village is very like other fishing-villages along the coast. Most of
the peculiar characteristics of the race are lost in the present
generation of young women, who are addicted to the use of hoops and
water-falls, and young men, who condescend to spoil their good looks
by dyeing their handsome blond beards with the fashionable mixture
which inevitably produces a lustre like stove-blacking. But there are
sensible fellows among them, fine specimens of the hardy New England
fisherman, Saxon-bearded, broad-shouldered, deep-chested, and bronzed
with shade on shade of ruddy brown. The neutral blues and grays of
the salt-water make perfect backgrounds for the pictures these men
are continually showing one in their life about the boats. Nothing
can be more satisfactory than the blendings and contrasts of color
and the picturesque effect of the general aspect of the natives in
their element. The eye is often struck with the richness of the color
of some rough hand, glowing with mingled red, brown, and orange,
against the gray-blue water, as it grasps an oar, perhaps, or pulls
in a rope. It is strange that the sun and wind, which give such fine
tints to the complexions of the lords of creation, should leave such
hideous traces on the faces of women. When they are exposed to the
same salt wind and clear sunshine they take the hue of dried fish, and
become objects for men and angels to weep over. To see a _bona fide_
Shoaler “sail a boat” (when the craft is a real boat and no tub) is
an experience. The vessel obeys his hand at the rudder as a trained
horse a touch on the rein, and seems to bow at the flash of his eye,
turning on her heel and running up into the wind, “luffing” to lean
again on the other tack,--obedient, graceful, perfectly beautiful,
yielding to breeze and to billow, yet swayed throughout by a stronger
and more imperative law. The men become strongly attached to their
boats, which seem to have a sort of human interest for them,--and no
wonder. They lead a life of the greatest hardship and exposure, during
the winter especially, setting their trawls fifteen or twenty miles to
the eastward of the islands, drawing them next day if the stormy winds
and waves will permit, and taking the fish to Portsmouth to sell. It is
desperately hard work, trawling at this season, with the bitter wind
blowing in their teeth, and the flying spray freezing upon everything
it touches,--boats, masts, sails, decks, clothes completely cased in
ice, and fish frozen solid as soon as taken from the water. The inborn
politeness of these fishermen to stranger-women is something delightful
to witness. I remember once landing in Portsmouth, and being obliged to
cross three or four schooners just in (with their freight of frozen
fish lying open-mouthed in a solid mass on deck) to reach the wharf. No
courtly gentlemen could have displayed more beautiful behavior than did
these rough fellows, all pressing forward, with real grace,--because
the feeling which prompted them was a true and lofty feeling,--to help
me over the tangle of ropes and sails and anchors to a safe footing on
shore. There is a ledge forty-five miles east of the islands, called
Jeffrey’s Ledge, where the Shoalers go for spring fishing. During a
northeast storm in May, part of the little fleet came reeling in before
the gale; and, not daring to trust themselves to beat up into the
harbor (a poor shelter at best), round the rocky reefs and ledges, the
fishermen anchored under the lee of Appledore, and there rode out the
storm. They were in continual peril; for, had their cables chafed apart
with the shock and strain of the billows among which they plunged, or
had their anchors dragged (which might have been expected, the bottom
of the sea between the islands and the mainland being composed of mud,
while all outside is rough and rocky), they would have inevitably been
driven to their destruction on the opposite coast. It was not pleasant
to watch them as the early twilight shut down over the vast, weltering
desolation of the sea, to see the slender masts waving helplessly from
one side to another,--sometimes almost horizontal, as the hulls turned
heavily this way and that, and the long breakers rolled in endless
succession against them. They saw the lights in our windows a half-mile
away; and we, in the warm, bright, quiet room, sitting by a fire that
danced and shone, fed with bits of wreck such as they might scatter
on Rye Beach before morning, could hardly think of anything else than
the misery of those poor fellows, wet, cold, hungry, sleepless, full
of anxiety till the morning should break and the wind should lull. No
boat could reach them through the terrible commotion of waves. But they
rode through the night in safety, and the morning brought relief. One
brave little schooner “toughed it out” on the distant ledge, and her
captain told me that no one could stand on board of her; the pressure
of the wind down on her decks was so great that she shuddered from stem
to stern, and he feared she would shake to pieces, for she was old and
not very seaworthy. Some of the men had wives and children watching
them from lighted windows at Star. What a fearful night for them! They
could not tell from hour to hour, through the thick darkness, if yet
the cables held; they could not see till daybreak whether the sea had
swallowed up their treasures. I wonder the wives were not white-haired
when the sun rose, and showed them those little specks yet rolling in
the breakers! The women are excessively timid about the water, more so
than landswomen. Having the terror and might of the ocean continually
encircling them, they become more impressed with it and distrust it,
knowing it so well. Very few accidents happen, however: the islanders
are a cautious people. Years ago, when the white sails of their little
fleet of whale-boats used to flutter out of the sheltered bight and
stand out to the fishing-grounds in the bay, how many eyes followed
them in the early light, and watched them in the distance through
the day, till, toward sunset, they spread their wings to fly back
with the evening wind! How pathetic the gathering of women on the
headlands, when out of the sky swept the squall that sent the small
boats staggering before it, and blinded the eyes, already drowned in
tears, with sudden rain that hid sky and sea and boats from their eager
gaze! What wringing of hands, what despairing cries, which the wild
wind bore away while it caught and fluttered the homely draperies and
unfastened the locks of maid and mother, to blow them about their pale
faces and anxious eyes! Now no longer the little fleet goes forth; for
the greater part of the islanders have stout schooners, and go trawling
with profit, if not with pleasure. A few solitaries fish in small
dories and earn a slender livelihood thereby.
The sea helps these poor people by bringing fuel to their very doors;
the waves continually deposit driftwood in every fissure of the rocks.
But sad, anxious lives they have led, especially the women, many of
whom have grown old before their time with hard work and bitter cares,
with hewing of wood and drawing of water, turning of fish on the flakes
to dry in the sun, endless household work, and the cares of maternity,
while their lords lounged about the rocks in their scarlet shirts in
the sun, or “held up the walls of the meeting-house,” as one expressed
it, with their brawny shoulders. I never saw such wrecks of humanity as
some of the old women of Star Island, who have long since gone to their
rest. In my childhood I caught glimpses of them occasionally, their
lean brown shapes crouching over the fire, with black pipes in their
sunken mouths, and hollow eyes, “of no use now but to gather brine,”
and rough, gray, straggling locks: despoiled and hopeless visions, it
seemed as if youth and joy would never have been theirs.
A WOMAN OF STAR ISLAND.
ISLES OF SHOALS, 1844.
Over the embers she sits,
Close at the edge of the grave,
With her hollow eyes like pits,
And her mouth like a sunken cave.
Her short black pipe held tight
Her withered lips between,
She rocks in the flickering light
Her figure bent and lean.
She turns the fish no more
That dry on the flakes in the sun;
No wood she drags to the door,
Nor water,--her labor is done.
She cares not for oath or blow,
She is past all hope or fear;
There is nothing she cares to know,
There is nothing hateful or dear.
Deep wrong have the bitter years
Wrought her, both body and soul.
Life has been seasoned with tears;
But saw not God the whole?
O wreck in woman’s shape!
Were you ever gracious and sweet?
Did youth’s enchantment drape
This horror, from head to feet?
Have dewy eyes looked out
From these hollow pits forlorn?
Played smiles the mouth about
Of shy, still rapture born?
Yea, once. But long ago
Has evil ground away
All beauty. The salt winds blow
On no sorrier sight to-day.
Trodden utterly out
Is every spark of hope.
There is only left her, a doubt,
A gesture, half-conscious, a grope
In the awful dark for a Touch
That never yet failed a soul.
Is not God tender to such?
Hath he not seen the whole?
The local pronunciation of the Shoalers is very peculiar, and a shrewd
sense of humor is one of their leading characteristics. Could De
Quincey have lived among them, I think he might have been tempted to
write an essay on swearing as a fine art, for it has reached a pitch
hardly short of sublimity in this favored spot. They seemed to have a
genius for it, and some of them really devoted their best powers to its
cultivation. The language was taxed to furnish them with prodigious
forms of speech wherewith to express the slightest emotion of pain,
anger, or amusement; and though the blood of the listener was sometimes
chilled in his veins, overhearing their unhesitating profanity, the
prevailing sentiment was likely to be one of amazement mingled with
intense amusement,--the whole thing was so grotesque and monstrous,
and their choice of words so comical, and generally so very much to the
point.
The real Shoals phraseology existing in past years was something not
to be described; it is impossible by any process known to science to
convey an idea of the intonations of their speech, quite different from
Yankee drawl or sailor-talk, and perfectly unique in itself. Why they
should have called a swallow a “swallick” and a sparrow a “sparrick”
I never could understand; or what they mean by calling a great gale
or tempest a “Tan toaster.” Anything that ends in _y_ or _e_ they
still pronounce _ay_ with great breadth; for instance, “Benny” is
Bennaye; “Billy” Billay, and so on. A man by the name of Beebe, the
modern “missionary,” was always spoken of as Beebay, when he was not
called by a less respectful title. Their sense of fun showed itself
in the nicknames with which they designated any person possessing the
slightest peculiarity. For instance, twenty years ago a minister of the
Methodist persuasion came to live among them; his wife was unreasonably
tall and thin. With the utmost promptitude and decision the irreverent
christened her “Legs,” and never spoke of her by any other name.
“Laigs has gone to Portsmouth,” or “Laigs has got a new gown,” etc.
A spinster of very dark complexion was called “Scip,” an abbreviation
of Scipio, a name supposed to appertain particularly to the colored
race. Another was called “Squint,” because of a defect in the power of
vision; and not only were they spoken of by these names, but called
so to their faces habitually. One man earned for himself the title of
“Brag,” so that no one ever thought of calling him by his real name;
his wife was Mrs. Brag; and constant use so robbed these names of their
offensiveness that the bearers not only heard them with equanimity,
but would hardly have known themselves by their true ones. A most
worthy Norwegian took up his abode for a brief space among them a few
years ago. His name was Ingebertsen. Now, to expect any Shoaler would
trouble himself to utter such a name as that was beyond all reason. At
once they called him “Carpenter,” apropos of nothing at all, for he
never had been a carpenter. But the name was the first that occurred to
them, and sufficiently easy of utterance. It was “Carpenter,” and “Mis’
Carpenter,” and “them Carpenter children,” and the name still clings
to fine old Ingebertsen and his family. Grandparents are addressed as
Grans and Gwammaye, Grans being an abbreviation of grandsire. “Tell
yer grans his dinner’s ready,” calls some woman from a cottage door.
One old man, too lazy almost to live, was called “Hing”; one of two
brothers “Bunker,” the other “Shothead”; an ancient scold was called
“Zeke,” another “Sir Polly,” and so on indefinitely. In pleasant
weather sometimes the younger women would paddle from one island to
another “making calls.” If any old “Grans” perceived them, loafing at
his door in the sun, “It’s going to storm! the women begin to flit!” he
would cry, as if they were a flock of coots. A woman, describing how
slightly her house was put together, said, “Lor’, ’twan’t never built,
’twas only hove together.” “I don’ know whe’r or no it’s best or no to
go fishin’ whiles mornin’,” says some rough fellow, meditating upon
the state of winds and waters. Of his boat another says with pride,
“_She’s_ a pretty piece of wood!” and another, “She strikes a sea and
comes down like a pillow,” describing her smooth sailing. Some one,
relating the way the civil authorities used to take political matters
into their own hands, said that “if a man didn’t vote as they wanted
him to, they took him and hove him up agin the meetin’ us,” by way of
bringing him to his senses. Two boys in bitter contention have been
heard calling each other “nasty-faced chowderheads,” as if the force of
language could no further go. “I’m dryer than a graven image,” a man
says when he is thirsty. But it is impossible to give an idea of their
common speech leaving out the profanity which makes it so startling.
Some comical stories are told of the behavior of officers of the law
in certain emergencies. On one occasion two men attacked each other in
the cove which served as the Plaza, the grand square of the village,
the general lounging-place. A comrade in a state of excitement ran
to inform the one policeman, who straightway repaired to the scene
of battle. There were the combatants raging like wild beasts, while
the whole community looked on aghast. What was to be done? Evidently
something, and at once. The policeman looked about him, considering. As
for interfering with that fearful twain, it was out of the question.
His eye fell upon a poor old man who leaned against a fish-house
enjoying the scene. A happy thought struck him! He dashed down upon the
ancient and unoffending spectator, and hurled him to the ground with
such force that he broke his collar-bone. Then, I suppose, he retired,
serene in the proud consciousness of having done his duty, and of
having been fully equal to the occasion.
Two of the chief magistrates of the place had a deadly feud, entirely
personal, which had smouldered between them for years. One day the
stronger of the two quietly “arrested” the weaker, tied him hand and
foot with ropes, “hove” him into his whale-boat, and sailed off with
him in triumph to the land. Arrived at the city of Portsmouth, he
conducted him to jail, delivered him over to the jailer with much
satisfaction, crying, “There! There he is! Take him and lock him up!
He’s a poor pris’ner. Don’t you give him nothin’ t’ eat!” and returned
rejoicing to the bosom of his family. It being Thanksgiving Day, the
jailer is said to have taken the prisoner at once into his house, and,
instead of locking him up, gave him, according to his own account, “one
of the best Thanksgiving dinners he ever ate.”
Nearly all the Shoalers have a singular gait, contracted from the
effort to keep their equilibrium while standing in boats, and from
the unavoidable gymnastics which any attempt at locomotion among the
rocks renders necessary. Some stiff-jointed old men have been known to
leap wildly from broad stone to stone on the smooth, flat pavements
of Portsmouth town, finding it out of the question to walk evenly and
decorously along the straight and easy way. This is no fable. Such is
the force of habit. Most of the men are more or less round-shouldered,
and seldom row upright, with head erect and shoulders thrown back.
They stoop so much over the fish-tables--cleaning, splitting, salting,
packing--that they acquire a permanent habit of stooping.
Twenty years ago, an old man by the name of Peter was alive on Star
Island. He was said to be a hundred years old; and anything more
grisly, in the shape of humanity, it has never been my lot to behold;
so lean and brown and ancient, he might have been Methuselah, for no
one knew how long he had lived on this rolling planet. Years before he
died he used to paddle across to our lighthouse, in placid summer days,
and, scanning him with a child’s curiosity, I wondered how he kept
alive. A few white hairs clung to his yellow crown, and his pale eyes,
“where the very blue had turned to white,” looked vacantly and wearily
out, as if trying faintly to see the end of the things of this world.
Somebody, probably old Nabbaye, in whose cottage he lived, always
scoured him with soft soap before he started on his voyage, and in
consequence a most preternatural shine overspread his blank forehead.
His under jaw had a disagreeably suggestive habit of dropping, he was
so feeble and so old, poor wretch! Yet would he brighten with a faint
attempt at a smile when bread and meat were put into his hands, and
say, over and over again, “Ye’re a Christian, ma’am; thank ye, ma’am,
thank ye,” thrust all that was given him, no matter what, between his
one upper garment--a checked shirt--and his bare skin, and then, by way
of expressing his gratitude, would strike up a dolorous quaver of--
“Over the water and over the lea
And over the water to Charlie,”
in a voice as querulous as a Scotch bagpipe.
Old Nabbaye, and Bennaye, her husband, with whom Peter lived, were a
queer old couple. Nabbaye had a stubbly and unequal growth of sparse
gray hair upon her chin, which gave her a most grim and terrible
aspect, as I remember her, with the grizzled locks standing out about
her head like one of the Furies. Yet she was a good enough old woman,
kind to Peter and Bennaye, and kept her bit of a cottage tidy as might
be. I well remember the grit of the shining sand on her scoured floor
beneath my childish footsteps. The family climbed at night by a ladder
up into a loft, which their little flock of fowls shared with them,
to sleep. Going by the house one evening, some one heard Nabbaye call
aloud to Bennaye up aloft, “Come, Bennaye, fetch me down them heens’
aigs!” To which Bennaye made answer, “I can’t find no aigs! I’ve looked
een the bed and een under the bed, and I can’t find no aigs!”
Till Bennaye grew very feeble, every summer night he paddled abroad
in his dory to fish for hake, and lonely he looked, tossing among
the waves, when our boat bore down and passed him with a hail which
he faintly returned, as we plunged lightly through the track of the
moonlight, young and happy, rejoicing in the beauty of the night, while
poor Bennaye only counted his gains in the grisly hake he caught, nor
considered the rubies the lighthouse scattered on the waves, or how the
moon sprinkled down silver before him. He did not mind the touch of
the balmy wind that blew across his weather-beaten face with the same
sweet greeting that so gladdened us, but fished and fished, watching
his line through the short summer night, and, when a blush of dawn
stole up in the east among the stars, wound up his tackle, took his
oars, and paddled home to Nabbaye with his booty,--his “fare of fish”
as the natives have it. Hake-fishing after this picturesque and tedious
fashion is done away with now; the islands are girdled with trawls,
which catch more fish in one night than could be obtained in a week’s
hard labor by hand.
When the dust of Bennaye and Nabbaye was mingled in the thin earth that
scarce can cover the multitude of the dead on Star Island, a youthful
couple, in whom I took great interest, occupied their little house. The
woman was remarkably handsome, with a beautiful head and masses of rich
black hair, a face regular as the face of a Greek statue, with eyes
that sparkled and cheeks that glowed,--a beauty she soon exchanged for
haggard and hollow looks. As their children were born they asked my
advice on the christening of each, and, being youthful and romantic, I
suggested Frederick as a sounding title for the first-born boy. Taylor
being the reigning President, his name was instantly added, and the
child was always addressed by his whole name. Going by the house one
day, my ears were assailed by a sharp outcry: “Frederick Taylor, if you
don’t come into the house this minute, I’ll slat your head off!” The
tender mother borrowed her expression from the fishermen, who disengage
mackerel and other delicate-gilled fish by “slatting” them off the hook.
All this family have gone, and the house in which they lived has fallen
to ruin; only the cellar remains, just such a rude hollow as those
scattered over Appledore.
The people along the coast rather look down upon the Shoalers as being
beyond the bounds of civilization. A young islander was expressing
his opinion on some matter to a native of Rye, who answered him with
great scorn: “You don’t know nothin’ about it! What do _you_ know?
_You_ never see an apple-tree all blowed out.” A Shoaler, walking with
some friends along a road in Rye, excited inextinguishable laughter by
clutching his companion’s sleeve as a toad hopped innocently across the
way, and crying: “Mr. Berraye, what kind of a bug do you call that?
D--d if I ever see such a bug as that, Mr. Berraye!” in a comical
terror. There are neither frogs nor toads at the Shoals. “Set right
down and help yourselves,” said an old fellow at whose door some guests
from the Shoals appeared at dinner-time. “Eat all you can. I ain’t got
no manners; the girl’s got the manners, and she ain’t to hum.”
One old Shoaler, long since gone to another world, was a laughable and
curious character. A man more wonderfully fulfilling the word “homely”
in the Yankee sense, I never saw. He had the largest, most misshapen
cheek-bones ever constructed, an illimitable upper lip, teeth that
should not be mentioned, and small, watery eyes. Skin and hair and eyes
and mouth were of the same pasty yellow, and that grotesque head was
set on a little, thin, and shambling body. He used to be head singer
at the church, and “pitched the tune” by whistling when the parson
had read the hymn. Then all who could joined in the singing, which
must have been remarkable, to say the least. So great a power of brag
is seldom found in one human being as that which permeated him from
top to toe, and found vent in stories of personal prowess and bravery
unexampled in history. He used to tell a story of his encounter with
thirteen “Spanish grandeers” in New Orleans, he having been a sailor
a great part of his life. He was innocently peering into a theatre,
when the “grandeers” fell upon him out of the exceeding pride of their
hearts. “Wall, sir, I turned, and I laid six o’ them grandeers to the
right and seven to the left, and then I put her for the old brig, and I
heerd no more on ’em!”
He considered himself unequalled as a musician, and would sing you
ballad after ballad, sitting bent forward with his arms on his knees,
and his wrinkled eyelids screwed tight together, grinding out the tune
with a quiet steadiness of purpose that seemed to betoken no end to his
capacities. Ballads of love and of war he sang,--the exploits of “Brave
Wolf,” or, as he pronounced it, “Brahn Wolf,” and one famous song of a
naval battle, of which only two lines remain in my memory;--
“With sixteen brass nineteens the Lion did growl,
With nineteen brass twenties the Tiger did howl.”
At the close of each verse he invariably dropped his voice, and said,
instead of sung, the last word, which had a most abrupt and surprising
effect, to which a listener never could become accustomed. The immortal
ballad of Lord Bateman he had remodelled with beautiful variations
of his own. The name of the coy maiden, the Turk’s only daughter,
Sophia, was Susan Fryan, according to his version, and Lord Bateman
was metamorphosed into Lord Bakum. When Susan Fryan crosses the sea to
Lord Bakum’s castle and knocks so loud that the gates do ring, he makes
the bold young porter, who was so ready for to let her in, go to his
master, who sits feasting with a new bride, and say:--
“Seven long years have I tended your gate, sir,
Seven long years out of twenty-three,
But so fair a creetur as now stands waitin’
Never before with my eyes did see.
“O, she has rings on every finger,
And round her middle if she’s one she has three;
O, I’m sure she’s got more good gold about her
Than would buy your bride and her companie!”
The enjoyment with which he gave this song was delightful to witness.
Of the many he used to sing, one was a doleful story of how a youth of
high degree fell in love with his mother’s fair waiting-woman, Betsy,
who was in consequence immediately transported to foreign lands. But
alas for her lover!--
“Then he fell sick and like to have died;
His mother round his sick-bed cried,
But all her crying it was in vain,
For Betsy was a-ploughing the raging main!”
The word “main” was brought out with startling effect. Another song
about a miller and his sons I only half remember:--
“The miller he called his oldest son,
Saying, ‘Now my glass it is almost run,
If I to you the mill relate,
What toll do you _re_sign to take?’
“The son replied: ‘My name is Jack,
And out of a bushel I’ll take a peck.’
‘Go, go, you fool!’ the old man cried,
And called the next to his bedside.
“The second said: ‘My name is Ralph,
And out of a bushel I’ll take a half.’
‘Go, go, you fool!’ the old man cried,
And called the next to his bedside.
“The youngest said: ‘My name is Paul,
And out of a bushel I’ll take it all!’
‘You are my son!’ the old man cried,
And _shot_ up his eyes and died in peace.”
The manner in which this last verse was delivered was inimitable, the
“died in peace” being spoken with great satisfaction. The singer had an
ancient violin, which he used to hug under his wizened chin, and from
which he drew such dismal tones as never before were heard on sea or
land. He had no more idea of playing than one of the codfish he daily
split and salted, yet he christened with pride all the shrieks and
wails he drew out of the wretched instrument with various high-sounding
titles. After he had entertained his audience for a while with these
aimless sounds, he was wont to say, “Wall, now I’ll give yer Prince
Esterhazy’s March,” and forthwith began again precisely the same
intolerable squeak.