USA > Connecticut > Colonial Days And Ways: As Gathered from Family Papers > Part 5
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Some one writing of the Lady Arbella John- son has said that "she came from a paradise of
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plenty and pleasure into a wilderness of wants." This expression is especially correct as regards its last clause. "A wilderness of wants " this cer- tainly must have seemed, not only to the sister of the Earl of Lincoln, but also to the hardiest of the colonists ; and these wants were actual, not imagi- nary, as evidenced by the frightful death-rates of the early years. But even the tapestried halls the delicate Lady Arbella had left would seem com- fortless enough to the daughter of any small farmer of modern New England, however much she might admire its splendor, could she now sud- denly find herself placed in the Lady Arbella's fine abode of "pleasure and plenty " as the latter had left it in 1630.
Floor-coverings were then a rarity even in palaces, and the sand and rushes which polished the boards or silenced the tread were as plentiful here as elsewhere. Porcelain was a luxury in any land; even delft was uncommon; and pewter was considered too fine for the daily use of any save the rich. Wooden dishes served on ordinary occasions in old England as in the New, save among the wealthiest. The sense of real priva- tion was felt in things much closer to the needs of the primitive man.
Great, very great, must have been the suffering from the cold and from the lack of suitable food. If the colonists sometimes took undue quantities of beer and the stronger liquors, not only the tra-
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ditions of the older land but the hard conditions of the new must be remembered in extenuation. They needed something besides cold water. Hot water had not been dreamed of as a beverage, and the milder stimulants of our day had not been introduced. The earliest mention of chocolate in Connecticut is said to have been in 1679. Five years later coffee is first named, and tea not until 1695.
For many years raised bread was hardly known, and this for several very good reasons. It was a difficult matter to preserve the leaven from one baking until the next. Either it would sour from too great heat, or it would lose its vitality from the severe cold weather. To bake bread in an iron pot over the fire or under the same utensil inverted before the blaze, was an undertaking very doubtful in its results ; yet there was no other way, for the brick or stone ovens of a later date did not exist during the first decade, and, except in a few instances, probably not for a score of years longer. Until a sufficiency of bread-stuffs could be raised here, which was not for several years, both wheat flour and oatmeal were imported in considerable quantities; but the first was costly even in Eng- land, and as both often arrived here in an exceed- ingly damaged condition, the roughly pounded or ground meal of Indian corn was for months at a time the staff of life -a staff which, for persons of weak powers of digestion, has often proved an insufficient support.
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For grinding this the only mills were of the sim- ple Indian construction-a large stone hollowed by natural or by artificial means, and another stone into which a wooden handle had been fitted. The latter was sometimes tied to a young sapling grow- ing near, which, by its rebound, saved the grinder the labor of lifting the pestle. In my childhood near the ruins of an ancient house stood a very large birch-tree; beneath it was a hollow stone, and still lingering amid the upper branches, which had grown in such a way as to hold and support it, could be seen one of these ancient pestles.
After the first few seasons summer vegetables were as fine and as plentiful as in old England, but it was impossible to preserve for winter use any that could not survive deep burial in trenches out of doors or in the cellars, overlaid with piles of earth mixed with dead leaves, so bitter was the winter frost and so inadequate the means of excluding it.
Poultry was more easily brought than larger live stock, and multiplied more rapidly, but it was a good many years after the landing at Plymouth before cows and sheep became plenty. Even as late as 1672, when Mrs. Lake made her will, a "cow and heifer" were evidently esteemed to be bequests of more than ordinary value; indeed, the same was then true in old England, where a man whose estate went by entail to his eldest son, and who bequeathed {1000 each to four younger sons,
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seems to have thought each of his daughters well portioned with {200, a cow, a heifer, ten sheep, and a feather-bed. Trumbull, in his history of Connecticut, gives the value of a good milch cow, at about 1640, as £30. At the same date car- penters and other mechanics were receiving from fourteen to eighteen pence per day. The work of a "paire of Oxen with tacklin" was held to be worth two shillings and fivepence for " six howers " in winter and "eight howers " the rest of the year, these hours making the full day's work for cattle, except in heavy upland plowing, when "six howers " was considered enough. A man's work- ing hours were reckoned from sun to sun in sum- mer, and from six to six o'clock in winter; but cattle were much more precious than men. The latter usually managed to survive the long and arduous sea voyage, but of the cattle which formed the deck-load of nearly all incoming ships in summer, not more than twenty-five per cent. were expected to survive, even under exceptionally fa- vorable conditions.
Some of the first of the colonists sent by nearly every returning ship for seeds and young fruit- trees, but comparatively few of the latter survived the long voyage, and of course those that did so required some years to come to maturity. This led to the making large use of the delicious wild berries in their seasons, but the best of these, as the raspberries and the strawberries, - which have
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sadly degenerated in size since Winthrop tanta- lized his home correspondents by describing indi- vidual berries as "two inches in length,"- do not take kindly to being dried, refusing to retain their flavor under such treatment, and no other method of preservation was then practicable.
Of such fruits as did endure the process great quantities were gathered and dried, a labor which added not a little to the toils of the women of the families during the summer. Under these condi- tions, it is not wonderful that the useful, long-suffer- ing pumpkin came into such universal favor. Preserving fruits by the only effectual method then known, except drying,-the boiling with the solid pound of fruit for pound of sugar,-was un- wholesome, very costly, and but little attempted. Game and fish were abundant and delicious. Salt meats were a staple import, and swine soon became plenty ; but horned cattle, sheep, and even domestic fowls were for a long time too valuable to be eaten.
For years there seems to have been little attempt at butter-making; most of that which was used here was imported from England, and often did not keep well, in spite of being frequently made unpalatable by the quantity of salt used to pre- serve it. On the occasion of the wedding of her daughter Hannah, Mrs. Lake writes that she had " made some very goode buttere although it seemed almost Wicket to soe yuse ye milk yt is so sore needet for ye sick & ye littell ownes."
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Sheep were spared for their wool and poultry for their eggs; when the chickens were sacrificed their feathers were carefully preserved, for in those days of scarcity a bed of hen feathers would not be despised, though those of the wild geese and ducks would certainly be more highly prized.
In later times there was no lack of material to keep the hands of matrons and maids busily spin- ning, but at first there was neither flax nor wool to spin. Woolen yarns were among the articles sent for to England; but threads from worn-out woolen garments long supplied much of the material for the stockings and mittens for working wear.
In these pioneer days the energies of the colo- nists were devoted to getting together the raw materials for a civilized existence. In 1640 the "Generall Court" of Connecticut Colony issued the following recommendation :
" Whereas as yt is observed yt experience has made appear that much ground within these lib- ertyes may be well improved both in Hempe & Flaxe & yt we myght in time have a supply of lynnen cloath amongst o'selves and for the more speedy procuring of Hempe Seede It is Ordered yt every family within these plantations shall pr'cure and plante this pr'sent yeare at lest onne spoonfull of English hempe seed in fruitful soyle at lest a foot distant betwixt each seed, and the
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same so planted shall be pr'served and kept in husbandly manner for supply of seed another yeare."
The following year the same ordinance was repeated ; after that it may be supposed that enough seed had been secured for future planting.
At what an humble distance must we now admire the indomitable and uncomplaining courage with which these colonists bore their material as well as their more than material privations. To one griev- ous privation I have seen no reference made as such. Perhaps it bore so heavily upon loving hearts that they feared to give expression to their feelings, and so lift the flood-gates of their suppressed sorrows.
There is preserved a letter written by Mrs. Lake when she had been living in this country twenty- eight years. Her beloved brother-in-law, Win- throp, had gone to England in the interests of the colonists, and Mrs. Lake thus writes to him :
"I would desire you to inquire whether my sis- ter Breadcale bee livinge, you may hear of her if livinge, at Iron Gate, where the boats weekly come from Lee."
There is a world of silent and weary heartbreak in this and similar inquiries in the same letter.
When Mrs. Lake had come to New England, Charles I, Strafford, and Archbishop Laud were carrying things with a high hand, driving the Puritans out from the folds as if they had been
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wolves. Between that time and the date of Mrs. Lake's letter the commonwealth had risen, flour- ished, and, when the mighty man who gave it form had passed from earth, had fallen, and the Restoration, which all good subjects were bound to call " happy," had dropped a veil over things which it could not, and others which it would not, undo. Amid all their own troubles and overturn- ings, it is scarcely to be wondered at that the relatives left at "home " should sometimes have forgotten to write to their kin beyond the sea, from whose thoughts they were never long absent. The river of death could hardly have sundered chiefest friends more effectually than did the turbulent Atlantic then, but the hungry heart would still hope and cry out for certainty.
When John and Hannah Gallup happily planned and stoutly built their forest homestead on the banks of the little Mystic River, it well may be that they " laid its foundations in the feare of God and reared its walls in the terror of the Indians," as Samuel Smith of Hadley, Massachu- setts, expressed it when writing in his old age in regard to the erection of the first meeting-house in Wethersfield, Connecticut, of which his father was pastor; and Samuel could speak feelingly upon the subject, having himself, in his young manhood in Hadley, had frequent occasion to defend his own house from savage attacks. Reverence for God was a part of the inheritance of the Puritan settlers,
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and terror of the Indians was a very natural con- sequence of their situation. Whoever may have been to blame in the first instance, there is no doubt that by fifty years after the landing at Plymouth, the question of proper treatment of the Indians received but one answer from the colonists : " We must extirpate them or they will exterminate us." At our distance from all such apprehensions it is easy to see the faults of the white men, and to sympathize with the misused Indian he was dis- placing; but had we lived in that time and under the same circumstances, it is doubtful if we would have been more altruistic than were our sorely harassed ancestors. The red man may have been as unjustly as he was unwisely treated by the white : but he was savage; he was untractable; he was cruel ; he was treacherous. If his provocations were great, his vengeance was terrible. His vicinity was an unending menace to the home of every settler.
The celebrated "Great Swamp Fight" of 1675 was so called to distinguish it from the smaller Swamp Fight, which occurred at almost the other extremity of Connecticut in 1637. In the later of these battles the power of the truly great chieftain, King Philip, and of the native tribes of New England was forever broken. Perhaps, yes, even probably, this decisive fight might have been rendered unnecessary had gentler counsels pre- vailed thirty or forty years before, but by 1675 it had become inevitable.
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When the colonial forces assembled to attack King Philip's fort the members of the opposing parties were supposed to be about two to one in favor of the Indians, full half of whom were sup- plied with muskets as well as with their native weapons; besides this, they fought behind defenses which, as the assaulting party had no cannon, must have seemed to be almost impregnable. The Narragansetts were the most nearly civilized of all the New England tribes. This fort was of their construction and was well built, with a strong and high palisade in the midst of a vast pine and cedar swamp. As an additional protection, the palisade was surrounded by a defensive hedge of interlacing felled trees, several feet in height and about a rod in thickness. Both parties to the conflict felt that they were fighting for their families, their homes, even their very existence as nations in these wilds.
The second John Gallup had always maintained pleasant personal relations with the Indians of whatever tribe, possessing those qualities of justice, firmness, and kindness which win confidence; but the moment was not one for considerations of this sort to have weight with either side. The husband of Hannah Lake was no longer a young man, having been married for thirty-two years; but the hardy pioneer was always in his prime between fifty and sixty, and age had bowed neither the back nor the spirit of Captain Gallup. At the head of his company of eighty men, he led an
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assault upon the fort's only vulnerable point, which was a reasonably well protected and gallantly de- fended gateway, where he fell with twenty of his men.
Whether his body was brought home to the woman who had loved him so long and so truly, I do not know, but probably it was not. The De- cember weather was bitterly cold, the half-frozen morass was extremely treacherous. The victorious party had already marched twenty miles that day, fought fiercely, sustained only by scant rations of frozen food, and had the same distance to walk back again, carrying more than one hundred and fifty wounded men with them, so it is probable that the bodies of the slain were hastily interred on the spot where they fell.
Neither do I know how long the wife survived her husband; but I do know that the name of the hero-sire who fell in defense of his wilderness home was long held in reverent remembrance by his descendants. In a journal letter kept by his great- great-granddaughter, Juliana Smith of Sharon, Connecticut, I find this entry :
" This evening my Mother has been telling me about her great-grandfather, Captain John Gallup, who was killed in King Philip's War. I thank God to be descended from such a man. Truthful, Kind and Brave!"
CHAPTER V
TWO HOUSES IN OLD NEW AMSTERDAM
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CHAPTER V.
TWO HOUSES IN OLD NEW AMSTERDAM.
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The Long Step from Con- necticut to New York. Comforts of the Dutch. Mr. David Codwise Tells of the Houses of his Grandfather and of Nic- laes Evertsen, Grandson of Lieutenant-Admiral Jan Evertsen.
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0 OT is a long step both in time, in 0 I distance, and in customs from the pioneer home in New London, Connecticut, started in 1644, to the homes of prosperous Dutch citizens of New Amsterdam in 1698.
Material progress in all the colonies had been enormous during the years that had intervened. It has always been believed that the Dutch settlers were at no time subjected to the hardships that had been so grievous to the Pilgrims and their imme- diate successors, but that may have been a mis- taken notion. Early Dutch records not having been so thoroughly searched, and letters, if any are in ex- istence, being in a foreign tongue, we have been con- tent to accept the conditions of later days as char- acteristic of the earlier ones as well. This much we know, that times were comparatively easy when Niclaes Evertsen, a recent immigrant from Holland, perhaps by the way of the West Indies, married Margrietye Van Baal, a native of the trading-post which her father had known as Fort Orange, but which, eight years before her birth, had
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been obliged to take the English name of Al- bany.
Yes; times were not hard in the little city of New York, notwithstanding that it had been cap- tured by the English, who were by no means as gentle and careful nurses of their colonies as the Dutch had been. The marriage just referred to occurred in 1698, at which time there was a con- siderable degree of material prosperity.
The Hollanders were natural traders, industri- ous, thrifty, honest, and persevering. Probably no nation had fewer vices or more virtues, and the last were of the kind that bring prosperity in their train. The English government paid them com- paratively little attention, and the shrewd Dutch colonists took no pains to awaken the interest (or cupidity) of their new and undesired masters. In preserving a salutary obscurity they were undoubt- edly aided by their quiet ways and their language, which few Englishmen cared to learn.
New York was now the little city's name upon colonial maps; but New Amsterdam it still re- mained in the hearts of its citizens, as well as in its customs and its people for many years to come. The British had been in possession for about thirty- five years when Niclaes Evertsen built his broad- roofed stone and shingle house somewhere upon the big farm which is said to have stretched from what is now Fourth Avenue, between Union and Madison squares, to the East River; but Dutch .
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was still the language of the people, in Dutch were their records kept, and Dutch were all their tastes and ways.
The very first comers among the Dutch settlers must, like the New England and all other pioneers, have lived in huts of rough, or at best of squared, logs; but instead of being treated with biting neglect like the colonies of England, the Dutch received every possible aid and comfort from the government of their mother-land, and stores and supplies of all sorts were sent out to them as rap- idly as possible and with a liberal hand, so that they were supplied with the comforts of those days sooner than their neighbors.
Even had the English so desired, they could not have given to their colonies as many comforts as could the Dutch, for the latter were far in advance of the former in all the peaceful and domestic arts. In addition to the help which they received from the home-land, the Dutch were fortunate in being most advantageously placed for acting as " middle- men " between Holland and the native American tribes, and thus they rapidly accumulated property ; hence their dwellings speedily became seats of comfort, or even of luxury, as those terms were then used.
The late David Codwise, for many years a mas- ter in chancery in the city of New York, dying in 1864 at the age of eighty-four years, was the hus- band of a sister of my grandmother. Under their
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most hospitable roof many of my girlhood's happy days were spent, and not the least happy were the hours passed in listening to my dear great-uncle's descriptions of the ways and things in old New York. Of his many talks I took some notes, and I am now extremely sorry that I did not take more, though I have been able to glean supple- mentary information from the many letters, wills, and expense-accounts now in my possession and relating to the periods of which he told.
I do not now remember whether the first of the two houses which Mr. Codwise described to me in considerable detail had belonged to his maternal or paternal great-grandfather ; I think, to the latter. Its date, set in small red tiles in the yellow brick walls over its principal door, was A.D. 1700. This house, my uncle said, was the duplicate of one which was erected at or about the same time by his ancestor's partner and most intimate friend, Captain Niclaes Evertsen. The latter was the grandson of the Lieutenant-Admiral Jan (or Johan) Evertsen, a knight of the Order of St. Michael, and one of the most famous officers of old Holland's famous navy, to whose harvest of heroes his family had, in the course of less than a century, supplied, besides himself, no less than three vice-admirals, one commodore, and five scheepsbevelhebbers (ship-commanders). At least seven of the nine died in battle. Jacob de Liefde, in his book on the "Great Dutch Admirals," says
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that fifteen of the Evertsens had borne the name honorably in battle both on land and on sea, and one must wonder that the immigrant Niclaes was content to remain a merchant and captain of one of his own ships, peacefully trading between New Amsterdam and the West Indies. But times had changed. Holland and England had become friends, and the claws of Spain and Portugal had been too closely clipped to be longer dangerous to their enemies. So to Captain Evertsen in the new land his title had acquired a purely peaceful signifi- cance. That his business was profitable is proved by the estate which he left, and by the generous plenishings and furnishings of his unusually large and commodious house.
Among the notes which I took from Mr. Cod- wise's conversations I am glad to find a description and a rough plan of the ground floors of what were in their day considered two of the finest dwellings on the island of Manhattan. They were built at about the same time-after the same design and probably by the same workmen -for two men who were partners in business and at- tached friends-Captain Niclaes Evertsen, and the ancestor of Mr. Codwise, whose surname may have been either Codwise or Beeckman, as that was the maiden name of my great-uncle's mother.
The Codwise house stood on what is now Dey Street, where it was still considered a handsome
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residence, until destroyed by fire not long before my great-uncle's twentieth birthday.
Land on Manhattan Island was not then sold by the inch, and these two houses were built with a glorious contempt of economy of space. In the center of each rose a great chimney-stack of stone, having four immense fireplaces, each striding across the corner of a wide, low-ceiled, broad-win- dowed room about twenty-two feet square. On either side, beyond the four rooms thus grouped around the chimney-stack, were two others of about equal dimensions, each having its own fire- place, for two more chimneys rose, one in each gable-end of the houses. The first story of the Evertsen house was built of stone; that of the Cod- wise house was constructed of buff-colored brick imported from Holland -a needless expense, as Mr. Codwise used to say, because brick-making was one of the earliest and most successful indus- tries started in the new land.
In both houses the exterior walls of the upper stories were covered by overlapping cedar shingles, clipped at the corners to produce an octagonal effect, as one may see them in certain cottages of to-day. In front and at the gable-ends the second stories projected a little beyond the lower. At the rear there was but one story, the long roof sloping from the peak by a slightly inward-curving sweep till it terminated over the low, comfortable-looking stoep, upon which opened the rear windows and
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doors of the first floor. All the first-floor rooms were handsomely wainscoted, and these, as well as the heavy ceiling beams, were, as Mr. Codwise re- membered them, cased and painted white. Each fireplace was surrounded by borders of tiles, all illustrating scriptural or naval scenes, save one set, which, in reddish brown figures on a white ground, portrayed the adventures of Don Quixote. One of these last tiles I saw in Mr. Codwise's possession in 1860. The walls of one room in each of the houses were hung with embossed leather, which had once been richly decorated in arabesque de- signs, and even in my great-uncle's remembrance the gold tracings had not been badly tarnished. Other walls in the best rooms of both houses were hung with a very substantial sort of paper, pic- tured with sprawling landscapes in which wind- mills, square-rigged boats, and very chunky cows figured prominently. This was said to have been put on soon after the houses were built. Accord- ing to the custom of the time, the bedrooms were always washed with lime.
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