Oldport Days
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Thomas Wentworth Higginson >> Oldport Days
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High winds bring a different scene. Sometimes I fancy that in
winter, with less visible life upon the surface of the water, and
less of unseen animal life below it, there is yet more that seems
like vital force in the individual particles of waves. Each
separate drop appears more charged with desperate and determined
life. The lines of surf run into each other more brokenly, and
with less steady roll. The low sun, too, lends a weird and jagged
shadow to gallop in before the crest of each advancing wave, and
sometimes there is a second crest on the shoulders of the first,
as if there were more than could be contained in a single curve.
Greens and purples are called forth to replace the prevailing
blue. Far out at sea, great separate mounds of water rear
themselves, as if to overlook the tossing plain. Sometimes these
move onward and subside with their green hue still unbroken, and
again they curve into detached hillocks of foam, white,
multitudinous, side by side, not ridged, but moving on like a mob
of white horses, neck overarching neck, breast crowded against
breast.
Across those tumultuous waves I like to watch, after sunset, the
revolving light; there is something about it so delicate and
human. It seems to bud or bubble out of the low, dark horizon; a
moment, and it is not, and then another moment, and it is. With
one throb the tremulous light is born; with another throb it has
reached its full size, and looks at you, coy and defiant; and
almost in that instant it is utterly gone. You cannot conceive
yourself to be watching something which merely turns on an axis;
but it seems suddenly to expand, a flower of light, or to close,
as if soft petals of darkness clasped it in. During its moments
of absence, the eye cannot quite keep the memory of its precise
position, and it often appears a hair-breadth to the right or
left of the expected spot. This enhances the elfish and fantastic
look, and so the pretty game goes on, with flickering surprises,
every night and all night long. But the illusion of the seasons
is just as oquettish; and when next summer comes to us, with its
blossoms and its joys, it will dawn as softly out of the darkness
and as softly give place to winter once more.
OLDPORT WHARVES.
Everyone who comes to a wharf feels an impulse to follow it down,
and look from the end. There is a fascination about it. It is the
point of contact between land and sea. A bridge evades the water,
and unites land with land, as if there were no obstacle. But a
wharf seeks the water, and grasps it with a solid hand. It is the
sign of a lasting friendship; once extended, there it remains;
the water embraces it, takes it into its tumultuous bosom at high
tide, leaves it in peace at ebb, rushes back to it eagerly again,
plays with it in sunshine, surges round it in storm, almost
crushing the massive thing. But the pledge once given is never
withdrawn. Buildings may rise and fall, but a solid wharf is
almost indestructible. Even if it seems destroyed, its materials
are all there. This shore might be swept away, these piers be
submerged or dashed asunder, still every brick and stone would
remain. Half the wharves of Oldport were ruined in the great
storm of 1815. Yet not one of them has stirred from the place
where it lay; its foundations have only spread more widely and
firmly; they are a part of the very pavement of the harbor,
submarine mountain ranges, on one of which yonder schooner now
lies aground. Thus the wild ocean only punished itself, and has
been embarrassed for half a century, like many another mad
profligate, by the wrecks of what it ruined.
Yet the surges are wont to deal very tenderly with these wharves.
In summer the sea decks them with floating weeds, and studs them
with an armor of shells. In the winter it surrounds them with a
smoother mail of ice, and the detached piles stand white and
gleaming, like the out-door palace of a Russian queen. How softly
and eagerly this coming tide swirls round them! All day the
fishes haunt their shadows; all night the phosphorescent water
glimmers by them, and washes with long, refluent waves along
their sides, decking their blackness with a spray of stars.
Water seems the natural outlet and discharge for every landscape,
and when we have followed down this artificial promontory, a
wharf, and have seen the waves on three sides of us, we have
taken the first step toward circumnavigating the globe. This is
our last terra firma. One step farther, and there is no possible
foothold but a deck, which tilts and totters beneath our feet. A
wharf, therefore, is properly neutral ground for all. It is a
silent hospitality, understood by all nations. It is in some sort
a thing of universal ownership. Having once built it, you must
grant its use to everyone; it is no trespass to land upon any
man's wharf.
The sea, like other beautiful savage creatures, derives most of
its charm from its reserves of untamed power. When a wild animal
is subdued to abjectness, all its interest is gone. The ocean is
never thus humiliated. So slight an advance of its waves would
overwhelm us, if only the restraining power once should fail, and
the water keep on rising! Even here, in these safe haunts of
commerce, we deal with the same salt tide which I myself have
seen ascend above these piers, and which within half a century
drowned a whole family in their home upon our Long Wharf.
It is still the same ungoverned ocean which, twice in every
twenty-four hours, reasserts its right of way, and stops only
where it will. At Monckton, on the Bay of Fundy, the wharves are
built forty feet high, and at ebb-tide you may look down on the
schooners lying aground upon the mud below. In six hours they
will be floating at your side. But the motions of the tide are as
resistless whether its rise be six feet or forty; as in the lazy
stretching of the caged lion's paw you can see all the terrors of
his spring.
Our principal wharf, the oldest in the town, has lately been
doubled in size, and quite transformed in shape, by an
importation of broad acres from the country. It is now what is
called "made land,"--a manufacture which has grown so easy that I
daily expect to see some enterprising contractor set up endwise a
bar of railroad iron, and construct a new planet at its summit,
which shall presently go spinning off into space and be called an
asteroid. There are some people whom would it be pleasant to
colonize in that way; but meanwhile the unchanged southern side
of the pier seems pleasanter, with its boat-builders' shops, all
facing sunward,--a cheerful haunt upon a winter's day. On the
early maps this wharf appears as "Queen-Hithe," a name more
graceful than its present cognomen. "Hithe" or "Hythe" signifies
a small harbor, and is the final syllable of many English names,
as of Lambeth. Hythe is also one of those Cinque-Ports of which
the Duke of Wellington was warden. This wharf was probably still
familiarly called Queen-Hithe in 1781, when Washington and
Rochambeau walked its length bareheaded between the ranks of
French soldiers; and it doubtless bore that name when Dean
Berkeley arrived in 1729, and the Rev. Mr. Honyman and all his
flock closed hastily their prayer-books, and hastened to the
landing to receive their guest. But it had lost this name ere the
days, yet remembered by aged men, when the Long Wharf became a
market. Beeves were then driven thither and tethered, while each
hungry applicant marked with a piece of chalk upon the creature's
side the desired cut; when a sufficient portion had been thus
secured, the sentence of death was issued. Fancy the chalk a live
coal, or the beast endowed with human consciousness, and no
Indian, or Inquisitorial tortures could have been more fearful.
It is like visiting the houses at Pompeii, to enter the strange
little black warehouses which cover some of our smaller wharves.
They are so old and so small it seems as if some race of pygmies
must have built them. Though they are two or three stories high,
with steep gambrel-roofs, and heavily timbered, their rooms are
yet so low that a man six feet high can hardly stand upright
beneath the great cross-beams. There is a row of these
structures, for instance, described on a map of 1762 as "the old
buildings on Lopez' Wharf," and to these another century has
probably brought very little change. Lopez was a Portuguese Jew,
who came to this place, with several hundred others, after the
Lisbon earthquake of 1755. He is said to have owned eighty
square-rigged vessels in this port, from which not one such craft
now sails. His little counting-room is in the second storey of
the building; its wall-timbers are of oak, and are still sound;
the few remaining planks are grained to resemble rosewood and
mahogany; the fragments of wall-paper are of English make. In the
cross-beam, just above your head, are the pigeon-holesonce
devoted to different vessels, whose names are still recorded
above them on faded paper,--"Ship Cleopatra," "Brig Juno," and
the like. Many of these vessels measured less than two hundred
tons, and it seems as if their owner had built his ships to match
the size of his counting-room.
A sterner tradition clings around an old building on a remoter
wharf; for men have but lately died who had seen slaves pass
within its doors for confinement. The wharf in those days
appertained to a distillery, an establishment then constantly
connected with the slave-trade, rum being sent to Africa, and
human beings brought back. Occasionally a cargo was landed here,
instead of being sent to the West Indies or to South Carolina,
and this building was fitted up for their temporary quarters. It
is but some twenty-five feet square, and must be less than thirty
feet in height, yet it is divided into three stories, of which
the lowest was used for other purposes, and the two upper were
reserved for slaves. There are still to be seen the barred
partitions and latticed door, making half the second floor into a
sort of cage, while the agent's room appears to have occupied the
other half. A similar latticed door--just such as I have seen in
Southern slave-pens--secures the foot of the upper stairway. The
whole small attic constitutes a single room, with a couple of
windows, and two additional breathing-holes, two feet square,
opening on the yard. It makes one sick to think of the poor
creatures who may once have gripped those bars with their hands,
or have glared with eager eyes between them; and it makes me
recall with delight the day when I once wrenched away the stocks
and chains from the floor of a pen like this, on the St. Mary's
River in Florida. It is almost forty years since this distillery
became a mill, and sixty since the slave-trade was abolished. The
date "1803" is scrawled upon the door of the cage,--the very year
when the port of Charleston was reopened for slaves, just before
the traffic ceased. A few years more, and such horrors will seem
as remote a memory in South Carolina, thank God! as in Rhode
Island.
Other wharves are occupied by mast-yards, places that seem like
play-rooms for grown men, crammed fuller than any old garret with
those odds and ends in which the youthful soul delights. There
are planks and spars and timber, broken rudders, rusty anchors,
coils of rope, bales of sail-cloth, heaps of blocks, piles of
chain-cable, great iron tar-kettles like antique helmets, strange
machines for steaming planks, inexplicable little chimneys,
engines that seem like dwarf-locomotives, windlasses that
apparently turn nothing, and incipient canals that lead nowhere.
For in these yards there seems no particular difference between
land and water; the tide comes and goes anywhere, and nobody
minds it; boats are drawn up among burdocks and ambrosia, and the
platform on which you stand suddenly proves to be something
afloat. Vessels are hauled upon the ways, each side of the wharf,
their poor ribs pitiably unclothed, ready for a cumbrous
mantua-making of oak and iron. On one side, within a floating
boom, lies a fleet of masts and unhewn logs, tethered uneasily,
like a herd of captive sea-monsters, rocking in the ripples. A
vast shed, that has doubtless looked ready to fall for these
dozen years spreads over, half the entrance to the wharf, and is
filled with spars, knee-timber, and planks of fragrant wood; its
uprights are festooned with all manner of great hawsers and
smaller ropes, and its dim loft is piled with empty casks and
idle sails. The sun always seems to shine in a ship-yard; there
are apt to be more loungers than laborers, and this gives a
pleasant air of repose; the neighboring water softens all harsher
sounds, the foot treads upon an elastic carpet of embedded chips,
and pleasant resinous odors are in the air.
Then there are wharves quite abandoned by commerce, and given
over to small tenements, filled with families so abundant that
they might dispel the fears of those alarmists who suspect that
children are ceasing to be born. Shrill voices resound
there--American or Irish, as the case may be--through the summer
noontides; and the domestic clothes-line forever stretches across
the paths where imported slaves once trod, or rich merchandise
lay piled. Some of these abodes are nestled in the corners of
houses once stately, with large windows and carven doorways.
Others occupy separate buildings, almost always of black,
unpainted wood, sometimes with the long, sloping roof of
Massachusetts, oftener with the quaint "gambrel" of Rhode Island.
From the busiest point of our main street, I can show you a
single cottage, with low gables, projecting eaves, and sheltering
sweetbrier, that seems as if it must have strayed hither, a
century or two ago, out of some English lane.
Some of the more secluded wharves appear wholly deserted by men
and women, and are tenanted alone by rats and boys,--two
amphibious races; either can swim anywhere, or scramble and
penetrate everywhere. The boys launch some abandoned skiff, and,
with an oar for a sail and another for a rudder, pass from wharf
to wharf; nor would it be surprising if the bright-eyed rats were
to take similar passage on a shingle. Yet,after all, the human
juveniles are the more sagacious brood. It is strange that people
should go to Europe, and seek the society of potentates less
imposing, when home can endow them with the occasional privilege
of a nod from an American boy. In these sequestered haunts, I
frequently meet some urchin three feet high who carries with him
an air of consummate worldly experience that completely
overpowers me, and I seem to shrink to the dimensions of Tom
Thumb. Before his calm and terrible glance all disguises fail.
You may put on a bold and careless air, and affect to overlook
him as you pass; but it is like assuming to ignore the existence
of the Pope of Rome, or of the London Times. He knows better.
Grown men are never very formidable; they are shy and shamefaced
themselves, usually preoccupied, and not very observing. If they
see a man loitering about, without visible aim, they class him as
a mild imbecile, and let him go; but boys are nature's
detectives, and one does not so easily evade their scrutinizing
eyes. I know full well that, while I study their ways, they are
noting mine through a clearer lens, and are probably taking my
measure far better than I take theirs. One instinctively shrinks
from making a sketch or memorandum while they are by; and if
caught in the act, one fondly hopes to pass for some harmless
speculator in real estate, whose pencillings may be only a matter
of habit, like those casual sums in compound interest which are
usually to be found scrawled on the margins of the daily papers
in Boston reading-rooms.
Our wharves are almost all connected by intricate by-ways among
the buildings; and one almost wishes to be a pirate or a
smuggler, for the pleasure of eluding the officers of justice
through such seductive paths. It is, perhaps, to counteract this
perilous fascination that our new police-office has been
established on a wharf. You will see its brick tower rising not
ungracefully, as you enter the inner harbor; it looks the better
for being almost windowless, though beauty was not the aim of the
omission. A curious stranger is said to have asked one of our
city fathers the reason of this peculiarity. "No use in windows,"
said the experienced official sadly; "the boys would only break
'em." It seems very unjust to assert that there is no
subordination in our American society; the citizens show
deference to the police, and the police to the boys.
The ancient aspect of these wharves extends itself sometimes to
the vessels which lie moored beside them. At yonder pier, for
instance, has lain for thirteen years a decaying bark, which was
suspected of being engaged in the slave-trade. She was run ashore
and abandoned on Block Island, in the winter of 1854, and was
afterwards brought in here. Her purchaser was offered eight
thousand dollars for his bargain, but refused it; and here the
vessel has remained, paying annual wharf dues and charges, till
she is worthless. She lies chained at the wharf, and the tide
rises and falls within her, thus furnishing a convenient
bathing-house for the children, who also find a perpetual
gymnasium in the broken shrouds that dangle from her masts.
Turner, when he painted his "slave-ship," could have asked no
better model. There is no name upon the stern, and it exhibits
merely a carved eagle, with the wings clipped and the head
knocked off. Only the lower masts remain, which are of a dismal
black, as are the tops and mizzen cross-trees. Within the
bulwarks, on each side, stand rows of black blocks, to which the
shrouds were once attached; these blocks are called by sailors
"dead-eyes," and each stands in weird mockery, with its three
ominous holes, like so many human skulls before some palace in
Dahomey. Other blocks like these swing more ominously yet at the
ends of the shrouds, that still hang suspended, waving and
creaking and jostling in the wind. Each year the ropes decay, and
soon the repulsive pendants will be gone. Not so with the iron
belaying-pins, a few of which still stand around the mast, so
rusted into the iron fife-rail that even the persevering industry
of the children cannot wrench them out. It seems as if some
guilty stain must cling to their sides, and hold them in. By one
of those fitnesses which fortune often adjusts, but which seem
incredible in art, the wharf is now used on one side for the
storage of slate, and the hulk is approached through an avenue of
gravestones. I never find myself in that neighborhood but my
steps instinctively seek that condemned vessel, whether by day,
when she makes a dark foreground for the white yachts and the
summer waves, or by night, when the storm breaks over her
desolate deck.
If we follow northward from "Queen-Hithe" along the shore, we
pass into a region where the ancient wharves of commerce, ruined
in 1815, have never been rebuilt; and only slender pathways for
pleasure voyagers now stretch above the submerged foundations.
Once the court end of the town, then its commercial centre, it is
now divided between the tenements of fishermen and the summer
homes of city households. Still the great old houses remain, with
mahogany stairways, carved wainscoting, and painted tiles; the
sea has encroached upon their gardens, and only boats like mine
approach where English dukes and French courtiers once landed. At
the head of yonder private wharf, in that spacious and still
cheerful abode, dwelt the beautiful Robinson sisterhood,--the
three Quaker belles of Revolutionary days, the memory of whose
loves might lend romance to this neighborhood forever. One of
these maidens was asked in marriage by a captain in the English
army, and was banished by her family to the Narragansett shore,
under a flag of truce, to avoid him; her lover was afterward
killed by a cannon-ball, in his tent, and she died unwedded.
Another was sought by two aspirants, who came in the same ship to
woo her, the one from Philadelphia, the other from New York. She
refused them both, and they sailed southward together; but, the
wind proving adverse, they returned, and one lingered till he won
her hand. Still another lover was forced into a vessel by his
friends, to tear him from the enchanted neighborhood; while
sailing past the house, he suddenly threw himself into the
water,--it must have been about where the end of the wharf now
rests,--that he might be rescued, and carried, a passive Leander,
into yonder door. The house was first the head-quarters of the
English commander, then of the French; and the sentinels of De
Noailles once trod where now croquet-balls form the heaviest
ordnance. Peaceful and untitled guests now throng in summer where
St. Vincents and Northumberlands once rustled and glittered; and
there is nothing to recall those brilliant days except the
painted tiles on the chimney, where there is a choice society of
coquettes and beaux, priests and conjurers, beggars and dancers,
and every wig and hoop dates back to the days of Queen Anne.
Sometimes when I stand upon this pier by night, and look across
the calm black water, so still, perhaps, that the starry
reflections seem to drop through it in prolonged javelins of
light instead of resting on the surface, and the opposite
lighthouse spreads its cloth of gold across the bay,--I can
imagine that I discern the French and English vessels just
weighing anchor; I see De Lauzun and De Noailles embarking, and
catch the last sheen upon their lace, the last glitter of their
swords. It vanishes, and I see only the lighthouse gleam, and the
dark masts of a sunken ship across the neighboring island. Those
motionless spars have, after all, a nearer interest, and, as I
saw them sink, I will tell their tale.
That vessel came in here one day last August, a stately,
full-sailed bark; nor was it known, till she had anchored, that
she was a mass of imprisoned fire below. She was the "Trajan,"
from Rockland, bound to New Orleans with a cargo of lime, which
took fire in a gale of wind, being wet with sea-water as the
vessel rolled. The captain and crew retreated to the deck, and
made the hatches fast, leaving even their clothing and provisions
below. They remained on deck, after reaching this harbor, till
the planks grew too hot beneath their feet, and the water came
boiling from the pumps. Then the vessel was towed into a depth of
five fathoms, to be scuttled and sunk. I watched her go down.
Early impressions from "Peter Parley" had portrayed the sinking
of a vessel as a frightful plunge, endangering all around, like a
maelstrom. The actual process was merely a subsidence so calm and
gentle that a child might have stood upon the deck till it sank
beneath him, and then might have floated away. Instead of a
convulsion, it was something stately and very pathetic to the
imagination. The bark remained almost level, the bows a little
higher than the stern; and her breath appeared to be surrendered
in a series of pulsations, as if every gasp of the lungs admitted
more of the suffocating wave. After each long heave, she went
visibly a few inches deeper, and then paused. The face of the
benign Emperor, her namesake, was on the stern; first sank the
carven beard, then the rather mutilated nose, then the white and
staring eyes, that gazed blankly over the engulfing waves. The
figure-head was Trajan again, at full length, with the costume of
an Indian hunter, and the face of a Roman sage; this image
lingered longer, and then vanished, like Victor Hugo's Gilliatt,
by cruel gradations. Meanwhile the gilded name upon the taffrail
had slowly disappeared also; but even when the ripples began to
meet across her deck, still her descent was calm. As the water
gained, the hidden fire was extinguished, and the smoke, at first
densely rising, grew rapidly less. Yet when it had stopped
altogether, and all but the top of the cabin had disappeared,
there came a new ebullition of steam, like a hot spring, throwing
itself several feet in air, and then ceasing.
As the vessel went down, several beams and planks came springing
endwise up the hatchway, like liberated men. But nothing had a
stranger look to me than some great black casks which had been
left on deck. These, as the water floated them, seemed to stir
and wake, and to become gifted with life, and then got into
motion and wallowed heavily about, like hippopotami or any
unwieldy and bewildered beasts. At last the most enterprising of
them slid somehow to the bulwark, and, after several clumsy
efforts, shouldered itself over; then others bounced out, eagerly
following, as sheep leap a wall, and then they all went bobbing
away, over the dancing waves. For the wind blew fresh meanwhile,
and there were some twenty sail-boats lying-to with reefed sails
by the wreck, like so many sea-birds; and when the loose stuff
began to be washed from the deck, they all took wing at once, to
save whatever could be picked up,--since at such times, as at a
conflagration on land, every little thing seems to assume a
value,--and at last one young fellow steered boldly up to the
sinking ship itself, sprang upon the vanishing taffrail for one
instant, as if resolved to be the last on board, and then pushed
off again. I never saw anything seem so extinguished out of the
universe as that great vessel, which had towered so colossal
above my little boat; it was impossible to imagine that she was
all there yet, beneath the foaming and indifferent waves. No
effort has yet been made to raise her; and a dead eagle seems to
have more in common with the living bird than has now this
submerged and decaying hulk with the white and winged creature
that came sailing into our harbor on that summer day.
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