USA > Maine > Lincoln County > Wiscasset > Wiscasset in Pownalborough; a history of the shire town and the salient historical features of the territory between the Sheepscot and Kennebec rivers > Part 46
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The Pearl, another of the Lennox coasters, was commanded by Captain Foster. She was used to carry hay and bricks to Boston. When no longer needed she was grounded on Goose Island and burned to the water's edge, where she remained until during a run of high tides she floated off and crashed into the long bridge just east of the draw. When the last bridge was built in 1932 they swung the draw a span to the eastward of the former one and in driving the piles they struck the submerged Pearl and with great difficulty and delay succeeded in forcing the pile through the sunken hulk.
Among the well-known coasters were the Boxer, the Smith Tuttle, the Maria Louisa, the Wm. E. Leggett, the Isabella, the Kate Lilly, the Oceanica, the Niger, the Lady Ellen, the S. H. Poole, the Emeline, the Buena Vista, the Robert Woodruff, the Cock of the Walk, the Melbourne, the Clarinda, the Ster- ling, the Tasso, the Minstrel, the Mary B. Rogers, the Fillmore, the Millie Washburn, the Newell B. Hawes, the Coquette, the Fannie Hodgkins, the Fair View, the Elizabeth, the J. H. Miller, the Antelope, the Matilda, the Cora, the Charter Oak, the Annie P. Chase, the Sheepscot, the Mavooshen, the R. T. Rundlett, and the October.
Should any chronicler of river life be tempted to write the saga of a scow, the carrier and pariah of the stream, he must not omit the moonlit nights when, moored to the bridge wharf in mid-stream, the Evening Star brazenly displayed the intimate wardrobe of the lubber as his wash hung on a clothes- line to dry, flapping like a flag of truce while the air was filled with the strains of a Devon chanty pumped out of an asthmatic accordion, and the odor of cabbage defiled the evening breeze.
And the scows had picturesque names, the Challenge, the Roaring Gimlet, the Struggle, the Home-brew, etc. Moses Huntoon was the marine architect who constructed these gundalows.
Scows were much in evidence in the days of the Kilmaree Club when Wiscasset enjoyed a picturesque river life.
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The West Indiaman
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Wiscasset having then been a port of entry and delivery for a decade, there were owned here thirty-five square-rigged vessels aggregating 10,000 tons, the majority of them being employed in the West India trade.
Ships sailed down the Sheepscot to Havana, Matanzas, Tobago, Trini- dad, Antigua, Nevis, Jamaica, Barbados, Bermuda, St. Croix and St. Kitts. Besides occasional shipments of horses, the West Indiaman took out dried fish, pork, beef, potatoes, headings and hoop poles for cooperage, long and short lumber, deals, box-shooks and barrel-staves; and brought return car- goes of West India cottons, bananas, plantains, raisins, oranges, lemons, salt, coffee, sugar, molasses and rum which were landed on the wharves that fringed Fore Street. This cargo was distributed all over the adjoining coun- try-up the valleys of the Sheepscot and Kennebec-in exchange for country produce such as hay and cattle or money, or else the cargo was re-shipped to Portsmouth and Boston.
A triagonal trade developed. Ship-owners sent to the West Indies their freight of fish and lumber, for which a homeward cargo of sugar and mo- lasses was procured which was brought back and manufactured into rum. All that was not used for home consumption or sold to the Indians was sent to Africa for slaves. The "black ivory," so secured was taken to the West Indies and exchanged for more sugar and more molasses. A liberal profit was gleaned from every stage of this three-cornered transaction.
Sometimes a little smuggling was surreptitiously done which caused noto- riety to cling to certain localities, though the Westport settlers in the vicin- ity of Rum Cove repudiate such an origin of its name.
Wiscasset in those by-gone days had several meeting places unknown to the present generation. The principal ones were: the meeting-house where the older inhabitants gathered; the town house; the engine house; Brim- stone Hill (crowned by the Methodist Church); the ferry-ways; the mar- ket house; the town pump; and Tan Yard Brook. They all formed loiter- ing places for the youth of the village, but the greatest rendezvous of all for the boys was down on the wharves when the West Indiamen came in, laden with products consigned to Whitney & Sewall, Asa F. Hall or Abiel Wood, who owned by far the greater number of vessels engaged in trade with the Antilles. On one of these vessels an Edgecomb man was first mate,
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and he always brought a supply of sugar-cane in the long-boat stored over the main hatch, and while the boys were crunching it he regaled them with stories of Matanzas-that Cuban city of yellow houses, yellow fever and aguardiente-and the pirates who then (1823) infested the Cuban coast. Especially notorious was Antonio, commonly called El Majorean, whose lair was on Cayo Romano near Matanzas, and who with his fellow vampires of the ocean were lying in wait for a Spanish felucca, than in Guanaha, which they intended to fit out as a cruiser, but they were dispersed by the United States barges Gnat, the Midge, and the cutter Grampus.
Coral, radiant shells that echoed the song of a tropical shore, and strange, sweet fruits were brought here. Occasionally from the West Indies came stowaways, perchance a Conch from the Bahamas or a Maroon from Ac- compong, landed from one of these merchantmen at Wiscasset Point.
The Salt and Spar Trade
Before the United States became a salt-producing nation, the salt and spar trade carried on between Wiscasset and the principal European ports, was one of the earliest commercial developments along the Sheepscot River, beginning as it did soon after the resettlement of the Point.
Vessels were built on its shores and crossed the Atlantic Ocean laden with masts and spars to be discharged at foreign harbors and reloaded with cargoes of salt from Worcestershire and Cheshire in England and Havre,3 the French seaport which became so important an objective in our transatlantic traffic.
Where the salt brought here in ship-loads in the early days was stored is not now known, for the salt store on Johnston's Wharf built by Henry Bragdon for Alexander Johnston was not put up until 1857. This wharf, also called Cook's Wharf, was bought by Sewall Southard in 1895 and has since been used by him and later by his son, Freeman D. Southard, as a coal shed.
One of the interesting angles connected with the salt and spar trade is that which connects the Marie Antoinette tradition with the Decker house, then on Jeremy Squam, and links such men as Col. James Swan of Dorches- ter, Gen. Henry Jackson of Boston and Talleyrand with Wiscasset, then better known as Pownalborough.
3. A contraction of the original name, Le Havre de Notre Dame de Grace, founded in 1509 by Louis XII, on the site of a fishing village and intended as a refuge for the French Navy.
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The following letter, the only one found written by any member of the Decker-Clough family alluding to the Queen, Marie Antoinette, is given herewith. It is an extract from a letter written October II, 1918, by the great-granddaughter of Stephen and Sarah (Decker) Clough.
My great grandfather Stephen Clough (not Samuel) was in France during the Revolution. He commanded the "Sally" and brought to the United States furniture be- longing to Marie Antoinette, and the Queen was to have come too, but for the dis- covery of the plot to save her life-This furniture was divided between the owners of the "Sally", (Stephen Clough, Joseph Decker and Matthew Bridge)4 the Swans of Boston, and the Lees of Wiscasset-Some years ago there was an article in the Boston Herald-on the incredulity of a Boston woman-on a house in Edgecomb being the Marie Antoinette house, when the Swan house in Dorchester-at that time not stand- ing-was called the Marie Antoinette house, and a room in it had been furnished with furniture belonging to the Queen, and Col. Swan had instigated a plot to bring her to the United States. Then the article tried to explain that Col. Swan was in Paris, and Capt. Clough might have met him there, etc. The Lees were personal friends and it is probably true Capt. Clough knew the Boston owner before he went to France and, also, if Col. Swan was connected with this plot, that he would choose a vessel owned by himself to carry the Queen away from France. Another article, not long ago, ap- peared in the Herald stating that clothing for the Queen was also brought here by Capt. Clough, that the "thrifty Madam Clough" made up a black satin dress and wore it-
The "thrifty Madam Clough" did make over and wear a black satin dress brought home from France by her husband, but it never belonged to Marie Antoinette-It was the robe worn by Louis XVI when he presided au Lit de Justice, and was bought at auction by Capt. Clough-
At this time Capt. Clough was about thirty years of age-when the King was guil- lotined in Jan. 1793-Madam Clough lacked two months of her twentieth birthday- the only child, a daughter of two and one half years, was named Sarah for her mother. My Grandmother-Mrs. Wm. Mclellan of Warren-was the second child, a third daughter, named Antoinette for the Queen with a younger daughter, and a son-the youngest child-who both died in childhood, were all the children in the Clough family.
A Frenchman of high rank did come to the house on Squam Island, but never, even to Grandmother, did Grandfather Clough reveal his name, or rank-To her questions, his reply was always-"It is my friend's secret."
Madam Clough was a woman of remarkable health and vitality-at forty years of age, she said she did not know the sensation of being tired.
She had a lovely disposition, and was beloved by all who knew her.
A step-granddaughter by a second marriage, who looked after Grandmother's com- fort in her declining years, and took care of her in her last illness, remarked to me once
4. These were the original owners in 1791. Joseph Decker died December 17, 1792. Matthew Bridge of Charlestown died November 24, 1814. Stephen Clough died on the Mississippi River in 1818.
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that no picture of Grandmother could do her justice, for "to me she had the face of an angel"-When over eighty my father induced her to sit for a daguerreotype, and some large photos were printed from it-we were speaking of this enlarged picture-I thought there were few of whom the above remark would be made by one who had had the care of them when ill, and over eighty. . . .
Very truly yours, CAROLINE M. CUTTER.
The "Frenchman of high rank" who went to the Clough house on Jeremy Squam Island is supposed to have been Talleyrand (1754-1838) whose full name and title were Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, Prince of Benevento, and in the Archives Nationales he is noted as "Evèque d'Autun." The benefice of the Bishop's mitre instead of the Cardinal's Hat was at that time one of the bitter disappointments of his life, but in view of the fact that in Paris his infâme conduite was notorious, any link connecting him with the Church savored of impropriety.
He later relinquished ecclesiastical ambitions for a portfolio, and became one of the most subtle and shrewd of all the modern diplomatists, but, his name being discovered on the civil list of Louis XVI as a man "disposed to serve the King," he was, toward the close of the year 1792, immediately placed on the list of émigrés. His connection with the Revolution thus dis- closed, he went to England where he lived until forced by the Alien Bill to leave that country, he being one of the four undesirable foreigners expelled by Pitt. Thus it came about that Talleyrand, in the winter of 1794, left London and came to America. He remained in the United States for more than a year at the end of which time he was able, after the fall of Robespi- erre and the Terrorists, to procure the revocation of his banishment and return to Paris in March, 1796.
There are two traditions connected with Talleyrand's sojourn in the United States and his visit to Maine which are unsupported by historical records, and if not sailors' yarns, they are at least romantic local legends.
One of them is that he came to Mt. Desert in quest of his mother, the daughter of a fisherman, who, as this story goes, was courted and left by a Frenchman (Capt. Baillic Talleyrand). She gave birth to a son, whose baby toes she accidentally scalded by dropping on them a teakettle of boiling water, thereby crippling him for life; and as Talleyrand had, according to his own account, fallen while climbing on a chest of drawers, he, too, was lame in one leg all the rest of his days. This coincidence of infirm feet was taken as proof positive that he belonged to the fisherman's daughter, long
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since dead. Even that excellent historian, Joseph Williamson, seems to have given credence to this tale."
The parentage of Talleyrand is well authenticated. His father was Charles Daniel, Comte de Talleyrand-Périgord, and his mother was Alex- andrine Marie Victoire Eléonore de Damas d' Antigny, and they were mar- ried January 12, 1751. She did not come from Maine and her father did not belong to the Guild of Fishmongers.
The other erroneous tradition is that Talleyrand was accompanied throughout his Maine tour by the young Duc d'Orleans, later Louis Phil- ippe, King of France, both of whom came to Wiscasset on the Sally direct from a European port.
He may have come to Wiscasset by water, and he may have arrived in a ship commanded by Captain Clough, but if he did so it was not from any European port, and was probably from no greater distance along the coast than Portland. Conclusive proof that it was not Louis Philippe who was his companion throughout his tour in Maine is furnished by the fact that Tal- leyrand left the United States to return to Europe in June, 1796, while the exiled prince did not arrive from Europe until October twenty-fifth of that year. Talleyrand's friend was, in all probability, Bon-Albert Briois Cheva- lier de Beaumetz, who had sailed with him on an American merchant ship which left Greenwich February 3, 1794, for Philadelphia, then the seat of government. In that city they remained until the following June, when, armed with letters of introduction to influential persons in New England, they left for New York and points further north. For example, a letter of Henry Knox, then in Philadelphia, introduced both of them to Christopher Gore of Waltham, Massachusetts, while a letter of Rufus King, of New York, introduced them to John Langdon, of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. They sailed from New York to New Haven, proceeding via Hartford to Boston, where they stopped for several days. It must have been about Au- gust fifth when they set out for Maine. That he came farther east than Portland is corroborated by his Memoirs in which he writes that he visited Frenchman's Bay and Machias, "à l'extremité des provinces de l'est."6
According to accepted tradition Talleyrand, whose visit to Maine was probably undertaken with a view to land speculation, proceeded with his friend to the west parish of Pownalborough (beginning that year to be known by the name of Dresden) where he was entertained at the hospitable
5. See North's History of Augusta, p. 253. 6. Memoires, I, 238.
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home of Edmund Bridge, who was serving as high sheriff of Lincoln Coun- ty. From there they went to the mill house at Bombahook brook (the stream which is the outlet of Cascade Pond and is the only stream flowing into the Kennebec River at Hallowell, sometimes called Vaughan's Brook," where they stopped with Mr. and Mrs. Charles Vaughan,8 and were also enter- tained by Judge Chandler Robbins at his home at the Hook, or Hallowell -so called the Hook, some say, from the shape of the shore at this point which curves like a hook, while others state that it was an abbreviation of Bombahook. In those days what is now the city of Augusta was called the Fort, because of the settlement in the vicinity of Fort Western, while the present city of Hallowell was designated by the Hook. At Augusta the travelers stayed at the tavern of Billy Pit, and dined with the wife and son of Colonel North, he being absent from home at that time.
These and other visits they made on the way back to the Quaker City .?
Louis Philippe was a guest of General Knox at his Thomaston home, Montpelier, in 1797, but evidence is lacking to support the tradition that Talleyrand was there while en route through Maine, possibly because the Knox mansion was not, at that time, completed.
There seems to be no doubt that both Talleyrand and Louis Philippe came to Maine, but not together.
The Pacific Trader
In the olden days before the transcontinental railroad had driven the cargo carriers and clipper ships from the seas, the voyage around Cape Horn, although no more difficult than any other long voyage, was apt to be fraught with high adventure and hurricanes. A man had to be a real sailor inured to hardship in order to reach the Golden Gate without experiencing some misadventure and when the west-bound vessel ran into a blow off the tip of the Horn the whole crew was often "wamble-cropped"-the phrase- ology of the forecastle for mal de mer. Those were the days of "wooden ships and iron men," long voyages and uncertain freights-days when the crew boasted that the ship could tow whatever she could not carry.
A voyage around the Horn, wind and weather permitting, was accom-
7. Statement of Mrs. Marion Brainerd Tubbs.
8. See pamphlet on The Vaughan Family by John H. Sheppard, p. 18.
9. Another Maine visit attributed to Talleyrand in 1794 is that to Col. Paul Dudley Sargent at his home in Sullivan. Talleyrand's whole itinerary in this section is so enmeshed with legend that it becomes vague and conjectural.
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plished by the Pacific trader in three or four months while the faster ships averaged from one hundred fifteen to one hundred twenty-five days. The run from Cod to line (Cape Cod to the equator) took about thirty days and the windjammer needed forty or more from the line to the Horn.
A vessel planning a passage to the west coast would generally go to New York and there her owners would advertise the date of her intended depar- ture and by so doing pick up a mixed cargo for San Francisco and other ports en route. Such freight consisted mostly of cotton, coal, hardware and whatever useful commodities were likely to find a market in the region whose Spanish name was Caliente fornalla (fiery furnace).
Until the harvest of the great western grain fields yielded homeward car- goes of wheat, return freights were restricted to nitrates from South Ameri- can ports or guano from the Chincha Islands off Peru, while ships that failed to get merchandise were beached and abandoned or else used for lodgings and storehouses for the rapidly increasing population
In 1848-1849 the vessels bound for the Pacific coast carried out a super- cargo of a different variety, also mixed. A week or so before the treaty of peace with Mexico, James W. Marshall discovered, quite by accident, gold in the mill-race at Sutter's Mill, near the town of Coloma in California, about forty miles from the present city of Sacramento. The news spread like a prairie fire until it reached the four corners of the civilized world. Thousands started on their way to the rich diggings in the far west and the gold rush was underway.
A stupendous migration followed which drew into its vortex not only the adventurous youth, stalwart and courageous from the older states, who scrambled overland in prairie schooners drawn by mules or oxen as fre- quently as by horses to the edge of the continent, or shipped in merchant vessels around the Horn, or took the shorter route via Nicaragua, or chose to go by the isthmus with long stretches on horseback or afoot, but also the flotsam and jetsam of the whole wide world. Thither went a tatterdemalion mob of outlaws and adventurers, hecates of baleful mien, hailing from the purlieus of the underworld and bound for Gold. Gambling, wild specula- tion, robbery, murder and kindred evils were practiced by experts and un- checked by law until the organization of the Vigilance Committee which freed the state from its nightmare of hedonism and crime.10
In twelve years over $ 500,000,000 worth of gold was obtained and the 10. California was not admitted to the Union until September 9, 1850.
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little mission village of San Francisco swelled to a city of 56,000 people, the majority of whom came from the Atlantic seaboard.
Just as there were three ways of going to California and Oregon-over the plains, across the isthmus of Panama, or around Cape Horn-so there were three overland trails which could be followed after crossing the Mis- sissippi River. By means of newly built railroads with their wood burners which chugged doggedly along, or by canal boats and stern-wheelers it was not difficult to reach that great water-way from the east. But beyond the Mississippi Valley to the Pacific coast real hardships confronted the traveler.
Every Wiscasset vessel sailing at that time for the California coast took out boys from Lincoln County burning with feverish impatience to reach that glittering El Dorado. Among those who went from this town were Lewis Henry Hubbard, Nathaniel Lincoln, Alvin Foye and later Joseph Tucker Hubbard, all of whom dared "to buffet the blind Horn's hate." Ebenezer Hilton Hubbard went by the isthmus of Panama and Charles Pierce Knight went via Nicaragua, crossing the lake and continuing the land journey on horseback to the coast where he took passage on a trading vessel northward to the land of promise. Two years later Mr. Knight returned to Wiscasset by the isthmus of Panama and passed the remainder of his life in his native town. Nathaniel Lincoln, Alvin Foye, and Joseph Tucker Hub- bard all returned in time to Wiscasset, but the two elder brothers of the last named remained for the rest of their lives in San Francisco.
Samuel Small, the brother of William Hannibal Small, came originally from Alna. He was in the Middle West when the gold rush began, and ac- cording to his own account, he went to California in a covered wagon over a corpse-strewn trail where bands of Mexicans and Indians had made short shrift of pilgrims in the desert, leaving their mutilated bodies to the merciless elements and coyotes. The macabre reminiscences with which he whiled away many a chilly evening after he came home are still recalled with a shudder.
And so the "Forty-niners" went and came in the ships that sailed out of the Sheepscot.
The Canton Trader
But the Canton trader, with her rich oriental argosy, was a merchantman of more brilliant plumage. Little wonder that when the mariners' tales were trumpeted the village youth heard the call of the sea, for the sailors' yarns of the water front were spun around pirate and privateer, cannibal and ka-
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naka, the roaring forties and crossing the line, perihelion and St. Elmo's fire, towering fiords and submerged coral reefs. Wanderlust sealed many a destiny when sailors from the antipodes sky-hooted home in a tea race around the Cape of Good Hope. Almost unbelievable were their prodigious tales of the walled city of Kwang-tung (of which Canton is merely a cor- ruption), with its principal streets bearing trade names, as Apothecary Street, Carpenter Street, etc .; its extraordinary native boat-town on the Pearl River where beady-eyed babies starved to death in junks; its temples, pagodas and mosques; the Temple of the Ocean Banner; the Temple of Five Hundred Gods; the Tartar City Temple and the Temple of the Five Genii; its Kwangtah or Plain Pagoda; its ancient Mohammedan mosque built by Arabian voyagers in the ninth century; the joss-houses, chiefly Buddhist temples where Buddhist bonzes in their saffron robes shuffled about; Chinese women riding to field work in wheelbarrows; and slant- eyed, ivory-faced, clog-footed Eurasian maids scuttling shyly around street corners; and lepers wearing bells. It all smacked of the far-away and unreal until the cargo was discharged and the hold ransacked, like some huge grab bag in a giant's hand, where along with the more prosaic articles of tea, rice, silk, cotton, linen, grege and pottery; copper basins, bronze bowls, filatures, stroud, duffel, wanghee for walking-sticks, opium and opium pipes, brilliant pictures painted on the famous pith paper came to light, as did Canton crêpe shawls, cassia, lead, powder, sky-rockets bearing heathenish graffito labels, wood and ivory carvings strange and ingenious which none but a skilled craftsman could perfect, and a small quantity of precious vermilion straight from the cinnabar mines of the west. Hidden away in a safe cubby-hole was a bit of tsew (rice wine) as well as the more potent beverage, Canton Samshoo.
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