I CALL it an old town, but it is only relatively old. When one reflects
on the countless centuries that have gone to the for-mation of this
crust of earth on which we temporarily move, the most ancient cities on
its surface seem merely things of the week before last. It was only the
other day, then--that is to say, in the month of June, 1603--that one
Martin Pring, in the ship Speedwell, an enormous ship of nearly fifty
tons burden, from Bristol, England, sailed up the Piscataqua River. The
Speedwell, numbering thirty men, officers and crew, had for consort the
Discoverer, of twenty-six tons and thirteen men. After following the
windings of “the brave river” for twelve miles or more, the two vessels
turned back and put to sea again, having failed in the chief object
of the expedition, which was to obtain a cargo of the medicinal
sassafras-tree, from the bark of which, as well known to our ancestors,
could be distilled the Elixir of Life.
It was at some point on the left bank of the Piscataqua, three or four
miles from the mouth of the river, that worthy Master Pring probably
effected one of his several landings. The beautiful stream widens
suddenly at this place, and the green banks, then covered with a network
of strawberry vines, and sloping invitingly to the lip of the crystal
water, must have won the tired mariners.
The explorers found themselves on the edge of a vast forest of oak,
hemlock, maple, and pine; but they saw no sassafras-trees to speak of,
nor did they encounter--what would have been infinitely less to their
taste--and red-men. Here and there were discoverable the scattered ashes
of fires where the Indians had encamped earlier in the spring; they
were absent now, at the silvery falls, higher up the stream, where fish
abounded at that season. The soft June breeze, laden with the delicate
breath of wild-flowers and the pungent odors of spruce and pine, ruffled
the duplicate sky in the water; the new leaves lisped pleasantly in the
tree tops, and the birds were singing as if they had gone mad. No ruder
sound or movement of life disturbed the primeval solitude. Master Pring
would scarcely recognize the spot were he to land there to-day.
Eleven years afterwards a much cleverer man than the commander of the
Speedwell dropped anchor in the Piscataqua--Captain John Smith of famous
memory. After slaying Turks in hand-to-hand combats, and doing all sorts
of doughty deeds wherever he chanced to decorate the globe with his
presence, he had come with two vessels to the fisheries on the rocky
selvage of Maine, when curiosity, or perhaps a deeper motive, led him
to examine the neighboring shore lines. With eight of his men in a small
boat, a ship’s yawl, he skirted the coast from Penobscot Bay to Cape
Cod, keeping his eye open. This keeping his eye open was a peculiarity
of the little captain; possibly a family trait. It was Smith who really
discovered the Isles of Shoals, exploring in person those masses of
bleached rock--those “isles assez hautes,” of which the French navigator
Pierre de Guast, Sieur de Monts, had caught a bird’s-eye glimpse through
the twilight in 1605. Captain Smith christened the group Smith’s Isles,
a title which posterity, with singular persistence of ingratitude, has
ignored. It was a tardy sense of justice that expressed itself a few
years ago in erecting on Star Island a simple marble shaft to the memory
of JOHN SMITH--the multitudinous! Perhaps this long delay is explained
by a natural hesitation to label a monument so ambiguously.
The modern Jason, meanwhile, was not without honor in his own country,
whatever may have happened to him in his own house, for the poet George
Wither addressed a copy of pompous verses “To his Friend Captain Smith,
upon his Description of New England.” “Sir,” he says--
“Sir: your Relations I haue read: which shew
Ther’s reason I should honor them and you:
And if their meaning I have vnderstood,
I dare to censure thus: Your Project’s good;
And may (if follow’d) doubtlesse quit the paine
With honour, pleasure and a trebble gaine;
Beside the benefit that shall arise
To make more happy our Posterities.”
The earliest map of this portion of our seaboard was prepared by Smith
and laid before Prince Charles, who asked to give the country a name. He
christened it New England. In that remarkable map the site of Portsmouth
is call Hull, and Kittery and York are known as Boston.
It was doubtless owing to Captain John Smith’s representation on his
return to England that the Laconia Company selected the banks of the
Piscataqua for their plantation. Smith was on an intimate footing
with Sir Ferinand Gorges, who, five years subsequently, made a tour of
inspection along the New England coast, in company with John Mason, then
Governor of Newfoundland. One of the results of this summer cruise is
the town of Portsmouth, among whose leafy ways, and into some of whose
old-fashioned houses, I purpose to take the reader, if he have an idle
hour on his hands. Should we meet the flitting ghost of some old-time
worthy, on the staircase or at a lonely street corner, the reader must
be prepared for it.