singing-birds, plants, etc., with such advantages of solitude; how
every leaf and bud and flower is pored over, and admired, and loved! A
whole conservatory, flushed with azaleas, and brilliant with forests
of camellias and every precious exotic that blooms, could not impart
so much delight as I have known a single rose to give, unfolding in
the bleak bitterness of a day in February, when this side of the
planet seemed to have arrived at its culmination of hopelessness, with
the Isles of Shoals the most hopeless speck upon its surface. One
gets close to the heart of these things; they are almost as precious
as Picciola to the prisoner, and yield a fresh and constant joy,
such as the pleasure-seeking inhabitants of cities could not find in
their whole round of shifting diversions. With a bright and cheerful
interior, open fires, books, and pictures, windows full of thrifty
blossoming plants and climbing vines, a family of singing-birds, plenty
of work, and a clear head and quiet conscience, it would go hard if
one could not be happy even in such loneliness. Books, of course, are
inestimable. Nowhere does one follow a play of Shakespeare’s with
greater zest, for it brings the whole world, which you need, about
you; doubly precious the deep thoughts wise men have given to help
us,--doubly sweet the songs of all the poets; for nothing comes between
to distract you.
One realizes how hard it was for Robinson Crusoe to keep the record of
his lonely days; for even in a family of eight or nine the succession
is kept with difficulty. I recollect that, after an unusually busy
Saturday, when household work was done, and lessons said, and the
family were looking forward to Sunday and merited leisure, at sunset
came a young Star-Islander on some errand to our door. One said to him,
“Well, Jud, how many fish have they caught to-day at Star?” Jud looked
askance and answered, like one who did not wish to be trifled with, “We
don’t go a-fishing Sundays!” So we had lost our Sunday, thinking it
was Saturday; and next day began the usual business, with no break of
refreshing rest between.
Though the thermometer says that here it is twelve degrees warmer in
winter than on the mainland, the difference is hardly perceptible,--the
situation is so bleak, while the winds of the north and west bite like
demons, with all the bitter breath of the snowy continent condensed in
their deadly chill. Easterly and southerly gales are milder; we have
no east winds such as sadden humanity on shore; they are tempered to
gentleness by some mysterious means. Sometimes there are periods of
cold which, though not intense (the mercury seldom falling lower than
11° above zero), are of such long duration that the fish are killed in
the sea. This happens frequently with perch, the dead bodies of which
strew the shores and float on the water in masses. Sometimes ice forms
in the mouth of the Piscataqua River, which, continually broken into
unequal blocks by the rushing tide and the immense pressure of the
outer ocean, fills the space between the islands and the shore, so that
it is very difficult to force a boat through. The few schooners moored
about the islands become so loaded with ice that sometimes they sink;
every plunge into the assailing waves adds a fresh crust, infinitely
thin; but in twenty-four hours enough accumulates to sink the vessel;
and it is part of the day’s work in the coldest weather to beat off the
ice,--and hard work it is. Every time the bowsprit dips under, the man
who sits astride it is immersed to his waist in the freezing water,
as he beats at the bow to free the laboring craft. I cannot imagine a
harder life than the sailors lead in winter in the coasting-vessels
that stream in endless processions to and fro along the shore; and
they seem to be the hardest set of people under the sun,--so rough and
reckless that they are not pleasant even at a distance. Sometimes they
land here. A crew of thirteen or fourteen came on shore last winter;
they might have been the ghosts of the men who manned the picaroons
that used to swarm in these seas. A more piratical-looking set could
not well be imagined. They roamed about, and glared in at the windows
with weather-beaten, brutal faces, and eyes that showed traces of
whiskey, ugly and unmistakable.
No other visitors break the solitude of Appledore, except neighbors
from Star once in a while; if any one is sick, they send, perhaps, for
medicine or milk; or they bring some rare fish; or if any one dies,
and they cannot reach the mainland, they come to get a coffin made. I
never shall forget one long, dreary, drizzly northeast storm, when two
men rowed across from Star to Appledore on this errand. A little child
had died, and they could not sail to the mainland, and had no means
to construct a coffin among themselves. All day I watched the making
of that little chrysalis; and at night the last nail was driven in,
and it lay across a bench in the midst of the litter of the workshop,
and a curious stillness seemed to emanate from the senseless boards.
I went back to the house and gathered a handful of scarlet geranium,
and returned with it through the rain. The brilliant blossoms were
sprinkled with glittering drops. I laid them in the little coffin,
while the wind wailed so sorrowfully outside, and the rain poured
against the windows. Two men came through the mist and storm, and one
swung the light little shell to his shoulder, and they carried it away,
and the gathering darkness shut down and hid them as they tossed
among the waves. I never saw the little girl, but where they buried
her I know: the lighthouse shines close by, and every night the quiet,
constant ray steals to her grave and softly touches it, as if to say,
with a caress, “Sleep well! Be thankful you are spared so much that I
see humanity endure, fixed here forever where I stand!”
It is exhilarating, spite of the intense cold, to wake to the
brightness the northwest gale always brings, after the hopeless smother
of a prolonged snow-storm. The sea is deep indigo, whitened with
flashing waves all over the surface; the sky is speckless; no cloud
passes across it the whole day long; and the sun sets red and clear,
without any abatement of the wind. The spray flying on the western
shore for a moment is rosy as the sinking sun shines through, but for
a moment only,--and again there is nothing but the ghastly whiteness
of the salt-water ice, the cold, gray rock, the sullen, foaming brine,
the unrelenting heavens, and the sharp wind cutting like a knife. All
night long it roars beneath the hollow sky,--roars still at sunrise.
Again the day passes precisely like the one gone before; the sun lies
in a glare of quicksilver on the western water, sinks again in the
red west to rise on just such another day; and thus goes on, for
weeks sometimes, with an exasperating pertinacity that would try the
most philosophical patience. There comes a time when just that glare
of quicksilver on the water is not to be endured a minute longer.
During this period no boat goes to or comes from the mainland, and the
prisoners on the rock are cut off from all intercourse with their kind.
Abroad, only the cattle move, crowding into the sunniest corners, and
stupidly chewing the cud; and the hens and ducks, that chatter and
cackle and cheerfully crow in spite of fate and the northwest gale.
The dauntless and graceful gulls soar on their strong pinions over the
drift cast up about the coves. Sometimes flocks of snow-buntings wheel
about the house and pierce the loud breathing of the wind with sweet,
wild cries. And often the spectral arctic owl may be seen on a height,
sitting upright, like a column of snow, its large, round head slowly
turning from left to right, ever on the alert, watching for the rats
that plague the settlement almost as grievously as they did Hamelin
town, in Brunswick, five hundred years ago.
How the rats came here first is not known; probably some old ship
imported them. They live partly on mussels, the shells of which lie in
heaps about their holes, as the violet-lined fresh-water shells lie
about the nests of the muskrats on the mainland. They burrow among the
rocks close to the shore, in favorable spots, and, somewhat like the
moles, make subterranean galleries, whence they issue at low tide, and,
stealing to the crevices of seaweed-curtained rocks, they fall upon
and dislodge any unfortunate crabs they may find, and kill and devour
them. Many a rat has caught a Tartar in this perilous kind of hunting,
has been dragged into the sea and killed,--drowned in the clutches of
the crab he sought to devour; for the strength of these shell-fish is
something astonishing.
Several snowy owls haunt the islands the whole winter long. I have
never heard them cry like other owls; when disturbed or angry, they
make a sound like a watchman’s rattle, very loud and harsh, or they
whistle with intense shrillness, like a human being. Their habitual
silence adds to their ghostliness; and when at noonday they sit, high
up, snow-white above the snow-drifts, blinking their pale yellow eyes
in the sun, they are weird indeed. One night in March I saw one perched
upon a rock between me and the “last remains of sunset dimly burning”
in the west, his curious outline drawn black against the redness of the
sky, his large head bent forward, and the whole aspect meditative and
most human in its expression. I longed to go out and sit beside him and
talk to him in the twilight, to ask of him the story of his life, or,
if he would have permitted it, to watch him without a word. The plumage
of this creature is wonderfully beautiful,--white, with scattered spots
like little flecks of tawny cloud,--and his black beak and talons are
powerful and sharp as iron; he might literally grapple his friend, or
his enemy, with hooks of steel. As he is clothed in a mass of down,
his outlines are so soft that he is like an enormous snowflake while
flying; and he is a sight worth seeing when he stretches wide his broad
wings, and sweeps down on his prey, silent and swift, with an unerring
aim, and bears it off to the highest rock he can find, to devour it. In
the summer one finds frequently upon the heights a little, solid ball
of silvery fur and pure white bones, washed and bleached by the rain
and sun; it is the rat’s skin and skeleton in a compact bundle, which
the owl rejects after having swallowed it.
Some quieter day, on the edge of a southerly wind, perhaps, boats go
out over the gray, sad water after sea-fowl,--the murres that swim
in little companies, keeping just out of reach of shot, and are so
spiteful that they beat the boat with their beaks, when wounded, in
impotent rage, till they are despatched with an oar or another shot; or
kittiwakes,--exquisite creatures like living forms of snow and cloud
in color, with beaks and feet of dull gold,--that come when you wave a
white handkerchief, and flutter almost within reach of your hand; or
oldwives, called by the natives _scoldenores_, with clean white caps;
or clumsy eider-ducks, or coots, or mergansers, or whatever they may
find. Black ducks, of course, are often shot. Their jet-black, shining
plumage is splendidly handsome, set off with the broad, flame-colored
beak. Little auks, stormy-petrels, loons, grebes, lords-and-ladies,
sea-pigeons, sea-parrots, various guillemots, and all sorts of gulls
abound. Sometimes an eagle sweeps over; gannets pay occasional visits;
the great blue heron is often seen in autumn and spring. One of the
most striking birds is the cormorant, called here “shag”; from it
the rock at Duck Island takes its name. It used to be an object of
almost awful interest to me when I beheld it perched upon White Island
Head,--a solemn figure, high and dark against the clouds. Once, while
living on that island, in the thickest of a great storm in autumn, when
we seemed to be set between two contending armies, deafened by the
continuous cannonading of breakers, and lashed and beaten by winds
and waters till it was almost impossible to hear ourselves speak, we
became aware of another sound, which pierced to our ears, bringing a
sudden terror lest it should be the voices of human beings. Opening the
window a little, what a wild combination of sounds came shrieking in!
A large flock of wild geese had settled for safety upon the rock, and
completely surrounded us,--agitated, clamorous, weary. We might have
secured any number of them, but it would have been a shameful thing.
We were glad, indeed, that they should share our little foothold in
that chaos, and they flew away unhurt when the tempest lulled. I was a
very young child when this happened, but I never can forget that autumn
night,--it seemed so wonderful and pitiful that those storm-beaten
birds should have come crying to our rock; and the strange, wild
chorus that swept in when the window was pried open a little took so
strong a hold upon my imagination that I shall hear it as long as I
live. The lighthouse, so beneficent to mankind, is the destroyer of
birds,--of land birds particularly, though in thick weather sea-birds
are occasionally bewildered into breaking their heads against the
glass, plunging forward headlong towards the light, just as the frail
moth of summer evenings madly seeks its death in the candle’s blaze.
Sometimes in autumn, always in spring, when birds are migrating, they
are destroyed in such quantities by this means that it is painful to
reflect upon. The keeper living at the island three years ago told me
that he picked up three hundred and seventy-five in one morning at the
foot of the lighthouse, all dead. They fly with such force against the
glass that their beaks are often splintered. The keeper said he found
the destruction greatest in hazy weather, and he thought “they struck a
ray at a great distance and followed it up.” Many a May morning have I
wandered about the rock at the foot of the tower mourning over a little
apron brimful of sparrows, swallows, thrushes, robins, fire-winged
blackbirds, many-colored warblers and fly-catchers, beautifully clothed
yellow-birds, nuthatches, catbirds, even the purple finch and scarlet
tanager and golden oriole, and many more beside,--enough to break the
heart of a small child to think of! Once a great eagle flew against
the lantern and shivered the glass. That was before I lived there; but
after we came, two gulls cracked one of the large, clear panes, one
stormy night.
The sea-birds are comparatively few and shy at this time; but I
remember when they were plentiful enough, when on Duck Island in
summer the “medrakes,” or tern, made rude nests on the beach, and the
little yellow gulls, just out of the eggs, ran tumbling about among
the stones, hiding their foolish heads in every crack and cranny, and,
like the ostrich, imagining themselves safe so long as they could not
see the danger. And even now the sandpipers build in numbers on the
islands, and the young birds, which look like tiny tufts of fog, run
about among the bayberry-bushes, with sweet, scared piping. They are
exquisitely beautiful and delicate, covered with a down just like
gray mist, with brilliant black eyes, and slender, graceful legs
that make one think of grass-stems. And here the loons congregate in
spring and autumn. These birds seem to me the most human and at the
same time the most demoniac of their kind. I learned to imitate their
different cries; they are wonderful! At one time the loon language was
so familiar that I could almost always summon a considerable flock by
going down to the water and assuming the neighborly and conversational
tone which they generally use: after calling a few minutes, first a
far-off voice responded, then other voices answered him, and when this
was kept up a while, half a dozen birds would come sailing in. It was
the most delightful little party imaginable; so comical were they, so
entertaining, that it was impossible not to laugh aloud,--and they
could laugh too, in a way which chilled the marrow of one’s bones.
They always laugh, when shot at, if they are missed; as the Shoalers
say, “They laugh like a warrior.” But their long, wild, melancholy cry
before a storm is the most awful note I ever heard from a bird. It is
so sad, so hopeless,--a clear, high shriek, shaken, as it drops into
silence, into broken notes that make you think of the fluttering of a
pennon in the wind,--a shudder of sound. They invariably utter this cry
before a storm.
Between the gales from all points of the compass, that
“’twixt the green sea and the azured vault
Set roaring war,”
some day there falls a dead calm; the whole expanse of the ocean is
like a mirror; there’s not a whisper of a wave, not a sigh from any
wind about the world,--an awful, breathless pause prevails. Then if
a loon swims into the motionless little bights about the island, and
raises his weird cry, the silent rocks re-echo the unearthly tone, and
it seems as if the creature were in league with the mysterious forces
that are so soon to turn this deathly stillness into confusion and
dismay. All through the day the ominous quiet lasts; in the afternoon,
while yet the sea is glassy, a curious undertone of mournful sound can
be perceived,--not fitful,--a steady moan such as the wind makes over
the mouth of an empty jar. Then the islanders say, “Do you hear Hog
Island crying? Now look out for a storm!” No one knows how that low
moaning is produced, or why Appledore, of all the islands, should alone
lament before the tempest. Through its gorges, perhaps, some current
of wind sighs with that hollow cry. Yet the sea could hardly keep its
unruffled surface were a wind abroad sufficient to draw out the boding
sound. Such a calm preceded the storm which destroyed the Minot’s Ledge
Lighthouse in 1849. I never knew such silence. Though the sun blazed
without a cloud, the sky and sea were utterly wan and colorless, and
before sunset the mysterious tone began to vibrate in the breezeless
air. “Hog Island’s crying!” said the islanders. One could but think
of the Ancient Mariner, as the angry sun went down in a brassy glare,
and still no ripple broke the calm. But with the twilight gathered the
waiting wind, slowly and steadily; and before morning the shock of the
breakers was like the incessant thundering of heavy guns; the solid
rock perceptibly trembled; windows shook, and glass and china rattled
in the house. It is impossible to describe the confusion, the tumult,
the rush and roar and thunder of waves and wind overwhelming those
rocks,--the whole Atlantic rushing headlong to cast itself upon them.
It was very exciting: the most timid among us lost all sense of fear.
Before the next night the sea had made a breach through the valley on
Appledore, in which the houses stand,--a thing that never had happened
within the memory of the oldest inhabitant. The waves piled in from
the eastward (where Old Harry was tossing the breakers sky-high),--a
maddened troop of giants, sweeping everything before them,--and
followed one another, white as milk, through the valley from east to
west, strewing the space with boulders from a solid wall six feet high
and as many thick, which ran across the top of the beach, and which
one tremendous wave toppled over like a child’s fence of blocks. Kelp
and sea-weed were piled in banks high up along the shore, and strewed
the doorsteps; and thousands of the hideous creatures known among the
Shoalers as sea-mice, a holothurian (a livid, shapeless mass of torpid
life), were scattered in all directions. While the storm was at its
height, it was impossible to do anything but watch it through windows
beaten by the blinding spray which burst in flying clouds all over
the island, drenching every inch of the soil in foaming brine. In the
coves the “yeasty surges” were churned into yellow masses of foam, that
blew across in trembling flakes, and clung wherever they lit, leaving
a hoary scum of salt when dry, which remained till sweet, fair water
dropped out of the clouds to wash it all away. It was long before the
sea went down; and, days after the sun began to shine, the fringe of
spray still leaped skyward from the eastern shore, and Shag and Mingo
Rocks at Duck Island tossed their distant clouds of snow against the
blue.
After the wind subsided, it was curious to examine the effects of the
breakers on the eastern shore, where huge masses of rock were struck
off from the cliffs, and flung among the wild heaps of scattered
boulders, to add to the already hopeless confusion of the gorges. The
eastern aspects of the islands change somewhat every year or two from
this cause; and, indeed, over all their surfaces continual change
goes on from the action of the weather. Under the hammer and chisel
of frost and heat, masses of stone are detached and fall from the
edges of cliffs, whole ledges become disintegrated, the rock cracks
in smooth, thin sheets, and, once loosened, the whole mass can be
pulled out, sheet by sheet. Twenty years ago those subtle, irresistible
tools of the weather had cracked off a large mass of rock from a ledge
on the slope of a gentle declivity. I could just lay my hand in the
space then: now three men can walk abreast between the ledge and the
detached mass; and nothing has touched it save heat and cold. The whole
aspect of the rocks is infinitely aged. I never can see the beautiful
salutation of sunrise upon their hoary fronts, without thinking how
many millions of times they have answered to that delicate touch.
On Boone Island,--a low, dangerous rock fifteen miles east of the
Shoals,--the sea has even greater opportunities of destruction, the
island is so low. Once, after a stormy night, the lighthouse-keeper
told me the family found a great stone, weighing half a ton, in the
back entry, which Father Neptune had deposited there,--his card, with
his compliments!
Often tremendous breakers encompass the islands when the surface of the
sea is perfectly calm and the weather serene and still,--the results
of great storms far out at sea. A “long swell” swings indolently, and
the ponderous waves roll in as if tired and half asleep, to burst
into clouds of splendor against the cliffs. Very different is their
hurried, eager breaking when the shoulder of a gale compels them. There
is no sound more gentle, more slumberous, than the distant roll of
these billows,--
“The rolling sea resounding soft,”
as Spenser has it. The rush of a fully alive and closely pursued
breaker is, at a distance, precisely like that which a rocket makes,
sweeping headlong upward through the air; but the other is a long and
peaceful sigh, a dreamy, lulling, beautiful sound, which produces a
Lethean forgetfulness of care and pain, makes all earthly ill seem
unreal, and it is as if one wandered
“In dreamful wastes, where footless fancies dwell.”
It requires a strong effort to emerge from this lotus-eating state of
mind. O, lovely it is, on sunny afternoons to sit high up in a crevice
of the rock and look down on the living magnificence of breakers such
as made music about us after the Minot’s Ledge storm,--to watch them
gather, one after another,
“Cliffs of emerald topped with snow,
That lift and lift, and then let go
A great white avalanche of thunder,”
which makes the solid earth tremble, and you, clinging to the moist
rock, feel like a little cockle-shell! If you are out of the reach of
the heavy fall of spray, the fine salt mist will still stream about
you, and salute your cheek with the healthful freshness of the brine,
make your hair damp, and encrust your eyebrows with salt. While you
sit watching the shifting splendor, uprises at once a higher cloud
than usual; and across it springs a sudden rainbow, like a beautiful
thought beyond the reach of human expression. High over your head the
white gulls soar, gathering the sunshine in the snowy hollows of their
wings. As you look up to them floating in the fathomless blue, there
is something awful in the purity of that arch beneath their wings, in
light or shade, as the broad pinions move with stately grace. There
is no bird so white,--nor swan, nor dove, nor mystic ibis: about the
ocean-marges there is no dust to soil their perfect snow, and no stormy
wind can ruffle their delicate plumes,--the beautiful, happy creatures!
One never tires of watching them. Again and again appears the rainbow
with lovely colors melting into each other and vanishing, to appear
again at the next upspringing of the spray. On the horizon the white
sails shine; and far and wide spreads the blue of the sea, with nothing
between you and the eastern continent across its vast, calm plain.
[Illustration: WHITE ISLAND.]