three weeks immediately following your return
to it, for your privilege of doing so is of the
briefest tenure. Some precious things you do
not lose, but your newly acquired vision fails
you shortly. Suddenly, while you are compar-
174 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH
ing, valuing, and criticising, the old scales fall
over your eyes, you insensibly slip back into
the well-worn grooves, and behold all outward
and most inward things in nearly the same
light as your untravelled neighbor, who has
never known
" The glory that was Greece
And the grandeur that was Rome."
You will have to go abroad again to renew
those magical spectacles which enabled you for
a few weeks to see your native land
AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA
CAPTAIN JOHN SMITH
I CALL it an old town, but it is only relatively
old. When one reflects on the countless cen-
turies that have gone to the formation 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 Speed-
well, 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
i;8 AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA
the medicinal sassafras-tree, from the bark of
which, as was 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 net-
work 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 any 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
treetops, and the birds were singing as if they
had gone mad. No ruder sound or movement
of life disturbed the primeval solitude. Master
AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 179
Pring would scarcely recognize the spot were
he to land there to-day.
Eleven years afterwards a much cleverer man
than the commander of 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 pecu-
liarity 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 asses 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 ingrati-
tude, has ignored. It was a tardy sense of jus-
tice that expressed itself a few years ago in
erecting on Star Island a simple marble shaft
to the memory of JOHN SMITH the multitu-
iSo AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA
dinous ! Perhaps this long delay is explained
by a natural hesitation to label a monument so
ambiguously.
The modern Jason, meanwhile, was not with-
out 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. He
quaintly says
" Sir : your Relations I haue read : which shew
Ther 's reason I should honour them and you :
And if their meaning I haue 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 sea-
board was prepared by Smith and laid before
Prince Charles, who was asked to give the
country a name. He christened it New Eng-
land. In that rather remarkable map the site
of Portsmouth is called 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 Piscataqua for their plantation. Smith
was on an intimate footing with Sir Ferdinand
AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 181
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 a staircase or at a lonely street cor-
ner, the reader must be prepared for it.
II
ALONG THE WATERSIDE
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,
AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 183
and at flood-tide, lying without a ripple in a
basin formed by the interlocked islands and the
mainland, it looks more like an inland 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 sea-
port. 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 exten-
sive conflagrations. One rarely comes 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 seven-
teenth century.
Though many of the old landmarks have
been swept away by the fateful hand of time or
fire, the town impresses one as a very old town,
especially as one saunters along the streets
1 84 AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA
down by the river. The worm-eaten wharves,
some of them covered by a sparse, unhealthy
beard of grass, and the weather-stained, unoc-
cupied warehouses are sufficient to satisfy a
moderate appetite for antiquity. These de-
serted piers and these long rows of empty bar-
racks, 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 has
not for years existed? There are no ships
lying at the pier-heads ; there are no gangs of
stevedores staggering under 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 crum-
bling piles and ridiculous warehouses, from
which even the ghost of prosperity has flown.
Once upon a time, however, Portsmouth car-
ried on an extensive trade with the West In-
dies, 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
AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 185
portly merchants, in knee-breeches and silver
shoe-buckles and plum-colored coats with ruf-
fles 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 adven-
turer. 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 an immemorial trait. The boys were al-
ways sailors ; " a gray-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, confront-
ing the salt spray and the gale, which had
blasted against his sire and grandsire." l 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 for-
eign nations.
1 Hawthorne in his introduction to The Scarlet Letter.
1 86 AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA
In other days, as I have said, a high maritime
spirit was a 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 Harle-
quin, 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 her into close quar-
ters, when suddenly the shy stranger threw
open her ports, and proved to be His Majes-
ty'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 mort-
gage bonds ; but its warmest lover will not
claim for it the distinction of being a great
mercantile centre. The majority of its 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 Ports-
mouth boy." Portsmouth even furnished the
king of the Sandwich Islands, Kekuanaoa,
with a prime minister, and his nankeen Ma-
jesty never had a better. The affection which
all these exiles cherish for their birthplace is
AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 187
worthy of remark. On two occasions in
1852 and 1873, the latter year being the 25oth
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 looks on
the lonely river as it goes murmuring past the
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 in-
188 AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA
side of a harebell. The opposite shore, in the
strangely shifting magic lights of sky and water,
stretches along like the silvery coast of fairy-
land. Directly opposite you is the navy yard,
with 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 by innumer-
able little windows, which blink like eyes in
the sunlight, are 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 Trefethen'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 among 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 float-
ing over it, is not to be painted in words. I
AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA
know of many a place where the scenery is
more varied and striking ; but there is a man-
dragora quality in the atmosphere 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
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 hoop-
skirt protruding from the tide mud like the
remains of some old-time wreck, is apt to break
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 men-
tioned, 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 beach, where the river whispers
and lisps among the pebbles as the tide creeps
in. It is a weather-beaten ex-skipper or ex-
190 AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA
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 than Old Probabilities, and as full
of moving incident as Othello himself then
he is not the wintry-haired shipman I used to
see a few years ago on the strip of beach just
beyond Liberty Bridge, building his driftwood
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 prosai-
cally 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 townsfolk 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, signaliz-
ing 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
AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 191
town to Liberty Bridge (then 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 typograph-
ical emblems of affliction, for was not Liberty
dead ? At all events, the Gazette itself was as
good as dead, since the printer could no longer
publish it if he were to be handicapped by a
heavy tax. " The day was ushered in by the
tolling of all the bells in town, the vessels in the
harbor had their colors hoisted half-mast high ;
about three o'clock a funeral procession was
formed, having a coffin with this inscription,
LIBERTY, AGED 145, STAMPT. It moved from
the state house, with two unbraced drums,
through the principal streets. As it passed the
Parade, minute-guns were fired; at the place
of interment a speech was delivered on the
occasion, stating the many advantages we had
received and the melancholy prospect before
us, at the seeming departure of our invaluable
liberties. But some signs of life appearing,
Liberty was not deposited in the grave ; it was
rescued by a number of her sons, the motto
changed to Liberty Revived, and carried off in
triumph. The detestable Act was buried in its
192 AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA
stead, and the clods of the valley were laid
upon it ; the bells changed their melancholy
sound to a more joyful tone." 1
With this side glance at one of the curious
humors of the time, we resume our peregrina-
tions.
Turning down a lane on your left, a few rods
beyond Liberty Bridge, you reach a spot known
as the Point of Graves, chiefly interesting as
showing what a graveyard may come to if it last
long enough. In 1671 one Captain John Pick-
ering, of whom we shall have more to say,
ceded to the town a piece of ground on this
neck for burial purposes. It is an odd-shaped
lot, comprising about half an acre, enclosed by
a crumbling red brick wall two or three feet
high, with wood capping. The place is over-
grown with thistles, rank grass, and fungi ; the
black slate headstones have mostly fallen over ;
those that still make a pretence of standing
slant to every point of the compass, and look
as if they were being blown this way and that
by a mysterious gale which leaves everything
else untouched ; the mounds have sunk to the
common level, and the old underground tombs
have collapsed. Here and there among the
moss and weeds you can pick out some name
that shines in the history of the early settle-
1 Annals of Portsmouth, by Nathaniel Adams, 1825.
AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 193
ment ; hundreds of the flower of the colony lie
here, but the known and the unknown, gentle
and simple, mingle their dust on a perfect
equality now. The marble that once bore a
haughty coat of arms is as smooth as the hum-
blest slate stone guiltless of heraldry. The
lion and the unicorn, wherever they appear on
some cracked slab, are very much tamed by
time. The once fat-faced cherubs, with wing
at either cheek, are the merest skeletons now.
Pride, pomp, grief, and remembrance are all at
an end. No reverent feet come here, no tears
fall here ; the old graveyard itself is dead ! A
more dismal, uncanny spot than this at twilight
would be hard to find. It is noticed that when
the boys pass it after nightfall, they always go
by whistling with a gayety that is perfectly
hollow.
Let us get into some more cheerful neigh-
borhood I
III
A STROLL ABOUT TOWN
As you leave the river front behind you, and
pass "up town," the streets grow wider, and the
architecture becomes more ambitious streets
fringed with beautiful old trees and lined with
commodious private dwellings, mostly square
white houses, with spacious halls running
through the centre. Previous to the Revolu-
tion, white paint was seldom used on houses,
and the diamond-shaped window-pane was al-
most universal. Many of the residences stand
back from the brick or flagstone sidewalk,
and have pretty gardens at the side or in
the rear, made bright with dahlias and sweet
with cinnamon roses. If you chance to live in
a town where the authorities cannot rest until
they have destroyed every precious tree within
their blighting reach, you will be especially
charmed by the beauty of the streets of Ports-
mouth. In some parts of the town, when the
chestnuts are in blossom, you would fancy
yourself in a garden in fairyland. In spring,
AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 195
summer, and autumn the foliage is the glory
of the fair town her luxuriant green and
golden tresses ! Nothing could seem more
like the work of enchantment than the specta-
cle which certain streets in Portsmouth present
in midwinter after a heavy snow-storm. You
may walk for miles under wonderful silvery
arches formed by the overhanging and inter-
laced boughs of the trees, festooned with a
drapery even more graceful and dazzling than
springtime gives them. The numerous elms
and maples which shade the principal thorough-
fares are not the result of chance, but the am-
ple reward of the loving care that is taken to
preserve the trees. There is a society in Ports-
mouth devoted to arboriculture. It is not un-
usual for persons to leave legacies to be ex-
pended in setting out shade and ornamental
trees along some favorite walk. Richards Ave-
nue, a long, unbuilt thoroughfare leading from
Middle Street to the South Burying-Ground,
perpetuates the name of a citizen who gave the
labor of his own hands to the beautifying of that
wind-swept and barren road to the cemetery.
This fondness and care for trees seem to be a
matter of heredity. So far back as 1660 the
selectmen instituted a fine of five shillings for
the cutting of timber or any other wood from
off the town common, excepting under special
conditions.
196 AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA
In the business section of the town trees are
few. The chief business streets are Congress
and Market. Market Street is the stronghold
of the dry-goods shops. There are seasons, I
suppose, when these shops are crowded, but I
have never happened to be in Portsmouth at
the time. I seldom pass through the narrow
cobble-paved street without wondering where
the customers are that must keep all these
flourishing little establishments going. Con-
gress Street a more elegant thoroughfare
than Market is the Nevski Prospekt of Ports-
mouth. Among the prominent buildings is the
Athenaeum, containing a reading-room and
library. From the high roof of this building
the stroller will do well to take a glance at the
surrounding country. He will naturally turn
seaward for the more picturesque aspects. If
the day is clear, he will see the famous Isles
of Shoals, lying nine miles away Appledore,
Smutty-Nose, Star Island, White Island, etc. ;