USA > Massachusetts > Essex County > Salem > Sketches about Salem people > Part 16
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The attitudes of the judges and others mainly concerned in the prosecutions, also offers a problem of speculative interest. The natural sense of justice which these persons presumably had in other affairs of life was for the time wholly submerged. Evidence was accepted at the trials
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WITCHCRAFT
which marked them as the most flagrant travesties on the doctrine of individual rights. No defence was allowed. The accused was prejudged and the outcome was assured. The presumption of innocence until guilt be proved be- yond reasonable doubt found no place in the procedure. All this, it would have seemed, must have outraged the sense of fairness of men of recognized integrity of char- acter, but such was not the case. That even so powerful a motive as religious fanaticism should have misled men like the Mathers, one of them the President of Harvard College, Judges Sewall, Stoughton, Richards, Winthrop, Danforth, Governor Phips, and Rev. John Hale, when it conflicted so obviously with the recognized rights of men, in an ordered community, must remain one of the perennial riddles, until perchance some medical philoso- pher of broad vision may find the solution. One must go far below the surface of ethical or religious theory to reach a proper understanding of this strange psychologi- cal phenomenon, no less pathological than the perform- ance of the "afflicted children."
We are on somewhat surer ground when we consider the more specific phenomena which witchcraft, at all periods of history, has brought into prominence. It is not diffi- cult to explain most of them on the basis of present-day knowledge. The imagination, the limits of which are be- yond accurate computation, is undoubtedly responsible for a very large number of the appearances and facts de- scribed apparently in good faith by many observers, such, for example, as animals of strange character, sundry un- explained noises and supposed apparitions. The animated controversy and discussion regarding spectral evidence is not difficult of explanation on the basis of our understand- < ing of hallucinosis under normal and pathological condi- tions. The often-repeated details of levitation and strange blows delivered by unseen agents are no doubt partly the result of an imagination excited to such a degree as to be no longer controlled, and partly in the case of apparent personal violence, bites and the like, to self-imposed in -- jury, of which the afflicted person may have had no-con- scious memory. In any event, we may safely assume
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WITCHCRAFT
that the various acts of witchcraft are ultimately sus- ceptible of natural explanation, however impossible such explanation may be in individual cases, with the facts now available.
The so-called witches' marks are easier of satisfactory understanding. Admitting, as we do, the power of sug- gestion to produce anæsthetic areas, the tests of pricking without pain or bleeding7 find a ready explanation, con- stantly observable in any modern neurological clinic. Skin excresences, small epithelial tumors and other localized affections and particularly the not infrequent supernumer- ary nipples both in men and women,8 which the devil or the familiars were supposed to suck, serve to explain the "little teats," which were unequivocal evidence of the guilt of the person on whom they were found. The trial by water which looms large in the various prosecutions need be mentioned merely as a strange vagary, a form of torture, without medical significance. The often-reported vomiting of nails, pins, usually crooked, and various other objects, and the methods by which they were brought to those afflicted is illustrated, for example, in such a state- ment as the following: "A thing like a bee flew at the face of the younger child; the child fell into a fit; and at last vomited up a two-prong nail with a broad head; affirming that the bee brought this nail and forced it into her
7 Tertullian says: "It is the Devil's custom to mark his, and note that this mark is Insensible, and being prick'd it will not Bleed. Sometimes, its like a Teate; sometimes but a blewish spot ; sometimes a Red one; and sometimes the flesh Sunk; but the Witches do sometimes cover them." . . . "There was a
notorious Witchfinder in Scotland (no doubt, Matthew Hopkins) that undertook by a Pin, to make an infallible Discovery of suspected persons, whether they were Witches or not, if when the Pin was run an Inch or two into the Body of the accused Party no Blood appeared, nor any sense of Pain, then lie de- clared them to be Witches; by means hereof my Author tells me no less than 300 persons were Condemned for Witches in that Kingdom." Cotton Mather, Wonders of the Invisible World, pp. 35 and 248, London, 1693 (Reprint, 1862).
8 Murray (The Witch-cult in Western Europe) quotes Bruce as stating that in 315 of both sexes, taken indiscriminately, 7.6 per cent had supernumerary nipples, and that this abnor- mality is about twice as frequent in men as in women. The occasional possibility of milk being excreted through such nip- ples probably accounts for the idea of giving suck to familiars.
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mouth.">9 Of course, such statements were implicitly believed and have been reported as facts. How far there was collusion with older and designing persons, how far the victims of these incidents were themselves maling- erers, or the dupes of their own imaginations, cannot now be determined. About this it is fruitless to speculate in detail. In general, however, it may be assumed that superstition, trickery, self-deception, and, above all, com- plicated hysterical reactions, all played a part in the struc- ture of the astonishing product which has descended to us as the intervention of the devil in the affairs of men.
When the whole subject of witchcraft in its medical as- pects has been rationalized to the extent of our present ability, there will still remain the foundation-mystery upon which it is built, namely, what lies beyond the reach of the senses, and what is our relation to the "invisible world," a belief in which persists in a large portion of the human race. Whatever our personal belief in this matter may be, we cannot refuse to consider the convic- tion of many thinking persons, who see no reason to doubt the existence of disembodied spirits having relations with those still living and capable of communication with them. [The story of the Witch of Endor has a strangely modern fiavor, (Samuel I, 18).] In this we clearly see a continu- ation of the method of thought and belief which now, in more sublimated form, is replacing the enormity of the witchcraft persecutions of the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Upham, writing in 1869, finds little to choose between the days and methods of active witchcraft and the spiritualism of his time.
"Now it is affirmed by those calling themselves spir- itualists that by certain rappings, or other incantations, they can summon into immediate but invisible presence the spirits of the departed, hold conferences with them and draw from them information not derivable from any sources of human knowledge. There is no essential dis- tinction between the old and the new belief and practice. The consequences that resulted from the former would be likely to result from the latter, if it should obtain uni-
9 Mather, loc. cit., p. 115.
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versal or general credence, be allowed to mix with judicial proceedings, or to any extent affect the rights of person, property or character."10
Kittredge writes:
"Besides, spiritualism and kindred delusions have taken over, under changed names, many of the phenomena, real and pretended, which would have been explained as due to witchcraft in days gone by."11
Witchcraft, including the earlier magic, as before indi- cated, cannot be dissociated from the fundamental crav- ings of the human mind, variously manifested in different periods of history, if the subject is to be studied in a wholly liberal spirit. Tolerance, still far from complete, has replaced gross intolerance, but the fundamental crav- ing remains unchanged. The pursuit of the unknown and mysterious is still the most absorbing occupation of the human mind; it is well for us in all modesty to be charitable in our estimate of the past that we may escape in a measure the harsh criticism of the future, which must inevitably be our lot. There is no lack of evidence that beliefs widely held today will be no less abhorrent to our descendants than the fanaticism of witchcraft is to us.
10 Upham, History of Witchcraft and Salem Village, Vol. II, p. 428.
11 Kittredge, Notes on Witchcraft, p. 63. See also Wendell, loc. cit.
CAPTAIN RICHARD DERBY 1712-1783 From a copy by Weir, after the portrait by Col. Henry Sargent
THE LIFE AND TIMES of RICHARD DERBY
MERCHANT OF SALEM
Almost all the books and articles about Salem tell of the founding of the city by the Endicott colony and of the early troubles of the colony. The witchcraft delusion, which came and went in a few short months, is given most disproportion- ate emphasis. The writers then skip glibly on to the War of the Revolution and the great outburst of commerce which followed, and which made Salem and Massachusetts rich and powerful. What was happening from the time of the witch- craft delusion till Leslie retreated from the North Bridge is largely overlooked, but not for one instant can it be believed that witchcraft prepared for revolution, or that ships and sailors burst forth, fully built and trained for foreign com- merce, from the otherwise unfertile soil of New England.
There have been a number of Richard Derbys in the course of Salem's history, but the subject of this paper is the ship- master, merchant, and patriot, Richard Derby, who was born in 1712 and died in 1783. During these seventy-one years America grew from a scattered group of colonies, clinging precariously to the Atlantic seaboard, to a free and inde- pendent nation; from a group of fishing villages and farming plantations to a world-wide sea power not to be despised by European nations then, as in 1918, engaged in a life-and- death struggle for supremacy.
Richard Derby was the son of a Captain Richard, who was the son of Roger, who landed in this country, in Boston, in 1671 and settled in Ipswich. This Roger, born in 1643, came
Copyright, 1929, by James Duncan Phillips. All rights reserved
(1)
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THE LIFE AND TIMES OF RICHARD DERBY
from Topsham in Devonshire, which is near Exeter, and ac- cording to Perley Derby, he may have been the son of a Roger of Somerton, Somersetshire, who was an Oxford graduate and an ordained clergyman, or he might have been the son of Richard Derby and Alice Lackland Derby, as Sidney Perley says.1 Anyway, he arrived in Boston July 18, 1671, and in January, 1672, Roger and his wife Lucretia Hillman, whom he had married in England, bought a place of two acres on Hill Street, Ipswich, and four acres of farmland, for one hundred pounds, and settled down. One child came with them from England; seven more were born here. He was a soap-boiler and shop-keeper, and he was also a non- conformist of a serious nature, probably a Quaker, for he soon got into trouble. Beginning in November, 1674, he was haled into court again and again for not coming to meeting. At first he was fined fifty shillings, then at the rate of "five shillings per week till they do attend," and then another fifty shillings. In September, 1676, Robert Lord, the marshal, seized his four acres of land to satisfy these fines, and less than two months later he was again fined forty shillings for non-attendance. Whether on account of this persecution or otherwise, he moved to Salem in 1681 and bought a farm- house, which stood about where the Public Library now stands, from John Darland, for twenty-seven pounds. He carried on the business of a tallow chandler in an old soap- house which stood about where Monroe Street runs through to Federal Street,2 and also that of a shop-keeper near the foot of Norman Street. Here he had a stock of Bibles, Testaments, and Psalters.3 The tombstones of Roger and his first wife Lucretia are still to be seen in the old South Danvers Burial Ground on Boston Street.
In his will, which disposed of an estate of four hundred and seventy-six pounds, he gave his house to his widow, who was one of the Haskets (mentioned later). She lived till 1740 and probably occupied the house during the boyhood of our Rich- ard. After her death it descended to the children of the son
1 History of Salem, III, 147.
? Perley Derby, "Genealogy of the Derby Family," Essex Institute Histor- ical Collections, III, 155.
¿ Perley, History of Salem, III, 128.
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BY JAMES DUNCAN PHILLIPS
Samuel, then dead. John received the "warehouse, lentows and warfs," 4 and Richard, the father of our Richard, got the "sope house" and twenty pounds when he came of age. It must be remembered that there was a step-mother in the case, and if any of the children "should contend without just cause they are to lose their parts."
Our Richard's grandfather, therefore, tried to make a soap- boiler out of his son, but instead the son became a mariner. He was born in Ipswich in 1679, over two years before the family moved from Ipswich to Salem, where his boyhood was spent.
In 1700, while he was a member of the crew of the brigan- tine Beginning, chartered to Philip English and others for a voyage from New Providence to London with brasilletto wood and molasses, she sprang a leak and had to head for Salem. We should not know this except that the captain, Thomas Marston, and he happened to sign the ship's protest. She seems to have been a pretty rotten old craft. We know nothing further about him except that he was one of the pilots of the Port Royal expedition in 1710, and married Martha Hasket, February 25, 1702-3. They had eight children, four of whom grew up, and he died in 1715 at the age of thirty-six. His young widow was a sister of her step- mother-in-law, and it is a fair guess that, on account of the double relationship, Richard grew up in the old homestead near the corner of Monroe and Essex Streets. The family was probably very poor, as there is no record of any estate being settled after the death of this first Richard.
The step-grandmother was the oldest of seven children and a widow when she married, and the mother was the youngest of the seven, but the mother was married only eleven years after the step-grandmother.
The Haskets were the daughters of Stephen Hasket, who came over in 1664, when thirty years old, from Henstredge in Somersetshire, and was a soap-boiler with a house on what is now Howard Street, down toward North River.5 He had been town constable in 1670 and, at the same time, held a license to retail strong waters out of doors, whatever that may
4 See Perley, History of Salem, II, 357, Corwin's Wharf.
$ Perley, History of Salem, II, 321.
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THE LIFE AND TIMES OF RICHARD DERBY
mean. It would seem to mean the legal predecessor of the pre- sent bootlegger. In 1680, he signed the petition for a new and larger meeting house, and in 1683 his county rate was six shil- lings, when the highest in town, and the only one above a pound, was that of William Browne, who paid three pounds, six shillings. Roger Derby paid only four shillings.
Hasket was evidently a man of definite opinions, like his grandson, for he made certain remarks about Captain George Corwin which so nettled that worthy gentleman that he com- plained to the General Court. The remarks must have been pretty bad, for on November 3, 1675, the Court, "considering the high reflections and scurrilous imputations cast upon Capt. George Corwin joined with notorious scandal raised upon said court and contemptuous expressions relating to the major general," condemned him to apologize to Corwin in public and pay the heavy fine of fifty pounds. Hasket there- upon humbly submitted himself to the court and the fine was reduced to twenty pounds.6
Hasket had five children besides the two girls who married the Derbys, and among them was an Elias Hasket, who was born in 1670, apparently in America, but he was probably a nephew of that Elias Hasket who lived in London and was the governor of Providence in the Bahama Islands in 1701-2. He had the title of Colonel and appears to have been quite a man.7
When Richard Derby was born in 1712, his grandfather Hasket had been dead three years and his grandfather Derby about fifteen. His grandmother Hasket soon married again and left Salem, but his combination step-grandmother and aunt Derby continued to live in Salem for many years. His father died when he was three years old, so he evidently grew up largely under the care of his energetic mother, though he had eight or ten uncles and aunts living in the vicinity, some of whom were married before he was born, and others as late as 1718. Among his uncles by marriage on the Derby side were Captain Joseph Flint and Joseph Bolles, of Ipswich, Thomas Palfrey and William Osborn. His bro-
' Perley, History of Salem, III, 75.
" See "Notarial Records of Essex County Clerk," Essex Institute Historical Collections, XVI, 102.
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BY JAMES DUNCAN PHILLIPS
thers and sisters were also about his own age, as he was the third child of the family. There were only nine years' dif- ference between the eldest and the youngest, and the sisters came alternately with the brothers. John and Mary were the older ones and only a year apart, while four years later came Richard and Martha about two years apart. It is easy to see that the latter two must have been the playmates, while the older pair rather looked down on them after the manner of older brothers and sisters.
We know little of Richard's early life and training. In fact, he does not appear on the horizon at all till we find him bound for Cadiz in 1736 as the full-fledged captain of the sloop Ranger with a cargo of fish, but of the surroundings of his early life we can get a good idea by considering the events which were happening in the world in general and in Salem in particular.
NEW ENGLAND IN DERBY'S BOYHOOD
The seventeenth century was a period of almost constant war in Europe. During the one hundred and twenty-six years from 1689 to 1815, France and England were at war for more than half the time. After four years of peace, the War of the Spanish Succession burst out in Europe in 1701, and that por- tion of it known in America as Queen Anne's War alternately flared up and flickered down for eleven years till it was brought to a close by the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. From Maine to Carolina the Indian raiding parties, urged on by the French, harried the frontier. In 1704, Deerfield was de- stroyed, and in 1708, Haverhill was surprised and partly destroyed. In 1709, an expedition planned against Acadia, for which the colonists had enlisted troops, was abandoned by the British Government to the great loss of the New England colonies, and the following year Annapolis or Port Royal, as it was then called, in Nova Scotia, or Acadia, was captured by a British fleet. This was the expedition on which Richard Derby, the father of our Richard, was sent by the colony with at least eight or ten other Salem captains to serve as pilots, and the sheriff impressed twenty-seven Salem seamen for the expedition.
·Into this atmosphere of war, Richard Derby was born in
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THE LIFE AND TIMES OF RICHARD DERBY
1712, and one year later the next intermission was ushered in by the Peace of Utrecht. Nova Scotia had been taken, but not Quebec, and the treaty gave Nova Scotia to England with vague boundaries in New Brunswick, then considered a part of it. This peace lasted for twenty-five years or more, but the seeds of trouble were present in the French hold on Quebec and the doubtful boundary in Maine. In fact, the whole boundary - from some doubtful point near the Gulf of St. Lawrence, vaguely following the height of land between the St. Lawrence and the southward-flowing rivers - was all doubtful, and the Indians were the medium used by both sides to drive the actual frontiers of their enemies backward. Most of the Indians in New England were more friendly to the French than to the English, and hence the contest for the next few years was rather one between the English and the Indians than with the French.
Maine had but a thin fringe of infrequent settlements on the coast, but the settlers were pushing up the Kennebec, and the French viewed with alarm the closing of the gap between the New Hampshire seacoast towns and the New Brunswick settlements which would shut them out from the Atlantic coast.
Sebastian Ralle had been for some years a French Jesuit missionary to the chief Indian settlement at Norridgwock.8 He was a politician as well as a priest, and was charged with the duty of seeing to it that the Indians made it difficult for the Kennebec colonists, till, in 1724, Massachusetts lost patience and sent out an expedition against Norridgwock, which cleaned it out with Puritan thoroughness, and the Indians who were left retired to the Chaudière. Ralle was killed, and, though shot with a gun in his hands resisting capture, his death caused a bitter protest from the Governor of Canada. In the same year Dunstable was attacked and pillaged by the Indians and Massachusetts organized the first rangers, who ranged the country from the settlements toward Canada to keep down the Indian raids, on the ground that a good offensive is the best defense. Captain Lovewell, the best known of these rangers, wiped out the fighting strength
8 See Governor Shute's letter, Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, 1st Series, V, 112, and 2d Series, VIII, 245-58, 266.
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BY JAMES DUNCAN PHILLIPS
of the Pequawket Indians of Conway in a notable fight, where the town of Fryeburg, Maine, now is, but most of his men fell in the fight. A lot of early New England ballads of doubtful literary value commemorate this famous fight, and no doubt Richard Derby, then twelve or thirteen years old, learned them by heart; as, for instance, this one which has a sort of echo of the "Ballad of Chevy Chase" about it:
"Then spake up Captain Lovewell, when first the fight began,
' Fight on, my valiant heroes, you see they fall like rain!' For, as we are informed, the Indians were so thick, A man could scarcely fire a gun, and not some of them hit.
"Our worthy Captain Lovewell among them there did die. They killed Lieutenant Robbins, and wounded good young Frye, Who was our English chaplain: he many Indians slew, And some of them he scalpéd, when bullets round him flew."
This "good young Frye" was betrothed to Susanna Rogers, of Boxford, who wrote a lament worthy of Anne Bradstreet, which begins:
"Assist, ye Muses, help my quill While floods of tears does down distil, Not from my eyes alone, but all That hears the sad and doleful fall Of that young student, Mr. Frye, Who in his blooming youth did die." 9
I doubt if any live boy would have learned Susanna's lament, but Richard certainly knew what was going on. It was talked of at home and on the street, and I suspect that the boys, in- stead of playing Indians, played the game of scalping Indians, which was the popular pastime then.
EDUCATION IN SALEM
It must not be inferred that this youth was permitted to grow up uneducated. Even if Salem had only about twenty- six hundred inhabitants, it was interested in education. In 1712, a school committee was appointed, for the first time in the town's history, "to procure a suitable grammar school master for ye instructing of youth in Grammar learning and to fit them for ye Colledge and also to learn them to write and ' Fiske, New France and New England, 248.
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THE LIFE AND TIMES OF RICHARD DERBY
cipher and to perfect them in reading." 10 The old watch- house was voted for a writing school under Nathaniel Higgin- son, and John Barnard was engaged to teach the Grammar School at fifty pounds a year. All boys who could afford to paid eight shillings per year, and the balance was raised by rent of the islands and other, public lands, and by income from the bequests of the Brownes and other early believers in education.
About the time that young Derby first went to school, as- suming he went at the age of six, the town, having just bought a stove for the school at an expense of £8-2-1, could not find a teacher, and lest the town be fined, Colonel Browne ad- vanced eighteen shillings to send Mr. Pratt off on horseback to Cambridge to get one; so John Nutting took charge of the fifty-four pupils and the hickory stick on July 23, 1718. It is a fair guess that Richard Derby was one of the youngest of the fifty-four. Eleven years later, the worthy Mr. Nutting had his salary raised twenty pounds, to the princely sum of ninety pounds. I suspect that Derby got all the schooling he ever had from this Mr. Nutting, for he doubtless went to sea by the time he was eighteen years of age, and did not benefit by the very generous gifts to the schools made by Samuel Browne in 1729.11
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