Chapter XVI: The Neighborhood of Narragansett (2)

Newport, before the Revolution, was a most important seaport. When Dean Berkeley was there it had about forty-five hundred inhabitants, and they had grown to twelve thousand when the Revolution began. The preceding half-century was the era of its greatest maritime prosperity, when Newport ships circumnavigated the globe. The salubrity of the climate and advantages of the harbor providing safe anchorage but a few miles from the ocean attracted many merchants and a large trade, and in those days the Quakers and the Hebrews were the leading citizens. In 1770 Boston alone surpassed Newport in the extent of its trade, which then was much greater than that of New York. It was about this time that a visitor to New York wrote back to the _Newport Mercury_ that "at its present rate of progress, New York will soon be as large as Newport." The Revolutionary War, however, almost ruined the town, and annihilated its commerce. The port was at first held by the English, and afterwards by the French, both battering and maltreating it, so that it emerged from the conflict in a dilapidated condition, with the population reduced to barely five thousand. The French learned to love the attractive island, and sought earnestly after the war to have it annexed to France, in return for the aid given the Americans, but Washington strongly opposed this and prevented it. The trade was gone, never to return, the merchants went away to Providence, New York and Boston, and it existed in quiet and uneventful neglect until the nineteenth century had made some progress, when people began seeking its pleasant shores for summer recreation. In 1840 two hotels were built, and this began the _renaissance_. The Civil War made vast fortunes, and their owners sought Newport, and it has since become the great summer home of the fashionable world of America, where they can, in friendly rivalry, make the most lavish displays possible for wealth to accomplish at a seaside resort.

Unlike most American watering-places, Newport is not an aggregation of hotels and lodging-houses, but it is pre-eminently a gathering of the costliest and most elaborate suburban homes this country can show. Built upon the extensive space surrounding the older town, and between it and the ocean, south and east, modern Newport is a galaxy of large and expensive country-houses, each in an enclosure of lawns, flower-gardens and foliage, highly ornamental and exceedingly well kept. Many of them are spacious palaces upon which enormous sums have been expended; and in front of their lawns, for several miles along the winding brow of the cliffs that fall off precipitously to the ocean's edge, is laid the noted "Cliff Walk." This is a narrow footpath at the edge of the greensward that has the waves dashing against the bases of the rocks supporting it, while inland, beyond the lawns, are the noble palaces of Newport. Each is a type of different architecture, and no matter how grand and imposing, each is called a "cottage." The greatest rivalry has been shown in construction, and the styles cover all known methods of building--Gothic, Elizabethan, Tudor, Swiss, Flemish, French, with every sort of ancient house in Britain or Continental Europe, imitated and improved upon, and in some cases widely varying systems being condensed together. Some of these "cottages" have thus become piles of buildings, with all sorts of porticos, doorways, pavilions, dormers, oriels, bow-windows, bays and turrets, towers, chimneys, gambrel roofs and gables, the whole being charmingly elaborated into wide-spreading, imposing and sometimes astonishing houses. Occasionally the villa is elongated into the stable, in an extended house, which includes the family, horses, hounds, domestics and grooms, all living under the same roof. A low and rambling style of architecture, with many gables and prominent colors, is the favorite for various Newport cottages. To the southward of the town are the Ocean Avenue and Ocean Drive, skirting the whole lower coast of the island for some ten miles, and displaying fine marine views.

There have been lavished upon these palaces of Newport, in construction and decoration, large portions of the greatest incomes of the multi-millionaires of New York and Boston, and hither they hie to enjoy the summer and early autumn in a sort of fashionable semi-seclusion, mingling only in their own sets, and rather resenting the excursions occasionally made by the plebeian folk into Newport to look at their displays. These princes of inherited wealth have made Newport peculiarly their own, and, their expenditures being on a scale commensurate with their millions, the growth and improvement of the newer part of the place have been extraordinary. Land in choice locations is quoted above $50,000 an acre, and a Newport "cottage" costs $500,000 to $1,000,000 to build, with more for the furnishing. Once, when I asked what was the qualification necessary to become a director of one of the great banks of New York, I was told that it was the ownership of ten shares of stock and a cottage at Newport. The sense of newness is sometimes impressive in gazing at these Aladdin palaces, for while the architecture reproduces quaint and ancient forms, the ancestral ivy does not yet cling to the walls, and the trees are still young. But there are older sites in Newport, back from the sea-front, where some of the estates, existing many years, have smaller and more subdued houses with signs of maturity, where the ivy broadly spreads and the trees have grown. Some of the foliage-embowered lanes, leading through the older suburbs, are charming in leafy richness and make scenes of exquisite rural beauty.

The Casino is the fashionable centre of Newport, a building in Old English style, fronting on Bellevue Avenue, having reading-rooms, a theatre, gardens and tennis-court, and here the band plays in the season, and there are concerts and balls. During the fashionable period, Bellevue Avenue is the daily scene of a stately procession of handsome equipages of all styles, as it is decreed that the great people of Newport shall always ride when on exhibition, and they thus pass and repass in the afternoons in splendid review. In the earlier times the town's chief benefactor was Judah Touro, who gave it Touro Park. His father was the rabbi of Newport synagogue, which now has no congregation. Judah spent fifty years in New Orleans amassing a fortune, which was bequeathed to various charities. He also liberally aided the fund for building Bunker Hill Monument. The synagogue, with the beautiful garden adjacent, the Jewish Cemetery, is maintained in perfect order. Touro Park is a pretty enclosure in the older town, containing statues of Commodore M. C. Perry and William Ellery Channing, who were natives of Newport, and a statue of the former's brother, Commodore Oliver H. Perry, the victor of Lake Erie, is also at the City Hall, not far away. In Touro Park is the great memorial around which the antiquarian treasures of this famous place are clustered, the "Old Stone Mill," a small round tower, overrun with ivy and supported on pillars between which are arched openings. Its origin is a mystery, and this is the antiquarian shrine at which Newport worships. Longfellow tells weirdly of it in his _Skeleton in Armor_, and some of the wise men suggest that it was built by the Norsemen when they first came this way and found Vinland so long ago. But the more practical townsfolk generally incline to the belief that an early colonist put it up for a windmill to grind corn, the weight of the evidence appearing to favor the theory that it was erected by Governor Benedict Arnold, of the colony, who died in 1678, and described it in his will as "my stone-built wind-will." It is, however, of sufficient antiquity and mystery to have a halo cast around it, and is the great relic of the town. The seacoast rocks that make the Newport Cliffs show some wonderful formations of chasms and spouting rocks. A fine fleet of yachts is usually in Newport water, and it is a favorite naval rendezvous, having the Training Station, War College and Torpedo Station, and a new Naval Hospital. This most famous of American seaside watering-places has a permanent population approximating twenty-five thousand, considerably increased by the summer visitors.

NEW BEDFORD.

To the eastward of Narragansett another bay is thrust far up into the land of Massachusetts, Buzzard's Bay, which almost bisects the great defensive forearm of Massachusetts, Cape Cod. This bay is thirty miles long and about seven miles wide. Between it and Narragansett are the tree-clad hills of the sparsely-settled regions which the Indians called Aponigansett and Acoaksett, out of which the Acushnet River runs down to its broadening estuary, now the harbor of New Bedford. Originally this city was peopled by Quakers of the English Russell family, of which the Duke of Bedford is the head, so that the colony was named from his title. A numerous Portuguese migration to the early settlements has caused one of the suburbs to still retain the name of Fayal. New Bedford stretches two miles along the western river-bank and far back upon the gradually ascending surface, and the population, including the opposite suburb of Fairhaven, numbers seventy thousand. Early a shipping port, it grew into celebrity with the advance of the whale fishery, which became its chief industry, and it was then said to be the wealthiest city in the country in proportion to population, having in 1854 four hundred and ten whaling ships, with ten thousand sailors, its fleets patrolling the remotest seas. When this fishery died out, the people went to manufacturing, and now they have numerous large mills busily spinning cotton, its noted product being the Wamsutta muslins. There still remain a few of the little bluff-bowed and flush-decked old whalers rotting at the wharves, with huge overhanging davits, and still redolent of oil--the relics of an almost obsolete industry. The ample fortunes originally gathered in the fishery enabled the marine aristocracy of the town to build their stately and comfortable old mansions which now enjoy an honorable repose in ample grounds along the quiet streets on the higher plateau back from the river.

When Samuel de Champlain came into the St. Lawrence River, he wrote that whales were killed by firing cannon-balls at them, and later explorers described how the Indians captured them. The colonists early began the fishery along the New England coasts, and New Bedford sent out its first ships in 1755. The period of greatest success in whaling was between 1820 and 1857. The advent of gas and petroleum, financial reverses, the gradual extermination of the whales, which had been pursued to the remotest regions, the substitution of steel for whalebone, and the use of hard rubber, all contributed to the decline of the business, and it was given its death-blow by the ravages of the Confederate privateers among the Pacific whaling fleets. Its memory is kept alive, however, by many romances of the sea, it having furnished an extensive and interesting literature. Not long ago it was related that the unfortunate sculptor who had carved the figure-heads for the whaleships was since compelled to earn a precarious livelihood by chopping out rude wooden idols for the South Sea islanders. Acushnet River is dammed in its upper waters, making an immense reservoir, furnishing power to the extensive mills. The harbor gradually broadens as it opens into Buzzard's Bay, and Clark's Point stretches far into the bay, having on the extremity an old-time square stone fort, with bastions at the corners, formerly the trusted defender of the harbor and the town, Fort Taber. Now, its only use is to furnish, on the outer corner, a foundation for a lighthouse lantern. The whaling fleet it formerly guided is all gone, but now it is the beacon for an enormous trade in coal, landed here for distribution by railway throughout New England. Another little stone fort is also built on the opposite side of the harbor, on a rock at the lower end of Fairhaven. Outside is the broad surface of the bay, a noble inland sea, with irregular and generally thinly populated shores, but with attractions that have drawn to it, in various localities, a large summer population, with many ornate villas of modern fashion. Just below Clark's Point is villa-studded Nonquitt, upon an upland among the undulating hills, where lived General Philip Sheridan, and to which he was brought home in a United States warship to die, in July, 1888. They tell us that when the venturesome Norsemen came along here, the bay was given the name of the Straum Fiord, but the antiquary is at a loss to find a satisfactory derivation for the present name of Buzzard's Bay. Far over its waters, as seen from Clark's Point, is the low, dark, gray forest-clad eastern shore, stretching down to the distant strait of Wood's Holl, leading out of the bay into Vineyard Sound. Spread across the bay entrance to the southward, and protecting it from the open sea, are the Elizabeth Islands.

VINEYARD SOUND.

After Captain Bartholomew Grosnold had discovered Cape Cod in May, 1602, he coasted along its shores, and coming down into what is known as Vineyard Sound, found himself in an archipelago of islands. He halted at the one called "No Man's Land," and gave it the name of Martha's Vineyard, which is now applied to the largest of these islands. Who his favorite Martha was, and why she should have been immortalized, old Bartholomew never told, thus disappointing many industrious people who have vainly sought the lady's personal history. "The Vineyard," as it is familiarly called, lies southeast of Buzzard's Bay, across which is the extended and narrow range of the Elizabeth Islands, trending far away to the southwestward, and ending with Cuttyhunk, where the first English spade was driven into New England soil. It was upon this, the outermost island, that Gosnold landed and planted his colony, naming it Elizabeth, in honor of his queen, a title afterwards given the entire range. The island had a pond in which was a rocky islet, and here, as they feared the Indians, the colonists built a fort and resided while they gathered a cargo of sassafras for their ship, that being then a much-prized specific in Europe. The settlement was brief; frightened by savage threats and rent by quarrels, they soon abandoned the place, loading their ship and returning to England disheartened. This settlement antedated by eighteen years the arrival of the "Mayflower" at Plymouth.

The Elizabeth group is a range of sixteen islands, stretching in a long line from the Cape Cod shore for eighteen miles southwest to the extremity of Cuttyhunk. It makes the southeastern boundary of Buzzard's Bay, with Martha's Vineyard beyond, there being between them the long and rather narrow channel of Vineyard Sound. The mariner going eastward out of Long Island Sound passes Sakonnet Point at the eastern verge of Narragansett Bay, and finds in front a chain of beacons posted across the route. Two of these are lightships, marking reefs to which are given the bucolic names of the "Hen and Chickens" and the "Sow and Pigs." If the shipmaster wishes to enter Buzzard's Bay for New Bedford, he sails between these two unromantic shoals, passing a lightship on either hand, and being further guided by a lighthouse on the extremity of Cuttyhunk. But if he wishes to follow the great maritime route to the eastward around Cape Cod, he gives the "Sow and Pigs" a wide berth to the northward and passes between it and the splendid flashing red and white beacon on Gay Head, the western extremity of Martha's Vineyard, south of Cuttyhunk. Gosnold was the first Englishman who saw the brilliant and variegated coloring of this remarkable promontory when the sun shone upon it, and appropriately called it the Gay Head. Its magnificent Fresnel lens, the most powerful in this region, is elevated one hundred and seventy feet above the sea, and is thirty miles east of Point Judith. The breadth of the entrance to Vineyard Sound from this lighthouse across to the lightship is about seven miles.

The northeastern extremity of the Elizabeth Islands is Naushon, and between it and the main land of Cape Cod are the strait and harbor formerly known to the sailor as Wood's Hole, but now refined into Wood's Holl, just as "Holmes's Hole," another popular harbor over on "the Vineyard," has since become Vineyard Haven. Both of these "holes," and particularly the latter, have always been favorite places for schooner skippers to run into and avoid adverse winds. The Elizabeth group has four large islands, the others being small. Narrow and often tortuous channels separate them. Cuttyhunk is about two and one-half miles long, and the present successor of Gosnold's ill-starred colony is a club from New York who have a seaside establishment there. Not far away, to the northward, is Penikese Island, covering about one hundred acres, which was formerly the location of Professor Agassiz's "Summer School of Natural History." East of Cuttyhunk is Nashawena, three miles long, and next comes Pasque Island, also the abiding-place of an attractive club comfortably housed. Naushon is the largest island, eight miles long, stretching from Pasque almost to Wood's Holl, and having opposite each other, on its northern and southern shores, two noted harbors of refuge, the Kettle and Tarpaulin Coves. Upon Naushon, early in the nineteenth century, lived James Bowdoin, the diplomatist and benefactor of Bowdoin College in Maine, which was named for his father. Naushon is a very pretty island, and was described in those days by a distinguished English lady traveller as "a little pocket America, a liliputian Western world, a compressed Columbia." Clustering around its northeastern extremity are some of the smaller islets of the group--the Ram Islands, and Wepecket, Uncatina and Nonamesset. The strait at Wood's Holl forms a rocky gateway leading from Buzzard's Bay into Vineyard Sound, and just beyond, on the Cape Cod shore, is its guiding beacon on the point of Nobska Hill. Wood's Holl has but a small harbor on the edge of the contracted and tortuous passage, which is full of rocks, difficult to navigate, and generally having the tide running through like a millrace. The settlement is small, displaying attractive cottages on the adjacent shores, and here are located the station and buildings of the United States Fish Commission and the Marine Biological Laboratory.

MARTHA'S VINEYARD.

Between the Elizabeth Islands and Martha's Vineyard is the great route of vessels passing to and from New England waters, and the lighthouse keeper at the entrance has counted more than a thousand of them passing in a single week. Aquatic birds skim the waters, and all about the Sound are islands great and small, their granite coasts contrasting with the blue waters they protect from the severity of ocean storms. A tale is told of the origin of the names of some of the islands, which is original, if apocryphal. The story comes as a tradition from the "oldest inhabitant" of these parts, who is said to have been the owner of all these islands, and who determined, before he died, to bestow the chief ones upon his four favorite daughters. Accordingly, Rhoda took Rhode Island; Elizabeth took hers; Martha was given "the Vineyard;" and there was left for Nancy the remaining large island--so "Nan-took-it."

Martha's Vineyard is shaped much like a triangle, and is twenty-three miles long and about ten miles broad in the widest part. Vineyard Haven, its chief harbor, is deep and narrow, opening like a pair of jaws at the northern apex of the triangle, the entrance being guarded by the pointed peninsulas of the East Chop and West Chop, each provided with a lighthouse. Within is one of the most fairly constructed natural harbors ever seen, a spacious haven of protection, often crowded with vessels, which run in there to escape rough treatment outside. Here is the pleasant village of Vineyard Haven, prettily located upon the sloping banks of a small cove inside, and having down at the end of the harbor a Government Marine Hospital. "The Vineyard's" famous western promontory of Gay Head is composed of ponderous cliffs, falling off steeply to the water, and presents an interesting geological study. The inclined strata rise about two hundred feet above the sea, being gaily colored in tints of red, white, yellow, green, and black. About forty-five hundred people reside on this island, including fishermen, sailors and farmers, but mostly gaining a livelihood by ministering to the wants of the large population of summer visitors. The first colonist was Thomas Mayhew, a Puritan from Southampton, who came in 1642, being then the grantee both of Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket.

Cottage City is the chief settlement, built upon the eastern ocean shore of "the Vineyard," a wonderful place attracting twenty to thirty thousand people in the summer. The bluff shore rises precipitously for thirty feet from the narrow beach forming the verge of the sea, and there are myriads of cottages, many hotels, and a complete summer town spreading over a large surface. Here are held the great Camp Meetings which are the attraction in August--one Methodist and the other Baptist. The former is the "Martha's Vineyard Camp Meeting Association," first established and meeting in the Wesleyan Grove, back from the sea. The other is the "Oak Bluffs Association," out by the ocean's edge. This place, thoroughly alive in summer, is dormant, however, for nearly nine months of the year. From it a railroad runs several miles southward along the shore to the little village of Edgartown, the place of original colonization, and the county-seat of Dukes County, Massachusetts, which is composed of all these islands. Towards the southeast, out of sight, is the distant island of Nantucket. Nearer is seen the misty outline of old Chappaquadick Island, called "the Old Chap," for short, with its long terminating extremity of Cape Poge. To the northward is the hazy mainland of Cape Cod, a streak upon the horizon, whence, long ago, these islands are supposed to have been sliced off during the glacial epoch, and going adrift, were thus anchored out in the ocean.

NANTUCKET.

The island of Nantucket, dropped in the Atlantic, everyone has heard of, but few visit. We are told by tradition that it was originally formed by the mythical Indian giant, Manshope, who, when he was tired of smoking, emptied here into the sea the ashes from his pipe. It was also the smoke from this pipe which created the fogs so plentifully abounding around the place. These fogs are very dense, and it is said of a certain noted Nantucket skipper going away on a long voyage that he marked one of them with his harpoon, and returning to the harbor three years later, at once recognized the same fog by his private mark. Old Manshope, the giant, was the tutelary genius of all the Indian tribes on the islands of Vineyard Sound and the adjacent mainland, and his home was on the cliffs of Gay Head, in an ancient extinct volcanic crater, now called the Devil's Den. He feasted here on the flesh of whales, which he broiled on live coals, obtaining fuel by uprooting huge trees. His firelight, thus made, is said to have been the earliest beacon seen by superstitious sailors passing the headland, and as it flickered in his midnight orgies, they solemnly shook their heads, saying, "Old Manshope is at it again." This powerful giant seems to have waded around Vineyard and Nantucket Sounds and regulated all the affairs of the neighborhood. But finally the sailors and colonists became so numerous that he waxed very wroth. With a single stroke of his ponderous club he separated "No Man's Land" from "the Vineyard," and then transformed his children into fishes. His wife lamented this cruelty, and he seized and threw her over to the mainland on Sakonnet Point, where she still lies, a misshapen rock. Then the disgusted giant vanished forever.

The Norsemen first named the island Nautikon, appropriately meaning the "Far Away Land." From this, on an early map, it appears as Natocko, then as Nantukes, and finally it became Nantucquet, from which the present name is derived. When Gosnold came along in 1602, he first saw its great eastern promontory, Sankaty Head, describing the island as covered with oak trees and populous with Indians. After the original grant was made to Thomas Mayhew, he sold it in 1659 to the "ten original purchasers" for £30 and two beaver hats, one for himself and one for his wife, he reserving one-tenth. These purchasers colonized the island, Thomas Macy, a Quaker who fled from Puritan persecution in New England, beginning the first settlement, and Peter Foulger, who came there somewhat later, had a daughter, who was the mother of Benjamin Franklin. John G. Whittier, the good Quaker poet, thus sings of Macy's flight to the island:

"Far round the bleak and stormy cape
The vent'rous Macy passed,
And on Nantucket's naked isle
Drew up his boat at last."

Macy landed at the site of the town of Nantucket, then the Indian village of Wesco, or the "White Stone," which lay on the shore of the harbor, and afterwards had a wharf built over it. The whale fishery, which made Nantucket's prosperity, began early, in boats from the island, and the population had increased by the Revolution to about forty-five hundred, Sherburne, as it then was called, being the chief whaling port in the world, with one hundred and fifty whale ships. The island was covered with trees, but they were all destroyed during the Revolution, and it was then made almost a desert, losing also the greater part of its population and much of the fishery fleet. There was a revival subsequently, and Nantucket reached its maximum prosperity in 1840, with nearly ten thousand population. Afterwards came the final decline of whaling, and the sandy, almost treeless island now has about three thousand people, who depend for a living chiefly on the summer visitors. It is without a whaleship, but it has many snug cottages, and those going for health and rest can well say, with Whittier:

"God bless the sea-beat island!
And grant forever more
That charity and freedom dwell,
As now, upon her shore."

Nantucket is southeast of Martha's Vineyard and south of Cape Cod, the sea between them being known as Nantucket Sound. The island is an irregular spherical triangle, sixteen miles long and three to four miles wide, the outer coast bent around like a bow, as the Gulf Stream currents wash the shores. To the south and east are the great Nantucket Shoals, dangerous to the navigator, but acting as a breakwater, preventing the island being entirely washed away by the sea, which makes constant encroachments. The harbor of Nantucket town presents sandy beaches and bluff shores, rising with some boldness from the water, the sand dunes stretching away in regular lines behind them. The town is snugly located at the bottom of a deep and secure harbor, having a breakwater outside, and its chief daily event is the arrival of the steamboat from the mainland, from which it is frequently cut off for days together by winter ice and stormy weather. There are various ancient and dilapidated wharves, fronting a collection of strange-looking old gabled houses, many having raised platforms on top of the peaked roofs, where the former inhabitants used to go up to watch for vessels. It is a healthy place, with modern hotels, tree-lined, pleasant streets, many gardens, and a magnificent climate, the winter rigors corrected by the closeness of the Gulf Stream. The surrounding country, outside the town, is almost everywhere a flat prairie-land, with the one horizon all around, of the distant blue sea. A narrow-gauge railroad leads over to the southeastern coast at Siasconset, the quaint original gem of the island, familiarly called 'Sconset, a curious little village of fishermen's huts, existing now about the same as in the primitive days. Its outlook is over the South Shoals, but not a sail is to be seen, for these shoals are the grave of every vessel getting upon them. It is a dismal reminder of vanished maritime prestige to see about the Nantucket coasts the gaunt ribs of the old hulks, half sunken in the sands where they have been cast ashore, as year by year they gradually break up in the great storms and slowly disappear. In the Boston _Daily Advertiser_ a poet plaintively mourns the fate of these marine skeletons seen "at midnight off the coast":

"Half-tombed in drifting sands upon the shore
Are ye, and heedless lashed by angry seas,
As through your blackened ribs the breeze
Exultant plays, and crested breakers roar,
And screeching sea-gulls round thee, prostrate, soar.
Wert thou allured by sighs of moaning trees,
As sirens sought to charm with songs like these
Ulysses and his brave companions o'er
To reefs deep hidden, silent, save in storm?
The rolling thunder of the sullen surge,
The mournful sobbing of the gathering gale,
Plain answer make, as round the spectre form
Of these gaunt skeletons they ceaseless scourge
The giant's battered coat of oaken mail!"

THE CONNECTICUT RIVER AND

WHITE MOUNTAINS.