THE YOUTHFUL ADVENTURES OF ISRAEL.
Imagination will easily picture the rural day of the youth of Israel.
Let us pass on to a less immature period.
It appears that he began his wanderings very early; moreover, that ere,
on just principles throwing off the yoke off his king, Israel, on
equally excusable grounds, emancipated himself from his sire. He
continued in the enjoyment of parental love till the age of eighteen,
when, having formed an attachment for a neighbor’s daughter—for some
reason, not deemed a suitable match by his father—he was severely
reprimanded, warned to discontinue his visits, and threatened with some
disgraceful punishment in case he persisted. As the girl was not only
beautiful, but amiable—though, as will be seen, rather weak—and her
family as respectable as any, though unfortunately but poor, Israel
deemed his father’s conduct unreasonable and oppressive; particularly
as it turned out that he had taken secret means to thwart his son with
the girl’s connections, if not with the girl herself, so as to place
almost insurmountable obstacles to an eventual marriage. For it had not
been the purpose of Israel to marry at once, but at a future day, when
prudence should approve the step. So, oppressed by his father, and
bitterly disappointed in his love, the desperate boy formed the
determination to quit them both for another home and other friends.
It was on Sunday, while the family were gone to a farmhouse church near
by, that he packed up as much of his clothing as might be contained in
a handkerchief, which, with a small quantity of provision, he hid in a
piece of woods in the rear of the house. He then returned, and
continued in the house till about nine in the evening, when, pretending
to go to bed, he passed out of a back door, and hastened to the woods
for his bundle.
It was a sultry night in July; and that he might travel with the more
ease on the succeeding day, he lay down at the foot of a pine tree,
reposing himself till an hour before dawn, when, upon awaking, he heard
the soft, prophetic sighing of the pine, stirred by the first breath of
the morning. Like the leaflets of that evergreen, all the fibres of his
heart trembled within him; tears fell from his eyes. But he thought of
the tyranny of his father, and what seemed to him the faithlessness of
his love; and shouldering his bundle, arose, and marched on.
His intention was to reach the new countries to the northward and
westward, lying between the Dutch settlements on the Hudson, and the
Yankee settlements on the Housatonic. This was mainly to elude all
search. For the same reason, for the first ten or twelve miles,
shunning the public roads, he travelled through the woods; for he knew
that he would soon be missed and pursued.
He reached his destination in safety; hired out to a farmer for a month
through the harvest; then crossed from the Hudson to the Connecticut.
Meeting here with an adventurer to the unknown regions lying about the
head waters of the latter river, he ascended with this man in a canoe,
paddling and pulling for many miles. Here again he hired himself out
for three months; at the end of that time to receive for his wages two
hundred acres of land lying in New Hampshire. The cheapness of the land
was not alone owing to the newness of the country, but to the perils
investing it. Not only was it a wilderness abounding with wild beasts,
but the widely-scattered inhabitants were in continual dread of being,
at some unguarded moment, destroyed or made captive by the Canadian
savages, who, ever since the French war, had improved every opportunity
to make forays across the defenceless frontier.
His employer proving false to his contract in the matter of the land,
and there being no law in the country to force him to fulfil it,
Israel—who, however brave-hearted, and even much of a dare-devil upon a
pinch, seems nevertheless to have evinced, throughout many parts of his
career, a singular patience and mildness—was obliged to look round for
other means of livelihood than clearing out a farm for himself in the
wilderness. A party of royal surveyors were at this period surveying
the unsettled regions bordering the Connecticut river to its source. At
fifteen shillings per month, he engaged himself to this party as
assistant chain-bearer, little thinking that the day was to come when
he should clank the king’s chains in a dungeon, even as now he trailed
them a free ranger of the woods. It was midwinter; the land was
surveyed upon snow-shoes. At the close of the day, fires were kindled
with dry hemlock, a hut thrown up, and the party ate and slept.
Paid off at last, Israel bought a gun and ammunition, and turned
hunter. Deer, beaver, etc., were plenty. In two or three months he had
many skins to show. I suppose it never entered his mind that he was
thus qualifying himself for a marksman of men. But thus were tutored
those wonderful shots who did such execution at Bunker’s Hill; these,
the hunter-soldiers, whom Putnam bade wait till the white of the
enemy’s eye was seen.
With the result of his hunting he purchased a hundred acres of land,
further down the river, toward the more settled parts; built himself a
log hut, and in two summers, with his own hands, cleared thirty acres
for sowing. In the winter seasons he hunted and trapped. At the end of
the two years, he sold back his land—now much improved—to the original
owner, at an advance of fifty pounds. He conveyed his cash and furs to
Charlestown, on the Connecticut (sometimes called No. 4), where he
trafficked them away for Indian blankets, pigments, and other showy
articles adapted to the business of a trader among savages. It was now
winter again. Putting his goods on a hand-sled, he started towards
Canada, a peddler in the wilderness, stopping at wigwams instead of
cottages. One fancies that, had it been summer, Israel would have
travelled with a wheelbarrow, and so trundled his wares through the
primeval forests, with the same indifference as porters roll their
barrows over the flagging of streets. In this way was bred that
fearless self-reliance and independence which conducted our forefathers
to national freedom.
This Canadian trip proved highly successful. Selling his glittering
goods at a great advance, he received in exchange valuable peltries and
furs at a corresponding reduction. Returning to Charlestown, he
disposed of his return cargo again at a very fine profit. And now, with
a light heart and a heavy purse, he resolved to visit his sweetheart
and parents, of whom, for three years, he had had no tidings.
They were not less astonished than delighted at his reappearance; he
had been numbered with the dead. But his love still seemed strangely
coy; willing, but yet somehow mysteriously withheld. The old intrigues
were still on foot. Israel soon discovered, that though rejoiced to
welcome the return of the prodigal son—so some called him—his father
still remained inflexibly determined against the match, and still
inexplicably countermined his wooing. With a dolorous heart he mildly
yielded to what seemed his fatality; and more intrepid in facing peril
for himself, than in endangering others by maintaining his rights (for
he was now one-and-twenty), resolved once more to retreat, and quit his
blue hills for the bluer billows.
A hermitage in the forest is the refuge of the narrow-minded
misanthrope; a hammock on the ocean is the asylum for the generous
distressed. The ocean brims with natural griefs and tragedies; and into
that watery immensity of terror, man’s private grief is lost like a
drop.
Travelling on foot to Providence, Rhode Island, Israel shipped on board
a sloop, bound with lime to the West Indies. On the tenth day out, the
vessel caught fire, from water communicating with the lime. It was
impossible to extinguish the flames. The boat was hoisted out, but
owing to long exposure to the sun, it needed continual bailing to keep
it afloat. They had only time to put in a firkin of butter and a
ten-gallon keg of water. Eight in number, the crew entrusted themselves
to the waves, in a leaky tub, many leagues from land. As the boat swept
under the burning bowsprit, Israel caught at a fragment of the
flying-jib, which sail had fallen down the stay, owing to the charring,
nigh the deck, of the rope which hoisted it. Tanned with the smoke, and
its edge blackened with the fire, this bit of canvass helped them
bravely on their way. Thanks to kind Providence, on the second day they
were picked up by a Dutch ship, bound from Eustatia to Holland. The
castaways were humanely received, and supplied with every necessary. At
the end of a week, while unsophisticated Israel was sitting in the
maintop, thinking what should befall him in Holland, and wondering what
sort of unsettled, wild country it was, and whether there was any
deer-shooting or beaver-trapping there, lo! an American brig, bound
from Piscataqua to Antigua, comes in sight. The American took them
aboard, and conveyed them safely to her port. There Israel shipped for
Porto Rico; from thence, sailed to Eustatia.
Other rovings ensued; until at last, entering on board a Nantucket
ship, he hunted the leviathan off the Western Islands and on the coast
of Africa, for sixteen months; returning at length to Nantucket with a
brimming hold. From that island he sailed again on another whaling
voyage, extending, this time, into the great South Sea. There, promoted
to be harpooner, Israel, whose eye and arm had been so improved by
practice with his gun in the wilderness, now further intensified his
aim, by darting the whale-lance; still, unwittingly, preparing himself
for the Bunker Hill rifle.
In this last voyage, our adventurer experienced to the extreme all the
hardships and privations of the whaleman’s life on a long voyage to
distant and barbarous waters—hardships and privations unknown at the
present day, when science has so greatly contributed, in manifold ways,
to lessen the sufferings, and add to the comforts of seafaring men.
Heartily sick of the ocean, and longing once more for the bush, Israel,
upon receiving his discharge at Nantucket at the end of the voyage,
hied straight back for his mountain home.
But if hopes of his sweetheart winged his returning flight, such hopes
were not destined to be crowned with fruition. The dear, false girl was
another’s.