golden days. These come in late June, when it seems as if the
sun had wrought a miracle among the bleak ledges and along the
treeless slopes. Everywhere then in the seemingly barren pastures
springs up the shrubby, lanceolate-leaved genista, clothing them
in a rolling sea of its golden bloom. For weeks then the hills are
glad with a wonder of papilionaceous yellow blossoms that any other
pastures, however prolific of beauty, find it hard to match. The
same Puritans that cherished the witchcraft delusion brought this
plant with them from England, the dyer’s greenweed, woadwaxen or
whin, and as they passed on into history left it behind them. It
has wandered far in the waste places in New England, but nowhere
does it so clothe the hills and rough slopes with beauty as it does
in the region about Salem. The thought of this, already pushing
up through the sod, is best to take back to the city with one. As
the good in the Puritans was far greater than their grim misdeeds,
so this goes far to hide the bleakness of the ledges, as it seems
striving to. Perhaps some day it will even overgrow and hide the
iron in the summit of the hill where children play to-day, and make
them forget the story of its tragedies which now they are so eager
to tell to the visiting stranger.
Salem’s golden days began a century or more after the witchcraft
delusion had burnt to ashes in the fury of its own fire. Certainly
the descendants of the men who feared the devil and his emissaries
feared little else. He might be formidable dancing at night with
withered crones on the weird hills of Salem pastures, but they
laughed in his face when he came on the high seas with shotted
guns and foreign sailors outnumbering their own guns and crews
two to one. They beat the devil and they outgeneraled him, those
Salem sailors of the seventeen hundreds, whether he came in
English privateer or French man-o’-war or a score of feluccas or
piratical junks, and they brought great treasures home to Salem
town. They explored uncharted seas, visited ports unheard of before
and carried the name and fame of their home town the world over.
The world has made a great hero of Paul Jones, but there were
half-a-dozen young sea captains out of Salem in Revolutionary times
who did all that he did, and more, yet did it so unostentatiously
and so much as a part of the day’s work that the records of it
are hard to trace and for the most part have been lost. During the
Revolution Salem sent out 158 armed vessels carrying more than 2000
guns. They took 445 prizes, losing in return fifty-one of their own
fleet. Jonathan Harraden, for instance, sailed from Salem in the
privateer General Pickering, 180 tons, carrying fourteen 6-pounders
and a crew of less than fifty men. Thus manned and equipped they
captured a British privateer of twenty-two guns. Harraden put a
part of his crew on the captured vessel and the two sailed on. Off
the coast of Spain they sighted a vessel bearing down upon them,
and the captive British captain laughed as he told Harraden that
this was the British frigate Achilles of forty-two guns.
“Well, I shall not run from her,” said Harraden, stoutly; and
he did not. The big frigate soon recaptured the prize with its
short crew, but the little Pickering laid up alongside of her at
nightfall when the battle ceased for want of light. Harraden went
to bed and got a good night’s sleep. In the morning the battle
began again so near the coast that a hundred thousand Spaniards
made the hills black with spectators. The disparity in size of
the two vessels was such that an eyewitness said it was like a
ship’s long boat attacking a man-o’-war. But the little boat won
the battle, and not only the big frigate but the recaptured prize
struck to the indomitable Salem captain and his fearless Salem
crew. The battle was no sooner over than the sea was black with the
boats of admiring Spaniards who came out in great numbers and later
took Captain Harraden ashore and carried him about the city on
their shoulders. Report does not state whether the captain enjoyed
the ride, but at least he must have been proud of the admiration
which called it forth. Sailing again after the battle with the
Achilles, Harraden met three British ships of the size of his and
captured the three of them, one after another. In all during the
Revolution this one Salem captain took from the British more than a
thousand guns and sent home great wealth in prizes taken from the
far stronger sailor nation with which his country, one might almost
have said his town, was at war.
Joseph Peabody was another Salem sailor whose fame was to outlast
the Revolution and grow greater in the succeeding days of
hard-won peace. In those following days of peaceful, or at least
semi-peaceful trading adventure, Peabody owned, first and last,
83 ships which he freighted himself. In his time he shipped 7000
seamen and promoted 45 men from cabin boys to captains. In Salem
ships these cabin-boy captains, often striplings of nineteen or
twenty, sailed the seven seas, opened new ports to commerce,
conquering the prejudice of potentates, matched their wits and
wisdom against those of skilled merchants of the Orient and brought
back princely profit to the ship owners of Salem and in part to
themselves, for often captain and crew alike shared in the profits
they helped to make. In those days the Chinese called the Yankees
“the new people,” for they first heard of them when Salem ships
visited their ports, and the list of new lands first visited by
American ships from Salem is a long one.
It was in November, 1785, that the Grand Turk, belonging to Elias
Derby and commanded by Ebenezer West, cleared for Canton, China,
the first American ship to seek this round-the-world port.
Seventeen months after she returned, the result of her voyage, for
one thing, being a cargo that brought her owners twice more capital
than she had carried out. The Salem merchants often sold not only
the cargo but the ship itself in these far distant ports, and
later the Grand Turk was thus disposed of in India, Derby building
another and a larger vessel of the same name. In 1794 Salem owned
160 vessels of a tonnage totaling 16,788 tons. In 1805 this number
had increased to 54 ships, 18 barques, 72 brigs and 86 schooners,
of which 48 were employed in trade around the Cape of Good Hope.
In 1806 there were 73 ships, 11 barques and 48 brigs, all engaged
in this foreign trade, which gave such splendid opportunity for
adventure and such princely returns. Cargoes have been brought into
Salem port that realized 800 per cent on the capital invested,
and from 1800 to 1807 inclusive 1542 vessels in the foreign trade
arrived, paying an annual average duty of $755,157.90, and this at
the 10 or 12 per cent ad valorem which was the reasonable rate of
those days.
In the story of this Salem shipping from 1775 to 1875 is an Odyssey
that some latter-day Homer may yet make ring down the future ages.
The captains and crews of these ships needed all the courage and
wisdom of Ulysses, nor had sea-worn Odysseus so wide wanderings or
so strange adventures as they.
In Hawthorne’s time this age of Homeric adventure had indeed passed
from the port, yet Salem ships still sailed the seas, for in 1847,
when he was dreaming of Hester Prynne, her preacher lover and her
weird and satanic husband, as he bent over that old desk in the
custom-house, 78 vessels cleared from Salem for foreign ports. So
true it is that one’s eyes see only what they are fitted to see.
All about the dreamer were the records of these mighty adventures
told for the most part indeed in invoices and clearance papers,
but also, one must believe, echoing in the traditions which his
snug-harbored mariner confrères must have known, yet no story came
from his pen that shows he felt the call of the sea to those keen,
daring sea rovers on whose trail he camped. This was no loss to us,
doubtless. We would not swap the “Scarlet Letter” for any tale
that Stevenson told. Yet think what fancies would have taken shape
in Stevenson’s brain out of the dusty ghosts that still linger in
the nooks of the old custom-house!
More things than these are hidden away in Salem. The homing
instinct of the old sailors brought back from the seas of all the
earth thousands of strange relics which are still to be seen in the
magnificent Peabody Academy of Science and in the Essex Institute,
institutions free to all the world of which the city is justly
proud. Yet the home-keeping instinct of those who remained behind
was as strong, and the Salem homes of the days of the merchant
princes still remain, in some cases much as they were a century and
more ago. Now and then, within the uproar of a busy street one gets
a glimpse over a high board fence of gardens of quaint beauty, the
gravel walks bordered with prim box, the sward of a century green
and smooth, and the hardy perennials that the old-time home-keepers
loved and tended growing and blossoming there still, as beautiful
and deep-rooted as were the lives of the Salem mothers that sent
their sons forth to adventure on the seven seas while they waited
and wove love and longing into the beds of garden bloom. The modern
city has crowded these for long, yet the atmosphere of their brave
beauty remains still and belongs with the square, patrician dignity
of the houses.
In one of these gardens I glimpsed an oriole, flashing his tropic
colors along the branches of a magnolia, now just in its wonder of
white bloom. It was as if white patience of mother love had waited
him there, a gay young wanderer from Surinam, where, very likely,
he had spent the winter on an annual voyage. Gay and restless he
was, and his mellow voice prattled no doubt of all the strange
sights he had seen and the adventures he had met, while the fair
tree enfolded him in her arms and worshiped him with the tender
home perfume of mother love. It made me wonder a little, too,
why Hawthorne missed the orioles in the Salem gardens which he
must have seen each spring, and only birds of such somber colors
flitted through the flowers of his fancy. But after all it was
only one more proof that out of the inner eye come the colors of
our thoughts, and that the inherited shadows of the witch-finding
days must have dwelt deep in the soul of the Salem-born,
Puritan-descended dreamer of weird and somber romances.
XII
VERMONT MAPLE SUGAR
_Sap-Boiling Time in the Green Mountain State_
At ten o’clock the sap began to tinkle all through the grove. In
nearly eight hundred buckets it fell, drop by drop, and the sugar
season had begun. It was late March, but from the snow to the sky
the day had all the warmth and glow of June. The sun had been up
since before six. By seven it was shining bright into the Southern
Vermont valley which the Deerfield River has carved out of the
everlasting hills that roll and rise till the cone of Haystack tips
them, nearly four thousand feet above the sea level. Yet till ten
o’clock the maples sulked.
More sap is boiled in this beautiful bowl-shaped valley of which
Wilmington is the metropolis than in any other part of the State.
Vermont makes four-fifths of the maple sugar that is made in New
England, nearly half of what is made in the United States, and
here if anywhere you may see the art practised in its perfection.
There may be better sugar makers than C. S. Grimes, who has been
at it for sixty years, but if so I do not know them. He began with
the old-time black iron kettle, boiled in the open over a green
wood fire. He has seen the business grow in the sugar house to the
use of scientifically accurate evaporating pans where sap flows in
a steady stream into one end and comes out syrup of a law-required
density of eleven pounds to the gallon at the other, the whole
working automatically; and in that time he has learned something of
the whims of the maples themselves, though not all of them.
Much of the lore of the great gray trees he told me as we sat
together on the broad doorstone of the little white farmhouse,
steeping in the sun and looking down upon the peaceful valley and
across to Haystack, hazed in the blue smoke of spring. Everything
was ready. The spiles were driven and the white, pent-roofed pails
hung. The wood-house end of the sugar house was full to the top
of four-foot sticks ready for the boiling. Even the pan was full
of sap, for there had been a slight run a week before. But the
cold had shut down and the trees had quit. The morning before the
thermometer had stood at zero and the sap in the pan was ice. So,
no doubt, it was in the trees, and would be until the warmth had
reached the heart of them. I learned more in the grove as the
patient old horse drew the sled through a foot or two of old snow,
and we gathered the crystal-clear sap from the buckets and poured
it into the barrel, plodding from tree to tree. More still I got in
the sugar house while the veteran fed the roaring fire and skimmed
the scum from the boiling liquid as it flowed, an inch deep or so,
along the winding channels, back and forth, sap at one end, syrup
at the other.
The white men learned from the Indians the art of making maple
sugar. In the “Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society,”
published in 1684, we find the following: “The savages of Canada
in the time that the sap rises in the maple make an incision in
the tree by which it runs out. After they have evaporated eight
pounds of the liquor there remains one pound as sweet and as much
sugar as that which is got out of the canes. The savages here have
practised this art longer than any now living among them remember.”
The white man has since brought the practice to a science. The art
remains the same. How far back into the dim ages of the past it
goes no man may tell.
The sugar maple reaches maturity at about a hundred years. Then
in the forest the trees are seventy to eighty feet tall and have
a diameter of two to four feet. Trees grown from seed produce
the sweetest sap, second growth not being so good. The seedling
under favorable conditions may reach a diameter of sixteen inches
in fifteen years, though such growth is exceptional. It is not
profitable to tap them before the age of twenty. After that they
may be drawn from yearly, a tap to a tree at first. On the largest
trees two or more buckets may be hung, never one above the other,
as the sap flows up or down, never sidewise. The sweetest and
best sap comes from the outermost ring of growth, the wood of the
previous year. It is sweetest at the height of the run. It flows
better by day than by night; the brighter, lighter and sunnier the
day the faster it flows, the trees resting more or less at night.
As the sun declines, so does the flow, even when the temperature
remains the same. On warm nights, however, there is likely to be
some flow. Daytime sap is sweetest, and the nearer the occurrence
of a freeze or a snowstorm the sweeter the sap. Light seems to be
a powerful agent in the mystery, but a certain balance of heat
and cold is more powerful still. Freezing nights with alternating
warm days bring the ideal conditions, frozen roots and warm twigs
setting the alchemy at work.
Yet with all this and much more general knowledge to draw from each
grove is a study. The maples are strongly individualistic, and
every tree is a law unto itself. Some have a much higher percentage
of sugar to the same amount of sap than others. Indeed, it is
confidently predicted by experts that a race of superior trees
could be easily developed by taking seed from those of highest
sugar percentage, just as superior fruit trees are thus bred. The
profit to the sugar-maker from this is obvious. The future may see
it done. As conditions exist the average yield of sugar per tree
is from two to three pounds, though in favorable seasons this is
increased in some groves to five or six pounds. On the other hand
there are records of large trees which have yielded as much as
forty pounds of sugar in a season, and many have been known to give
twenty pounds. Sometimes a certain tree on a farm gets to be known
as “the sweet tree,” because of the large amount of sugar it yields
yearly.
The sky held a faint violet haze which deepened to royal purple
in all distances, a violet which seemed to materialize into
innumerable bluebirds which caroled coaxingly as they flew toward
the grove. Over on the edge of it song sparrows sang invitingly,
but the sugar makers did not move from the cosy doorstep until
nearly noon. Then we went toward the grove somewhat warily, as a
man tends his traps in the wilderness, rather hoping for luck but
doubtful. The sap moves when it gets ready, and no man can surely
say when. But a look into a bucket or two told us that the time
was at hand for quick action. From every tree a clear, colorless
liquid was oozing with rapid drip into the buckets, some of which
were a third full already. It looked like water, this new-born sap,
as clear as that from the finest spring, yet to my eye it seemed
to have a certain radiance, not a sparkle like an effervescent
liquid, but something purer and more effulgent, as if the nascent
life in it touched something in you by nerves dormant to ordinary
sensations. The sugar cane gives up its juice only to force. It
must be crushed and pressed. But here is a sweetness which the
tree almost bursts to deliver, which will not only drip from every
wound, but will force its way with overmastering prodigality. If
instead of putting a hollow oaken tap into the three-eighths inch
auger hole bored through the bark you drive in a solid plug, the
sap will push through the very pores of the oak wood. No wonder
when it reaches the twig tips the buds are driven into action and
the blossoms burst with astonishing vigor that nothing can delay.
There is little sweetness of taste to this wine of the wood gods,
but a cool, delectable refreshment that is born of the free winds
and mountain air. It tempts you to drink deep and often, and I
suspect that Vermonters do and have since the State was first
settled. No State has given to the nation more sturdy, dependable,
keenly vitalized, strong-souled men and women than this, from
the days of Ethan Allen down, and it may be that deep draughts
from the potent purity distilled by the rough-barked, rock-rooted
maples has more to do with it than we know. Maple syrup ought to be
recommended to the schools. I believe it would increase scholarship
and promote ethics.
The gray grove was like a temple of white stillness as we went
from tree to tree. The only sound was the crunch of soft snow and
the splash of sap within the barrel, a cool sound like that of sea
waves curling on the rocks. A pair of white-breasted nuthatches ran
deftly among the branches and seemed to respect the hush of the
place, calling to one another in tiny tones that only emphasized
the quiet. Here was the gray column of a beech, its smooth trunk
looking as if carved out of mottled marble. There stood a yellow
birch with a fringe of flaxen curls. But for the most part the
growth was of maples alone and with little underbrush, so that
we looked between the trees down to the valley below and up its
further side till the gaze touched the sky on the distant blue
summit of Haystack. It was easy to note with what feathers and fur
the earth keeps herself warm in the fierce cold of Vermont winters.
In the distance the black growth of evergreen spruce and hemlock
would hardly let the roughest gale pass within. Where these do
not stand interwoven the misty mingling of the twigs of deciduous
trees made a cloak that was softly beautiful to the eye yet hardly
less penetrable, and over all the cleared spaces and under all
other protection was the white ermine of the snow. The March sun
and the thawing rains of approaching spring had settled this snow
ermine closer to the ground, indeed, but had only compacted it more
firmly. A foot or more of it was everywhere and you could plunge to
the shoulders in the drifts.
[Illustration: “The only sound was the crunch of soft snow and the
splash of sap within the barrel.”
_See page 171_ ]
Soon the gathering barrel was full and the horse plodded back to
the sugar house, where from the hillside the sap ran into the
sapholder, a twenty-one barrel cask propped up within, thence to
go by gravity through a tube to the pan. Here the elder Grimes
was busy, feeding the roaring fire with four-foot sticks, skimming
the scum from the boiling sap and drawing the syrup into gallon
cans at the other end. Sugar making is no job for a lazy man, even
though the pan regulates the flow of the sap automatically, nor is
it nowadays to be conducted without some capital. The plant is a
small one, yet here, counting house, tools, tanks, pan, buckets,
etc., was an investment which easily figured up a thousand dollars.
The clear liquid from the trees ran in a steady stream, and the
boiling sap bubbled and frothed in one end and collected in palest
amber shallows in the other. Now that the run is started from eight
to thirty barrels of sap a day will come to the sugar house, taxing
the powers of the sugar maker to the uttermost to keep ahead of the
flow. It does not do for the sap to wait. The best syrup is made
from it when first collected and it will spoil if the delay before
boiling is too long. Often the fires roar and the sap boils for the
greater part of the twenty-four hours. It may be one or even three
o’clock in the morning during a good run before the man at the pan
can let his fire go out and snatch a few hours’ sleep. If the
night has been warm gathering may begin again soon after sunrise
and again he must be at his fires.
It is at the sugar house that the business of making maple sugar
has lost much of the romance of old days. The big black kettle in
the little shed or the open woods with its sugaring-off frolics
by the boys and girls is a thing of the past. In its place you
have a small factory equipment running overtime, with much of the
regularity of factory drudgery, while the short season lasts. Yet
it is a godsend to the farmer. His winter’s work in the woods is
done. His farm work has not yet begun, and the sugar brings in
many hundred dollars in ready cash, readier cash than he gets
on any other farm product. Good syrup brings from $1 to $1.25 a
gallon, and on a recent year it was estimated the returns from
maple sugar averaged over $3 each for every man, woman and child
in the State. That of course is gross returns, not profits. These
vary so greatly in individual cases and in various years that it
is impossible to get at the net result. Some Vermont farmers do
not think that sugar pays, and many have even gone to the extent
of cutting off their groves for wood, preferring the cash from the
trees once for all. This, of course, is killing the goose, for it
greatly depreciates the value of the farm. Indeed it is an axiom
in the Green Mountain State that a farm without a sugar orchard is
an unmarketable commodity. For all that it is safe to say that for
one reason or another not half the available trees in the State are
tapped yearly.