A few miles from Boston, in Massachusetts, there is a deep inlet
winding several miles into the interior of the country from
Charles Bay, and terminating in a thickly-wooded swamp, or
morass. On one side of this inlet is a beautiful dark grove; on
the opposite side the land rises abruptly from the water’s edge,
into a high ridge on which grow a few scattered oaks of great age
and immense size. It was under one of these gigantic trees,
according to old stories, that Kidd the pirate buried his
treasure. The inlet allowed a facility to bring the money in a
boat secretly and at night to the very foot of the hill. The
elevation of the place permitted a good look-out to be kept that
no one was at hand, while the remarkable trees formed good
landmarks by which the place might easily be found again. The old
stories add, moreover, that the devil presided at the hiding of
the money, and took it under his guardianship; but this, it is
well-known, he always does with buried treasure, particularly
when it has been ill gotten. Be that as it may, Kidd never
returned to recover his wealth; being shortly after seized at
Boston, sent out to England, and there hanged for a pirate.
About the year 1727, just at the time when earthquakes were
prevalent in New England, and shook many tall sinners down upon
their knees, there lived near this place a meagre miserly fellow
of the name of Tom Walker. He had a wife as miserly as himself;
they were so miserly that they even conspired to cheat each
other. Whatever the woman could lay hands on she hid away; a hen
could not cackle but she was on the alert to secure the new-laid
egg. Her husband was continually prying about to detect her
secret hoards, and many and fierce were the conflicts that took
place about what ought to have been common property. They lived
in a forlorn-looking house, that stood alone and had an air of
starvation. A few straggling savin trees, emblems of sterility,
grew near it; no smoke ever curled from its chimney; no traveller
stopped at its door. A miserable horse, whose ribs were as
articulate as the bars of a gridiron, stalked about a field where
a thin carpet of moss, scarcely covering the ragged beds of
pudding-stone, tantalized and balked his hunger; and sometimes he
would lean his head over the fence, looked piteously at the
passer-by, and seem to petition deliverance from this land of
famine.
The house and its inmates had altogether a bad name. Tom’s wife
was a tall termagant, fierce of temper, loud of tongue, and
strong of arm. Her voice was often heard in wordy warfare with
her husband; and his face sometimes showed signs that their
conflicts were not confined to words. No one ventured, however,
to interfere between them; the lonely wayfarer shrunk within
himself at the horrid clamor and clapper-clawing; eyed the den of
discord askance, and hurried on his way, rejoicing, if a
bachelor, in his celibacy.
One day that Tom Walker had been to a distant part of the
neighborhood, he took what he considered a short cut homewards
through the swamp. Like most short cuts, it was an ill-chosen
route. The swamp was thickly grown with great gloomy pines and
hemlocks, some of them ninety feet high; which made it dark at
noon-day, and a retreat for all the owls of the neighborhood. It
was full of pits and quagmires, partly covered with weeds and
mosses; where the green surface often betrayed the traveller into
a gulf of black smothering mud; there were also dark and stagnant
pools, the abodes of the tadpole, the bull-frog, and the
water-snake, and where trunks of pines and hemlocks lay half
drowned, half rotting, looking like alligators, sleeping in the
mire.
Tom had long been picking his way cautiously through this
treacherous forest; stepping from tuft to tuft of rushes and
roots which afforded precarious footholds among deep sloughs; or
pacing carefully, like a cat, among the prostrate trunks of
trees; startled now and then by the sudden screaming of the
bittern, or the quacking of a wild duck, rising on the wing from
some solitary pool. At length he arrived at a piece of firm
ground, which ran out like a peninsula into the deep bosom of the
swamp. It had been one of the strongholds of the Indians during
their wars with the first colonists. Here they had thrown up a
kind of fort which they had looked upon as almost impregnable,
and had used as a place of refuge for their squaws and children.
Nothing remained of the Indian fort but a few embankments
gradually sinking to the level of the surrounding earth, and
already overgrown in part by oaks and other forest trees, the
foliage of which formed a contrast to the dark pines and hemlocks
of the swamp.
It was late in the dusk of evening that Tom Walker reached the
old fort, and he paused there for a while to rest himself. Any
one but he would have felt unwilling to linger in this lonely,
melancholy place, for the common people had a bad opinion of it
from the stories handed down from the time of the Indian wars;
when it was asserted that the savages held incantations here and
made sacrifices to the evil spirit. Tom Walker, however, was not
a man to be troubled with any fears of the kind.
He reposed himself for some time on the trunk of a fallen
hemlock, listening to the boding cry of the tree-toad, and
delving with his walking-staff into a mound of black mould at his
feet. As he turned up the soil unconsciously, his staff struck
against something hard. He raked it out of the vegetable mould,
and lo! a cloven skull with an Indian tomahawk buried deep in it,
lay before him. The rust on the weapon showed the time that had
elapsed since this death blow had been given. It was a dreary
memento of the fierce struggle that had taken place in this last
foothold of the Indian warriors.
“Humph!” said Tom Walker, as he gave the skull a kick to shake
the dirt from it.
“Let that skull alone!” said a gruff voice.
Tom lifted up his eyes and beheld a great black man, seated
directly Opposite him on the stump of a tree. He was exceedingly
surprised, having neither seen nor heard any one approach, and he
was still more perplexed on observing, as well as the gathering
gloom would permit, that the stranger was neither negro nor
Indian. It is true, he was dressed in a rude, half Indian garb,
and had a red belt or sash swathed round his body, but his face
was neither black nor copper color, but swarthy and dingy and
begrimed with soot, as if he had been accustomed to toil among
fires and forges. He had a shock of coarse black hair, that stood
out from his head in all directions; and bore an axe on his
shoulder.
He scowled for a moment at Tom with a pair of great red eyes.
“What are you doing in my grounds?” said the black man, with a
hoarse growling voice.
“Your grounds?” said Tom, with a sneer; “no more your grounds
than mine: they belong to Deacon Peabody.”
“Deacon Peabody be d——d,” said the stranger, “as I flatter myself
he will be, if he does not look more to his own sins and less to
his neighbor’s. Look yonder, and see how Deacon Peabody is
faring.”
Tom looked in the direction that the stranger pointed, and beheld
one of the great trees, fair and flourishing without, but rotten
at the core, and saw that it had been nearly hewn through, so
that the first high wind was likely to blow it down. On the bark
of the tree was scored the name of Deacon Peabody. He now looked
round and found most of the tall trees marked with the names of
some great men of the colony, and all more or less scored by the
axe. The one on which he had been seated, and which had evidently
just been hewn down, bore the name of Crowninshield; and he
recollected a mighty rich man of that name, who made a vulgar
display of wealth, which it was whispered he had acquired by
buccaneering.
“He’s just ready for burning!” said the black man, with a growl
of triumph. “You see I am likely to have a good stock of firewood
for winter.”
“But what right have you,” said Tom, “to cut down Deacon
Peabody’s timber?”
“The right of prior claim,” said the other. “This woodland
belonged to me long before one of your white-faced race put foot
upon the soil.”
“And pray, who are you, if I may be so bold?” said Tom.
“Oh, I go by various names. I am the Wild Huntsman in some
countries; the Black Miner in others. In this neighborhood I am
known by the name of the Black Woodsman. I am he to whom the red
men devoted this spot, and now and then roasted a white man by
way of sweet-smelling sacrifice. Since the red men have been
exterminated by you white savages, I amuse myself by presiding at
the persecutions of quakers and anabaptists; I am the great
patron and prompter of slave dealers, and the grand master of the
Salem witches.”
“The upshot of all which is, that, if I mistake not,” said Tom,
sturdily, “you are he commonly called Old Scratch.”
“The same at your service!” replied the black man, with a half
civil nod.
Such was the opening of this interview, according to the old
story, though it has almost too familiar an air to be credited.
One would think that to meet with such a singular personage in
this wild, lonely place, would have shaken any man’s nerves; but
Tom was a hard-minded fellow, not easily daunted, and he had
lived so long with a termagant wife, that he did not even fear
the devil.
It is said that after this commencement they had a long and
earnest Conversation together, as Tom returned homewards. The
black man told him of great sums of money which had been buried
by Kidd the pirate, under the oak trees on the high ridge not far
from the morass. All these were under his command and protected
by his power, so that none could find them but such as
propitiated his favor. These he offered to place within Tom
Walker’s reach, having conceived an especial kindness for him:
but they were to be had only on certain conditions. What these
conditions were, may easily be surmised, though Tom never
disclosed them publicly. They must have been very hard, for he
required time to think of them, and he was not a man to stick at
trifles where money was in view. When they had reached the edge
of the swamp the stranger paused.
“What proof have I that all you have been telling me is true?”
said Tom.
“There is my signature,” said the black man, pressing his finger
on Tom’s forehead. So saying, he turned off among the thickets of
the swamp, and seemed, as Tom said, to go down, down, down, into
the earth, until nothing but his head and shoulders could be
seen, and so on until he totally disappeared.
When Tom reached home he found the black print of a finger burnt,
as it were, into his forehead, which nothing could obliterate.
The first news his wife had to tell him was the sudden death of
Absalom Crowninshield, the rich buccaneer. It was announced in
the papers with the usual flourish, that “a great man had fallen
in Israel.”
Tom recollected the tree which his black friend had just hewn
down, and which was ready for burning. “Let the freebooter
roast,” said Tom, “who cares!” He now felt convinced that all he
had heard and seen was no illusion.
He was not prone to let his wife into his confidence; but as this
was an uneasy secret, he willingly shared it with her. All her
avarice was awakened at the mention of hidden gold, and she urged
her husband to comply with the black man’s terms and secure what
would make them wealthy for life. However Tom might have felt
disposed to sell himself to the devil, he was determined not to
do so to oblige his wife; so he flatly refused out of the mere
spirit of contradiction. Many and bitter were the quarrels they
had on the subject, but the more she talked the more resolute was
Tom not to be damned to please her. At length she determined to
drive the bargain on her own account, and if she succeeded, to
keep all the gain to herself.
Being of the same fearless temper as her husband, she sat off for
the old Indian fort towards the close of a summer’s day. She was
many hour’s absent. When she came back she was reserved and
sullen in her replies. She spoke something of a black man whom
she had met about twilight, hewing at the root of a tall tree. He
was sulky, however, and would not come to terms; she was to go
again with a propitiatory offering, but what it was she forebore
to say.
The next evening she sat off again for the swamp, with her apron
heavily laden. Tom waited and waited for her, but in vain:
midnight came, but she did not make her appearance; morning,
noon, night returned, but still she did not come. Tom now grew
uneasy for her safety; especially as he found she had carried off
in her apron the silver tea pot and spoons and every portable
article of value. Another night elapsed, another morning came;
but no wife. In a word, she was ever heard of more.
What was her real fate nobody knows, in consequence of so many
pretending to know. It is one of those facts that have become
confounded by a variety of historians. Some asserted that she
lost her way among the tangled mazes of the swamp and sunk into
some pit or slough; others, more uncharitable, hinted that she
had eloped with the household booty, and made off to some other
province; while others assert that the tempter had decoyed her
into a dismal quagmire, on top of which her hat was found lying.
In confirmation of this, it was said a great black man with an
axe on his shoulder was seen late that very evening coming out of
the swamp, carrying a bundle tied in a check apron, with an air
of surly triumph.
The most current and probable story, however, observes that Tom
Walker grew so anxious about the fate of his wife and his
property that he sat out at length to seek them both at the
Indian fort. During a long summer’s afternoon he searched about
the gloomy place, but no wife was to be seen. He called her name
repeatedly, but she was no where to be heard. The bittern alone
responded to his voice, as he flew screaming by; or the bull-frog
croaked dolefully from a neighboring pool. At length, it is said,
just in the brown hour of twilight, when the owls began to hoot
and the bats to flit about, his attention was attracted by the
clamor of carrion crows that were hovering about a cypress tree.
He looked and beheld a bundle tied in a check apron and hanging
in the branches of a tree; with a great vulture perched hard by,
as if keeping watch upon it. He leaped with joy, for he
recognized his wife’s apron, and supposed it to contain the
household valuables.
“Let us get hold of the property,” said he consolingly to
himself, “and we will endeavor to do without the woman.”
As he scrambled up the tree the vulture spread its wide wings,
and sailed off screaming into the deep shadows of the forest. Tom
seized the check apron, but, woful sight! found nothing but a
heart and liver tied up in it.
Such, according to the most authentic old story, was all that was
to be found of Tom’s wife. She had probably attempted to deal
with the black man as she had been accustomed to deal with her
husband; but though a female scold is generally considered a
match for the devil, yet in this instance she appears to have had
the worst of it. She must have died game, however: from the part
that remained unconquered. Indeed, it is said Tom noticed many
prints of cloven feet deeply stamped about the tree, and several
handfuls of hair that looked as if they had been plucked from the
coarse black shock of the woodsman. Tom knew his wife’s prowess
by experience. He shrugged his shoulders as he looked at the
signs of a fierce clapper-clawing. “Egad,” said he to himself,
“Old Scratch must have had a tough time of it!”
Tom consoled himself for the loss of his property by the loss of
his wife; for he was a little of a philosopher. He even felt
something like gratitude towards the black woodsman, who he
considered had done him a kindness. He sought, therefore, to
cultivate a farther acquaintance with him, but for some time
without success; the old black legs played shy, for whatever
people may think, he is not always to be had for calling for; he
knows how to play his cards when pretty sure of his game.
At length, it is said, when delay had whetted Tom’s eagerness to
the quick, and prepared him to agree to any thing rather than not
gain the promised treasure, he met the black man one evening in
his usual woodman dress, with his axe on his shoulder, sauntering
along the edge of the swamp, and humming a tune. He affected to
receive Tom’s advance with great indifference, made brief
replies, and went on humming his tune.
By degrees, however, Tom brought him to business, and they began
to haggle about the terms on which the former was to have the
pirate’s treasure. There was one condition which need not be
mentioned, being generally understood in all cases where the
devil grants favors; but there were others about which, though of
less importance, he was inflexibly obstinate. He insisted that
the money found through his means should be employed in his
service. He proposed, therefore, that Tom should employ it in the
black traffic; that is to say, that he should fit out a slave
ship. This, however, Tom resolutely refused; he was bad enough,
in all conscience; but the devil himself could not tempt him to
turn slave dealer.
Finding Tom so squeamish on this point, he did not insist upon
it, but proposed instead that he should turn usurer; the devil
being extremely anxious for the increase of usurers, looking upon
them as his peculiar people.
To this no objections were made, for it was just to Tom’s taste.
“You shall open a broker’s shop in Boston next month,” said the
black man.
“I’ll do it to-morrow, if you wish,” said Tom Walker.
“You shall lend money at two per cent a month.”
“Egad, I’ll charge four!” replied Tom Walker.
“You shall extort bonds, foreclose mortgages, drive the merchant
to bankruptcy—”
“I’ll drive him to the d—-l,” cried Tom Walker, eagerly.
“You are the usurer for my money!” said the black legs, with
delight. “When will you want the rhino?”
“This very night.”
“Done!” said the devil.
“Done!” said Tom Walker.—So they shook hands and struck a
bargain.
A few days’ time saw Tom Walker seated behind his desk in a
counting house in Boston. His reputation for a ready-moneyed man,
who would lend money out for a good consideration, soon spread
abroad. Every body remembers the days of Governor Belcher, when
money was particularly scarce. It was a time of paper credit. The
country had been deluged with government bills; the famous Land
Bank had been established; there had been a rage for speculating;
the people had run mad with schemes for new settlements; for
building cities in the wilderness; land jobbers went about with
maps of grants, and townships, and Eldorados, lying nobody knew
where, but which every body was ready to purchase. In a word, the
great speculating fever which breaks out every now and then in
the country, had raged to an alarming degree, and body was
dreaming of making sudden fortunes from nothing. As usual, the
fever had subsided; the dream had gone off, and the imaginary
fortunes with it; the patients were left in doleful plight, and
the whole country resounded with the consequent cry of “hard
times.”
At this propitious time of public distress did Tom Walker set up
as a usurer in Boston. His door was soon thronged by customers.
The needy and the adventurous; the gambling speculator; the
dreaming land jobber; the thriftless tradesman; the merchant with
cracked credit; in short, every one driven to raise money by
desperate means and desperate sacrifices, hurried to Tom Walker.
Thus Tom was the universal friend of the needy, and he acted like
a “friend in need;” that is to say, he always exacted good pay
and good security. In proportion to the distress of the applicant
was the hardness of his terms. He accumulated bonds and
mortgages; gradually squeezed his customers closer and closer;
and sent them, at length, dry as a sponge from his door.
In this way he made money hand over hand; became a rich and
mighty man, and exalted his cocked hat upon ’change. He built
himself, as usual, a vast house, out of ostentation; but left the
greater part of it unfinished and unfurnished out of parsimony.
He even set up a carriage in the fullness of his vain-glory,
though he nearly starved the horses which drew it; and as the
ungreased wheels groaned and screeched on the axle trees, you
would have thought you heard the souls of the poor debtors he was
squeezing.
As Tom waxed old, however, he grew thoughtful. Having secured the
good things of this world, he began to feel anxious about those
of the next. He thought with regret on the bargain he had made
with his black friend, and set his wits to work to cheat him out
of the conditions. He became, therefore, all of a sudden, a
violent church-goer. He prayed loudly and strenuously as if
heaven were to be taken by force of lungs. Indeed, one might
always tell when he had sinned most during the week, by the
clamor of his Sunday devotion. The quiet Christians who had been
modestly and steadfastly travelling Zion-ward, were struck with
self-reproach at seeing themselves so suddenly outstripped in
their career by this new-made convert. Tom was as rigid in
religious, as in money matters; he was a stern supervisor and
censurer of his neighbors, and seemed to think every sin entered
up to their account became a credit on his own side of the page.
He even talked of the expediency of reviving the persecution of
quakers and anabaptists. In a word, Tom’s zeal became as
notorious as his riches.
Still, in spite of all this strenuous attention to forms, Tom had
a Lurking dread that the devil, after all, would have his due.
That he might not be taken unawares, therefore, it is said he
always carried a small Bible in his coat pocket. He had also a
great folio Bible on his counting-house desk, and would
frequently be found reading it when people called on business; on
such occasions he would lay his green spectacles on the book, to
mark the place, while he turned round to drive some usurious
bargain.
Some say that Tom grew a little crack-brained in his old days,
and that fancying his end approaching, he had his horse new shod,
saddled and bridled, and buried with his feet uppermost; because
he supposed that at the last day the world would be turned upside
down; in which case he should find his horse standing ready for
mounting, and he was determined at the worst to give his old
friend a run for it. This, however, is probably a mere old wives’
fable. If he really did take such a precaution it was totally
superfluous; at least so says the authentic old legend, which
closes his story in the following manner:
On one hot afternoon in the dog days, just as a terrible black
thunder-gust was coming up, Tom sat in his counting-house in his
white linen cap and India silk morning-gown. He was on the point
of foreclosing a mortgage, by which he would complete the ruin of
an unlucky land speculator for whom he had professed the greatest
friendship. The poor land jobber begged him to grant a few
months’ indulgence. Tom had grown testy and irritated and refused
another day.
“My family will be ruined and brought upon the parish,” said the
land jobber.
“Charity begins at home,” replied Tom, “I must take care of
myself in these hard times.”
“You have made so much money out of me,” said the speculator.
Tom lost his patience and his piety—“The devil take me,” said he,
“if I have made a farthing!”
Just then there were three loud knocks at the street door. He
stepped out to see who was there. A black man was holding a black
horse which neighed and stamped with impatience.
“Tom, you’re come for!” said the black fellow, gruffly. Tom
shrunk back, but too late. He had left his little Bible at the
bottom of his coat pocket, and his big Bible on the desk buried
under the mortgage he was about to foreclose: never was sinner
taken more unawares. The black man whisked him like a child
astride the horse and away he galloped in the midst of a
thunder-storm. The clerks stuck their pens behind their ears and
stared after him from the windows. Away went Tom Walker, dashing
down the street; his white cap bobbing up and down; his
morning-gown fluttering in the wind, and his steed striking fire
out of the pavement at every bound. When the clerks turned to
look for the black man he had disappeared.
Tom Walker never returned to foreclose the mortgage. A countryman
who lived on the borders of the swamp, reported that in the
height of the thunder-gust he had heard a great clattering of
hoofs and a howling along the road, and that when he ran to the
window he just caught sight of a figure, such as I have
described, on a horse that galloped like mad across the fields,
over the hills and down into the black hemlock swamp towards the
old Indian fort; and that shortly after a thunder-bolt fell in
that direction which seemed to set the whole forest in a blaze.
The good people of Boston shook their heads and shrugged their
shoulders, but had been so much accustomed to witches and goblins
and tricks of the devil in all kinds of shapes from the first
settlement of the colony, that they were not so much
horror-struck as might have been expected. Trustees were
appointed to take charge of Tom’s effects. There was nothing,
however, to administer upon. On searching his coffers all his
bonds and mortgages were found reduced to cinders. In place of
gold and silver, his iron chest was filled with chips and
shavings; two skeletons lay in his stable instead of his
half-starved horses, and the very next day his great house took
fire and was burnt to the ground.
Such was the end of Tom Walker and his ill-gotten wealth. Let all
griping money-brokers lay this story to heart. The truth of it is
not to be doubted. The very hole under the oak trees, from whence
he dug Kidd’s money, is to be seen to this day; and the
neighboring swamp and old Indian fort is often haunted in stormy
nights by a figure on horseback, in a morning-gown and white cap,
which is doubtless the troubled spirit of the usurer. In fact,
the story has resolved itself into a proverb, and is the origin
of that popular saying prevalent throughout New-England, of “The
Devil and Tom Walker.”
Such, as nearly as I can recollect, was the tenor of the tale
told by the Cape Cod whaler. There were divers trivial
particulars which I have omitted, and which wiled away the
morning very pleasantly, until the time of tide favorable for
fishing being passed, it was proposed that we should go to land,
and refresh ourselves under the trees, until the noontide heat
should have abated.
We accordingly landed on a delectable part of the island of
Mannahatta, in that shady and embowered tract formerly under
dominion of the ancient family of the Hardenbrooks. It was a spot
well known to me in the course of the aquatic expeditions of my
boyhood. Not far from where we landed, was an old Dutch family
vault, in the side of a bank, which had been an object of great
awe and fable among my schoolboy associates. There were several
mouldering coffins within; but what gave it a fearful interest
with us, was its being connected in our minds with the pirate
wreck which lay among the rocks of Hell Gate. There were also
stories of smuggling connected with it, particularly during a
time that this retired spot was owned by a noted burgher called
Ready Money Prevost; a man of whom it was whispered that he had
many and mysterious dealings with parts beyond seas. All these
things, however, had been jumbled together in our minds in that
vague way in which such things are mingled up in the tales of
boyhood.
While I was musing upon these matters my companions had spread a
repast, from the contents of our well-stored pannier, and we
solaced ourselves during the warm sunny hours of mid-day under
the shade of a broad chestnut, on the cool grassy carpet that
swept down to the water’s edge. While lolling on the grass I
summoned up the dusky recollections of my boyhood respecting this
place, and repeated them like the imperfectly remembered traces
of a dream, for the entertainment of my companions. When I had
finished, a worthy old burgher, John Josse Vandermoere, the same
who once related to me the adventures of Dolph Heyliger, broke
silence and observed, that he recollected a story about
money-digging which occurred in this very neighborhood. As we
knew him to be one of the most authentic narrators of the
province we begged him to let us have the particulars, and
accordingly, while we refreshed ourselves with a clean long pipe
of Blase Moore’s tobacco, the authentic John Josse Vandermoere
related the following tale.