You would never think now that tall Indiamen were once built here in our
town, but they were, and sailed hence round the world away, and we too
boasted our wharves, with the once-familiar notice:
"All ships required to cock-a-bill their yards before lying at this
dock."
The last ship built in the town was the _Valley Forge_, launched about
1860; the last built at Bowman's Point, two miles above, was the _Two
Brothers_. The _Valley Forge_ for ten whole years was never out of
Eastern waters, plying between China and Sumatra, and the seaports of
the Inland Sea.
Mr. Peter Simons, one of our early magnates, and "ship's husband," of
many vessels (kind, merry, handsome Mr. Peter, he never was husband to
anyone but his ships), took a treasure voyage to the Spanish Main once,
and brought home a moderate sized treasure, some of the doubloons of
which are preserved in his family to this day.
Ship-building was the chief industry of the place. There were four
principal ship-yards. The skippers as well as the lumber came from close
at hand. It seems a wonderful thing, in these stay-at-home times, that
keen young lads from the farms could have been, at twenty-one, in
command of full-rigged ships, fearlessly making their way, in prosperous
trade, to places that might as well be in Mars, for all most of us know
of them to-day: but Java and the Spice Islands, Shanghai, Tasmania, and
the Moluccas were household words in those days, and you still hear a
sentence now and then which shows the one-time familiarity of ways which
have passed from our knowledge.
The portraits at the house of Captain George Annable, the last of our
clipper-ship captains, were painted in Antwerp. So were those (very
queer ones), at Captain Charles Aiken's, and at Captain Andrews'. It
appears now in talk with Captain Annable that _of course_ they were
painted at Antwerp, for that was where the American skippers as a rule
wintered. Living there was better and cheaper for them and their
families than at any other foreign port. It became the custom to winter
at Antwerp, and there grew to be an American society there.
Captain Annable has crossed the Atlantic sixty-three times, sailing
clipper mail-ships.
The Captains are nearly all gone now. Little trace of the ship-yards
remains, and even the wharves from which the Indiamen sailed have
rotted, and been replaced by the lumber and coal wharves of to-day; but
all through the countryside you come on touches of the shipping days,
and of the East, as startling as a sudden fragrance of sandalwood in
some old cabinet. At one house I know there is a collection of
butterflies and moths of the Far East, with two cream-colored Atlas
moths eight inches from tip to tip. At another there is a set of
rice-paper paintings of the orders of the Japanese nobility and gentry,
with full insignia of state robes, which ought to be in a museum; and
the parlor of a third neighbor, the gracious widow of a sea-captain,
has, besides carved teak furniture and Chinese embroideries, a set of
carved ivory chessmen fit for a palace. The king and queen stand over
eight inches high. The castles are true elephant-and-castles, and the
pawns are tiny mounted and turbaned warriors, brandishing scimitars. The
figures stand on carved open-work balls-within-balls, four
deep--"Laborious Orient ivory, sphere in sphere"--as delicate as
frost-work. This set was bought in Shanghai, when the foreign compound
still had its guard of soldiers, and the Chinese thronged the doorways
to stare at the "white devils."
The great gold-figured lacquer cabinet, the pride of one of our
statelier houses, was brought from China a hundred years ago, by a young
Captain Jameson, who was coming home for his wedding. He sailed again
with his bride immediately after the marriage, and their ship never was
heard of. The cabinet was sold, and then sold again, till it finally
reached the setting which fits it so well.
You find lacquered Indian teapoys, Eastern porcelains, shells and corals
from all round the world far out in scattered farmhouses; and farm-hands
are still summoned to meals by a blast on a conch-shell, a queer note,
not unlike the belling of an elk.
Beside the actual china and embroideries and carvings, something of the
character bred in the seafaring days has spread, like nourishing silt,
through our countryside. The Captains were grave, quiet men. They had
power of command, and keenness in emergency. Contact with many people of
many nations quickened their perceptions and gave them charming manners;
but more than this, there was something large-minded and tranquil about
them. All their lives they had to deal with an element stronger than
themselves. The next day's work could never be planned or calculated on,
and something of the detached quality which comes from dealing with the
sea, a long and simple perspective towards human affairs, became part of
them.
An expression of married life, so beautiful that I can never forget it,
came from the lips of the widow of one of our sea-captains, a little old
lady, now over eighty, who lives alone in a tiny brick cottage (where
she has accomplished the almost unique feat of making English ivy
flourish in our sub-arctic climate). She wears a wonderful cap, and
fills her house with quilts and cushions of silk patch-work which would
make a kaleidoscope blink. I had an errand to her about a poorer
neighbor, one Thanksgiving time. Her house is an outlying one, and I
remember how the farm lights, scattered all about our river hills, shone
in the soft autumn evening.
Her bright warm kitchen was coziness itself, with a shiny stove, full to
the brim with red coals, and a big lamp. She sat with her cat on her
knee, sewing on an orange and green cushion, made in queer little puffs,
and she jumped up, dropping thimble, and spectacles, in her warm-hearted
welcome. After my errand, we fell into talk, about "Cap'n," and their
long voyaging together. That was when the Captains as a matter of course
took their wives, and often their children, with them, keeping a cow on
board for the family's use, and sometimes chickens and pigs. Many babies
who grew to be sturdy citizens were born on the high seas in those days.
She told about long peaceful days, slipping through the Trades, and
about gales, but mostly about china and pottery, for this was their
hobby, almost their passion. They took inconvenient journeys of great
length to see new potteries, and hoped at last to see all the sea-board
china factories, in East and West. She showed me her treasures, pretty
bits of Sevres, majolica, Doulton, and Wedgewood, all standing together,
and among them an alabaster model of the leaning tower of Pisa (Pysa,
she called it). At last, with a lowered voice, she spoke of the worst
danger they had ever been through, a typhoon in the Bay of Bengal. The
ship lay dismasted, and the waves broke over her helplessness. She was
lifted up and dashed down like a log, and every soul on board expected
only to perish.
"Cap'n come downstairs to our cabin:
"Oh, Mary," he says, "if only you was to home! I could die easy if only
you was to home!"
"I be to home!" I says. "If I had the wings of a dove, I wouldn't be
anywheres but where I be!"
This ranks with the epitaph at Nantucket:
"Think what a wife should be, and she was that!"
Another seafaring friend was, as so often happens, the last person whom
you would ever connect with adventures, a little lady so tiny, so
dainty, that a trip across the lawn with garden gloves and hat, to tie
up her roses, might have been her longest excursion; but instead she has
sailed round and round the world with her courtly sea-captain father,
has lifted her quiet gray eyes to see coral islands and spice islands,
and the strange mountain ranges of the East Indies.
"She wore white mostly when we were in the Trades or the Tropics," her
father has told me, "and she sat on deck all day, with her white
fancy-work. She always seemed to like whatever was happening."
One day, in a fog with a heavy sea running, the ship ran on a reef. The
life-saving crew got the men off with great difficulty, but the Captain
refused to leave his post, and little Miss Jessie refused too.
"No, thank you," she said, in her soft voice, "No, thanks very much, I
think I will stay with the Captain."
"And you couldn't move her," he said, "any more than the rock of
Gibraltar."
With the night the storm lessened, and almost by a miracle the ship was
got off safely next morning.
I must tell of one more seafaring couple, who lived down the river in a
low white cottage where "Captain," retired from service, could watch
vessels passing, even without his handsome brass-bound binoculars, a
much-prized tribute for life-saving.
The wife was long paralyzed, and the Captain, with the simple-minded
nephew they had adopted, tended her as he might have tended an adored
child. He bought her silk waists, fine aprons, little frills of one sort
or another, fastened them on her with clumsy, loving fingers, and then
would sit back, laughing with pride, while the paralyzed woman, with her
wrecked face, managed to make uncouth sounds of pleasure.
"Don't she look handsome? Don't she look nice as anybody?" he would ask
of the neighbors, and show the new wig he had bought her, as the poor
hair was thin. His simple pride thought it as beautiful as any young
girl's curls, and indeed it was very youthful. One's heart was wrung,
yet uplifted, too, for here was love which had passed through the
absolute wrecking of life, and was untouched.
The Captain was a tall hearty man, but it was he who died first, after
all, and all in a minute. The paralyzed creature thus bereaved, moaned,
day after day; her eyes seemed to be asking for something, there in the
room, and no one could find the right thing, till someone thought of the
Captain's binoculars, which he always had by him. From that moment she
became tranquil, and even grew happy again, if only she had the bright
brass thing where her poor hand could touch it. If it was moved, she
moaned for it to be set back. It was her precious token, from his hand
to hers. With it beside her she could wait and be good, poor dear soul,
until, in about two years, her release came, and she went to join
"Captain."
One word more about Mr. Peter Simons, of whom the town keeps pleasant
memories. He lived handsomely, in a handsome house overlooking the
river, and his housekeeper, Deborah Twycross, was as much of a magnate
in her own way as himself. Mr. Peter was very high with her; but he
stood in awe of her, too. Still, he never would let her engage his
second servant, a privilege which she coveted.
In his young days a "hired girl" received $2.00 a week wages, if she
could milk, $1.50 if she could not. By the time Mr. Peter was
established in stately bachelor housekeeping no girl was any longer
expected to milk, and few knew how. But when engaging a servant, if he
did not like the applicant's looks, Mr. Peter would say,
"Can you milk?"
Of course, she could not, and there the matter would end. He never asked
a girl whose looks he liked, if she could milk!
He was a man of endless secret benevolence, and posed all the time as a
hard-fisted person and a miser. He was at the most devious pains to
conceal his constant kindnesses. The noble minister who at that time
carried our Town on his young shoulders, received sums of money, in
every time of need, for library, schools, or cases of poverty and
suffering, directed in a variety of elaborately disguised handwritings.
He was able in time to trace them all to Mr. Peter. Many a struggling
young man was set on his feet and established in life by this secret
benefactor; and after Mr. Peter's death, his coal dealer told how for
years he had had orders to deliver loads of coal to this and that family
in distress, after dark, and as noiselessly as possible, under an
agreement of secrecy, enforced by such threats that he never dared
disobey.
The Town has changed since Mr. Peter's day. Boys no longer brave the
terrors of a visit to a White Witch to have their warts charmed, or a
toothache healed. ("Mother Hatch," who plied her arts some thirty years
ago, was the last of these. Her appliances for fortune-telling were the
correct ones of cards, an ink-well, and a glass to gaze in; but a small
trembling sufferer in knickerbockers--a hero to the still more trembling
group of friends and eggers-on outside--did not benefit by these higher
mysteries. The enchantress, beside her traffic in the black arts, took
in washing; she would withdraw her hands from the suds, and lay a
reeking finger on the offending tooth, the patient gasping and shutting
his terror-stricken eyes while she recited a sufficient incantation.)
Even the memory of the Whipping-post, which still stood in Mr. Peter's
childhood, has long since vanished. The town bell is no longer rung at
seven in the morning and at noon, and a steam fire-whistle has replaced
the tocsin of alarm that formerly was rung from all the church steeples;
but the curfew still rings every night, at nine in the evening (the bell
which rings it was made by Paul Revere); and, among the customary
Scriptural-sounding offices of fence-viewers, field-drivers, measurers
of wood and bark, etc., the town still has a town crier. A very few
years ago it still had a pound-keeper and hog-reeve, but by now the
outlines of the pound itself have disappeared.