
faded away from the knowledge of this generation. An astute antiquarian
eye, however, may define the site of the town by the few scattered
bricks which the ploughshare has mingled with the ordinary tillage of
the fields. It may be determined, still more visibly, by the mouldering
and shapeless ruin of the ancient State House, whose venerable
remains,--I relate it with a blush--have been pillaged, to furnish
building materials for an unsightly church, which now obtrusively
presents its mottled, mortar-stained and shabby front to the view of
the visiter, immediately beside the wreck of this early monument of the
founders of Maryland. Over these ruins a storm-shaken and magnificent
mulberry, aboriginal, and cotemporary with the settlement of the
province, yet rears its shattered and topless trunk, and daily distils
upon the sacred relics at its foot, the dews of heaven,--an august and
brave old mourner to the departed companions of its prime. There is yet
another memorial in the family tomb of the Proprietary, whose
long-respected and holy repose, beneath the scant shade of the
mulberry, has, within twenty years past, been desecrated by a worse
than Vandal outrage, and whose lineaments may now with difficulty be
followed amidst the rubbish produced by this violation.
These faded memorials tell their story like honest chroniclers. And a
brave story it is of hardy adventure, and manly love of freedom! The
scattered bricks, all moulded in the mother-land, remind us of the
launching of the bark, the struggle with the unfamiliar wave, the array
of the wonder-stricken savage, and the rude fellowship of the first
meeting. They recall the hearths whose early fires gleamed upon the
visage of the bold cavalier, while the deep, unconquerable faith of
religion, and the impassioned instincts of the Anglo-Saxon devotion to
liberty, were breathed by household groups, in customary household
terms. They speak of sudden alarms, and quick arming for battle;--of
stout resolve, and still stouter achievement. They tell of the victory
won, and quiet gradually confirmed,--and of the increasing rapture as,
day by day, the settler's hopes were converted into realities, when he
saw the wilderness put forth the blossoms of security and comfort.
The river penetrates from the Potomac some twelve miles inland, where
it terminates in little forked bays which wash the base of the woody
hills. St. George's Island stretches half across its mouth, forming a
screen by which the course of the Potomac is partly concealed from
view. From this island, looking northward, up St. Mary's river, the eye
rests upon a glittering sheet of water about a league in breadth,
bounded on either shore by low meadow-grounds and cultivated fields
girt with borders of forest; whilst in the distance, some two leagues
upward, interlocking promontories, with highlands in their rear, and
cedar-crowned cliffs and abrupt acclivities which shut in the channel,
give to the river the features of a lake. St. Inigoe's creek, flowing
into the river upon the right hand, along the base of these cliffs,
forms by its southern shore a flat, narrow and grass-clad point, upon
which the ancient Jesuit House of the patron saint whose name
distinguishes the creek, throws up, in sharp relief, its chateau-like
profile, together with its windmill, its old trees, barns and
cottages,--the whole suggesting a resemblance to a strip of pasteboard
scenery on a prolonged and slender base line of green.
When the voyager from the island has trimmed his sail and reached the
promontories which formed his first perspective, the river, now reduced
to a gun-shot in width, again opens to his view a succession of little
bays, intercepted by more frequent headlands and branching off into
sinuous creeks that lose themselves in the hills. Here and there,
amongst these creeks, a slender beach of white sand separates from its
parent flood a pool, which reposes like a mirror in the deep forest;
and all around, high hills sweep down upon these placid lakes, and
disclose half-embowered cottages, whose hoary roofs and antique forms
turn the musings of the spectator to the palmy days of the Lord
Proprietary.
A more enchanting landscape than St. Mary's river,--a lovelier
assemblage of grassy bank and hoary grove, upland slope, cliff, cot and
strand, of tangled brake and narrow bay, broad, seaward road-stead and
air-suspended cape, may not be found beneath the yearly travel of the
sun!
The ancient city was situated nearly two miles beyond the confluence of
St. Inigoe's creek, upon a spacious level plain which maintained an
elevation of some fifty feet above the river. The low-browed,
double-roofed and cumbrous habitations of the towns-people were
scattered at random over this plain, forming snug and pleasant groups
for a painter's eye, and deriving an air of competence and comfort from
the gardens and bowers in which they were sheltered. The State House
stood at the upper extremity of the town, upon a cedar-clad headland
which, by an abrupt descent, terminated in a long, flat, sandy point,
that reached almost half across the river. In regard to this building,
tradition--which I find to be somewhat inclined to brag of its
glory--affirms it to have been constructed in the shape of a cross,
looking towards the river, with walls thick enough to resist cannon,
and perilous steep roofs, from the top of the chief of which shot up a
spire, whereon was impaled a dolphin with a crooked, bifurcated tail. A
wooden quay and warehouse on the point showed this to be the seat of
trade, and a crescent-shaped bay or indentation between this and a
similar headland at the lower extremity of the town, constituted the
anchorage or harbour for the scant shipping of the port.
The State House looked rearward over the town common,--a large space of
open ground, at the farther end of which, upon the border of a marshy
inlet, covered with bulrushes and cat-tails, stood a squat, sturdy and
tight little gaol, supported,--to use the military phrase,--on one
flank by a pillory and stocks, and on the other by an implement of
government which has gone out of fashion in our day, but which found
favour with our ancestors as an approved antidote to the prevalent
distemper of an unnecessary or too clamorous loquacity in their
dames--a ducking stool, that hung suspended over a pool of sufficient
depth for the most obstinate case that might occur.
Without wearying my reader with too much description, I shall content
myself with referring to but two or three additional particulars as
necessary to my future purpose: a Catholic chapel devoted to St.
Ignatius, the patron of the province, in humble and unostentatious
guise, occupied, with its appurtenances, a few acres in the centre of
the plain, a short distance from that confine of the city which lay
nearest to St. Inigoe's; and in the opposite quarter, not far from the
State House, a building of much more pretension, though by no means so
neat, had been erected for the service of the Church of England, which
was then fast growing into the ascendant. On one of the streets leading
to the beach was the market house, surrounded by its ordinaries and
ale-houses: and lastly, in the year 1681, to which this description
refers, a little hostelry of famous report, known by the sign of "The
Crow and Archer," and kept by Master Garret Weasel, stood on the
water's edge, at the foot of the bank below the State House, on a piece
of level ground looking out upon the harbour, where the traveller may
still find a luxuriant wilderness of pear trees, the scions of a
notable ancestor which, tradition says, the aforesaid Garret planted
with his own hand.
The country around St. Mary's bore, at the period I have designated,
the same broad traces of settlement and cultivation which belong to it
at the present day. For many miles the scene was one of varied field
and forest, studded over with dwellings and farm yards. The settlements
had extended across the neck of land to the Chesapeake, and along both
shores of St. Mary's river to the Potomac. This open country was
diversified by woodland, and enlivened every where by the expanse of
navigable water which reflected sun and sky, grove and field and lowly
cottage in a thousand beautiful lights. Indeed, all the maritime border
of the province, comprehending Calvert, St. Mary's and Charles, as well
as the counties on the opposite shore of the Chesapeake, might be said,
at this date, to be in a condition of secure and prosperous habitation.
The great ocean forest had receded some hundred miles westward from St.
Mary's. The region of country comprising the present county of Anne
Arundel, as well as Cecil and the Isle of Kent, was a frontier already
settled with numerous tenants of the Lord Proprietary. All westward
from this was the birthright of the stern Sasquesahannoch, the fierce
Shenandoah, and their kindred men of the woods.
They are gone! Like shadows have these men of might sunk on the earth.
They, their game, their wigwams, their monuments, their primeval
forests,--yea, even their graves, have flitted away in this spectral
flight. Saxon and Norman, bluff Briton and heavy Suabian inherit the
land. And in its turn, well-a-day! our pragmatical little city hath
departed. Not all its infant glory, nor its manhood's bustle, its
walls, gardens and bowers,--its warm housekeeping, its gossiping
burghers, its politics and its factions,--not even its prolific dames
and gamesome urchins could keep it in the upper air until this our day.
Alas, for the vaulting pride of the village, the vain glory of the
city, and the metropolitan boast! St. Mary's hath sunk to the level of
Tyre and Sidon, Balbec and Palmyra! She hath become trackless,
tokenless.
I have wandered over the blank field where she sank down to rest. It
was a book whose characters I could scarce decipher. I asked for relics
of the departed. The winter evening tale told by father to son, and the
written legend, more durable than monument of marble, have survived to
answer my question, when brick and tile, hearth and tomb have all
vanished from the quest of the traveller.
What I have gathered from these researches will occupy my reader
through the following pages.