USA > Massachusetts > Middlesex County > Old landmarks and historic fields of Middlesex > Part 5
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The venerable Secretary was busily engaged with a heap of papers, and requested his visitor to be brief. This hint was not lost on the Captain.
" Mr. Dickerson, I am the person who removed the figure- head from the Constitution, and I have brought it with me for the purpose of returning it to the Government."
The Secretary threw himself back in his chair, pushed his gold-bowed spectacles with a sudden movement up on his fore- head, and regarded with genuine astonishment the man who, after evading the most diligent search for his discovery, now came forward and made this voluntary avowal. Between amaze- ment and choler the old gentleman could scarce sputter out, -
" You, sir ! you ! What, sir, did you have the audacity to disfigure a ship of the United States Navy ?"
" Sir, I took the responsibility."
" Well, sir, I'll have you arrested immediately"; and the Secretary took up the bell to summon a messenger.
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HISTORIC FIELDS AND MANSIONS OF MIDDLESEX.
" Stop, sir," said the Captain, " you cannot inflict any pun- ishment ; I can only be sued for a trespass, and in the county where the offence was committed. Say the word, and I will go back to Charlestown and await my trial ; but if a Middle- sex jury don't give me damages, my name's not Dewey." The Captain had explored his ground : there was no statute at that time against defacing ships of war, and he knew it. Mr. Dick- erson, an able lawyer, reflected a moment, and then put down his bell. "You are right, sir," said he ; "and now tell me all about the affair."
The Captain remained some time closeted with the Secretary, of whose treatment he had no reason to complain.
All these incidents, recently related by Captain Dewey to the writer, stamp him as a man of no common decision of character. He resolved, deliberated upon, planned, and exe- cuted his enterprise without the assistance of a single indi- vidual, - one person only receiving a hint from him at the moment he set out, as a precaution in case any accident might befall him. Though approximating to the Scriptural limit of human life, Captain Dewey shows little sign of decay. A man of middle stature, his sandy hair is lightly touched with gray, his figure but little bent ; his complexion is florid, perhaps from the effects of an early seafaring life ; his mouth is expressive of determined resolution, and an eye of bluish gray lights up in moments of animation a physiognomy far from unpleasant. He is not the man to commit an act of mere bravado, but is devoted to his convictions of right with the zeal of a Mussulman. We may safely add that he was never a Jackson Democrat.
The names of several of the vessels constructed by Mr. Barker have become historical. The Frolic was captured in 1814 by H. B. M. frigate Orpheus and an armed schooner, after a chase of sixty miles, during which the Frolic threw her lee guns overboard. She was rated as a vessel of 18 guns, but was built to carry twenty 32-pounder carronades and two long 18- or 24-pounders. At the time of her capture she was commanded by Master-Commandant Bainbridge.
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AN HOUR IN THE GOVERNMENT DOCKYARD.
The Independence was launched July 20, 1814, during hos- tilities with Great Britain, and was the first seventy-four afloat in our navy, - if the America, launched in 1782, and given to the French, be excepted. Her first cruise was to the Mediterranean, where she carried the broad pennant of Commodore Bainbridge, and was the first of her class to display our Stars and Stripes abroad. Owing to a defect in her build she was afterwards converted into a serviceable double-banked 60-gun frigate. As such she has been much admired by naval critics, and was honored while lying at Cronstadt by a visit from the Czar Nicholas,* incognito.
The Vermont has never made a foreign cruise, though in- tended in 1853 for the flagship of Commodore Perry's expedi- tion to Japan. The Virginia, sleeping like another Rip Van Winkle, in her big cradle for half a century, until she had be- come as unsuited to service as the galley of Medina Sidonia would be, remains in one of the ship-houses, a specimen of ancient naval architecture, with her bluff bows and sides tum- bling inboard. It would, perhaps, require a nautical eye such as we do not possess to determine which was the stem and which the stern of this ship. The Cumberland went down at Hampton Roads in the unequal conflict with the Merrimac in March, 1862. The Cyane, named after the British ship cap- tured by the Constitution, was broken up at Philadelphia in 1836.
The launch of the Merrimac, in the summer of 1855, is a well-remembered scene. Such was the admiration of her beautiful proportions that it was generally said, if the other five frigates ordered to be built were like her, we should at length have a steam navy worthy of the name. Her model was furnished by Mr. Lenthall, chief of the Bureau of Con- struction, and she was built by Mr. Delano, then Naval Con- structor at this station, under the supervision of Commodore Gregory. Melvin Simmons was the master-carpenter. A year after her keel was laid she glided without accident into the element in which she was destined to play so important a part.
* Captain Preble's Notes on Ship-building in Massachusetts.
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HISTORIC FIELDS AND MANSIONS OF MIDDLESEX.
She displayed at every available point the flag her batteries were turned against in her first and only battle. Many thousand spectators witnessed from the neighboring wharves, bridges, and shipping her splendid rush into the waters. The Ohio and Vermont, then lying at their moorings in the stream, were thronged with people who welcomed the good ship, at her parting from the shore, with loud huzzas. As she rode on the surface of the river, majestic and beautiful, no conjecture, we will venture to say, was made by any among that vast mul- titude of the powers of destruction she was destined to ex- hibit. At that time her size appeared remarkable, and so indeed it was when compared with the smaller craft among which she floated. Her armament was from the celebrated foundry of Cyrus Alger, South Boston.
Returning from a peaceful cruise in the Pacific, she arrived at Norfolk early in February, 1860, and was lying at that station in ordinary when the flag of rebellion was raised at Charleston. But for the prevalence of treason in high places, the Merrimac would have been saved to our navy before the destruction of the dockyard at Norfolk, April 21, 1861. She became a rebel vessel, and, encased in iron, descended the river, appearing among our fleet in Hampton Roads March 8, 1862, where she pursued a course of havoc - her iron prow crashing into our wooden ships - unparalleled in naval annals. Her conflict on the following day with the little Monitor, commanded by the brave Worden, and of which the world may be said, in a manner, to have been spectators, is still fresh in the memories of the present generation.
Napoleon, no mean judge, while candidly admitting the superiority of the English over the French sailors, asserted as his belief, that the Americans were better seamen than the English. It was the general belief in the British Navy, dur- ing the War of 1812, that our discipline was more severe than their own. If true, this would have gone far to confute the assertion that our crews were largely composed of British sailors. The truth is, that we always had plenty of the best sailors in the world.
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AN HOUR IN THE GOVERNMENT DOCKYARD.
General Hyslop, who was on the quarter-deck of the Java during her contest with the Constitution, stated it as his con- viction that the American sailors were far more elastic and ac- tive in their habits than the British. He was astonished, also, at the superior gunnery of the crew of Old Ironsides, who were able to discharge three broadsides to two from the Java, thus adding one third to the weight of their fire. To this cir- cumstance he attributed the victory of Bainbridge.
It is well known that the royal navy was long indebted to American forests for its masts, the Crown reserving for this pur- pose the trees of a certain girth, to which an officer affixed the broad-arrow. The owner of the soil might, if he chose, cut down and haul the king's trees to the nearest seaport, receiv- ing a certain compensation for his labor; and one of the most notable old-time sights the Maine woods witnessed was the removal of the giant pines by a long train of oxen to the sea. As was truly said of England,
" E'en the tall mast that bears your flag on high Grew in our soil, and ripened in our sky."
The mast-ship had its regular time for sailing from Piscata- qua (Portsmouth) or Falmouth (Portland), convoyed, in time of war with France, by a frigate. In process of time the in- creasing scarcity of timber led to the construction of ship's masts in sections: The first vessel in our navy to carry one of these sticks was the Constitution, whose mainmast, in 1803, when she sailed for Tripoli, was a made mast of twenty-eight pieces.
Copper sheathing for vessels of war was first applied to the Alarm, British frigate, in 1758, but conductors, which we owe to the genius of Franklin, were first used on American ships, and previous to 1790.
The cipher which is used in the United States to designate government property owes its origin, according to Frost's Naval History, to a joke. When the so-called last war with England broke out there were two inspectors of provisions at Troy, New York, named Ebenezer and Samuel Wilson. The latter gentleman (universally known as " Uncle Sam ") gen-
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HISTORIC FIELDS AND MANSIONS OF MIDDLESEX.
erally superintended in person a large number of workmen, who, on one occasion, were employed in overhauling the pro- visions purchased by the contractor, Elbert Anderson of New York. The casks were marked "E. A. - U. S." This work fell to the lot of a facetious fellow, who, on being asked the meaning of the mark, said he did not know unless it meant Elbert Anderson and Uncle Sam, alluding to Uncle Sam Wil- son. The joke took and became very current.
The Charlestown yard is further distinguished as having the only ropewalk under the control of the government, in which an endless twisting of the flexible material - from the slender thread which flies the youth's kite to the serpent-like folds of the great ship's cable- is forever going on.
" At the end an open door; Squares of sunshine on the floor Light the long and dusky lane; And the whirring of a wheel, Dull and drowsy, makes me feel All its spokes are in my brain."
Under cover of houses or temporary roofs are some of those sea-monsters whose creation dates from the Rebellion ; sub- marine volcanoes that hurl destruction by the ton, and vomit fire and smoke from their jaws. As they lie here upon the river's brink, with their iron scales and their long, low hulks, we can liken them to nothing else than so many huge alligators basking themselves in the sunshine to-day, but only waiting the signal to plunge their half submerged bodies into the stream and depart on their errand of havoc. Long may ye lie here powerless by the shore, ye harbingers of ruin ; and long may your iron entrails lack the food that, breathing life into those lungs of brass and steel, gives motion to your unwieldy bulk ! May ye lie here tied to the shore, until your iron crust drops off like the shell of any venerable crustacean, ere the tocsin again shall sound that lets slip such " dogs of war " !
The lower ship-house marks the beach where the choice troops of Old England left their boats and began their fatal march to Breed's Hill ; where the glittering and moving mass,
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AN HOUR IN THE GOVERNMENT DOCKYARD.
extending itself like a painted wall, broke off into columns of attack. The light infantry and grenadiers keep the shore of the Mystic, and at length deploy in front of the stern old ranger, John Stark, and of the brave Knowlton, crouched behind their flimsy, simulated rampart of sweet-scented, new-mown hay. A flash, a rattling volley, and the line is enveloped in smoke, which, drifting slowly away before the breeze, reveals what was a wall of living steel rent into fragments, little scattered groups, while the space between is covered with the dead and dying. Reader, do you know the battle-field and its horrors, - an arm tossing here and there ; a limb stiffened after some grotesque fashion in the last act of the expiring will, the finger pressed against the trigger, the bayonet at the charge, while the green turf is dotted far and near with little fires fallen from the deadly muzzles ?
Many of the slain in this battle were probably buried within the dockyard enclosure ; and they will show you at the Naval Institute a heap of bones brought to light while digging down the hill, - relics of the fight which the earth has given up be- fore their time. We have little sympathy with the exhibition of dead men's bones. These poor memorials of the brave de- serve Christian burial at our hands. Fallen far from the Welsh hills or Irish lakes, there is something uncanny and reproach- ful in their detention above ground ; a grave and a stone is due to the remains of those whose fate may one day be our own.
Having thus circumnavigated the hundred acres of Uncle Sam's exclusive domain, we may congratulate that much-abused old gentleman upon the successful speculation he has made. The original estimates included only twenty-three acres, to be obtained from the following proprietors, namely :
Seven acres of Harris, estimated worth $ 12,000
Three Stearns,
500
Two
Breed
150
Nine
3,600 $ 16,250
Two acres additional were procured in order to alter the road so as to get more room where the ships were to be built, and for which was paid,
3,000.
3
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HISTORIC FIELDS AND MANSIONS OF MIDDLESEX.
Subsequent purchases, together with the attendant expenses, swelled the first cost of the site to $ 40,000, for about eighty acres of land and marsh ; but the work of filling, which has con- stantly proceeded, has considerably extended the area. The government has expended about three and a half millions upon the yard, the value of the land alone being now estimated at nearly six millions. Efforts have been made to induce the re- moval to some other locality, in order to secure the site for commerce, but thus far without success.
The Naval Institute, which comprises a museum, a library, and a reading-room, is very creditable to its founders and pro- moters. The walls of the museum are decorated with imple- ments of war, or of the chase, belonging to every nation between the poles, while the cabinets are well stocked with curiosities and relics to which every vessel arriving at the station brings accessions. It will readily be seen, with such unlimited op- portunities for bringing, free of cost, articles of value from the most remote climes, what collections might be made at the public dockyards were the government to give a little official stimulus to the object.
The sword which Preble wore before Tripoli, and that of Captain Whynyates of H. M. ship Frolic, are here preserved, together with relics of the Boxer, the figure-head of the General Armstrong, privateer, and some memorials of the ill-fated Cum- berland. The library is valuable and well selected, but the books appear but little used. A huge aquatic fowl, which stands sentinel near the entrance to these rooms, seems to have been placed there for the convenience of cleaning pens, his downy breast being seamed with inky stains.
There are few trophies within the yard, the billet-head which the Constitution carried in 1812, and one of the umbrellas with which Hull walked his ship away from Broke's squadron, being the most noticeable. The latter is now utilized as an awning, and is placed over a music-stand, a perpetual reminder of,
" A Yankee ship and a Yankee crew !"
The great wall of Tartary is not more formidable than is the
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AN HOUR IN THE GOVERNMENT DOCKYARD.
granite fence which shoulders out the neighborhood, and speaks of the possibilities of invasion of these precincts by the rabble. The appearance without is that of a prison, or a fortress ; within, a vista of greensward stocked with cannon, with rows of poplars shading cold granite walls, confounds the vision. Joyous children are warned away from the enclosures by some battered old guardian who will never more be fit for sea. " Keep off!" "Touch nothing !" "Your pass !"- So, we are free again.
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HISTORIC FIELDS AND MANSIONS OF MIDDLESEX.
CHAPTER £ III.
BUNKER HILL AND THE MONUMENT.
" I'd better gone an' sair'd the King, At Bunker's Hill."
BURNS.
N June, 1875, was celebrated the centennial of the Battle of Bunker . Hill. Never before did the tall gray shaft look down upon such a pageant. Fifty years had elapsed since the corner-stone of the monument was laid, in the presence of General Lafayette, Daniel Webster, and of many survivors of the battle. It is not idle sentimentality that has hallowed the spot. A hundred thou- sand brave men have fought the better be- cause its traditions yet linger among us, and are still recounted around our firesides.
Why is it that we can o'erleap the tre- mendous conflicts that have taken place since Bunker Hill, and still feel an undiminished interest in that day? It is not the battle, for it was fought without BUNKER HILL MONUMENT. order on the American side, and without. skill on the British ; it is not the carnage,
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BUNKER HILL AND THE MONUMENT.
for many fields have been more bloody in our own times. It is perhaps because the men of New England here cast their first defiance in the teeth of the trained bands of Old England ; it is because it was an act of aggression, and showed that our sires were determined to fight and ready to die in their good cause. The battle was as astounding to British arrogance as it was destructive to British prestige ; it cannot be doubted that the memory of that day followed Sir William Howe with blighting effect to the end of his military career.
The story of the battle is so familiar that every schoolboy will tell you where the Provincials intrenched, and where the enemy landed ; how many times the foe was borne back with slaughter, and how many fell. Here, across the river, is Copp's Hill, where Clinton and Burgoyne watched the varying for- tunes of the battle, and from which a battery played upon these heights. The dead sleep as quietly there now as they did on the day when the foundations of the hill were shaken by the discharges of the guns. There, you see the tower and steeple of Christ Church, from which Gage, it is said, witnessed the fray, and whose bells first rang a Merry Christmas peal in 1745, the year of Louisburg. Below us the river ebbs and flows as it did in centuries gone by. Behind us is Bunker Hill proper, its name so tenaciously allied with the battle as to compel the adoption of an historical error. The Neck, over which the Americans advanced and retreated, has disappeared within the body ; the Mill Pond causeway is still, in a measure, intact, but the pond itself is fast becoming dry land, and the marshes are hiding beneath a desert of gravel.
The British force engaged at Bunker Hill was made up from parts of fourteen regiments, then in Boston, besides the Royal Artillery and two battalions of Marines. Some of these corps were the very élite of the army. These were the 4th, or Hodg- son's ; 5th, Percy's ; 10th, Sandford's ; 18th, or Royal Irish ; 22d, Gage's ; 23d, Howe's (Welsh Fusileers) ; 35th, F. H. Campbell's ; 38th, Pigot's ; 43d, Cary's ; 47th, Carleton's ; 52d, Clavering's ; 63d, Grant's ; 65th, Urmston's. The marching regiments for the American service consisted of twelve com-
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HISTORIC FIELDS AND MANSIONS OF MIDDLESEX.
panies, and each company mustered fifty-six effective rank and file. Two companies of each regiment were usually left at home on recruiting service.
" And now they're forming at the Point, and now the lines advance; We see beneath the sultry sun their polished bayonets glance; We hear anear the throbbing drum, the bugle challenge ring; Quick bursts and loud the flashing cloud, and rolls from wing to wing; But on the height our bulwark stands tremendous in its gloom, - As sullen as a tropic sky, and silent as a tomb."
As these troops disembarked and paraded at the Point be- low, the spectacle must have extorted the admiration even of the rude. bands who, with compressed lips and bated breath, awaited their coming. Let us review the king's regulars as they stand in battle array.
The scarlet uniforms, burnished arms, and perfect discipline are common to all the battalions. The 4th, or " King's Own," stands on the right in the place of honor. They have the king's cipher on a red ground, within the garter, with the crown above, in the centre of their colors. In the corners of the sec- ond color, which every regiment carried, is the Lion of England, their ancient badge. The gren- BRITISH FLAG CAPTURED AT YORKTOWN. adiers have the king's crest and cipher on the front of their caps.
Percy's Northum- berland Fusileers have St. George and the Dragon on their colors, and on the grenadiers' caps and arms. The Royal Irish display a harp in a blue field in the centre of their colors, with a crown above it; and in the three corners of the second color is blazoned the Lion of Nassau, the arms of King William III. The caps of the grenadiers show the king's crest and the harp
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BUNKER HILL AND THE MONUMENT.
and crown. An officer of this regiment was the first Briton to mount the redoubt.
The Royal Welsh have the Prince of Wales arms, - three feathers issuing out of a coronet. In the corners of the second color are the badges of Edward the Black Prince, a rising sun, red dragon, and plumed cap, with the motto Ich dien. The marines are clothed and armed in the same manner as his Majesty's other corps of infantry, their uniform scarlet, turned up with white, white waistcoats and breeches. They also wear caps like those of the fusileer regiments, which caused them to be called by the French Les Petits Grenadiers.
Our readers are probably aware that the Fusileers were so called, upon their first organization, from the circumstance that they carried their fusees with slings. There are three regiments bearing this designation in the British Army ; namely, 23d or Royal Welsh, raised in 1688; 21st or North British, raised in 1679 ; and 7th or Royal English, raised in 1685. The grena- diers were a company armed with a pouch of hand grenades, and originated in France in 1667, but were not adopted in England until twenty years later.
" Come, let us fill a bumper, and drink a health to those
Who wear the caps and pouches and eke the looped clothes."
In 1774, when the Royal Welsh left New York, Rivington the bookseller, to whose shop the officers resorted, wrote to a brother bookseller in Boston as follows : -
" My friends, the gallant Royals of Wales, are as respectable a corps of gentlemen as are to be found in the uniform of any crowned head upon earth. You may depend upon their honor and integrity." They have not left the least unfavorable impression behind them, and their departure is more regretted than that of any officers who ever garrisoned our city. Pray present my respects to Colonel Bar- nard, Major Blunt," etc., etc.
This celebrated corps, which had bled freely on the Old World battle-fields, embarked, on the 27th of July, on board the transports for Boston. The officers bore the reputation of " gentlemen of the most approved integrity and of the nicest punctuality." Rivington, with the cunning for which he was
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HISTORIC FIELDS AND MANSIONS OF MIDDLESEX.
distinguished, made use of the gallant and unsuspecting Cap- tain Horsfall to smuggle four chests of tea into Boston as a part of the officers' private luggage. The package was consigned, under strict injunctions of secrecy, to Henry Knox ; but Riving- ton, more than suspecting that his consignee would have nothing to do with the obnoxious herb, directed him to turn it over to some one else, in case he should decline the commission. Patriotism and tea were then incompatible, and Knox declined the bait to tempt his cupidity.
The Welsh Fusileers had an ancient and privileged custom of passing in review preceded by a goat with gilded horns, and adorned with garlands of flowers. Every Ist of March, the anniversary of their tutelar saint, David, the officers gave a splendid entertainment to all their Welsh brethren ; and, after the removal of the cloth, a bumper was filled round to his Royal Highness, the Prince of Wales, whose health was always the first drank on that day. The goat, richly caparisoned for the occasion, was then brought in, and, a handsome drummer-boy being mounted on his back, the animal was led thrice around the table by the drum-major. It happened in 1775, at Boston, that the animal gave such a spring from the floor that he dropped his rider upon the table ; then, leaping over the heads of some officers, he ran to the barracks, with all his trappings, to the no small joy of the garrison and populace.
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