The Story of an Island Which Disappeared and the Curious Old Legend of
the Spot Now Marked by This Interesting Beacon.
As a person enters Boston Harbor by the main ship channel, having
threaded his way between Lovell’s Island and Gallup’s Island, and just
before passing between Long Island and Deer Island, he sees at his left
a unique monument marking a dangerous ledge and shoal. So peculiar is
its appearance that every stranger is sure to ask, “What is that?” To
this some local wiseacre promptly responds, “Nix’s Mate”; but usually he
cannot explain its meaning or even spell the name correctly.
The “Mate” is a massive piece of copper-riveted masonry, forty feet
square and twelve feet high (with stairs on one side), upon whose top
rises a black wooden pyramid, twenty feet high. Two hundred years ago,
where this weird pyramid now stands, there was a fertile island of
twelve acres, furnishing excellent grazing, and called, in
consequence, Green Island. So much is history. A curious old book,
long out of print,[4] has woven the legend of the name into a pleasing
romance, which in brief is as follows:
Footnote 4:
Nix’s Mate: an Historical Romance of America, by the author of
“Athenia of Damascus,” etc. In two volumes. Published by Samuel
Colman, No. VIII Astor House, Broadway, 1839.
When Sir William Phips made his celebrated expedition to the Spanish
Main in 1687, under the auspices of the Duke of Albemarle, in which he
recovered some millions of sunken gold and enriched himself for life,
he was accompanied by one Captain Nix and his first mate, Edward
Fitzvassal. As the first expedition was so wonderfully successful,
Captain Nix went out on another search and raised another precious
cargo from the bottom of the deep. But on his return the crew of his
vessel, the Dolphin, mutinied, under the leadership of the mate, and
turned pirates.
Captain Nix and six others were set adrift early in the year 1689, in
an open boat, and left to their fate. After incredible hardships they
reached land, only to be captured by savages. Toward spring they
escaped in a canoe, and finally landed on Green Island, June 1, 1689.
They contrived to reach Boston Town, and there they found the Dolphin
and Fitzvassal, too, who had assumed the name of Captain Nix.
Fitzvassal was tried for piracy, convicted, and sentenced to be
executed on Green Island on June 5. But for some service which he had
rendered to the colony while bearing his assumed name he was pardoned
by the governor (Bradstreet). Before the news of the pardon reached
him, however, he took a fatal dose of poison.
He was buried on Green Island, and his sole mourner was an Indian maid
and sibyl who had loved him. She prophesied that the island would wash
away, and her prediction was fulfilled: little by little, the earth
slid off the rock into the sea, and now nothing remains but a
dangerous ledge upon which stands the curious beacon—Nix’s Mate.
Achievements of Famous Invalids.
Some of the Most Distinguished Workers in the Fields of Literature and
Music Have Won Their Triumphs While Defying Disease—Many Examples of
Extraordinary Longevity.
_An original article written for_ THE SCRAP BOOK.
Ill health and infirmity do not always prevent the accomplishment of
great things, and the list of invalids who have been famous for
excelling in their chosen field is long and brilliant. Naturally such
persons usually have been restricted to the quieter pursuits. Literature
seems to have been the field wherein most of them have found congenial
occupation, though there have been great invalids in other professions,
also.
The long battle of Robert Louis Stevenson against the malady which
finally conquered him, is well known to every one. He traveled about,
from place to place, searching for the spot where he could hope to live
at least long enough to do some of the work which it lay in him to do,
until, at last, in the Samoan Islands, in the South Seas, he found the
haven for which he had been searching. There the heroic struggle went on
for the four last years of his life, and there he was buried high on the
peak of Mount Væa, above his island home.
Probably no famous writer suffered for a longer period than did
Alexander Pope, who was stricken, when only a child of ten, with a
malady which deformed his body and robbed him of health and comeliness,
leaving him to forty-six years of invalidism. His constant study and
work, combined with this physical infirmity, made his life “one long
disease.”
Carlyle, Heine, and Keats.
Thomas Carlyle was a chronic dyspeptic, and suffered, all his life, the
torments which only those unfortunates, who are victims of this disease,
can comprehend. The bitterness of some of his writings which were
published after his death may surely be excused when this is considered,
for the chronic dyspeptic is generally understood to develop, in spite
of himself, a gloomy view of life.
Heinrich Heine, the great German lyric poet, was the victim, during the
last twelve years of his life, of relentless disease. He bore his
dreadful sufferings so patiently that he appears in a nobler light than
ever before during his life. His hearing was bad, his sight was dim, and
his legs were paralyzed, yet he wrote some of his most wonderful songs
during the long watches of sleepless nights, lying on his
“mattress-grave.” He described his condition as “a grave without rest,
death without the privileges of the departed,” yet he was never so
many-sided as during this period. He produced humorous pieces, political
songs, and the tenderest poems. He kept at his work as long as he could
hear and speak, his last words being “paper and pencil.”
John Keats, while on a tour of the English Lakes, contracted a throat
trouble which developed into consumption. He continued to write, though
he failed rapidly in health, and his last volume contains some of his
best poems.
Mrs. Browning and the Brontës.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning was confined to her room for seven years, but
was restored to something like a normal state of health before her
marriage. The long period of illness was partly caused by the death of
her brother, of whom she was extremely fond, and many times her life was
despaired of. She wrote in spite of sickness, however, and produced some
excellent verse. All her life she struggled against a naturally weak
constitution and she worked under difficulties.
Count Giacomo Leopardi, an Italian poet, was another whose life from
childhood was made melancholy by impaired health. In his case it was
largely the result of the energy with which he gave himself up to study,
when he was only a child, thus undermining an already delicate
constitution. He was the victim of a perpetual melancholy, and he
wandered to and fro in Italy, always the prey of ceaseless physical
tortures, which prevented him from accepting any permanent position that
might have relieved the constant and pressing need of money. He attained
distinction as a philologist and was offered a university professorship
in Germany by Bunsen, but was unable to accept it because of his
infirmity.
The three gifted Brontë sisters were all in wretched health. Emily and
Anne died within a year of each other, leaving Charlotte to a lonely
life of sorrow and heartache. She worked on, in spite of all, with
indomitable energy and courage, and the genius of the woman is all the
more remarkable when one realizes that her sufferings were both physical
and mental. Her work came from an aching heart as well as from a weak
and ill body. One short year of happiness was hers at the end, when she
became the wife of the Rev. Mr. Nicholls, curate under her father, who
had long loved her.
Parkman and Prescott.
Francis Parkman, the American historian, is an illustrious example of
heroic perseverance in the face of great difficulties. He selected as
his life work the writing of the history of the rise and fall of the
French power in America. He began a most exhaustive research which
carried him west into the Black Hills, where the hardships he endured
broke down his health and left him a semi-invalid for the rest of his
life.
He kept at his appointed task, though fourteen years elapsed between the
first part of his work and the second. To occupy the time which his
health would not permit him to devote to the greater work, he took up
the study of horticulture, in which he grew so proficient that he
published a book on roses and was made professor of horticulture in the
Harvard Agricultural School.
From 1865 to 1892 he brought out the various parts necessary to complete
his great work. During all of this time, however, his health was so
precarious that he depended almost entirely upon dictation instead of
his pen, and his material was collected for him by hired copyists. The
story of his struggle is regarded as one of the most heroic in the
history of literature.
William Hickling Prescott was another historian whose labors were made
difficult by infirmity. While he was at Harvard he lost the sight of one
eye by an accident, and the other was so affected that he was obliged to
pass several months in a darkened room. The sight was partly restored,
but he could never use it in any trying work, nor more than a little
while each day, and he suffered constantly with it and from the
apprehension which it occasioned.
With the aid of secretaries and readers he set to work, determined to
prepare himself for literature, as more active fields were closed to
him. He wrote some himself, in spite of his affliction, using a writing
frame designed especially for the blind—and he produced work which
placed him in the ranks with the most brilliant historians.
Famous Musicians and Poets.
Chopin, the great modern master of pianoforte composition, was unable,
because of lack of physical strength, to play some of his own works as
he would have them played. A trip to England, of only eleven days’
duration, was enough to develop the latent consumption which was in his
family, and from this time on he worked under the advancing ravages of
the disease, though he lived twelve years before finally succumbing to
its onslaught. Many times during this period he was reported at death’s
door.
Handel became blind seven years before his death, yet continued his work
and accompanied one of his oratorios upon the organ only eight days
before his death.
Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott both were lame from a deformed foot, but
suffered no inconvenience from the infirmity. Milton became blind and
Beethoven was deaf from about his thirtieth year. He faced the pathetic
situation with the brave resolve: “I will grapple with fate; it shall
never drag me down.” His life was lived along these lines, and never did
his courage falter or his fortitude give way, though the affliction to a
musician was almost the greatest he could suffer.
Methuselahs Laughed at Doctors.
Some of the modern Methuselahs have been persons who were given up by
the doctors to fill an early grave. Surely this fact, taken in
connection with the many examples that there are of the great things
which invalids have accomplished, ought to bring the champions of
euthanasia up short. Perhaps it is too much to expect that anything will
stop the man who is once thoroughly launched on this delusive line of
thought, but for the sake of the timorous who are not, perhaps, as
rugged in health as the men who advocate this “simple and humane”
reform, the following examples of men and women, not famous, who have
attained to a “green old age” in spite of being in an apparently
hopeless condition, are quoted. They are taken from a paper written by
E. H. Von den Eynden, of Antwerp, and published there in 1882, under the
title “Singularités Macrobiologiques”—(Curiosities of Long Life).
Adèle Lambotte died at Liege in 1763, aged one hundred and one years.
She was scarcely thirty-two inches in height, and so crippled in her
legs and feet that from infancy she was compelled to walk on crutches.
In 1774 there lived at Château Neuf, in Thimerais, France, a certain
demoiselle Thierree. At the time, she was over forty years old, and an
invalid, forever taking medicines. A contemporary describes her
graphically thus:
“A few tufts of grisly hair, two squinting eyes, lost in the multitude
of wrinkles and hanging folds of skin that stood for nose and cheeks,
and with a head in perpetual oscillation.”
She lived in the open air, strolling from point to point in all sorts
of wind and weather. She enjoyed an income amounting to about one
thousand dollars, and some of her friends made her a proposition to
transfer their property to her providing she would pay them a certain
annuity and devise the property back to them at her death.
The bargain was made, and faithfully kept, as far as the annuity was
concerned, yet so skilfully did she manage affairs that she soon had
an income of two thousand dollars over and above all expenditures. Her
friends meanwhile imagined that they had made a good bargain, as her
physician had assured them that she “could never see the return of the
swallows next spring.”
The swallows came and went, and came and went again, and they got
impatient, and in some way the “old mamselle” found it out. Then she
set herself to live in earnest. She wept for Louis XVI, lived through
and detested the Revolution, saw the funerals of Bonaparte and Charles
X, and lived through the barricades of 1830.
Finally, in 1835, she died, aged one hundred and five years, lacking
part of a month. On making an inventory of her affairs her executor
found upward of four hundred linen chemises, each made with her own
hands, not one of which had ever been worn. Her revenue, at the time
of her death, was two hundred thousand dollars.
The people who made the bargain had died one after another, the last
one more than forty years before her demise.
Remarkable Centenarians.
In 1699 the Mémoires of the Academy of Sciences recorded the death of
a man, aged one hundred years, whose spinal column consisted of one
single bone, the intermediate cartilages having ossified.
About the middle of the seventeenth century there was carried in
solemn procession and hung up before the shrine of Notre Dame de
Liesse an enormous vesical calculus, on which was engraved the
following legend:
“This stone was removed from François Annibal d’Etrées, duke and peer,
Grand Marshal of France, by the grace of God through the intercession
of the Blessed Virgin, September 15, 1654.”
The grand marshal was eighty-two years old when the terrible operation
was performed. It gave him a new lease of life, as he did not die
until 1675, more than twenty years afterward, aged one hundred and two
years and a few months.
A poor girl, daughter of a retainer of the Château de Colemberg, near
Boulogne, named Nicole Mare, was born deformed, and, besides having a
withered forearm, was so humpbacked that she stood less than four feet
high. With all this, she lived to the age of one hundred and ten
years. Her occupation was herding cattle, and it is said that the only
food she ever tasted was bread and milk.
Sick for One Hundred Years.
The celebrated Fontanelle, who, it is said, never enjoyed a well day
in his life, and whose constitution was so frail that the least
exposure made him ill, yet lived within less than one month of one
hundred years.
M. Le Fermy, a peasant of the village of Saint-Justin, near
Mont-de-Marsan, France, died in his native village September 13, 1714,
aged one hundred and ten years and two months. All his life he was
regarded as a feeble man. The note recording his death says:
“He was married five times, _although_ he lived soberly and was
regarded as weakly.”
In 1760, at Graessans, in the diocese of Saint-Papoul, France, died a
woman whose age is recorded as one hundred and thirteen years and one
month. She died of asthma, with which she had suffered for forty-five
years.
The Benedictine monk, Brother N. Graillet, of the Abbey of Calvary, at
La Fère, France, died in the abbey in 1763, aged one hundred and two
years. He had entered the abbey in his thirtieth year, in ill-health
and disappointed in life. “For seventy-two years, although always
feeble, he obeyed every rule of the abbey, and was always first in
filling the functions of the community,” is his record.
Pierre Foucault, a native of Abbéville, died in that place in 1766,
aged one hundred and fifteen years. Up to the age of fifty his health
had been very precarious, and during the years between fifty and sixty
“he suffered many maladies.” After that he recovered his usual health
and lived fifty-five years. His father died aged one hundred and two,
and his grandfather was accidentally killed while hunting, at the age
of eighty-seven.
Had Many Diseases.
Madame Ristori, probably an ancestress of the celebrated artiste, died
at Empoi—a village in Tuscany—in 1767, aged one hundred and ten years.
Her whole life was passed in frightful poverty and hardship. She was
an invalid nearly her whole life, and had, besides, almost every
disease that can be named, at one or another period of her existence.
Marguerite Couppéc, widow of Richard Couppéc, died at Rouen in 1769.
The baptismal register at Caux, where she was born in 1654, shows
conclusively that she was one hundred and fifteen years old at death.
“All her life,” says her tombstone, “she lived in poverty and illness,
having had many most violent diseases, notwithstanding which she was
most laborious, being always occupied as long as her hands could
work.”