Nooks and Corners of the New England Coast

The Neck is the peculiar domain of a transient population of care-worn fugitives from the city. The red-roofed cottages were picturesque objects among the rocks, but bore marks of the disorder in which the winter had left them. They seemed shivering up there on the ledges, though it was the seventh day of May, for there had been a light fall of snow, followed by a searching north-west wind. Not even a curl of smoke issued from the chimneys to take off the prevailing chilliness. Down at the harbor side there was an old farmstead with some noble trees I liked better. On the beach I had trod in Hawthorne's "Foot-prints." I might here rekindle Longfellow's "Fire of Drift-wood:"

"We sat within the farm-house old,Whose windows, looking o'er the bay,Gave to the sea-breeze, damp and cold,An easy entrance night and day."Not far away we saw the port,The strange old-fashioned silent town,The light-house, the dismantled fort,The wooden houses quaint and brown."

The light-keeper, whom I found at home, indulged me in a few moments' chat. He could not account, he said, for the extraordinary predilection of the Light-house Board for whitewash. Dwelling, covered way, and tower were each and all besmeared; and the keeper seemed not overconfident that he might not soon receive an order to put on a coat of it himself. He did not object to the summer, but in winter his berth was not so pleasant. I already felt convinced of this. To a question he replied that Government estimated his services at five hundred dollars per annum; and he pointedly asked me how he was to support a family on the stipend? Yet he must keep his light trimmed and burning; for if that goes out, so does he.

All the light-houses are supplied with lard-oil, which burns without incrusting the wick of the lamp; but the keeper objected that it was always chilled in cold weather, and that he usually had to take it into the dwelling and heat it on the stove before it could be used. A good deal of moisture collects on the plate-glass windows of the lantern when the wind is off-shore, but if it be off the land the glass is dry. In very cold weather, when it becomes coated with frost, the light is visible but a short distance at sea. To remedy this evil, spirits of wine are furnished to keepers, but does not wholly remove the difficulty.

Afterward we spoke of the commerce of Marblehead. The only craft now in port were five or six ballast-lighters that had wintered in the upper harbor; with this exception it was deserted. The keeper had been master of a fishing vessel. I could not help remarking to him on this ominous state of things.

"I have seen as many as a hundred and twenty vessels lying below us here, getting ready for a cruise on the Banks," he said.

"And now?"

"Now there are not more than fifteen sail that hail out of here."

"So that fishing, as a business – "

"Is knocked higher than a kite."

Will it ever come down again?

We commiserate the situation of an individual out of business; what shall we, then, say of a town thrown out of employment? Before the Revolution, Marblehead was our principal fishing port. When the war came this industry was broken up for the seven years of the contest. Most of the men went into the army, one entire regiment being raised here. Many entered on board privateers or the public armed vessels of the revolted colonies. At the close of the war, great destitution prevailed by reason of the losses in men the town had sustained; and as usual a lottery was resorted to for the benefit of the survivors. The War of 1812 again drove the Marblehead fishermen from their peaceful calling to man our little navy. At its close five hundred of her sons were in British prisons.

Fisheries have often been called the agriculture of the seas. Sir Walter Raleigh attributed the wealth and power of Holland, not to its commerce or carrying trade, but to its fisheries. Captain John Smith was of this opinion; so were Mirabeau and De Witt. Franklin seemed to prefer the fisheries of America to agriculture; and Edmund Burke paid our fishermen the noblest panegyric of them all:

"No sea but is vexed by their fisheries. No climate that is not witness to their toils. Neither the perseverance of Holland, nor the activity of France, nor the dexterous and firm sagacity of English enterprise ever carried this most perilous mode of hardy industry to the extent to which it has been pushed by this recent people – a people who are still, as it were, but in the gristle, and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood."149

Add to this Napoleon's opinion that the American was the superior of the English seaman, and national self-complacency may safely rest on two such eminent authorities.

The light-keeper, who had been on the Banks, informed me that it was still the custom, when lying to in a heavy blow, to pour oil on the waves alongside the vessel; and that it was effectual in smoothing the sea – not a wave breaking within its influence. Dr. Franklin's experiments are the first I remember to have read of. A single tea-spoonful, he says, quieted the ruffled surface of near half an acre of water in a windy day, and rendered it as smooth as a looking-glass.150 This man would have triumphed over nature herself.

Without doubt Marblehead owes a large share of her naval renown to her fishery; to those men who entered the sea-service at the bowsprit, like the great navigator, Cook, and not at the cabin windows. They gave a distinctively American character to our little navies of 1776 and 1812. Southey, while writing his "Life of Nelson," flings down his pen in despair to say: "What a miserable thing is this loss of a second frigate to the Americans. It is a cruel stroke; and, though their frigates are larger ships than ours, must be felt as a disgrace, and in fact is disgrace. It looks as if there was a dry-rot in our wooden walls. Is it that this captain also is a youngster hoisted up by interest, or that the Americans were manned by Englishmen, or that our men do not fight heartily, or that their men are better than ours?"

One writer calls the fishery "a great nursery of the marine, from whence a constant supply of men, inured to the perils of the sea, are constantly ready for the service of their country." Supposing this doctrine correct, it becomes an interesting question where the sailors of future navies are to come from? The whale-fishery has been fairly beaten out of the field by oil-spouting rocks. Why should we brave the perils of the Arctic circle when by sinking a tube in Pennsylvania we may strike a fellow of a thousand barrels, and wax rich while asleep? New London, Nantucket, New Bedford, and Edgartown have answered. The cod and mackerel fisheries have dwindled into like insignificance, say Marblehead, Gloucester, and all fishing ports along shore. When these towns, once so exclusively maritime, found the fishery slipping through their fingers, they took up shoe-making, and at present you will see plenty of Crispins, but not many blue-jackets, in Marblehead. Cobbling is now carried on in the barn-lofts, fish-houses, and cottages. Yet this change of condition is not met, as in the failing whale-fishery, by a supply from a different source; fish continues to be as highly esteemed and in greater request than ever; it is the supply, not the demand, that is diminishing.

There are some of those larger shoe-factories in the town where hides are received at the front door, and are delivered at the back, in an incredibly short time, ready for wear. The young men I saw in long aprons at the benches had none of the rugged look of their fathers. Their white arms showed little of the brawn that comes from constant handling of the oar. The air of the work-shop was stifling, and I gladly left it, thinking these were hardly the fellows to stand by the guns or reef-tackles. One old man with whom I conversed bitterly deplored that shoe-making had killed fishing, and had made the young men, as he phrased it, "nash," which is what they say of fish that the sun has spoiled. At the time I was there shoe-making itself was suffering from a depression of trade, and many of the inhabitants appeared to be in a state of uncertainty as to their future that, I imagine, may become chronic. One individual, while lamenting the decline of business, brightened up as he said, "But I understand they an't much better off at Beverly."

The decline of the cod-fishery is attributed to the use of trawls, and to the greed that kills the goose that has laid the golden egg. Formerly fish were taken with hand-lines only, over the side of the vessel. Then they began to carry dories, in which the crew sought out the best places. The men lost in fogs or bad weather while looking for or visiting their trawls swell the list of casualties year by year. Fitting out fishing-vessels, instead of being the simple matter it once was, has become an affair of capital, the trawls for a vessel sometimes costing fifteen hundred dollars.

Douglass gives some particulars of the fishery, as practiced in his own and at an earlier day. He says the North Sea cod, and those taken on the Irish coast were considered better than the American fish, but were inadequate to the supply. No fish were considered merchantable in England or Ireland less than eighteen inches long from the first fin to the beginning of the tail. In Newfoundland they worked their fish "belly down;" in New England they were worked with their backs downward, to receive more salt, and add to their weight. The stock-fish of Norway and Iceland were cured without salt, by hanging them in winter upon sticks called by the Dutch "stocks" – this may have been the origin of our dun-fish. The fish made in Marblehead for Spain were known as "Bilboa drithe," and could be held out horizontally by the tail. Those cured for the western market were called "Albany drithe," from the fact that Albany was the head-quarters of that trade.

To quote from Douglass, he says: "In 1746 Marblehead ships off more dried cod than all the rest of New England besides. Anno 1732 a good fish year, and in profound peace, Marblehead had about one hundred and twenty schooners of about fifty tons burden, seven men aboard, and one man ashore to make the fish, or about one thousand men employed, besides the seamen who carry the fish to market. Two hundred quintals considered a fare. In 1747 they have not exceeding seventy schooners, and make five fares yearly to I. Sables, St. George's Banks, etc."

M. Rochefoucauld Liancourt, who visited New England in 1799, making a tour of the coast as far as the Penobscot, says at that time the vessels were usually of seventy tons, and had a master, seven seamen, and a boy. The owner had a quarter, the dryer on the coast an eighth, and the rest was shared by the master and seamen, in proportion to the fish they had taken. Every man took care of his own fish.

As early as 1631 Governor Matthew Cradock established a fishing station at Marblehead, in charge of Isaac Allerton, whose name appears fifth on the celebrated compact of the Pilgrims, signed at Cape Cod, November 11th, 1620.151 Winthrop mentions in his journal that as the Arabella was standing in for Naumkeag, on the 12th of June, 1630, Mr. Allerton boarded her in a shallop as he was sailing to Pemaquid. Moses Maverick lived at Marblehead with Allerton, and married his daughter Sarah. In 1635 Allerton conveyed to his son-in-law all the houses, buildings, and stages he had at Marblehead. In 1638 Moses was licensed to sell a tun of wine a year.

In Winthrop's "Journal," under the date of 1633, is the following with reference to this plantation:152

"February 1. – Mr. Cradock's house at Marblehead was burnt down about midnight before, there being then in it Mr. Allerton, and many fishermen whom he employed that season, who all were preserved by a special providence of God, with most of his goods therein, by a tailor, who sat up that night at work in the house, and, hearing a noise, looked out and saw the house on fire above the oven in the thatch."153

While retracing my steps back to town, I pictured the harbor in its day of prosperity. A hundred sail would have given it a degree of animation quite marvelous to see. Six hours a hundred sharp prows point up the harbor, and six they look out to sea. Above the tapering forest of equal growth are thrust the crossed spars of ships from Cadiz, in Spain. Innumerable wherries dart about, rowed by two men each; they are strongly built, for baiting trawls on the banks and in a sea is no child's play. The cheery cries, rattling of blocks, and universal bustle aboard the fleet announce the preparations for sailing. At the top of the flood up go a score of sails, and round go as many windlasses to a rattling chorus. Anchors are hove short in a trice. The vessels first under way draw out from among the fleet, clear the mouth of the harbor, and in a few minutes more are flinging the seas from their bows with Marblehead Light well under their lee.

I do not know who first discovered Marblehead. The vague idea associates it with a heap of sterile rocks, inhabited by fishermen speaking an unintelligible jargon. Though not twenty miles from the New England metropolis, and notwithstanding its past is interwoven with every page of our historic times, less is known of it than would seem credible to the intelligent reader. A faithful chronicle of its fortunes would, no doubt, be sufficiently curious, though many would, I fear, prefer the stories of Tyre and Carthage. But Marblehead is unique; there is nothing like it on this side of the water.

I was struck, on entering the place, with Whitefield's observation when he asked where the dead were buried; for the great want appears to be earth. But a further acquaintance revealed more pleasant inclosures of turf, orchards, and garden-spots than its gaunt crags seemed capable of sustaining. The town may be said to embrace two very dissimilar portions, of which the larger appears paralyzed with age, and the other the outgrowth of a newer and more thriving generation. It is with the old town I have to do.

I preferred to commit myself to the guidance of the narrow streets, and drift about wherever they listed. The stranger need not try to settle his topography beforehand. He would lose his labor. It was only after a third visit that I began to have some notions of the maze of rocky lanes, alleys, and courts. Caprice seemed to have governed the location of a majority of the houses by the water-side, and the streets to have adjusted themselves to the wooden anarchy; or else the idea forced itself upon you that the houses must have been stranded here by the flood, remaining where the subsiding waters left them; for they stand anywhere and nowhere, in a ravine or atop a cliff, crowding upon and elbowing each other until no man, it would seem, might know his own. How one of those ancient mariners rolling heavily homeward after a night's carouse could have found his own dwelling, is a mystery I do not undertake to solve.

M. De Chastellux, who had a compliment ready-made for every thing American, was accosted when in Boston with the remark,

"Marquis, you find a crooked city in Boston?"

"Ah, ver good, ver good," said the chevalier; "it show de liberté."

I found Washington Street a good base of operations. A modern dwelling is rarely met with between this thoroughfare and the water. On State (formerly King) Street there is but one house less than a century old, and the frame of that one was being raised the day Washington came to town. Even he was struck by the antiquated look of the buildings. The long exemption from fire is little less than miraculous, for a building of brick or stone is an exception. Old houses, gambrel-roofed, hip-roofed, and pitch-roofed, with an occasional reminiscence of London in Milton's day, are ranged on all sides; little altered in a hundred years, though I should have liked better to have chanced this way when the porches of some were projecting ten feet into the street. I enjoyed losing myself among them; for, certes, there is more of the crust of antiquity about Marblehead than any place of its years in America.

An air of snug and substantial comfort hung about many of the older houses, and some localities betokened there was an upper as well as a nether stratum of society in Marblehead. Fine old trees flourished in secluded neighborhoods, where the brass door-knockers shone with unwonted lustre. I think my fingers itched to grasp them, so suggestive were they of feudal times when stranger knight summoned castle-warden by striking with his sword-hilt on the oaken door. Fancy goes in unbidden at their portals, and roves among their cramped corridors and best rooms, peering into closets where choice china is kept, or rummaging among the curious lumber of the garrets, the accumulations of many generations. On the whole, the dwellings represent so far as they may a singular equality of condition. It is only by turning into some court or by-way that you come unexpectedly upon a mansion having about it some relics of a former splendor. Though Marblehead has its Billingsgate, I saw nothing of the squalor of our larger cities; and though it may have its Rotten Row, I remarked neither lackeys nor showy equipages.

There are few sidewalks in the older quarter. The streets are too narrow to afford such a luxury, averaging, should say, not more than a rod in width in the older ones, with barely room for a single vehicle. The passer-by may, if he pleases, look into the first-floor sitting-rooms, and see the family gathered at its usual occupations. Whether it be a greater indiscretion to look in at the windows than to look out of them, as the matrons and maidens are in the habit of doing when a stranger is in the neighborhood is a question I willingly remand to the decision of my readers; yet I confess I found the temptation too strong to be resisted. In order to protect those houses at the street corners, a massive stone post is often seen imbedded in the ground; but to give them a wide berth is impossible, and I looked for business to be brisk at the wheelwright's shop.

Again, as the street encounters a ledge in its way, one side of it mounts the acclivity, ten, twenty feet above your head, while the other keeps the level as before. Such accidental looking-down upon their neighbors does not, perhaps, argue moral or material pre-eminence; but, for all that, there may be a shilling side. One thing about these old houses impressed me pleasantly; though many of them were guiltless of paint, and on some roofs mosses had begun to creep, and a yellow rust to cover the clapboards, there were few windows that did not boast a goodly show of scarlet geraniums, fuchsias, or mignonnette, with ivy clustering lovingly about the frames, making the dark old casements blossom again, and glow with a wealth of warm color.

I was too well acquainted with maritime towns to be surprised at finding fishing-boats, even of a few tons burden, a quarter of a mile from the water. They might even be said to crop out with remarkable frequency. Some were covered with boughs, their winter protection; others were being patched, painted, or calked, preparatory for launching, with an assiduity and solicitude that can only be appreciated by the owners of such craft. On the street that skirts the harbor I saw a fisherman just landed enter his cottage, "paying out," as he went, from a coil of rope, one end being, I ascertained, fastened to his wherry. I remember to have seen in Mexico the vaqueros, on alighting from their mules, take from the pommel of their saddles some fathoms of braided hair-rope, called a lariat, and, on entering a shop or dwelling, uncoil it as they went. The custom of these Marblehead fishermen seemed no less ingenious.

In a sea-port my instinct is for the water. I have a predilection for the wharves, and, though I could well enough dispense with their smells, for their sights and sounds. The cross-ways in Marblehead seem in search of the harbor as they go wriggling about the ledges. I should say they had been formed on the ancient foot-paths leading down to the fishing stages. At the head of one pier, half imbedded in the earth, was an old honey-combed cannon that looked as if it might have spoken a word in the dispute with the mother country, but now played the part of a capstan, and truant boys were casting dirt between its blistered lips. In Red Stone Cove there lay, stranded and broken in two, a long-boat, brought years ago from China, perhaps, on the deck of some Indiaman. Its build was outlandish; so unlike the wherries that were by, yet so like the craft that swim in the turbid Yang Tse. I took a seat in it, and was carried to the land of pagodas, opium, and mandarins. Its sheathing of camphor-wood still exhaled the pungent odor of the aromatic tree. On either quarter was painted an enormous eye that seemed to follow you about the strand. In all these voyages some part of the Old World seems to have drifted westward, and attached itself to the shores of the New. Here it was a Portuguese from the Tagus, or a Spaniard of Alicante; elsewhere a Norwegian, Swede, or Finn, grafted on a strange clime and way of life.

The men I saw about the wharves, in woolen "jumpers" and heavy fishing boots, had the true "guinea-stamp" of the old Ironsides of the sea. To see those lumberings fishermen in the streets you would not think they could be so handy, or tread so lightly in a dory. I saw there an old foreign-looking seaman, one of those fellows with short, bowed legs, drooping shoulders, contracted eyelids, and hands dug in their pockets, who may be met with at all hours of the day and night hulking about the quays of a shipping town. This man eyed the preparations of amateur boatmen with the contemptuous curiosity often vouchsafed by such personages in the small affair of getting a pleasure-boat under way. One poor fellow, who kept a little shop where he could hear the wash of the tide on the loose pebbles of the cove, told me he had lost his leg by the cable getting a turn round it. Though they have a rough outside, these men have hearts. His skipper, he said, had put about, though it was a dead loss to him, and sailed a hundred miles to land his mutilated shipmate.

How did Marblehead look in the olden time? Its early history is allied with that of Salem, of which it formed a part until 1648. Francis Higginson, who came over in 1629, says, in that year, "There are in all of us, both old and new planters, about three hundred, whereof two hundred of them are settled at Nehumkek, now called Salem; and the rest have planted themselves at Masathulets Bay, beginning to build a town there which wee do call Cherton or Charles Town." His New England's "Plantation" is curious reading. I have observed in my researches that these old divines are often fond of drawing the long bow, a failing of which Higginson, one of the earliest, seems conscious when he asks in his exordium, "Shall such a man as I lye? No, verily!"

William Wood, describing the place in 1633, says of it: "Marvil Head is a place which lyeth 4 miles full south from Salem, and is a very convenient place for a plantation, especially for such as will set upon the trade of fishing. There was made here a ship's loading of fish the last year, where still stand the stages and drying scaffolds." In 1635, the court order that "there shal be a Plantacion at Marblehead."

John Josselyn looked in here in 1663. "Marvil, or Marblehead," he says, is "a small harbour, the shore rockie, on which the town is built, consisting of a few scattered houses; here they have stages for fishermen, orchards, and gardens half a mile within land, good pastures, and arable land."

It had now begun to emerge from the insignificance of a fishing village, and to assume a place among the number of maritime towns. In 1696 a French spy makes report: "Marvalet est composé de 100 ou 120 maisons pescheurs où il peut entrer de gros vaisseaux."

In 1707-'8 Marblehead was represented to the Lords of Trade as a smuggling port for Boston, for which it also furnished pilots. A few years earlier (1704) Quelch, the pirate, had been apprehended there, after having scattered his gold right and left. But it was not until an order had come from the Governor and Council at Boston that he was arrested, nor had there been a province law against piracy until within a few years.154 Seven of Quelch's gang were taken by Major Stephen Sewall; and the inhabitants of Marblehead were required to bring in the gold coin, melted down, and silver plate they had not been unwilling to receive.

It was, no doubt, owing to the lawless habits introduced that the character of the sea-faring population partook of a certain wildness – such as good Parson Barnard inveighs against – manifesting itself in every-day transactions, and infusing into the men an adventurous and reckless spirit which fitted them in a measure for deeds of daring, and gave to the old sea-port no small portion of the notoriety it enjoys.