Part 10
But, in the first place, I crave indulgence while I say a single word personal to myself. I want to explain why I meant to be here last April, and why I am here now. Towards Weymouth, I confess to a peculiarly kindly feeling. Not only was Weymouth the birthplace and maiden home of one whom, among my ancestors, I specially reverence, but to Weymouth I feel under personal obligation. It is a short story, soon told; it relates also wholly to myself, but here I feel at liberty to tell it.
Just thirty years ago last spring, on a day in April, if my memory serves me right, your old-time selectman, James Humphrey,--remembered by you as “Judge” Humphrey,--called at my office, then in Pemberton Square, Boston. Taking a chair by my desk, he next occasioned wide-eyed surprise on my part by inviting me, on behalf of a committee of the town of Weymouth, to deliver an historical address at the coming 250th anniversary of the permanent settlement of the place. Recently returned to civil life from four years of active military service, and nominally a lawyer, I was at that time chairman of the State Board of Railroad Commissioners, and, as such, devoting my attention to questions connected with the growth and development of transportation. To independent historical investigation I had never given a thought. As to Weymouth, I very honestly confess I hardly knew where the town so called was, much less anything of its story; having a somewhat vague impression only that my great-grandmother, Parson William Smith’s daughter, Abigail, had been born there, and there lived her girlhood. Such was my surprise, I remember, that I suggested to Mr. Humphrey he must be acting under a misapprehension, intending to invite some other member of my family, possibly my father. He, however, at once assured me such was not the case, satisfying me finally that, a man sober and in his right mind, he knew what he was about, and who he was talking to. Subsequently, I learned that he did indeed act as the representative of a committee appointed at the last annual Weymouth town meeting; for an explanation of the choice appeared,--as “a great-grandson of Abigail (Smith) Adams, a native of Weymouth,” I had been selected for the task. Overcoming my surprise, I told Mr. Humphrey I would take the matter under consideration. Doing so, I finally concluded to accept. Though I had not the faintest idea of it at the time, that acceptance marked for me an epoch; I had, in fact, come to a turning-point in life. That, instinctively, if somewhat unadvisedly and blindly, I followed the path thus unexpectedly opened has been to me ever since cause of gratitude to Weymouth. For thirty years it has led me through pastures green and pleasant places. But at the moment, so little did I know of the earlier history of Massachusetts, I was not aware that any settlement had been effected hereabouts immediately after that at Plymouth, or that the first name of the place was Wessagusset; nor, finally, that Thomas Morton had at about the same time, erected the famous May-pole at Merrymount, on the hill opposite where I dwelt. Thus the field into which I was invited was one wholly new to me, and unwittingly I entered on it; but, for once, fortune builded for me better than I knew. I began on a study which has since lasted continuously.
Weymouth is, therefore, in my mind closely and inseparably associated, not only with the commencement of what I dare not call a career, but with a fortuitous incident which led for me to more pleasurable pursuits than elsewhere it has been given me to follow.
That address of mine, the immediate outcome of the invitation extended through Mr. Humphrey in 1874, has since been more than once kindly referred to by investigators here in Weymouth; and, I infer from my being here to-night, it is even yet not wholly forgotten. I may add also that it is distinctly the cause of my being here; for, as six months ago I thought over your invitation to address a Weymouth audience once more, it seemed to offer what must be a rare opportunity in any life,--an opportunity to go back, after years of study directed largely to historical topics, more especially to topics connected with New England, Massachusetts and the region hereabout, and to review what I in the beginning said, close to the spot where I said it. Accordingly, I this evening propose to find my text in what I uttered on King-oak hill thirty years ago last July; and, in so doing, to pass judgment upon it.
For a first performance, I will honestly confess it does not seem to me, as I now look over it, wholly devoid of merit. Curiously enough also, the best portions of it are distinctly the closing portions, in which I wrote with a warmth and feeling absent from the earlier part. Nevertheless, that Weymouth address of 1874, as I now see it, was, as a whole, wrong in conception and faulty in execution. It was wrong in conception, because in it I tried to cover too much ground. That it was defective in execution, is most apparent. Accepting an invitation to deliver a commemorative address on the 250th anniversary of the permanent settlement of Weymouth, I attempted an historical sketch covering the town’s whole existence. I ought to have confined myself to a close analysis of its first twenty years. That period would have opened to me, had I known how to use it, a field of investigation at once ample in extent and curiously rich. Nor is this all; it would have done a great deal more. Unwittingly, I missed the opportunity of a life-time. Simply, I was not equal to the occasion. My consolation is that few would have been equal to it. But of this, more presently.
To make either a comprehensive or careful analysis of the early history of your town now, is out of my power; nor would one evening’s time admit of it. I will, however, say that to-day, not less than in the days of the late James Savage, “a careful history of Weymouth is much wanted.”[100] Nine years after my prentice effort, your associate and recording secretary, Gilbert Nash, approached the subject both with a better comprehension, and a knowledge much closer and far wider than I could boast. But my effort, supplemented though it was by him, left much to be desired,--a desideratum it should be the mission of this Society to make good.
Turning then to Wessagusset, and the early history of Weymouth, and confining myself to them, I find its record composed of two parts:--the Wessagusset settlements, pre-historic almost in character, and the subsequent struggling into life of Weymouth, in the early years of the colony. The story of Wessagusset is in itself curiously interesting, as well as of momentous importance; and it was in connection with that I missed the opportunity of a life-time, to which I just referred. It vexes me now to think of it. It even brings to mind Whittier’s familiar lines:
“For of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these: ‘It might have been!’”
It came about in this wise:--Weymouth is very classic ground; to what an extent it is classic I certainly did not at the time now in question appreciate; nor, I am confident, did your people appreciate it. Not only did some of the most dramatic, as well as momentous, episodes in the early life of Massachusetts here occur, but it so chanced that one at least of those episodes has been woven into a poem familiar as a household word. I refer, of course, to Longfellow’s “Courtship of Miles Standish.” It was with that I should forever have connected my effort of 1874; I should have vindicated history, while showing how, as material for poetical treatment, Longfellow had failed to use it as it might have been used. He also had proved unequal to the occasion. You remember the episode in Longfellow’s poem to which I refer; it is the seventh part, entitled “The March of Miles Standish.” I would like to read the whole of this part to you; and then, in sharp contrast, set before you the historic facts. I must, however, confine myself to some two score lines of the poem, enough to recall its spirit, and follow them with a mere outline of the actual facts. But that will suffice:
“Meanwhile the stalwart Miles Standish was marching steadily northward, Winding through forest and swamp, and along the trend of the seashore. * * * * *
“After a three days’ march he came to an Indian encampment Pitched on the edge of a meadow, between the sea and the forest; Women at work by the tents, and the warriors, horrid with war paint, Seated about a fire, and smoking and talking together; Who, when they saw from afar the sudden approach of the white men, Saw the flash of the sun on breastplate and sabre and musket, Straightway leaped to their feet, and two, from among them advancing, Came to parley with Standish, and offer him furs as a present; Friendship was in their looks, but in their hearts there was hatred. Braves of the tribe were these, and brothers gigantic in stature, Huge as Goliath of Gath, or the terrible Og, king of Bashan; One was Pecksuot named, and the other was called Wattawamat. * * * * *
“But when he heard their defiance, the boast, the taunt, and the insult, All the hot blood of his race, of Sir Hugh and of Thurston de Standish, Boiled and beat in his heart, and swelled in the veins of his temples. Headlong he leaped on the boaster, and, snatching his knife from its scabbard, Plunged it into his heart, and, reeling backward, the savage Fell with his face to the sky, and a fiendlike fierceness upon it. Straight there arose from the forest the awful sound of the war-whoop, And, like a flurry of snow on the whistling wind of December, Swift and sudden and keen came a flight of feathery arrows. Then came a cloud of smoke, and out of the cloud came the lightning, Out of the lightning thunder; and death unseen ran before it. Frightened the savages fled for shelter in swamp and in thicket, Hotly pursued and beset; but their sachem, the brave Wattawamat, Fled not; he was dead. Unswerving and swift had a bullet Passed through his brain, and he fell with both hands clutching the greensward, Seeming in death to hold back from his foe the land of his fathers.
“There on the flowers of the meadow the warriors lay, and above them, Silent, with folded arms, stood Hobomok, friend of the white man. * * * * *
“Thus the first battle was fought and won by the stalwart Miles Standish. When the tidings thereof were brought to the village of Plymouth, And as a trophy of war the head of the brave Wattawamat Scowled from the roof of the fort, which at once was a church and a fortress, All who beheld it rejoiced, and praised the Lord, and took courage.”
Such is the poet’s rendering; now what were the facts? We all recognize in these cases what is known as “poetic license.” It is the unquestioned privilege of the poet to so mould hard facts and actual conditions as to make realities conform to his idea of the everlasting fitness of things. On the other hand, it is but fair that, in so doing, the artist should improve on the facts. In other words, he should at least not make them more prosaic, and distinctly less dramatic, than they were. In the present case, I submit, Longfellow, instead of rendering things more poetic and dramatic, made them distinctly less so. This I shall now proceed to show.
And here let me premise that it was the habit of Longfellow, as I think the unfortunate habit, to improvise,--so to speak, to evolve from his inner consciousness,--the local atmosphere and conditions of those poems of his in which he dealt with history and historical happenings. It was so with the “Ride of Paul Revere;” it was so with the episodes made use of in the “Tales of a Wayside Inn;” it is notorious it was so in the case of “Evangeline” and Acadia; it was strikingly, and far more inexcusably, so in the case of “Miles Standish” and Plymouth. While preparing a poem which has deservedly become an American classic, as such throwing a glamour of romance over that entire region to which it has given the name of the “Evangeline Country,” Longfellow never sought to draw inspiration from actual contact with that “forest primeval” of which he sang; nor again, when dealing with the events of our own early history, did he once visit, much less study, the scene of that which he pictured. He imagined everything. I gravely question whether he even knew that the conflict he describes in the lines I have just quoted took place on the shores of Boston bay, and at a point not twenty miles from the historic mansion in which he lived, and the library where he imagined. He certainly, and more’s the pity, never stood on King-oak hill, or sailed up the Fore-river.
What actually occurred here in April, 1623, I have endeavored elsewhere to describe in detail, just as it appears in our early records. Those curious on the subject will find my narrative in a chapter (vi) entitled “The Smoking Flax Blood-Quenched,” in a work of mine, the matured outcome of my address here in 1874, called “Three Episodes of Massachusetts History.” To that I refer them. Meanwhile, suffice it for me now to say, the actual occurrences of those early April days were stronger, more virile, and infinitely more dramatic and better adapted to poetic treatment,--in one word, more Homeric,--than the wholly apocryphal, and somewhat mawkish, cast given them in the lines I have quoted. Indeed, so far as the incidents drawn from the history of Weymouth are concerned, the whole is, in the original records, replete with vigorous life. It smacks of the savage; it is racy of the soil; it smells of the sea. It begins with the flight of Phineas Pratt from Wessagusset to Plymouth, his loss of the way, his fear lest his foot-prints in the late-lingering snow banks should betray him, his nights in the woods, his pursuit by the Indians, his guidance by the stars and sky, his fording the icy river, and his arrival in Plymouth just as Miles Standish was embarking for Wessagusset. Nothing then can be more picturesque, more epic in outline, than Standish’s voyage, with his little company of grim, silent men in that open boat. Sternly bent on action, they skirted, under a gloomy eastern sky, along the surf-beaten shore, the mist driving in their faces as the swelling seas broke roughly in white surge over the rocks and ledges which still obstruct the course they took. From the distance came the dull, monotonous roar of the breakers, indicating the line of the coast. At last they cast anchor before the desolate and apparently deserted block-house here in your Fore-river, and presently some woe-begone stragglers answered their call. Next came the meeting with the savages, the fencing talk, and the episode of what Holmes, in still another poem, refers to as,
“Wituwamet’s pictured knife And Pecksuot’s whooping shout;”
all closing with the fierce hand-to-hand death grapple on the blood-soaked, slippery floor of the rude stockade. Last of all the return to Plymouth, with the gory head of Wattawamat, “that bloody and bold villain,” a ghastly freight, stowed in the rummage of their boat.
The whole story is, in the originals, full of life, simplicity and vigor, needing only to be turned into verse. But, in place of the voyage, we have in Longfellow’s poem a march through the woods, which, having never taken place, has in it nothing characteristic; an interview before an Indian encampment “pitched on the edge of a meadow, between the sea and the forest,” at which the knife scene is enacted, instead of in the rude block-house; and, finally, the killing takes place amid a discharge of firearms, and “there on the flowers of the meadow the warriors” are made to lie; whereas in fact they died far more vigorously, as well as poetically, on the bloody floor of the log-house in which they were surprised, “not making any fearful noise, but catching at their weapons and striving to the last.” And as for “flowers,” it was early in April, and, in spots, the snow still lingered!
That Longfellow wrote very sweet verse, none will deny; but, assuredly, he was not Homeric. At his hands your Weymouth history failed to have justice done it. The case is, I fear, irremediable.
Another cause of great subsequent regret to me has been the fact that, in 1874, the exact locality of the site of the original Wessagusset settlement, and of Weston’s block-house, in which took place the death grapple just referred to, was not known. Tradition asserted that it was somewhere on Phillips creek, above the Fore-river bridge. Seventeen years later, in a volume entitled “The Defences of Norumbega,” published in 1891, by the late Prof. E. N. Horsford, I chanced across a reproduction of Gov. Winthrop’s map of Massachusetts bay of 1634. This map was in 1884 discovered by Henry Waters, among the manuscripts of the Sloan collection, preserved in the British Museum.[101] A portion of it, covering the Weymouth Fore-river and the Wessagusset site, was reproduced in the printed “Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society” (Second Series, vol. vii, pp. 22-30), and thereon is indicated the site of the original Wessagusset. That site no longer exists; and it will ever be matter of profound regret to me that the spot was not known, and the exact location fixed, a few years earlier, at the time of the celebration of 1874. The spot was then unimproved, as the expression goes; it has since been “improved” out of existence. Sold for a trifling sum as a gravel, or a material, pit, had what has since come to light then been known, it might have been secured, and dedicated forever as a public water park fronting on the Fore-river. A permanent memorial should there have been erected.
Instead, bodily carried away, it has literally been cast into the sea; and the tide now daily ebbs and flows over the spot where, two hundred and eighty-two years ago last April, Thomas Weston’s “stout knaves” established themselves; and where, on April 6, 1623, that hand-to-hand death grapple took place between Miles Standish and the fierce Pecksuot, the result of which struck terror to the hearts of the Massachusetts savages, and gave immediate safety, and years of subsequent peace, to the infant Plymouth plantation.
Thus, what occurred at Wessagusset in that pre-historic period has been in poetry and common acceptance so disguised, perverted and transmogrified as to have lost all semblance of itself. It can no longer be recognized; while the place where it all occurred has ceased to be. So it only for us remains to recur to actualities.
In one other aspect the temporary lodgment of Thomas Weston’s “rude fellows” here in Weymouth from June, 1622, to April, 1623, has an interest in the Massachusetts annals. It is characteristic of a distinct phase in the first attempts at the European occupation of New England. I used the word “occupation” designedly, for those sporadic trading stations cannot be referred to correctly as settlements; they contained in themselves no power of self-perpetuation, being composed wholly of men engaged for wages in an effort at the trade exploitation of a region. This is wholly different from colonization in good faith. Thomas Weston acted on a well-defined plan, when, early in 1622, he dispatched his company to establish themselves somewhere on the shores of Massachusetts bay. He himself expressed it:--“Families,” he said, “were an encumbrance in any well-organized plantation; but a trading-post occupied by able-bodied men only could accomplish more in New England in seven years than in old England in twenty.”
Nor was his, here at Wessagusset, by any means the earliest attempt of the sort. On the contrary, it had been preceded by a score of years; and, twelve months ago, on the 1st day of September, 1903, the 300th anniversary was observed of the similar, but even more abortive, experiment made by Capt. Bartholomew Gosnold on the island of Cuttyhunk, at the extreme western end of the Elizabethan group, off New Bedford. Again, three years later, in August, 1607, a similar attempt was made further to the eastward, when the Popham and Gorges plantation was established on the Kennebec. In that case, the adventurers did actually winter on the coast; but, as the survivors described their experience, they found the country “over cold, and in respect of that not habitable by Englishmen.”
At this time, as probably long before and continuously thereafter, Monhegan island, southwest of Penobscot bay, seems to have been a rendezvous for fishermen; and when, in the early spring of 1622, those composing the advance of Thomas Weston’s company arrived at the Damariscove station, on the group of islands just south of Penobscot bay, they found that the men belonging to the ships there fishing “had newly set up a May-pole and were very merry.” But, a band of sea-farers only, there were no families in that company. These, one and all, were mere fishing or trading posts; and, so far as I have been able to learn, not until the Mayflower put into Provincetown harbor on what is now the 21st of November, 1620, had any women of European blood ever set foot on New England soil. That day is properly celebrated. It marked the close of the trade-exploiting period, and the beginning of true colonization.
With almost no interval between, or, at most, with an interval of less than six months,--from early April to mid-September,--the Gorges settlement followed, here at Weymouth, on that of Weston. Except in one respect, I now find my thirty-years-ago treatment of this Gorges settlement not unsatisfactory. I failed to grasp its significance in connection with the European occupation of Massachusetts; and in that connection it has a very considerable significance. To a certain extent Mr. Nash afterwards made good my deficiencies. Nevertheless, the story has, I apprehend, even yet, never been fully told. To tell it should be one of the chief functions of your Society. I will endeavor briefly to outline it, as I now surmise it to have been. For, with inquirers into the events of a remote past, it is much as it is with persons looking for things in dark places. The intellectual perceptions, like the eyes, by degrees become accustomed to a murky environment; and when so accustomed, things quite invisible to others are by long-time investigators distinctly seen.