An Old Town By The Sea
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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!
CONTENTS
I. CAPTAIN JOHN SMITH
II. ALONG THE WATER SIDE
III. A STROLL ABOUT TOWN
IV. A STROLL ABOUT TOWN (continued)
V. OLD STRAWBERRY BANK
VI. SOME OLD PORTSMOUTH PROFILES
VII. PERSONAL REMINISCENCES
INDEX OF NAMES
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
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 addre
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