USA > Massachusetts > Plymouth County > Marion > Lands of Sippican on Buzzards Bay > Part 28
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He was very courteous. The ships all around were having a great deal of trouble with water thieves at the time, and long afterwards they found that her protector was the "King" of the wharf thieves of New York harbor.
"Weren't you frightened?"
"Well, no", said Josephine, and she added thoughtfully, her eyes seeing tall masts, and city docks, "He was a nice ap- pearing man." She was sober. There was quiet in the
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room. Timothy; the husband, who was lost on the Emerald, perhaps seen too through the mist of years.
Old sea yarns!
"Father, did you really sleep on Robinson Crusoe's Is- land? Oh, weren't you thrilled, father?"
"Well, no! too many wild goats!"
Marion is growing; land near the shore is rapidly taken for summer homes.
In the meantime Major Rowland Luce's shore property three acres and wharf has come into the possession of the town, purchased from Capt. George's family at a low price that the town may have a shore for everybody, and Mrs. Taber's fund left for the beauty of the village, fills in the marsh, and builds a sea wall, and a bath house is erected.
Its friends are kind to Marion.
In 1902 Barnabas Holmes left a great tract of the Holmes lands to the town. Woodland near the Gilder Studio and stretching back to the Mattapoisett road, including "Jona- than's orchard," "Walnut orchard", "Spring Lane", "to be kept mainly in forest", also a strip of shore land 33 ft. wide, "not to be sold, leased, nor disposed of but kept for the use of the inhabitants forever.".
Marion has 27 miles of macadam, and is appropriating $25,030 for running expenses, and its valuation is 11/2 million dollars.
Gay days in the village, celebrated people on the streets, band benefits, church fairs, club house benefits, and a wonderful illumination of the harbor. Every boat strung with lights, while all around the whole harbor every 200 yards flared a torch. On Great Neck, Little Neck, Charles Neck, Ram Island, Little Island, fires and bon fires, with an orchestra at the Casino of the Hotel Sippican, a band on Little Island, and fire works from a raft in the middle of the stream, with a long string of illum- inated canoes and row boats floating between the glistening yachts.
It was a scene from fairy land and one old traveller sitting on the porch of the Hotel said that never in his "so- journs about the globe" had he seen anything so beautiful.
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Everything was moving fast in the village.
The time was more that of Fritze Scheff than Henry James.
Davis is staying with the Kiplings for the Coronation of King Edward.
And the town is talking about some sort of a new sewer system that shall not affect the harbor, and it decided to put in an up-to-date intermittent sand filtration plant.
So many celebrated people walking about that one old Sippicanner allowed that he didn't know as "the Angel Gabriel, with horn and all, would excite any body much now if he did light!"
It is 1904 and the Russo-Japanese war headlines are blackening the papers.
Davis writes that he and John Fox are "in a room which is as free to the public view as the porch at Marion. We eat, sleep and dress in this room and it is like trying to be at home on the top of a Chickering Grand."
Later he writes, "Not even a siege of London could hold our thoughts from home. I have just missed the mail which would have told me you were at Marion. I should so love to have heard from you from there. I do not think you will find the Church house uncomfortable and you can always run across the road when the traffic is not too great and chat with Benjamin. I do hope Dad will have got such good health from Marion and such lashers of fish."
Disgusted at being kept so far from the war zone he came home to have great fun.
He coached his play, "Miss Civilization" with so much fire and energy that the hero and heroine actors blossomed out into real Broadway performers.
When his play, "The Taming of Helen" was produced in what is now the Cozy Theatre, one newspaper reporter com- mented, "Oh! but the townspeople of Marion are pampered by their loyal friends!"
It took Davis a week to make the hall and entrance over for the play. He chopped and screwed, and sawed and painted
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John Fox, Finley Peter Dunn, Fritzie Scheff and "R. H. D."
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and draped. For the act that required a stairway forty feet high, he built a step, and threw a rug over it.
There had to be chambers in the Inner Temple! Entrance Hall at Gower House! And the Green Room to the Imperial Theatre! but when Henry Miller, Jessie Millward, Dwrina DeWolf and the rest of the company arrived from Boston, the Stage Carpenter, Property Man, Artist met them in one man, and the stage was ready.
Three hundred invitations had been sent out. The ushers wore the gorgeous costumes of the Marion Band, and the re- served seats were chairs marked with a chalk, "D", which was imprinted on the trowsers of John Drew, and Charles Belmont Davis, to the amusement of the newspaper men. "R. H. D." worked the acetylene gas footlights up and down, and it was all a grand success.
With his celebrated friends coming and going Davis was always appearing in Sunday editions.
It was not a posing man of the world, but a young ad- venturer bubbling over with life.
One summer he started the cleaning of the streets of the village. He hired some men, equipped them with a little two wheel cart and spiked sticks, and set them at work.
On a holiday when the men were laid off, Davis, who as he said of one of his characters "could put long disarrangements of the alphabet after his name" could be seen in white flannels, with the little cart and a spiked stick, industriously spearing up bits of papers on the Main St. Of course it got into the Sun- day papers as Richard Harding Davis posing again for pub- licity, but the townspeople knew he didn't need to pose for publicity, and they just smiled with affection for him.
Almost grown up now is Marion.
By 1905 it had awarded the contract for the sand filtra- tion sewerage system, voting $30,000 for the purpose, and more macadam is put in. But the white roads are doomed! Peter Dunn who was a visitor to Marion has Mr. Dooley say the next year
"Do I think the autymobill has come to stay? Sure, I'll never tell ye. I've seen all the wurruld but me on roller skates.
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I've seen ivery body ridin' a bicycle but me. When messenger- boys is dashin' up the street in an eighty horse power Demon Terror the rich will be flyin' kites or r-runnin' baloons."
A big car from Chicago is setting the old Rochester horses to raring straight up in the air, and the macadam is very dusty and disagreeable even through the silk veils and close visored caps.
Everybody goes to see Maude Adams in "Peter Pan", and Davis's farce, "The Galloper".
Almost the last link with the old Rochester-Towne-in-New England was broken when "Miss Eugenia" died in 1907. Graceful, delicate lady, the friend of all the great ones who came to the lands of Sippican, from Daniel Webster to the gay young artists and writers of the end of the century. Her wonderful old house gave the young people a glimpse of that far away time of the early days, of the sweet thin songs, of languishing belles and ardent beaux and sighing rejected suit- ors (53 on Miss Eugenia's list). It was looking through a window again into the old garden of box hedges and a sun dial, and figures in knee breeches and buckles, and brocades and laces, vanishing down the far pathway bordered in flowers.
Those sheltered days are gone for women. Times are changing, and out in the bustling world Mr. Gilder writes,
"Watchman, what seeest thou in the new Dawn? I behold Service honored above possession. I see men as brothers -- in time of calm and in days of monstrous calamity stretching hands to one another over lands and seas and across ancient barriers of race and religion and condition."
Changing times, but Capt. Hiram Nye, whaleman, who had married Lucy, great grand daughter of George Bonum Nye, and had retired twenty years ago, was called by his New Bed- ford agents to go down on the Indian Ocean, and take charge of the Charles W. Morgan which was in command of Capt. Earle of Mattapoisett who was obliged to come home with his wife and child.
Capt. Nye was living in his home on Main St., a long whaling life, beginning with the Osceola in 1866, behind him. He had been in the Osceola when she was wrecked in the Indian
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Ocean on the Glorioso reef, and for four days and three nights, for 200 miles the crew had rowed to the Comoro Islands. The beautiful Fleetwing built like a clipper ship in 1877 was his home for eight years, first as mate, then as captain. She made such successful voyages she became noted in the whaling ports of the world.
"Wild Whales", "heavy gales", familiar words of the old whaling logs, were in the captain's memory.
On Apr. 5, 1874 he is writing
"Saw sperm whales, lowered two boats - the Larboard went on, did not get past, the whale stove the boat-the whale layed and looked at the Boat as long as he liked and went off - the Second mate half a mile to windward with his sail in. Got the stoven boat on board made sail and stood to the South."
Like the mermaid in Cape Cod Bay "looking earnestly" at the sailors, was the whale in Capt. Nye's log.
Arctic whaling! "pack ice and walruses"-"heavy ice". June 28, 1879 "Passed through Bearing Straits bound to the Arctic," he writes, and on Sept. 6 "worked forty miles up a lead twenty miles wide."
Sept. 8, "Fleet all left Herald Island. Afraid the ice would close in."
Oct. 16. "Plenty of ice. Land in sight to S. E. Ship working through the ice to the S."
Nov. 12. San Francisco! and Dec. 8-sailing on another voyage!
Now after 22 years he is on his way from N. Y. to South Hampton, then to Port Natal, Africa, to sail again for whales.
He had trouble ahead - had to make officers from boat steerers. One real whaler, he found on board. The second mate, George Christian who had been on the ship 14 years, a descendant of Fletcher Christian, the mutineer of Pitcairn Island.
Two hurricanes struck the Morgan; one in which Captain Nye said he could see no water, blue or black, only a vast field of snow with banks 20 ft. high with the ship scudding under
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bare poles part of the time and then hove to with oil bags over the stern to smooth the seas some.
The Morgan had taken 11,000 pounds of whalebone, 1600 barrels of oil, of which 1050 was sperm.
They took eight right whales and then the captain brought the Morgan home.
For a week before the Morgan came in, the New Bedford wharves, that had been the cradles of the whalers of the world for three quarters of a century, were without a whale ship, the first time in fifty years.
And the adventurers came home.
The Pilgrim Land is getting very modern. In 1909 the great "Red and Blue" war maneuvers were held on the roads and through the fields and woods.of the Old Colony. Aug. 16-"R. H. D." is writing to his mother
"I spent the morning locating the different regiments - of course Hiller's knowledge of the country was wonderfully convenient. We have great luck in seeing the only fight of the day, the first one of the war. Indeed, I think we caused it. There was a troop of cavalry with a captain who was afraid to advance. I chided him into doing something, the umpire having confided to me he would mark him if he did not. But he did it wrong, anyway he charged a barn with 36 troopers, and lost every fourth man. In real warfare he would have lost all his men and all his horses."
Aug. 19. "The war came to an end with one army, the Red one, with the road to Boston open before it. Indeed when the end came they were fighting with their backs to that city, and could have entered it tonight. I begged both Bliss and Wood to send in the cavalry, just for the moral effect but they were afraid of the feeling that was quite strong. I had much fun, never more."
"I met a troop of cavalry this morning, riding away from the battle, down a cross road, and thinking it was a flanking manoeuver I started to follow them with the car.
'Where are you going?' I asked the captain.
'No where', he said, 'We are dead.'
Miss Edith Austin - Hostess of "The Bund", a house whose hospitality extends from "Marigold Days"
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An umpire was charging in advance of two troops of the 10th, down a state road when one trooper of the enemy turned back and alone charged the two troops. 'You idiot', yelled the troopers, 'don't you know that you and your horse are shot know it!'"
'Sure I know', yelled the trooper, 'but the horse don't know it!'
Sunny days on the Middleboro road! Soldiers marching, but nobody believed in war any more!
The old soldiers no longer marched with heads up, or proudly rode horse back on Memorial Day.
"Ah, Comrades, do not honor this day tamely!" writes Mary, daughter of Capt. Henry Allen.
Mary had sailed to Liverpool with the young wife Sophia so many years ago, but her life, in those days of the "Depend- ence of females upon men" had been warped by a smothered romance, and her heart blossomed into verse that caught the at- tention of the great editors of the day.
Mary calls to the bowed old soldiers sitting in "the barge" on Memorial Day.
"Bring your old energy to its keeping. Lift your worn swords high, not to kill, but to cut the shackles of life and re- lease your souls. For the angel at the gate at last flies to meet you. It's eyes are resolute and kind. It divides the tumult of your masque. It is a winged victory, a marvelous incand- escence. Our strong captains kneel to it delivering their swords. For one by one, O brothers! O sisters! we tender ours. For this is the death with whom we seem to struggle, from whom we shrink, this splendid deliverer. We lay all flags and flowers at His compelling feet."
"The waves are billowing flags. The sunset pins with stars against the sky, those more gorgeous. The little gate stands ajar. And great garlands drift to our hands out of the sea from gardens to which fighting sailors dropped in utter weariness the battle done".
"Fighting sailors!" Adventurers setting out again upon an unknown sea!
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And over in Europe rode power, in silvered helmets, and long lances, and plumes, which was to call again the greatest correspondent, and adventurer of his time to the greatest ad- venture of all, which led him beyond the world.
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CHAPTER XIX
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"Give me to rest in a quiet town Built by old rovers of the sea Where they have come to lay them down Sure of their spirit's mastery."
PULSIVER
On that far Spring day a timorous, saddened, sick little group of adventurers faced the tall chief with his sixty war- riors behind him!
Three centuries of time have swept over the Lands of Sippican! And in 1920 the Pilgrims come again to Ply- mouth! Thousands and thousands, with millions all over the great land looking East; and one descendant of Massasoit, the last, walked the roads, while the "Mayflower" rocked in the harbor, and the bands played.
"The Lands of Sippican" entered the long procession in a picture of the whaling days, a harpooner poised to throw his dart at a spouting sperm whale.
With grand pageantry Plymouth and her daughter towns celebrated her 300 years on this mighty continent.
In 1820 at the 200th Anniversary of the Landing of the Pilgrims, Daniel Webster said,
"Advance then ye future generations! We would hail you as you rise in your long succession to fill the places which we now fill, and to take the blessings of existence where we are passing and soon shall have passed, our human duration - we bid you welcome to the healthful skies and the verdant fields of New England. We greet your accession to the good in- heritance which we have enjoyed."
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And from the prairies, the Great Lakes, from the Babylons of cities all over America, they came to the "good inheritance" to hold family reunions, to visit the homestead, to buy land, to build homes, to play in the sea and the sun, like Massasoit's bronzed people.
The long waves still wash the shores of the bays and islands, ice shaped dark ages ago, but the waters of the Massa- chusetts and Buzzards Bays meet where the "Dutch" traded with the First Comers, where the fence was planned to keep the wolves off the Cape. Gosnold's "mighty headland" is an island, and ocean liners move like great barges along De Rasiere's course past Bird Island.
"Many changes" sigh the old people. "So quaint, so old", exclaim the young visiting Westerners ..
"Why, in the West we build the electric light plant first!"
"But this is the land of the Pilgrims, 300 years old, slow to change!"
One family kept the Post Office in Sippican for 63 years, and the village has a constable, "P. C.", who has been in office 30 years.
Always ready to improve the village when the health of the people is concerned, the voters in town meeting passed appropriations for an artesian water supply and filter sewer system. It employed a visiting nurse, and drained the salt marshes to get rid of Gov. Winslow's "muskeet" a decade be- fore any other town in the State.
The cattle came home to winter on the warm lands in 1639, but still some say the weather has grown warmer, and point to cod and even a diamond backed terrapin caught in the bay.
Some changes there must be.
The captains' farms along the Rochester road are cut into house lots for the younger generations.
Marion has grown from the 900 population of the clipper ship days to 1700 in 1933.
Some old landmarks are gone. The Ebenezer White house built in 1709 by Mark Haskell has been carefully taken
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Tabor Academy - Dormitory on Sippican Harbor
Kittansett Club, Winter House - "Where the beach-plums used to grow."
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down, timber by timber, and built into the new trading post for the "Duch" at Manomet.
The trodden way of the Indians and settlers, the old "Sandwich Path", has no longer flax drying on the shores of Mary's Pond, but picnickers and bathers and perspiring heads of families bringing their broods out from the heat of nearby mill towns for a day's outing in the Rochester woods.
Country homes show through the pines and oaks of Great Neck.
Tabor Academy has gone to the sea! There are special sea trips to Central and South America and across the ocean to England, France and Germany; a schooner the Tabor Boy, and a fleet of small boats lie out where the coasters and the whalers swung in the stream. The marsh, on the road from the Old Landing has grown into a park-like athletic field; and along the shore below the ship yard where the hollowed logs drew up water to the salt works, a big gymnasium and dormitory stand, and boys in sailor suits go up and down the roads of Sippican.
A forest of steel masts towering 400 feet into the air to catch the magical surges of ether from foreign shores and ships at sea, rose where the old road to "the Center" is lost in the forest.
A great war brought its changes, too.
The battles of the silver helmets stirring in Europe seemed far away, but if Capt. Briggs had listened in 1850 per- haps he could have caught the distant singing "50,000 strong", and the wide brimmed planter could have heard the fife and drums of "Dixie Land" that were to change states into a nation.
So the village of the Lands of Sippican listened to one hundred million men, women, children, singing, "America! America!" And there were boys marching again, sentries on Tabor Academy grounds, girls selling Liberty Bonds, and the State Guard holding Field Day on the muster field at "the Center" just as in 1775 and 1812.
"Citizens of Marion, the third Liberty Loan Drive starts April 6-
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The town of Marion is to be asked to subscribe for some- thing over $200,000. In order to reach the allotment Marion must have the help of every man, woman and child in town."
But bells ring, and whistles blow, and Marion's medal to it's returned soldier is mentioned by the N. Y. Telegram, "The Marion Cross is the best thing of its sort produced in the country."
The Sippican and the Beverly Yacht Clubs merged, and the boat races start near Bird Island Light where "the lovely lady" lived with Pirate Moore.
The hoop skirts of the sailors' brides are rusting in the attics next to the band boxes and hair trunks of stage coach days. The barns of old Rochester-Towne are cleared for the auto trucks and tractors. There is scarcely an old wagon or sleigh left for the hens to roost on. Two golf courses cover the farm land on Great Neck, the "ministry lands by the sea", and the little white ball flies where the beach plums used to grow.
Where the square riggers came up the harbor, glistening yachts lie at anchor, and craft like enormous sea birds, the Vanitie, the Resolute, the Atlantic, sail over the blue waters that hide the guns of the Nimrod.
They use keys and lock their doors now in Sippican, and the Universalist houses aren't all painted yellow and the Congregationalists white: the script that Maine and Rhode Island wouldn't accept for money has vanished.
Times have changed some. In 1863 Capt. Emerson Hadley was putting into the town treasury, $540. Capt. John Pitcher, $653., Capt. Stephen Luce, $962., Capt. Russell Grey, $1925., Capt. Stephen Hadley, $2700., Capt. Peleg Blankinship, $636., and Capt. Obed Delano, $315.
In 1933 the valuation is given at $5,264,591.00.
But the wild flowers still grow in the woodlands. When the authors of "How to Know the Wild Flowers" came to this section they found so many varieties on the Lands of Sippican that they settled down in a little house near "the wharf" to classify and sketch the shy blossoms; and now, a quarter of a century later, the moccasin flower, the Indian pipe, and the
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waxen sweet pipsissewa still grow in the woods. And the fringed gentian, anemone, jack-in-the-pulpit, wintergreen and partridge berry nestle in cool places; and along the shore are found the sea lavender, asters, mullen, beach-pea, wild colum- bine and mallow, old time flowers of Sippican.
The seal slip from the rocks on Charles Neck, sometimes; gulls fly over; the hermit-thrush and other shy birds of New England build their nests in the swamps and uplands. Of course one, perhaps, could not catch an American eagle with a pitchfork and present the great bird to the Natural History Museum, as Humphrey Allen did a half century ago, but there are tall herons on the marshes, deer and raccoon and all kind of little furry creatures hide in the woodland. And still a straight back and black eyes, a long lithe step, tell of ancestors who wore moccasins.
And Pilgrims!
The Plymouth lists of males able to bear arms in the sev- eral settlements of 1643, are the names of Sippican today.
In 1620 a Brown and a Winslow had two of the "meer- steads & garden plots of those which came first."
By 1623, the DeLaNoys, the Faunces, the Clarkes, the Deans, the Briggs, Snows, Pierces, the Rogers were deciding matters in the settlements. Up from Duxbury, Barnstable, Yarmouth, Scituate, Sandwich, Marshfield they come.
And the others on the Marion Tax list of 1933!
Ashley, Austin, Allen, Bliss, Bates, Baker, Burgess, Bacon, Bourne, Dexter, Davis, Gibbs, Hamlin, Hammond, Hathaway, Higgins, Hurst, Howland, Holmes, Hiller, Holaway, Jackson, Jenkins, Jenny, Lewis, Luce, Mayo, Maycomber, Nickerson, Nye, Paine, Perry, Packard, Robinson, Ryder, Sabins, Samp- son, Savery, Sherman, Smith, Taber, Tripp, Taylor, Wing, Watson, Washburn, Walker.
Old Colony names for 300 years!
Their stone walls, their hand made nails, their great hewn beams are still a part of old Rochester, and old Rochester- Towne still looks out on the road! "Oh, Yes! there were witches in the Center when I was a girl! Ann Cook! She would come
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to the door and ask for food, and nobody dared to refuse her!" So says a relative of the good captain Cole who gave his life for his crew.
"If you refused, she would say, 'You'll be sorry by and by!' and sure enough some thing would be bound to happen. Every- body was scared of her."
Why, one day Father and I were driving over to New Bed- ford, and she stopped us on the road and Father says, 'Go long with you', and she shook her fist at him, and sure enough be- fore we had gone very far a wheel came off, and we had a dreadful time!
Oh Yes! There were witches in Rochester!"
And then the old farmers Almanac is brought out to see if there is to be a change in the weather.
Pilgrims and sailors still in Sippican!
The great days of the sea's hard tasks in brine and wind and storm for Buzzards Bay sailors are ended; the little Philopena ring from Sippican lies somewhere on the ocean floor, and the winds whistle, and the great "Cape Horn seas" rage, and the silent deep sea waters never raise it from it's bed; and along the edges of the continents and islands are ashes and wreckage of old Rochester ships, the great forest trees of the Lands of Sippican crumbled into dust.
John Christian and the other drowned sailors never speak. There are no deep sea captains left in Sippican, but still the Captain's bell from the white meeting house rings at nine o'clock to tell Sippican and the Old Landing that there will be divine service later in the morning. There walk the streets of the villages, children and grand children of sailors who have in their lives Hong Kong, Fayal, the Barbadoes, Gibraltar, Calcutta, Canton as familiar as New York or New Bedford. Their lives are full of memories of big docks, tarred ropes, nimble sailors and tall masts; the long planks of the decks, the rope ladders marching up into the sky, and the lively shifting of the scenes of a great harbor water front.
There are old toys from foreign lands, embroidered shawls and treasures from the Orient in the houses, and the tang of the tamarind in memory is still on Sippican lips.
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Sometimes a grey haired man - the boy of yesterday - waves in parting, the sailors' Good Bye! "Well, see you in Liverpool!" And visions of black docks, and shining masts, and roaring seas come for a second into the modern world of airplanes and filling stations.
An old sailor shifts his chair legs.
"Why talkin' of Chili", he says, "I lay days and days waitin' to get over the mountains! Or was it Peru? Deserted ship? Yes! Ship too hard! Some that way.
In three days every sailor had been knocked flat except me! They didn't get me! I was busy when they came around workin' on somethin', didn't look up! But I made up my mind, the first port I'd leave!
The boats come out from shore you know when you come to anchor.
I got my advance. I was furlin'. Along came a boat. I beckoned. He rowed underneath. I dropped in. I gave him five in gold. I knew a little Spanish. I told him to row like - blazes! Oh, Yes! They shot at me, but I didn't get a scratch!"
"That night", he reminisced, "that night the mate came into the dance hall where I was. Did he know me? He knew me all right, I had on spurred boots, and a poncho, and a wide Spanish hat. I was dancin'! He knew me but they'd have knifed him if he had laid a hand on me."
The old whalemen and sailors and civil war soldiers are gone; the last "fighting sailors dropped in utter weariness" - Theodore Tripp and John Wilbur - but the flag as it fell was caught and lifted high by the Sons and Daughters of Veterans like a torch of remembrance in honor of a phantom army whose souls are marching on. On Memorial Day the procession moves in memory of all the soldiers of the "armies in Heaven that follow him in fine linen, white and clean."
For the whalers the last Shipping List of Buzzards Bay reads on Dec. 29, 1914-
"No sales for whale bone" and "oil 48c"; but the Charles W. Morgan itself, almost a century old, that Capt. Nye brought back from the Indian Ocean is moored in cement at Round Hill,
EZIE
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Dartmouth, and the children and grandchildren of whalers and thousands of others file over it and stare at a real whaler of the old times.
And the Lagoda that was wrecked on foreign shores, the wonder ship that was in every whaleman's world, that had been known to make 313% profit for one of the oil kings of New Bedford, lies in half-model monumental state in the Old Dart- mouth museum, surrounded by the little shops, given by the Bourne family in memory of a staunch old ship and whaling days. Beside it is the sperm whale model carried in pro- cession by the Lands of Sippican at the 300th celebration of the Landing at Plymouth.
The old days come back in song and story!
Down Converse Road, the Indian braves and squaws appear again near Charles the Indian's rock, in pageantry, where the girl scouts play and work, and over in Plymouth three blanketed Navajo Indians stand facing the East with heads bowed praying to the Great Spirit that there may come from the "Rain Mount far away" relief for their parched country of New Mexico.
Again a President of the United States of America comes to Sippican. In the New Bedford Standard-Times of June 18, 1933 appears the item "Franklin D. Roosevelt, sailor, who had piloted the Ship of State through three months of stormy and perilous seas, slept last night aboard a much less ambitious craft - the little schooner Amberjack II - in peaceful Marion Harbor." Where Captain Elisha set sail for the Indian Ocean, where Capt. George Luce moored the Herald ready for his honeymoon trip, the President weighed anchor for a vacation cruise, but "that's another story".
Many years after Henry James' first visit, he comes again in memory to the lands of Sippican.
In the American Scene he writes-
"I remembered, in fine, Mattapoisett, I remembered Mar- ion, an admirable example of that frequent New England phenomenon - the presence of an unreasoned appeal in nature, its the sense of beauty appeal on a basis of items that failed some how, count and recount them, as one would to justify the effect" - James cannot explain it! -
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"Seeing the land grow mild and vague and interchange- ably familiar with the sea, all under the spell of the reported 'gulf stream' those mystic words that breathe a softness where ever they sound."
Again, he writes, "of what, in the bright air, for the charmed visitor, were the softness and sweetness of impression made? I had to take if for a mystery!"
It may be that in "the bright air" still remains the joy of a bronzed people playing countless glorious summers on the shores under King Massasoit, leaving such heaps of white shells from their feasts, that today, after three hundred years they lie along Stewart Island like tumbling white surf. Perhaps Gosnold cutting sassafras; perhaps the first comers trudging down with their cattle for the warm winter days; perhaps the old ship builders and captains wrote their content and love on "the bright air".
Perhaps the dark poet's thought for "the woods that bring the sunset near" and the gay pictures of the adventurous youth still remain.
Indians, Pilgrims, pioneers, ship builders, whalers, clipper ship captains, artists, sailors of today and yesterday, all have given something to the "bright air"!
Only lilacs, tangled with weeds and briars, show where little Joseph Prince began his diary near "the long bridg" that "rany" day in August, 1711, but perhaps down the old road like Kipling's Lost Road there is "the beat of a horse's feet
And the swish of a skirt in the dew,
Steadily cantering through
The misty solitudes
As though, they perfectly knew
The old lost road in the woods."
Perhaps across in Blankinship's Cove, where the great colored glistening dragon flies of sea planes dash along the water, on dark dawns the steady light shines out again for Captain Turner, as the wife watches night after night for the missing sailor to come home, regardless of the message the blazing "ghost ship" that comes sailing, sailing up the harbor, brings to her.
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LANDS OF SIPPICAN
Perhaps on Front Street, opposite Handy's Tavern on white June midnights, a garden grows again; and Captain Bar- den, home from a voyage, comes up between the rows of great fir trees from the stable, and a stately lady walks up and down, between the box hedges, stopping to lean over the lilies-of-the- valley, and the white lilacs drop their sweetness on her head. And the square riggers and the whalers lie out in the stream, all on "the bright air" for Henry James and all lovers of the village.
Through the mists of the coming years "crystal cities gleam", "undimmed by human tears," for Richard Gilder's message from the pylon of the old Chicago Fair sounds con- stantly in the mind of to-day - "The Brotherhood of Man. The Federation of Nations, The Peace of the World."
But in Sippican the tides rise and fall gently, the little boats bob at the buoys just as in the captains' days, and the young sailors race up and down as in the 90's.
"Hither cometh Marion, a bright nymph of the sea, the lass who always loved a sailor", so Noble Everett, orator of the day, called out the village at the Bi-Centennial in 1879. And to-day "Marion" means to its lovers the salt tang from the shore and salt meadows, the white wings of the sea birds and the little boats, and the "Sou West" wind rippling the bay with white caps, the tug of a fish line, and spray in the face!
Times may have changed for the wide world outside, but, as for 250 years, in Sippican village
"The lapping waters lave it s feet It rides at anchor like a fleet."
And as in the days of Gosnold, of Massasoit, three centuries ago, there lie on the horizon of the "Lands of Sippican"
Naushon, Nashawena, Penikese, Cuttyhunk
"Rising like a misty breath The Islands of Elizabeth."
FINIS
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MASTTE'
Wintering in the Arctic - "With the ice slowly closing in." Mr. Bradford artist.
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