An Old Town By The Sea(滨海古城)

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An Old Town By The Sea

by Thomas Bailey Aldrich

An Old Town By The Sea

PISCATAQUA RIVER

Thou singest by the gleaming isles, By woods, and fields of corn,

Thou singest, and the sunlight smiles Upon my birthday morn.

But I within a city, I, So full of vague unrest, Would almost give my

life to lie An hour upon upon thy breast.

To let the wherry listless go, And, wrapt in dreamy joy, Dip, and surge

idly to and fro, Like the red harbor-buoy;

To sit in happy indolence, To rest upon the oars, And catch the heavy

earthy scents That blow from summer shores;

To see the rounded sun go down, And with its parting fires Light up

the windows of the town And burn the tapering spires;

And then to hear the muffled tolls From steeples slim and white, And

watch, among the Isles of Shoals, The Beacon's orange light.

O River! flowing to the main Through woods, and fields of corn, Hear

thou my longing and my pain This sunny birthday morn;

And take this song which fancy shapes To music like thine own, And

sing it to the cliffs and capes And crags where I am known!

An Old Town By The Sea

I. CAPTAIN JOHN SMITH

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

An Old Town By The Sea

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

An Old Town By The Sea

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.

An Old Town By The Sea

II. ALONG THE WATER SIDE

IT is not supposable that the early settlers selected the site of their

plantation on account of its picturesqueness. They were influenced entirely

by the lay of the land, its nearness and easy access to the sea, and the

secure harbor it offered to their fishing-vessels; yet they could not have

chosen a more beautiful spot had beauty been the sole consideration. The

first settlement was made at Odiorne's Point--the Pilgrims' Rock of New

Hampshire; there the Manor, or Mason's Hall, was built by the Laconia

Company in 1623. It was not until 1631 that the Great House was

erected by Humphrey Chadborn on Strawberry Bank. Mr. Chadborn,

consciously or unconsciously, sowed a seed from which a city has sprung.

The town of Portsmouth stretches along the south bank of the

Piscataqua, about two miles from the sea as the crow flies--three miles

following the serpentine course of the river. The stream broadens

suddenly at this point, and at flood tide, lying without a ripple in a basin

formed by the interlocked islands and the mainland, it looks more like an

island lake than a river. To the unaccustomed eye there is no visible outlet.

Standing on one of the wharves at the foot of State Street or Court Street, a

stranger would at first scarcely suspect the contiguity of the ocean. A little

observation, however, would show him that he was in a seaport. The rich

red rust on the gables and roofs of ancient buildings looking seaward

would tell him that. There is a fitful saline flavor in the air, and if while

he gazed a dense white fog should come rolling in, like a line of phantom

breakers, he would no longer have any doubts. It is of course the oldest

part of the town that skirts the river, though few of the notable houses that

remain are to be found there. Like all New England settlements,

Portsmouth was built of wood, and has been subjected to extensive

conflagrations. You rarely come across a brick building that is not

shockingly modern. The first house of the kind was erected by Richard

Wibird towards the close of the seventeenth century.

Though many of the old landmarks have been swept away by the

fateful hand of time and fire, the town impresses you as a very old town,

especially as you saunter along the streets down by the river. The worm-

An Old Town By The Sea

eaten wharves, some of them covered by a sparse, unhealthy beard of

grass, and the weather-stained, unoccupied warehouses are sufficient to

satisfy a moderate appetite for antiquity. These deserted piers and these

long rows of empty barracks, with their sarcastic cranes projecting from

the eaves, rather puzzle the stranger. Why this great preparation for a

commercial activity that does not exist, and evidently had not for years

existed? There are no ships lying at the pier-heads; there are no gangs of

stevedores staggering under the heavy cases of merchandise; here and

there is a barge laden down to the bulwarks with coal, and here and there a

square-rigged schooner from Maine smothered with fragrant planks and

clapboards; an imported citizen is fishing at the end of the wharf, a

ruminative freckled son of Drogheda, in perfect sympathy with the

indolent sunshine that seems to be sole proprietor of these crumbling piles

and ridiculous warehouses, from which even the ghost of prosperity has

flown.

Once upon a time, however, Portsmouth carried on an extensive trade

with the West Indies, threatening as a maritime port to eclipse both Boston

and New York. At the windows of these musty counting-rooms which

overlook the river near Spring Market used to stand portly merchants, in

knee breeches and silver shoe-buckles and plum-colored coats with ruffles

at the wrist, waiting for their ships to come up the Narrows; the cries of

stevedores and the chants of sailors at the windlass used to echo along the

shore where all is silence now. For reasons not worth setting forth, the

trade with the Indies abruptly closed, having ruined as well as enriched

many a Portsmouth adventurer. This explains the empty warehouses and

the unused wharves. Portsmouth remains the interesting widow of a once

very lively commerce. I fancy that few fortunes are either made or lost in

Portsmouth nowadays. Formerly it turned out the best ships, as it did the

ablest ship captains, in the world. There were families in which the love

for blue water was in immemorial trait. The boys were always sailors; "a

grey-headed shipmaster, in each generation, retiring from the quarter-deck

to the homestead, while a boy of fourteen took the hereditary place before

the mast, confronting the salt spray and the gale, which had blasted against

his sire and grandsire." (1. Hawthorne in his introduction to The Scarlet

An Old Town By The Sea

Letter.) With thousands of miles of sea-line and a score or two of the

finest harbors on the globe, we have adroitly turned over our carrying

trade to foreign nations.

In other days, as I have said, a high maritime spirit was characteristic

of Portsmouth. The town did a profitable business in the war of 1812,

sending out a large fleet of the sauciest small craft on record. A pleasant

story is told of one of these little privateers--the Harlequin, owned and

commanded by Captain Elihu Brown. The Harlequin one day gave chase

to a large ship, which did not seem to have much fight aboard, and had got

it into close quarters, when suddenly the shy stranger threw open her ports,

and proved to be His Majesty's Ship-of-War Bulwark, seventy-four guns.

Poor Captain Brown!

Portsmouth has several large cotton factories and one or two corpulent

breweries; it is a wealthy old town, with a liking for first mortgage bonds;

but its warmest lover will not claim for it the distinction of being a great

mercantile centre. The majority of her young men are forced to seek

other fields to reap, and almost every city in the Union, and many a city

across the sea, can point to some eminent merchant, lawyer, or what not,

as "a Portsmouth boy." Portsmouth even furnished the late king of the

Sandwich Islands, Kekuanaoa, with a prime minister, and his nankeen

Majesty never had a better. The affection which all these exiles cherish for

their birthplace is worthy of remark. On two occasions--in 1852 and

1873, the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the settlement of

Strawberry Bank--the transplanted sons of Portsmouth were seized with an

impulse to return home. Simultaneously and almost without concerted

action, the lines of pilgrims took up their march from every quarter of the

globe, and swept down with music and banners on the motherly old town.

To come back to the wharves. I do not know of any spot with such a

fascinating air of dreams and idleness about it as the old wharf at the end

of Court Street. The very fact that it was once a noisy, busy place, crowded

with sailors and soldiers--in the war of 1812--gives an emphasis to the

quiet that broods over it to-day. The lounger who sits of a summer

afternoon on a rusty anchor fluke in the shadow of one of the silent

warehouses, and look on the lonely river as it goes murmuring past the

An Old Town By The Sea

town, cannot be too grateful to the India trade for having taken itself off

elsewhere.

What a slumberous, delightful, lazy place it is! The sunshine seems

to lie a foot deep on the planks of the dusty wharf, which yields up to the

warmth a vague perfume of the cargoes of rum, molasses, and spice that

used to be piled upon it. The river is as blue as the inside of a harebell.

The opposite shore, in the strangely shifting magic lights of sky and water,

stretches along like the silvery coast of fairyland. Directly opposite you

is the navy yard, and its neat officers' quarters and workshops and arsenals,

and its vast shiphouses, in which the keel of many a famous frigate has

been laid. Those monster buildings on the water's edge, with their roofs

pierced with innumerable little windows, which blink like eyes in the

sunlight, and the shiphouses. On your right lies a cluster of small islands,--

there are a dozen or more in the harbor--on the most extensive of which

you see the fading-away remains of some earthworks thrown up in 1812.

Between this--Trefethren's Island--and Peirce's Island lie the Narrows.

Perhaps a bark or a sloop-of-war is making up to town; the hulk is hidden

amoung the islands, and the topmasts have the effect of sweeping across

the dry land. On your left is a long bridge, more than a quarter of a mile in

length, set upon piles where the water is twenty or thirty feet deep, leading

to the navy yard and Kittery--the Kittery so often the theme of Whittier's

verse.

This is a mere outline of the landscape that spreads before you. Its

changeful beauty of form and color, with the summer clouds floating over

it, is not to be painted in words. I know of many a place where the scenery

is more varied and striking; but there is a mandragora quality in the

atmosphere here that holds you to the spot, and makes the half-hours seem

like minutes. I could fancy a man sitting on the end of that old wharf very

contentedly for two or three years, provided it could be always in June.

Perhaps, too, one would desire it to be always high water. The tide

falls from eight to twelve feet, and when the water makes out between the

wharves some of the picturesqueness makes out also. A corroded section

of stovepipe mailed in barnacles, or the skeleton of a hoopskirt protruding

from the tide mud like the remains of some old-time wreck, is apt to break

An Old Town By The Sea

the enchantment.

I fear I have given the reader an exaggerated idea of the solitude that

reigns along the river-side. Sometimes there is society here of an

unconventional kind, if you care to seek it. Aside from the foreign

gentleman before mentioned, you are likely to encounter, farther down the

shore toward the Point of Graves (a burial-place of the colonial period), a

battered and aged native fisherman boiling lobsters on a little gravelly

bench, where the river whispers and lisps among the pebbles as the tide

creeps in. It is a weather-beaten ex-skipper or ex-pilot, with strands of

coarse hair, like seaweed, falling about a face that has the expression of a

half-open clam. He is always ready to talk with you, this amphibious

person; and if he is not the most entertaining of gossips--more weather-

wise that Old Probabilities, and as full of moving incident as Othello

himself--then he is not the wintery-haired shipman I used to see a few

years ago on the strip of beach just beyond Liberty Bridge, building his

drift-wood fire under a great tin boiler, and making it lively for a lot of

reluctant lobsters.

I imagine that very little change has taken place in this immediate

locality, known prosaically as Puddle Dock, during the past fifty or sixty

years. The view you get looking across Liberty Bridge, Water Street, is

probably the same in every respect that presented itself to the eyes of the

town folk a century ago. The flagstaff, on the right, is the representative

of the old "standard of liberty" which the Sons planted on this spot in

January, 1766, signalizing their opposition to the enforcement of the

Stamp Act. On the same occasion the patriots called at the house of Mr.

George Meserve, the agent for distributing the stamps in New Hampshire,

and relieved him of his stamp-master's commission, which document they

carried on the point of a sword through the town to Liberty Bridge (the

Swing Bridge), where they erected the staff, with the motto, "Liberty,

Property, and no Stamp!"

The Stamp Act was to go into operation on the first day of November.

On the previous morning the "New Hampshire Gazette" appeared with a

deep black border and all the typographical emblems of affliction, for was

not Liberty dead? At all events, the "Gazette" itself was as good as dead,

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AnOldTownByTheSea1AnOldTownByTheSeabyThomasBaileyAldrichAnOldTownByTheSea2PISCATAQUARIVERThousingestbythegleamingisles,Bywoods,andfieldsofcorn,Thousingest,andthesunlightsmilesUponmybirthdaymorn.ButIwithinacity,I,Sofullofvagueunrest,WouldalmostgivemylifetolieAnhouruponuponthybreast.Toletthewherrylist...

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