USA > Massachusetts > Essex County > The story of Essex County, Volume II > Part 41
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"'Gloucester, August 26th, 1819. . . We were pro- ceeding this morning down the harbor, in the schooner's boat; when abreast of Dallivan's Neck, William T. Malbone, Esq., commander of the schooner, seeing some appearance on the water, said, "There is your sea serpent," meaning it as a laugh on me, for believing in its existence; but it proved to be no joke.
"'The animal was then between thirty and forty yards distance from us. Mr. Malbone, Midshipman Blake, myself, and our four boatmen, had a distinct view of him. He soon sunk, but not so deep but we could trace his course. He rose again within twenty yards' distance of us, and lay some time on the water. He then turned, and steered for Ten Pound Island; we pulled after him, but finding that he was not pleased with the noise of our oars, they were laid in, and the boat sculled. We again approached very near him. He con- tinued some length of time, plying between Ten Pound Island and Stage Point. . . From my knowledge of aquatic ani- mals, and habits of intimacy with marine appearances, I could not be deceived. We had a good view of him, except the very short period while he was under water, for half an hour. . . . .
"'His color is a dark brown, with white under the throat. His size we could not accurately ascertain, but his head is about three feet in circumference, flat, and much smaller than his body. We did not see his tail; but from the end of his head to the farthest protuberance was not far from one hun- dred feet. I speak with a degree of certainty, from being much accustomed to measure and estimate distances and length. I counted fourteen bunches on his back, the first one, say, ten or twelve feet from his head, and the others about seven feet apart. They decreased in size toward the tail.
"'His motion was sometimes very rapid, and at other times he lay nearly still. He turned slowly, and took up con- siderable room in doing it. He sometimes darted under water,
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with the greatest velocity, as if seizing prey. The protuber- ances were not from his motion, as they were the same whether in slow or rapid movement. His motion was partly vertical and partly horizontal.
" 'I have given you in round numbers one hundred feet for his length-that is, what we saw; but I should say he must be one hundred and thirty feet in length, allowing for his tail. There were a considerable number of birds about the sea ser- pent, as I have seen them about a snake on shore. That there is an aquatic animal in the form of a snake is not to be doubted. Mr. Malbone, till this day, was incredulous. No man would now convince him there was not such a being. ..
"'With respect, your obedient servant,
"CHEEVER FELCH. "'Major B. Russell.'
"I think it will be admitted that this is a clear and valuable statement. It is the work of a man of education, of some nautical experience, interested in natural history, and engaged in marine surveying-a job which calls for accuracy and good eyesight. Moreover, it is written on the spot and immediately after the event.
"My friend, Mr. J. G. Lockhart, in his very entertaining 'Mysteries of the Sea,' has suggested that the occurrence of many sea serpent reports in certain years, and hardly any before or afterwards, rather suggests that they had their ori- gin in some form of mass-hallucination. But the facts are quite otherwise. Although it is undoubtedly true that for the best and fullest evidence we must look to the 'vintage' years of 1817 and 1819, that is not to say that other years were entirely barren. I have before me a list of reports, all relating to the New England waters. It contains particulars of appearances reported in the following years (excluding 1817 and 1819) :
"'1751, 1777 (or 1778), 1779, 1780, 1794, 1799, 1802, 1815, 1820, 1826, 1833 (two reports), 1835, 1839 (two reports ), 1861, and 1890.'
"At the same time, it is fair to say, that there is one point which can justly be urged in favor of the theory of mass-
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hallucination. The crowds which flocked to the shore at Gloucester in 1817, and at Nahant two years later, undoubt- edly went there in a state of 'expectant attention.' . . . . In such circumstances a whale, a shark, or a school of porpoises might well provide the raw material out of which the excited imaginations of expectant onlookers might conjure the crea- ture which they so greatly desired to see.
"Granted. But, in this event, what are we to make of such evidence as Felch's ? Here the theory of the 'expectant crowd' fails for two cogent reasons-there was no expectancy, and there was no crowd.
"If no other evidence had ever come to light elsewhere, I for one should be inclined to hold that that afforded by the appearances off Gloucester and Nahant in 1817 and 1819 would amply warrant the deduction that the existence of a marine animal of unknown species with serpentine head and neck, and about a hundred feet in length, was an established fact."
Scenery and Sports
CHAPTER XXV
Scenery and Sports By Katharine Thompson
The scenery of Essex County is varied and beautiful, and famous throughout America. Its miles of curving beaches, of dunes and salt marshes change abruptly at Cape Ann to a craggy and forbidding coast indented with deep harbors; farther inland, there are winding streams and smooth gliding rivers, industrial towns and agricultural villages, rich river land, and the haunted desolation of Dogtown Common. Deep woods, giving the impression of wildness remote from all civilization, are accessible from concrete roads, and adjacent to trim towns. Wild birds fly over cultivated fields to take refuge in sanctuaries.
With such variety of scenery, a variety of sports has naturally developed. Yachting, canoeing, fishing, hunting, swimming, golf, tennis-all these sports flourish in their beautiful Essex County settings. Where the Puritans fought against Indians, wolves, priva- tions, and the inclinations of their own natures, their descendants return to play; and yet to recapture, consciously or unconsciously, some impression of their ancestors. For half the charm of modern Essex County is the ever-present memory of the past. Few are the Essex County towns too industrialized and too modern not to have somewhere a seventeenth century house, weathered and yet still sturdy; few are the villages so small as not to remember with pride some distinguished son, some minor declaration of independence. In spite of nearby superhighways, the elm-lined streets of villages and even of some of the larger towns, are still faithful to the course of the seventeenth century cows who first sketched them out, without
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benefit of surveyor. And when the leaves fall the outlines of the hills and the slopes up from rivers or harbors are still to be seen, momen- tarily, in spite of the modern houses which have been built upon them, as they appeared to the first white men who saw them with eyes made eager by a long and hard passage.
"Le beau port" was Champlain's name for the site of Gloucester eighteen years before the Dorchester Company attempted to colonize it; and the gallant John Smith, nine years later than Champlain. saluted Cape Ann as "the Paradise of all those parts." The first writer to admire and remain, however, was Francis Higginson, in "the leafy month of June," 1629.
"By now we were within three leagues of Capan and as we sayled along the coasts, we saw every hill and dale and every island full of gay woods and high trees. The nearer we came to the Shoare, the more flowers in abundance, sometymes scattered abroad, sometymes joyned in sheets nine or ten yards long which we supposed to be brought from the low meadows by the tydes. Now what with fine woods and green trees by land and these yellow flowers paynting the sea, made us all desirous to see our new Paradise of New England whence we saw such forerunning signals of fertilitie afarre off."
Eagerly some of them went ashore
"and brought backe agayne ripe strawberries and gooseberries and sweet single roses."
And then as they went down the coast to the "curious and dif- ficult harbor of Naumkeag," they marvelled at the
"islands replenished with thick woods and high trees and many fair green pastures."
The woods were much denser than they are now. All the coun- try was, in Higginson's phrase, "thicke woode for the Generalle," a dark and silent waste, traversed only by Indian paths, and broken now and then by clearings made by the Indians or natural openings near rivers.
By far the most amusing and sanguine account of early times was that made by William Wood in his "New England's Prospect," in
.
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1634, in which he generalized valiantly on not more than three years' experience with the New England climate.
"New England [he said] is for certaine the best ground and sweetest Climate in all those parts, agreing well with the temper of our English bodies, being high land, and sharpe Ayre, and though most of our English Townes border upon the Sea-coast, yet are they not often troubled with Mists, or unwholesome fogges, or cold weather from the Sea, which lies East and South from the Land. And whereas in England most of the colde windes and weathers come from the Sea, and those situations are counted most unwholesome, that are neare the Sea-coaste, in that Countrey it is not so, but otherwise ; for in the extremity of winter, the Northeast and South winde coming from the Sea, produceth warme weather, and bringing in the warme-working waters of the Sea, looseneth the frozen Bayes carrying away their ice with their Tides, melting the Snow, and thawing the ground; onely the North-weste winde comming over the Land is the cause of extreame cold weather, being always accompanied with deep Snowes and bitter Frost, so that in two or three dayes the Rivers are passable for horse and man. But as it is an Axiome in Nature, Nullum violentum est perpetuum, No extreames last long, so this colde winde blowes seldom above three dayes together, after which the weather is more tollerable, the Aire being nothing so sharpe, but peradventure in foure or five days after this cold messen- ger will blow a fresh, forbidding any to out-face him with- out prejudice to their noses; but it may be objected that it is too cold a countrey for our English men, who have been accus- tomed to a warmer Climate, to which it may be answered (Igne levatur hyems) there is Wood good store, and better cheap to build warme houses, and make good fires, which makes the Winter lesse tedious; and moreover, the extremeity of this cold weather lasteth but for two Moneths or ten weekes, beginning in December, and breaking up the tenth day of February; which hath beene a passage very remarkeable, that for ten or a dozen yeares the weather hath held himselfe to his day, unlocking his ycie Bayes and Rivers, which are never frozen againe the same yeare, except there be 'some
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THE STORY OF ESSEX COUNTY
small frost until the middle of March. The hard winters are commonly the forerunners of pleasant spring times, and fer- tile summers. The Summers be hotter than in England . yet are they tollerable, being often cooled with fresh blowing windes, it seldome being so hot as men are driven from their labours, especially such whose employments are within doores, or under the coole shade. . . The Sum- mers are commonly hot and dry, there being seldom any raines; I have known it six or seaven weekes, before one shower hath moystened the Plowman's labour, yet the Har- vest hath beene very good.
Few chambers of commerce could make a better apologia for the New England climate than this, the first.
With the rapid colonization that followed the coming of the Mas- sachusetts Bay Company, the look of the countryside soon changed. Not only did villages spring up everywhere, and grow to be towns, but the land was ruthlessly cleared for planting. Before the end of the century it became necessary to enact laws to protect the forests.
Life was so hard for the very earliest settlers that they had little time for sports. King James' "Book of Sports," printed in 1618, had offered them a fairly large approved list, including dancing on the green, maypole dancing, leaping, vaulting, wrestling, pitching the bar, throwing the sledge, archery and bull and bear baiting, except on Sundays and holy days. But the Puritans officially disapproved of sports, and soon the magistrates forbade "sports of the inn-yard" such as dicing, bowls, billiards, quoits and nine-pins. Shuffleboard, also included in this ban, was yet practiced and permitted in so great a center of orthodoxy as Salem Village. Probably some bear baiting and cock fighting went on (as the latter still does today) unknown to authority. Though every effort was made to keep down drunkenness, the tavern or ordinary was sometimes the scene of disorder; in 1631 a ruling was passed that wedding parties could not be held in ordi- naries, because there had been "too many miscarriages at weddings."
And even where sobriety prevailed, there was a great deal of fun. All the characteristic community activities of the frontier went on- for all the major operations of their lives, neighbors gave a hand and turned what would have been unendurably hard tasks into festivals. When a young man had cleared land for a house, he would have a
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"raising." Everyone would come and help him; they would start at daybreak and by nightfall the house would be almost finished. Simi- lary, when a stone wall was to be built, there would be a stone bee. Then, when the harvests had been gathered, everyone would collect in successive barns and husk the corn. On winter evenings the com- munity would gather round a great fireplace and shell nuts or make birch brooms. After the work was done they sometimes played at blind man's buff and perhaps even danced. In the spring, of course, there were the sugaring-off bees. Marshing-the gathering of grass in the salt marshes for pasturing or thatching-was a frontier activity peculiar to Essex County.
After the harvest young and old always gathered to shoot at targets for prizes. These meetings were called turkey shoots because traditionally the targets-which at the same time were the prizes- were turkeys. On training days, too, the marksmen showed their skill-and they might well be proud of it, for necessity had made them into the best shots in the world of their time.
One of the delights of the early settlers was watching the games of the Indians. William Wood observed that among their pastimes were :
"Footeball, shooting, running and swimming; when they play country against country, there are rich Goales, all behung with Wampomeage, Mowhackeries, and blacke Otter skinnes. It would exceede the beleefe of many to relate the worth of one Goale, wherefore it shall be namelesse. Their Goales be a mile long places on the sands, which are even as a board; their ball is no bigger than a handball which sometimes they mount in the Aire with their naked Feete, sometimes it is swayed by the multitude; sometimes also it is two dayes before they get a Goale, then they marke the ground they winne, and beginne there the next day. While the men play the boyes pipe and the women dance and sing trophies of their husbands' conquests; all being done, a feast summons their departure. It is most delight to see them play, in smaller companies, when men may view their swift footemanship, their curious tossings of their Ball, their flouncing into the water, their lubberlike wrestling, having no cunning at all in that kind, one English being able to beate ten Indians at footeball.
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THE STORY OF ESSEX COUNTY
And others of the settlers, with some envy, saw from afar off the Indians gambling upon Lynn Long Beach.
But the chief diversion as well as the chief business of the first white citizens of Essex County must have been hunting and shooting. All the early writers speak with awe of the abundance of wild fowl; for Essex County could hardly be improved as a haunt for wild birds. Lying in one of the main highways of migration, its great fresh water swamps, its countless small ponds, its long sandy beaches, its varied foliage, all make it an ideal station.
Francis Higginson, in his "New England's Plantation," declared :
"In winter time the country doth so abound with wild geese, wild ducks and other sea fowle, that a great part of win- ter the planters have eaten nothing but roaste meate of divers fowles which they have killed.
The migrations of the wild pigeons astounded William Wood:
"These birds come into the Countrye, to goe to the North parts in the beginning of our Spring, at which time (if I may be counted worthy to be believed in a thing that is not so strange as true), I have seene them fly as if the Ayerie regi- ment had been Pigeons; seeing neither beginning nor ending, length or breadth, of these Millions of Millions." So they continued for foure or five houres together."
Still another bird, new to him, delighted him :
"For colour, she is as glorious as the Raine-bow; as she flies, she makes a little humming noise like a humble-bee; wherefore shee is called the Humbird."
The heath hen, represented for several years by but one melan- choly specimen, left drumming alone, with not a female of its kind, not one lovely companion in the world, was once so common, accord- ing to Thomas Nuttall, that
"servants in Boston stipulated with their employers not to have the heath hen brought to table oftener than a few times in the week."
Mown down by fowling pieces, caught in nets, the wild fowl soon began to disappear. The great auks, the Labrador ducks, the trum-
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SCENERY AND SPORTS
peter swans, the snow geese, the cranes, the wild turkeys and the pigeons were soon either exterminated or rarely seen, and the game birds of Essex County today, numerous as they still seem, are but a pitiful remnant of the numberless flocks of the seventeenth century.
The fauna of New England made William Wood burst into verse :
"The kingly Lyon and the strong arm'd Bear, The large limbed Moose with the tripping Deare.
Quill darting porcupines, and Rackoones bee, Castelld in the hollow of an aged tree.
The skipping Squerrill, Rabbet, purblinde Hare,
Immured in the selfesame Castle are,
Least red-eyed ferrets, wily foxes should Them undermine, if rampired but with mould.
The grim fac't Ounce and ravenous howling Woolfe,
Whose meagre paunch suckes like a swallowing gulfe. Black glistering Otters, and rich-coated Bever,
The Civit-scented musquash, smelling ever. . "
He did admit, however, that he had never actually seen a "Lyon," but he had been told that roaring had been heard in the woods which could have been uttered by no other animal. Bears were plentiful until the middle of the eighteenth century. They were first caught by traps rigged with muskets so that they themselves set off the trigger ; later they were caught in steel or iron traps. Sometimes deer or moose were trapped or caged, but more often they were shot. Hares and rabbits were caught in ingenious devices consisting of nooses attached to bent saplings.
The wolves were the worst enemy of the settlers. Roaming the country in packs, they were powerful and dangerous. Even as late as the first decade of the eighteenth century parents would not per- mit children to go out alone for fear they would be devoured. To combat them, the settlers made wolf pits and organized wolf drives.
As for fishing, the salmon bass and the sturgeon once present in Ipswich waters have vanished, but because of intelligent preservation there are still no less than one hundred and four species of marine fish and twenty species of fresh water fish in Essex County. Perhaps, even at that, there are not quite as many fish, however, as in 1699, when Edward Ward declared :
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THE STORY OF ESSEX COUNTY
"Lobsters and codfish are held in such disdain by reason of their planty 'tis as scandalous for a poor man in Boston to carry one through the streets as 'tis for an Alderman of the City of London to be seen walking with a groatsworth of Fresh-Herrings from Billings-Gate to his own house."
Unlike the gentlemen of the South, who came prepared to repro- duce in the New World the leisurely ways of their class in England, the Puritans expected, and found, a more rugged life in their harsher climate. The difference between the northern and southern settlers is epitomized by the fact that, while the future Virginians brought over race horses, the future New Englanders brought sturdy horses destined for hard service in fields and in wood trails. Horse racing as a sport, therefore, played no part in the early life of Essex County.
With the opening of the nineteenth century, Essex County, and particularly the North Shore, began to be recognized as a potential playground. First people from Boston, then, gradually, people from all over the United States came here either to build their own houses or to summer in the hotels which began to spring up. By 1820 there was a Boston-Nahant steamboat which brought Sunday crowds to Nahant; this peninsula, once a pasture for Lynn cattle, soon found itself a summer resort.
As the visitors appeared, sports developed. Today, in its facili- ties for yachting, sailing, swimming, tennis and golf, Essex County is unsurpassed, while other minor sports, such as hunting, archery and skeet shooting, are well developed.
It is fitting that Essex County, with its long and glorious maritime history, should be today the center of most of the yachting of the United States. It was one of the first places where yachting flour- ished. "Cleopatra's Barge," George Crowninshield's Salem-built yacht, was the first to cross the Atlantic. Painted on one side like a man-of-war, and on the other in vertical stripes of divers colors, varied with sea monsters, rigged with particolored ropes, it must have seemed as gay and barbarous in Europe as those feather-bedecked savages whom the early settlers in America occasionally brought back with them to startle England.
In the early part of the nineteenth century there were several small yacht and boat clubs in Boston and the North Shore. The Dream Club, in 1845, had staged the first yacht race off Nahant, but
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SCENERY AND SPORTS
it was not until the building of "America" that there was any general yacht building. Beverly yachtsmen, 1868, organized several sweep- stakes races. Then, in 1870, John Heard founded the Eastern Yacht Club, recruiting it from the more active members of the old Boston Yacht Club. It began with more members, more funds and more yachts than any other club in the neighborhood and today it is still second only to the New York Yacht Club. It held its first annual regatta in Marblehead in 1871. Chiefly remarkable to the land lub- ber are the incredible banquets which are a glowing chapter in the club's early history, banquets whose main courses contained not less than ten varieties of game birds.
Since the founding of the Eastern, the Corinthian and the Pleon have also been formed at Marblehead, where the Boston Yacht Club maintains a clubhouse, and the New York Yacht Club often stops during its annual cruise. Today Marblehead can justify its claim to be the yachting center of the world.
Last year, in Marblehead race week, each of three clubs had over three hundred yachts sailing in separate events, and easily one thou- sand yachts could be seen at one time in the harbor, coming from Massachusetts Bay, Buzzards Bay, and the Great Lakes.
Besides the Marblehead clubs there are countless other yacht clubs in Essex County. Gloucester is the second largest yachting cen- ter, with the Cape Ann, the Gloucester, and the East Gloucester Yacht clubs, which participate in the annual championship races and the Sears Cup races, usually held toward the end of August. Also on Cape Ann are the Annisquam and the Eastern Point, and in Rockport the Sandy Bay, while in nearby Essex is the Conomo Point. In New- buryport there is the American Yacht Club station. Manchester, Haverhill, Lynn, West Lynn, Lowell, Bradford, and Swampscott all have yacht clubs; the Jubilee is in Beverly; the Palmer's Cove, Col- lins Cove, and Rod, Gun and Yacht Club in Salem; the Saugus River and the Volunteer in Lynn. Moreover, there is the Nahant Dory Club, and in Haverhill the Crescent Motor Boat Club, in Ipswich the Agawam Motor Boat Association, in Lowell the Motor Boat Club, in Lynn the Eureka Boat Club, and in Beverly the United Shoe Machinery Corporation's Motor Boat Club.
Marblehead is also a center for model yacht races. Possessing in Red's Pond, a fresh water pond more than fifty feet above sea level,
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it is able to stage races with models of every kind, ranging in size from twelve inches up to six meters, and showing every kind of hull from scow to catamaran.
Nearly every country club in Essex County runs off a golf tourna- ment during the summer. Of these the most famous are the men's and the ladies' four-ball and the Leslie cup match at Essex County Club in Manchester. The Blighty tournament on the Fourth of July, at Colonel John Prentiss' estate on Eastern Point, though a private event, is equally famous. There is a four-ball match at Myopia on Labor Day weekend.
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