Nooks and Corners of the New England Coast

There is a little inclosure at the upper end of Thames Street in which is a granite obelisk to the memory of John Coggeshall, president of the plantations under their first patent. The name was originally Coxehall. It is the same John Coggeshall briefly met with in the trial scene, to whom a lineal descendant has raised this monument.

Other burial-places may be enumerated, but that lying in the shadow of Trinity Church is probably first to challenge the attention of such as seek to read the annals of the past on memorial stones. The church steeple, with gilded crown on the pinnacle – how these churchmen love the old emblems! – was in full view from my window, slender and graceful, the gilded vane flashing in the morning sun, itself a monument of its ancient flock below.

Here are the names of Hunter, of Kay, of Honyman, and of Malbone: all are to be met with in Newport streets or annals. The presence of foreign armies on the isle is emphasized by the burial of French and British officers in this church-yard. A few family escutcheons designate the ancient adherence to the dogma that all men were not created politically free and equal. One of the unaccustomed objects the stranger sees in peering through the railings of these old church-yards is the blazonry of which the possessors were once so proud, and which is now carried with them to their graves. In cavities where leaden coats of arms have once been imbedded are little basins to catch the rain, where careless sparrows drink and take their morning baths, twittering and chirruping among the homesteads of the dead.

Stuart, who was fond of rambling through the old grave-yards, reading the inscriptions, went to Trinity. He mentions his pew, and the sweetness of the organ, the gift of Berkeley. The painter had a Scotsman's inordinate fondness for snuff, and would be most naturally drawn with palette in one hand and a huge pinch of snuff in the other. A resident of the same street once told me that when Stuart's table-cloth was shaken out at the window the whole street sneezed. He was a good talker and listener, though crabbed and eccentric to a degree.

I venture to contribute to the already portentous number the following anecdote of Stuart: Dining one day at the house of Josiah Quincy, his attention was attracted by an engraving of West's "Battle of the Boyne." "Ah!" said Stuart, "I was studying with West when he was at work on that picture, and had to lie for hours on the floor, dressed in armor, for him to paint me in the foreground as the Duke of Schomberg. At last West said, 'Are you dead, Stuart?' 'Only half, sir,' was my reply; and my answer was true; for the stiffness of the armor almost deprived me of sensation. Then I had to sit for hours on a horse belonging to King George, to represent King William. After the painting was finished, an Irishman who saw it observed to West, 'You have the battle-ground there correct enough, but where is the monument? I was in Ireland the other day and saw it.' He expected to see a memorial of the battle in a representation of its commencement."[296 - Stuart was in Boston at the time of the battle of Lexington, and managed to escape a few days after Bunker Hill. His obituary in the Boston Daily Advertiser, a very noble tribute from one man of genius to another, was written by Allston.]

In the yard of the Congregational Church in Spring Street is a slate grave-stone to the memory of Dr. Samuel Hopkins, settled as pastor of the First Congregational Church of Newport, in 1770. At first his sentiments were so little pleasing to his people that it was voted by the church not to give him a call; but the doctor preached a farewell sermon of such beauty and impressiveness that the vote was recalled, and Hopkins consented to remain. The salient points of his character have furnished the hero for Mrs. Stowe's "Minister's Wooing." The First Congregational Church of Newport was established in 1720.

CHAPTER XXVI.

TO MOUNT HOPE, AND BEYOND

"La mattina al monte, e la sera al fonte." —Italian Proverb

Mohammed, it is said, on viewing the delicious and alluring situation of Damascus, would not enter that city, but turned away with the exclamation, "There is but one paradise for man, and I am determined to have mine in the other world."

I started on my morning walk up the island just as the clocks were striking eight. Spring comes in Newport very early and very verdant. The bloom of orchard and of lilac greeted me. At every step I crushed the perfume out of violets blossoming in the strip of greensward that bordered the broad band of road. I often looked back upon the fortunate city, mounting the green slopes and scattering itself among the quiet fields. The last point of land was visible even down to Point Judith. A faint roll of drums reached me from the fort. Good-bye to a pleasant place! I felt, in turning away, that if Damascus had been like Newport, I should have entered Damascus.

Distant about a mile from Newport is "Tonomy," or more properly Miantonimo Hill. It is the highest elevation in the southern part of the island, receiving its name as the seat of a sachem. Some remains of field-works are seen on its slopes.[297 - It was the fortress of the British left wing. Two large and elegant country houses at its base, included within the lines, were occupied by the officers.]

Near the southern foot of Miantonimo Hill is the old Malbone place, the site of a colonial mansion celebrated in its day as the finest in Newport. It was destroyed by fire rather more than a century ago. Tradition avers that Colonel Godfrey Malbone, seeing his house in flames, ordered the table removed to the lawn, and coolly finished his dinner there. It was a two-story stone-built house, which had cost the owner a hundred thousand dollars.

Many are the dark, vague, and mysterious hints let fall from time to time relative to the life of Malbone. As a merchant his ventures are said to have been lawless even for his lawless age. His corsairs preyed upon the commerce of Frenchman or Spaniard without regard for treaties. Rum and slaves were the commodities in which the Newport of his time trafficked largely. Smuggling was hardly deemed dishonorable in a merchant. As confirming this easy condition of commercial virtue, a writer mentions having seen in Malbone's garden the entrance of one of those subterranean passages leading to the shore I have so often unearthed.

During the French war of George II., Newport, from its beginning to the year 1744, had armed and sent to sea more than a score of privateers. It was called the nursery of corsairs. It was also called rich; and the French, in planning its capture, facilitated by the information of a resident French merchant, a spy, calculated on levying a heavy contribution. "Perhaps we had better burn it, as a pernicious hole, from the number of privateers there fitted out, as dangerous in peace as in war; being a sort of freebooter, who confiscates à tord et à travers," say they. These harsh expressions sound strangely unfamiliar when contrasted with French panegyric of the next generation.

Edward G. Malbone, a natural son, belonged to a collateral branch of the family.[298 - He was the son of John, the son of Godfrey Malbone.] Newport was the birthplace of this exquisite miniature painter and most refined of men. This refinement appears in his works, which are full of artistic grace and dainty delicacy. Little of his life was passed here, though that little is much prized by all who know his worth as a man. Allston and Malbone are said to have worked together in Newport as pupils of Samuel King, beginning thus the friendship that so long subsisted between them.

About midway of the island, on the eastern shore, is The Glen, once more frequented than at present. A line carried across the island from this point would pass near the old farmstead, which was the quarters of the British general, Prescott. It is on the west road leading by the most direct route from Newport to Bristol Ferry.

Colonel Barton, whose station was at Tiverton, conceived the idea of releasing General Lee, then a prisoner, by securing General Prescott. Having matured his plans, he crossed over to Warwick Neck, where he was detained two days by a violent storm. With him were forty volunteers, who manned five whale-boats. The enemy were then in possession of both Canonicut and Prudence islands, with some shipping lying under the little isle, called Hope, which is between Prudence and the western shore of the bay.

On the night of the 9th of July, 1711, every thing being favorable, Barton informed his men for the first time where they were going. His party embarked in their boats, rowing between Patience and Prudence in order to elude the enemy's guard-boats. Meeting with no obstacle, they coasted the west shore of Prudence, passed around the southern end, and landed on Rhode Island. They then pushed on for Overing's house, where they knew General Prescott was to be found.

The sentinel on duty was quickly seized and disarmed, and the house surrounded. On entering General Prescott's chamber, Barton saw him rising from his bed.

"Are you General Prescott?"

"Yes, sir."

"Then you are my prisoner."

The general was allowed to half dress himself, and was then conducted to the boats. His aid, Major Barrington, had also been taken. Arrived at the shore, General Prescott finished his toilet in the open air. Soon after leaving the island the alarm was given in the British camp. "Sir," said Prescott to Barton, as they stepped ashore at Warwick Neck, "you have made a d – d bold push to-night." The Americans had returned in just six and a half hours from the time they set out.

While on his way to the American head-quarters, Prescott was horse-whipped by an innkeeper whom he insulted. The situation of the house from which he was carried off is easily distinguished by the pond before it, whose overflow falls in a miniature cascade into the road. Very little, if any, of the original building is remaining.

Talbot's achievement the next year was in carrying off a British armed vessel, the Pigot, that guarded Seconnet Passage and the communication between the islands and the main-land. With a few troops from the camp at Providence he manned a small vessel and set sail. On coming near the Pigot, Talbot caused his vessel to drift down upon her, when he carried her by boarding. He took his prize successfully into Stonington.

The absence of forest-trees on the island gives it a general resemblance to the rolling prairie of the West. The slopes are gracefully rounded as the Vermont hills – ground-swells, over which the road rises or descends in regular irregularity. Over this road that discarded vehicle, the stage-coach, once rolled and lurched, and was more wondered at than the train that now rattles along under the hills by the shore.

It is said that Dexter Brown, "an enterprising man," set up a four-horse stage-coach between Boston and Providence as early as 1772. When "well regulated," it left Providence every Monday, and arrived in Boston on Tuesday night; returning, it left Boston on Thursday, reaching Providence on Friday night. The coach was chiefly patronized by people who visited Newport for their health. On a long route, the change from one coach into another, equally cramped, might not inaptly be said to resemble an exchange of prisoners.

All travelers here have remarked on the productiveness of Rhode Island. Its dairies and its poultry have always been celebrated. Orchards bursting with blossoms somewhat relieved the bare aspect of the hills. Fields of spinach and of clover varied the coloring of the pastures, which were shaded off on cool slopes into the dark green of Kentucky blue-grass. Groups of brown hay-ricks, left from the winter's store, stood impaled in barn-yards. Flocks of geese waddled by the roadside. Ox-teams, market-men, boys with droves of pigs, made the whole way a pastoral. On lifting the eye from the yellow band of road a windmill would be seen with its long arms beating the air. I liked to walk through the green lanes that led up to them, and hold brief chat with the boy or maid of the mill. I shall never look at one without thinking of Don Quixote and of Sancho Panza. The lack of streams and water-power is thus supplied by air-currents and wind-power. It is an ill wind indeed that blows nobody good on Rhode Island.

I have said nothing of the fish-market of the island, and that market is of course centred in Newport. Dr. Dwight enumerates twenty-six different species, to be found in their season. Sheep's-head, considered superior to turbot, were sometimes caught off Hanging Rocks. Blackfish (tautog) and scup, or scuppaug, are much esteemed. When I was last on the island, the fishermen were emptying their seines of the scup, which were so plenty as to be almost valueless, a string of fine fish, ready dressed, bringing only twelve cents. The flesh of a tautog is very firm, and he will live a long time out of water. The boats used here by fishermen have the mast well forward, in the manner known to experts along shore as the "Newport rig." Formerly they used "pinkeys," or Chebacco boats, so called from a famous fishing precinct of Essex County, Massachusetts.

The quartz imbedded in the stone makes the roadside walls appear as if splashed with whitewash. I saw few ledges from Newport to Lawton's Valley. The stones brought up by the plow were all small and flat, but at the upper end of the island I observed they were the round masses or pebbles met with on the opposite main-land. There is also on the western shore a coal vein of inferior quality. The dust from it mingles with that of the road before you arrive at Bristol ferry.

I made a brief halt at the old grass-grown earth-work on the crest of the hill overlooking Lawton's Valley. No wayfarer should lose the rare views to be had here. The fort forms a throne from which the Queen of Aquidneck, a voluptuous rather than virgin princess, a Cleopatra rather than an Elizabeth, might behold her empire. At the foot of the hill is the remarkable vale intersecting the island, sprinkled with cottages among orchards; on the left, part of Canonicut and all of Prudence lie outstretched along the sunny bay; farther north the steeples of Bristol distinctly, and of Providence dimly, are seen; to the right Mount Hope, Tiverton, and perhaps a faint spectral chimney or two at Fall River. The long dark line on the water from the island to Tiverton is the stone bridge.[299 - The first bridge spanning what was known as Howland's Ferry was completed in 1795. It was of wood, destroyed and swept to sea by a storm; rebuilt, and again destroyed by worms. The present stone structure was built in 1809-'10, and, though injured by the gale of 1815, stands firm.]

Turning to the southward is the battle-field of 1778, where Sullivan and Greene fought with Pigot and Prescott, and where Lafayette, though he had ridden from Boston in six hours, was not. This campaign, begun so auspiciously, terminated ingloriously. New England had been aroused to arms. Men of all ranks of society shouldered their firelocks and marched. Volunteers from Newburyport, a company of the first merchants of Salem, artillery and infantry corps from Boston, thronged the roads to Sullivan's camp. It was a good and salutary lesson to the Americans, not to put their faith in French appearances.[300 - The battle was fought in the valley below Quaker, sometimes called Meeting-house, Hill. Sullivan commanded in chief, though Greene is entitled to a large share of the credit of repulsing the British attack. It was a well-fought action. Pigot, by British accounts, had six thousand regular troops. Lafayette was mad as a March hare at their fighting without him.]

When Coddington and his associates determined to remove from Massachusetts, they meant to settle upon Long Island or in Delaware Bay. While their vessel was making the dangerous passage around Cape Cod without them, they came by land to Providence, where Mr. Williams courteously entertained and afterward influenced them to settle upon the Isle of Aquidneck. Plymouth having disclaimed jurisdiction over it, and promised to look upon and assist them as loving neighbors, in March, 1637-'38, the exiles organized their political community upon the northern end of the island. Sir H. Vane and Roger Williams were instrumental in procuring Rhode Island from the Narraganset chieftains, Miantonimo and Canonicus. By the next spring their numbers were so much augmented that some of the settlers removed to the southern or western shores. The island was divided into two townships – Portsmouth, which now engrosses its upper half, and Newport. In 1644 they named it the Isle of Rhodes, which was merely exchanging one pagan name for another.[301 - Lechford, writing between 1637 and 1641, says: "At the island called Aquedney are about two hundred families. There was a church where one Master Clark was elder: the place where the church was is called Newport, but that church, I hear, is now dissolved. At the other end of the island there is another town called Portsmouth, but no church. Those of the island have a pretended civil government of their own erection without the king's patent."]

Mount Hope is scarcely more than two hundred feet high, though in its isolation it looks higher. It is commandingly situated on a point of land on the eastern shore of Bristol Neck, giving its name to a broad expanse of water that receives Taunton River in its course to the sea. On the eastern side the hill is precipitous, vastly more so than Horse Neck, down which the valiant Putnam urged his steed when pursued by British dragoons. Down this declivity Philip is said to have rolled like a cask when surprised by white enemies. Here, on the shores of Taunton River, is the scene of those hand-to-hand encounters between settler and savage in which the old historians are wont to mix up gunpowder with religion so perplexedly. In those days the fall of a red chieftain on the hunting-grounds of his fathers was hailed as a special providence. Mount Hope was the sequel of Samoset's "Welcome, Englishmen."

By the river, in the forked branches of blasted sycamores, the fish-hawk builds and broods. Their nests are made of dried eel-grass from the shore interwoven with twigs. The shrill scream of the female at my coming was answered by the cry of the male, who left his fishing out on the river at the first signal of distress. An old traveler says this bird sometimes seems to lie expanded on the water, he hovers so close to it. Having by some attractive power drawn the fish within his reach, he darts suddenly upon them. The charm he makes use of is supposed to be an oil contained in a small bag in the body. In defense of his mate and her young the bird seems to forget fear.

After many agreeable surprises already encountered, I was unprepared for what I saw from the summit of Mount Hope. I felt it was good to be there. Every town in Rhode Island is said to be visible. All the islands dispersed about the bay are revealed at a glance. Glimmering in the distance was Providence. On the farther shore of Mount Hope Bay, Fall River appeared niched in the sheer side of a granite ledge. Here were Warren and Bristol, there Warwick; and, far down the greater bay, Newport was swathed in a hazy cloud. I had made a long walk, yet felt no fatigue, on the top of Mount Hope.

Near the brow of the hill Philip fixed his wigwam and held his dusky court. He has had Irving for his biographer, Southey for his bard, and Forrest for his ideal representative. In his own time he was the public enemy whom any should slay; in ours he is considered as a martyr to the idea of liberty – his idea of liberty not differing from that of Tell and Toussaint, whom we call heroes.

Philip did not comprehend the religion of the whites, but as he understood their policy he naturally distrusted their faith. When the prophet Eliot preached to him, he went up to that good man, and, pulling off a button from his doublet, said he valued his discourse as little as the piece of "brass – the monster!" exclaims pious Cotton Mather.

Such hills as Mount Hope were the settlers' sun-dials, when clocks and watches were luxuries known only to the wealthy few. The crest is a green nipple, having quartz cropping out everywhere; in fact, the basis of the hill is nearly a solid mass of quartz. Between the site of Philip's wigwam and the shore, where the escarpment is fifty feet, is a natural excavation, five or six feet from the ground, called "Philip's Throne." A small grass-plot is before it, and at its foot trickles a never-failing spring of water, known as "Philip's Spring."

The manner of Philip's death, as given in Church's history, is considered authentic. Church's party crossed the ferry, and reached Mount Hope about midnight. Detachments were placed in ambush at all the avenues of escape. Captain Golding, with a number of picked men and a guide, was ordered to assault the stronghold by break of day. One of Philip's Indians having showed himself, Golding fired a volley into the camp. The Indians then fled to the neighboring swamp, Philip the foremost. Having gained the shore, he ran directly upon Church's ambuscade. An Englishman snapped his gun at him without effect, when his companion, one of Church's Indian soldiers, sent a bullet through the heart of the chief. He fell on his face in the mud and water, with his gun under him. After the fight was over, Church ordered the body to be quartered and decapitated. The executioner was also an Indian, and before he struck the body made a short speech to it. Philip's head was taken to Plymouth in triumph, where, arriving on the very day the church was keeping a solemn thanksgiving, in the words of Mather, "God sent 'em in the head of a leviathan for a thanksgiving feast."

I made the ascent of Mount Hope from the south, where it is gradual; but on the west, where I descended, I found it abrupt, and covered with a grove of oak-trees sprinkled with stones among fern. With the exception of a few tumble-down stone walls that cross it, and now and then a cow quietly cropping the herbage, it is as wild as when it was the eyrie of the proud-spirited chieftain, "the Last of the Wampanoags."

At Bristol the railway will set you down opposite to Fall River, or by returning to Bristol ferry you may take, on the Rhode Island side, the rail for Dighton and its sculptured rock. This rock, which has puzzled so many learned brains both of the Old World and the New, lies near the eastern shore of Taunton River, opposite Dighton wharves.[302 - To be exact, the shores adjacent to the rock are in the town of Berkeley, formerly part of Dighton.]

I wanted two things in Dighton – direction to the rock, and a skiff to cross the river to it. An ancient builder of boats, very tall and very lank, having his adze in his hand and his admeasurements chalked on the toes of his boots, supplied me with both.

"What on airth do you want to look at that rock for?" he expostulated rather than questioned. "I'd as lief look at the side of that house," pointing to his work-shop.

"You do not seem to value your archæological remains overmuch," I submitted.

"Bless you, I knew a gal born and brought up right in sight of that air rock, who got married and went to Baltimore to live, without ever having sot eyes on it. When she had staid there a spell she heard so much about Dighton Rock, she came all the way back a purpose to see it. Fee-male curiosity, you see, sir."

The river is half a mile broad at Dighton, with low, uninteresting shores. The "Writing Rock," a large boulder of fine-grained greenstone, is submerged either wholly or in part by the tidal flow, but when uncovered presents a smooth face, slightly inclined toward the open river. When so close as to lay hold of it, you are aware, of faint impressions on its surface, yet these have become so nearly effaced by the action of the tides and the chafing of drift ice as to be fragmentary, and therefore disappointing. As is usual, the action of the salt air has turned this, as other rocks by the shores, to a dusky red color. Seventy years ago the characters or lines traced on the rock were by actual measurement an inch in breadth by half an inch in depth, and distinct enough to attract attention from the decks of passing vessels.

The rock is first mentioned, says Schoolcraft, in a sermon of Dr. Danforth, of 1680. The river had then been frequented by white men for sixty years. It is next alluded to in the dedication of a sermon to Sir H. Ashurst by Cotton Mather, in these words: "Among the other curiosities of New England one is that of a mighty rock, on a perpendicular side whereof, by a river which at high tide covers part of it, there are very deeply engraved, no man alive knows how or when, about half a score lines near ten foot long and a foot and a half broad, filled with strange characters, which would suggest as odd thoughts about them that were here before us as there are odd shapes in that elaborate monument, whereof you shall see the first line transcribed here."

In the "Philosophical Transactions" of the Royal Society of London, covering a period from 1700 to 1720, are several communications from Cotton Mather, one of which (part iv., p. 112) is as follows: