of your town now, is out of my power; nor would one evening’s time
admit of it. I will, however, say that to-day, not less than in the
days of the late James Savage, “a careful history of Weymouth is much
wanted.”[100] Nine years after my prentice effort, your associate and
recording secretary, Gilbert Nash, approached the subject both with a
better comprehension, and a knowledge much closer and far wider than
I could boast. But my effort, supplemented though it was by him, left
much to be desired,--a desideratum it should be the mission of this
Society to make good.
Turning then to Wessagusset, and the early history of Weymouth, and
confining myself to them, I find its record composed of two parts:--the
Wessagusset settlements, pre-historic almost in character, and the
subsequent struggling into life of Weymouth, in the early years of the
colony. The story of Wessagusset is in itself curiously interesting,
as well as of momentous importance; and it was in connection with that
I missed the opportunity of a life-time, to which I just referred. It
vexes me now to think of it. It even brings to mind Whittier’s familiar
lines:
“For of all sad words of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these: ‘It might have been!’”
It came about in this wise:--Weymouth is very classic ground; to what
an extent it is classic I certainly did not at the time now in question
appreciate; nor, I am confident, did your people appreciate it. Not
only did some of the most dramatic, as well as momentous, episodes in
the early life of Massachusetts here occur, but it so chanced that
one at least of those episodes has been woven into a poem familiar as
a household word. I refer, of course, to Longfellow’s “Courtship of
Miles Standish.” It was with that I should forever have connected my
effort of 1874; I should have vindicated history, while showing how, as
material for poetical treatment, Longfellow had failed to use it as it
might have been used. He also had proved unequal to the occasion. You
remember the episode in Longfellow’s poem to which I refer; it is the
seventh part, entitled “The March of Miles Standish.” I would like to
read the whole of this part to you; and then, in sharp contrast, set
before you the historic facts. I must, however, confine myself to some
two score lines of the poem, enough to recall its spirit, and follow
them with a mere outline of the actual facts. But that will suffice:
“Meanwhile the stalwart Miles Standish was marching steadily
northward,
Winding through forest and swamp, and along the trend of the seashore.
* * * * *
“After a three days’ march he came to an Indian encampment
Pitched on the edge of a meadow, between the sea and the forest;
Women at work by the tents, and the warriors, horrid with war paint,
Seated about a fire, and smoking and talking together;
Who, when they saw from afar the sudden approach of the white men,
Saw the flash of the sun on breastplate and sabre and musket,
Straightway leaped to their feet, and two, from among them advancing,
Came to parley with Standish, and offer him furs as a present;
Friendship was in their looks, but in their hearts there was hatred.
Braves of the tribe were these, and brothers gigantic in stature,
Huge as Goliath of Gath, or the terrible Og, king of Bashan;
One was Pecksuot named, and the other was called Wattawamat.
* * * * *
“But when he heard their defiance, the boast, the taunt, and the
insult,
All the hot blood of his race, of Sir Hugh and of Thurston de
Standish,
Boiled and beat in his heart, and swelled in the veins of his temples.
Headlong he leaped on the boaster, and, snatching his knife from its
scabbard,
Plunged it into his heart, and, reeling backward, the savage
Fell with his face to the sky, and a fiendlike fierceness upon it.
Straight there arose from the forest the awful sound of the war-whoop,
And, like a flurry of snow on the whistling wind of December,
Swift and sudden and keen came a flight of feathery arrows.
Then came a cloud of smoke, and out of the cloud came the lightning,
Out of the lightning thunder; and death unseen ran before it.
Frightened the savages fled for shelter in swamp and in thicket,
Hotly pursued and beset; but their sachem, the brave Wattawamat,
Fled not; he was dead. Unswerving and swift had a bullet
Passed through his brain, and he fell with both hands clutching the
greensward,
Seeming in death to hold back from his foe the land of his fathers.
“There on the flowers of the meadow the warriors lay, and above them,
Silent, with folded arms, stood Hobomok, friend of the white man.
* * * * *
“Thus the first battle was fought and won by the stalwart Miles
Standish.
When the tidings thereof were brought to the village of Plymouth,
And as a trophy of war the head of the brave Wattawamat
Scowled from the roof of the fort, which at once was a church and
a fortress,
All who beheld it rejoiced, and praised the Lord, and took courage.”
Such is the poet’s rendering; now what were the facts? We all
recognize in these cases what is known as “poetic license.” It is the
unquestioned privilege of the poet to so mould hard facts and actual
conditions as to make realities conform to his idea of the everlasting
fitness of things. On the other hand, it is but fair that, in so doing,
the artist should improve on the facts. In other words, he should
at least not make them more prosaic, and distinctly less dramatic,
than they were. In the present case, I submit, Longfellow, instead of
rendering things more poetic and dramatic, made them distinctly less
so. This I shall now proceed to show.
And here let me premise that it was the habit of Longfellow, as I think
the unfortunate habit, to improvise,--so to speak, to evolve from his
inner consciousness,--the local atmosphere and conditions of those
poems of his in which he dealt with history and historical happenings.
It was so with the “Ride of Paul Revere;” it was so with the episodes
made use of in the “Tales of a Wayside Inn;” it is notorious it was so
in the case of “Evangeline” and Acadia; it was strikingly, and far more
inexcusably, so in the case of “Miles Standish” and Plymouth. While
preparing a poem which has deservedly become an American classic, as
such throwing a glamour of romance over that entire region to which it
has given the name of the “Evangeline Country,” Longfellow never sought
to draw inspiration from actual contact with that “forest primeval” of
which he sang; nor again, when dealing with the events of our own early
history, did he once visit, much less study, the scene of that which he
pictured. He imagined everything. I gravely question whether he even
knew that the conflict he describes in the lines I have just quoted
took place on the shores of Boston bay, and at a point not twenty miles
from the historic mansion in which he lived, and the library where he
imagined. He certainly, and more’s the pity, never stood on King-oak
hill, or sailed up the Fore-river.
What actually occurred here in April, 1623, I have endeavored elsewhere
to describe in detail, just as it appears in our early records. Those
curious on the subject will find my narrative in a chapter (vi)
entitled “The Smoking Flax Blood-Quenched,” in a work of mine, the
matured outcome of my address here in 1874, called “Three Episodes of
Massachusetts History.” To that I refer them. Meanwhile, suffice it
for me now to say, the actual occurrences of those early April days
were stronger, more virile, and infinitely more dramatic and better
adapted to poetic treatment,--in one word, more Homeric,--than the
wholly apocryphal, and somewhat mawkish, cast given them in the lines
I have quoted. Indeed, so far as the incidents drawn from the history
of Weymouth are concerned, the whole is, in the original records,
replete with vigorous life. It smacks of the savage; it is racy of the
soil; it smells of the sea. It begins with the flight of Phineas Pratt
from Wessagusset to Plymouth, his loss of the way, his fear lest his
foot-prints in the late-lingering snow banks should betray him, his
nights in the woods, his pursuit by the Indians, his guidance by the
stars and sky, his fording the icy river, and his arrival in Plymouth
just as Miles Standish was embarking for Wessagusset. Nothing then can
be more picturesque, more epic in outline, than Standish’s voyage,
with his little company of grim, silent men in that open boat. Sternly
bent on action, they skirted, under a gloomy eastern sky, along the
surf-beaten shore, the mist driving in their faces as the swelling
seas broke roughly in white surge over the rocks and ledges which
still obstruct the course they took. From the distance came the dull,
monotonous roar of the breakers, indicating the line of the coast.
At last they cast anchor before the desolate and apparently deserted
block-house here in your Fore-river, and presently some woe-begone
stragglers answered their call. Next came the meeting with the savages,
the fencing talk, and the episode of what Holmes, in still another
poem, refers to as,
“Wituwamet’s pictured knife
And Pecksuot’s whooping shout;”
all closing with the fierce hand-to-hand death grapple on the
blood-soaked, slippery floor of the rude stockade. Last of all the
return to Plymouth, with the gory head of Wattawamat, “that bloody and
bold villain,” a ghastly freight, stowed in the rummage of their boat.
The whole story is, in the originals, full of life, simplicity and
vigor, needing only to be turned into verse. But, in place of the
voyage, we have in Longfellow’s poem a march through the woods,
which, having never taken place, has in it nothing characteristic;
an interview before an Indian encampment “pitched on the edge of a
meadow, between the sea and the forest,” at which the knife scene is
enacted, instead of in the rude block-house; and, finally, the killing
takes place amid a discharge of firearms, and “there on the flowers of
the meadow the warriors” are made to lie; whereas in fact they died
far more vigorously, as well as poetically, on the bloody floor of
the log-house in which they were surprised, “not making any fearful
noise, but catching at their weapons and striving to the last.” And as
for “flowers,” it was early in April, and, in spots, the snow still
lingered!
That Longfellow wrote very sweet verse, none will deny; but, assuredly,
he was not Homeric. At his hands your Weymouth history failed to have
justice done it. The case is, I fear, irremediable.
Another cause of great subsequent regret to me has been the fact that,
in 1874, the exact locality of the site of the original Wessagusset
settlement, and of Weston’s block-house, in which took place the death
grapple just referred to, was not known. Tradition asserted that it was
somewhere on Phillips creek, above the Fore-river bridge. Seventeen
years later, in a volume entitled “The Defences of Norumbega,”
published in 1891, by the late Prof. E. N. Horsford, I chanced across
a reproduction of Gov. Winthrop’s map of Massachusetts bay of 1634.
This map was in 1884 discovered by Henry Waters, among the manuscripts
of the Sloan collection, preserved in the British Museum.[101] A
portion of it, covering the Weymouth Fore-river and the Wessagusset
site, was reproduced in the printed “Proceedings of the Massachusetts
Historical Society” (Second Series, vol. vii, pp. 22-30), and thereon
is indicated the site of the original Wessagusset. That site no longer
exists; and it will ever be matter of profound regret to me that the
spot was not known, and the exact location fixed, a few years earlier,
at the time of the celebration of 1874. The spot was then unimproved,
as the expression goes; it has since been “improved” out of existence.
Sold for a trifling sum as a gravel, or a material, pit, had what has
since come to light then been known, it might have been secured, and
dedicated forever as a public water park fronting on the Fore-river. A
permanent memorial should there have been erected.
Instead, bodily carried away, it has literally been cast into the
sea; and the tide now daily ebbs and flows over the spot where, two
hundred and eighty-two years ago last April, Thomas Weston’s “stout
knaves” established themselves; and where, on April 6, 1623, that
hand-to-hand death grapple took place between Miles Standish and the
fierce Pecksuot, the result of which struck terror to the hearts of
the Massachusetts savages, and gave immediate safety, and years of
subsequent peace, to the infant Plymouth plantation.
Thus, what occurred at Wessagusset in that pre-historic period has
been in poetry and common acceptance so disguised, perverted and
transmogrified as to have lost all semblance of itself. It can no
longer be recognized; while the place where it all occurred has ceased
to be. So it only for us remains to recur to actualities.
In one other aspect the temporary lodgment of Thomas Weston’s “rude
fellows” here in Weymouth from June, 1622, to April, 1623, has an
interest in the Massachusetts annals. It is characteristic of a
distinct phase in the first attempts at the European occupation of New
England. I used the word “occupation” designedly, for those sporadic
trading stations cannot be referred to correctly as settlements; they
contained in themselves no power of self-perpetuation, being composed
wholly of men engaged for wages in an effort at the trade exploitation
of a region. This is wholly different from colonization in good faith.
Thomas Weston acted on a well-defined plan, when, early in 1622,
he dispatched his company to establish themselves somewhere on the
shores of Massachusetts bay. He himself expressed it:--“Families,” he
said, “were an encumbrance in any well-organized plantation; but a
trading-post occupied by able-bodied men only could accomplish more in
New England in seven years than in old England in twenty.”
Nor was his, here at Wessagusset, by any means the earliest attempt
of the sort. On the contrary, it had been preceded by a score of
years; and, twelve months ago, on the 1st day of September, 1903,
the 300th anniversary was observed of the similar, but even more
abortive, experiment made by Capt. Bartholomew Gosnold on the island of
Cuttyhunk, at the extreme western end of the Elizabethan group, off New
Bedford. Again, three years later, in August, 1607, a similar attempt
was made further to the eastward, when the Popham and Gorges plantation
was established on the Kennebec. In that case, the adventurers did
actually winter on the coast; but, as the survivors described their
experience, they found the country “over cold, and in respect of that
not habitable by Englishmen.”
At this time, as probably long before and continuously thereafter,
Monhegan island, southwest of Penobscot bay, seems to have been a
rendezvous for fishermen; and when, in the early spring of 1622,
those composing the advance of Thomas Weston’s company arrived at the
Damariscove station, on the group of islands just south of Penobscot
bay, they found that the men belonging to the ships there fishing “had
newly set up a May-pole and were very merry.” But, a band of sea-farers
only, there were no families in that company. These, one and all, were
mere fishing or trading posts; and, so far as I have been able to
learn, not until the Mayflower put into Provincetown harbor on what
is now the 21st of November, 1620, had any women of European blood
ever set foot on New England soil. That day is properly celebrated. It
marked the close of the trade-exploiting period, and the beginning of
true colonization.
With almost no interval between, or, at most, with an interval of
less than six months,--from early April to mid-September,--the Gorges
settlement followed, here at Weymouth, on that of Weston. Except in
one respect, I now find my thirty-years-ago treatment of this Gorges
settlement not unsatisfactory. I failed to grasp its significance in
connection with the European occupation of Massachusetts; and in that
connection it has a very considerable significance. To a certain extent
Mr. Nash afterwards made good my deficiencies. Nevertheless, the story
has, I apprehend, even yet, never been fully told. To tell it should
be one of the chief functions of your Society. I will endeavor briefly
to outline it, as I now surmise it to have been. For, with inquirers
into the events of a remote past, it is much as it is with persons
looking for things in dark places. The intellectual perceptions, like
the eyes, by degrees become accustomed to a murky environment; and
when so accustomed, things quite invisible to others are by long-time
investigators distinctly seen.
When that work of mine to which I have already referred,--the “Three
Episodes of Massachusetts History,”--appeared, now ten years ago, the
introductory part was entitled “The First Settlement of Boston Bay.”
Recently, a fifth impression has been called for, and this afforded
me an opportunity for a second preface to it, of some significance.
When the book first appeared, it naturally passed into the hands
of reviewers. As a rule, those reviews were not unfriendly; but
the writer of one of them displayed, in perfect good faith, his
absolute and complete inability to grasp the elementary significance
of the work before him. Supposing that the “First Settlement” there
referred to was that of Winthrop, in 1630, he intimated doubt as to
the necessity for any further account of that incident, it having
been already sufficiently dealt with. The man failed to get even a
glimmering perception of the fact that I was therein endeavoring
to exhume, and, so to speak, to vivify, a pre-historic settlement,
one anterior to that of Winthrop, and obliterated by it; as much
obliterated by it as are the ruins of earlier Egyptian temples, a
succession of which have occupied the same site. I was, in fact, a sort
of historical resurrectionist. Thus, as I sought to show, the real
first settlement of the region about Boston bay was considerably prior
to that of Winthrop; and, beginning with Weston’s venture in June,
1622, was, some ten years later, merged in that of Boston. But, for
years before Winthrop came, the region about Boston bay was occupied;
and, moreover, nearly all those stragglers,--the “old planters” they
were called,--came from Weymouth. Weymouth thus antedated Boston as a
permanent European settlement by at least six years.
This fact I endeavored to establish, and fix in our Massachusetts
history; and, moreover, the fact has singular historical interest. It
was a struggle for possession between two forms of civilization and of
religious faith. The Gorges settlement was ecclesiastical and feudal;
that led by Winthrop was theological and democratic: that is, both as
respects church and state, the Gorges attempt at Wessagusset was the
antithesis, the direct opposite, to the Winthrop accomplishment at
Shawmut. Moreover, the fate of the two settlements during the earlier
and crucial period depended not on events in Massachusetts, but upon
a struggle for supremacy going on in England. Gorges represented
Charles I; Winthrop, the Parliament. If the fortune of war had turned
otherwise than it did turn, and Charles I had emerged from the conflict
victorious, there can be little question Sir Ferdinando Gorges, and
not John Winthrop, would have shaped the destiny of Massachusetts. Its
history would then have been wholly other than it was.
In discussing the developments of the past,--the sequence of
history,--it is never worth while to philosophize over what might have
been, had something, which did not happen, chanced to happen at the
crucial moment. What did occur, actually occurred; and not something
else. None the less, so far as Weymouth is concerned, the forgotten
story of that abortive Gorges attempt at a feudal pre-emption, is
history; and, moreover, it is an extremely suggestive bit of history.
At one time, the chances seemed to preponderate in favor of Gorges,
and against Winthrop. First on the ground, the Gorges settlement
represented prerogative at a period when king and primate had it all
their own way. The permanence of the Puritan colony was thus for a
time at stake; and, indeed, it was years before the Gorges claims
ceased to occasion anxiety in the Boston council chamber. More than
once a royal intervention, from which there was no apparent avenue of
escape, seemed imminent. The single possible recourse was to a policy
of delay, of procrastination; and, while pursuing it, those entrusted
with the fate of the infant commonwealth watched in fear and trembling
the slow course of English events, as they unfolded themselves towards
a doubtful end. Time, and the chances of war on the other side of the
Atlantic, at last dispelled danger; but the Wessagusset settlement,
prior in time, long made itself sensibly felt as a disturbing factor
in Massachusetts development. And now, looking back on the celebration
held here in 1874, and my own contribution to it, I think I may fairly
claim that form and substance were at that time and there given to a
chapter of history then altogether forgotten; but, when revived, not
devoid of interest, because explanatory of much, before mysterious.
The Gorges settlement, moreover, was, I take it, a true settlement, not
a mere attempt at trade exploitation. And by a true settlement I mean
that it contained in itself the possibility of continued life; it was
self-perpetuating, for those composing it were in part women. Of it,
every line of contemporaneous record long since perished. That such a
record once existed, we know. In the inventory made after his death
of the property of William Blackstone, the recluse of Shawmut, among
the titles of a not inconsiderable library is found the significant
item, “ten paper books.” They were valued at six pence each; but, in
all human probability, those “paper books” contained Blackstone’s
day-by-day account of what occurred during the eleven years which
elapsed between his landing at Wessagusset in 1623, and his removal
from Boston in 1634. Those “paper books” we, moreover, know, preserved
for over forty years and until the death of him who wrote in them,
perished a month later in the flame and smoke which marked the outbreak
of King Philip’s war. In the next century also when, about 1750, Thomas
Prince compiled his Annals, he made reference to “manuscript letters,
taken from some of the oldest people at Weymouth.” These also are
hopelessly gone. Thus we have not, nor can we now reasonably hope ever
to have, any direct and authentic memorials of earliest Weymouth. We do
know, however, that Samuel Maverick came to Massachusetts bay in 1624,
and that he was associated with Gorges. That he came to Wessagusset,
cannot be asserted.[102] The place was outside the limits of the Robert
Gorges patent, and Maverick permanently established himself across the
bay at Chelsea, then known as Winnisimmet. He there married the widow
of David Thompson, another Gorges associate and the first occupant
of Thompson’s island, which, at the mouth of the Neponset, still
perpetuates his name. To Samuel Maverick a son was born before 1630.
Thomas Walford, also one of the Gorges following, that doughty
blacksmith of Charlestown who, by killing a wolf, discharged the fine
imposed on him because of nonconformity in church-going, was a married
man.
Of William Jeffreys and John Burslam, we know only that they remained
at Wessagusset, and were living here, apparently in prosperous
circumstances, at the time the place was incorporated as Weymouth. We
do not know positively that they were married, or had families; but the
inference is strong that such was the case. They were not adventurers,
mere wanderers, of the Thomas Weston and Thomas Morton stripe. They
had given hostages to fortune, and had a stake in the country.