USA > Vermont > Orange County > Bradford > Stories of old Bradford > Part 5
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"What did the warriors look like?"
"Most of them were naked to the waist and wore a 'malo' or loin cloth made of tapa, a cloth made from bark. Some wore trousers bought from traders. Most of them carried spears of cocoanut like this one. Many carried guns that had been bought from foreign ships.
"Kamehameha watched them proudly. The sun glinting on his naked brown skin made him look like a bronze statue. He wore a beautiful Hawaiian feather coat in honor of the occasion.
"What's that-a feather coat? Would it be made of fea- thers now?"
"No. It was made of treated tapa or bark. It had been dyed a beautiful soft shade of blue. It had a pretty patterned bor- der of darker shades. It was tied about the neck and hung down his back to his waist in loose, graceful folds. On his close-cut white hair, he wore a feather cap. On the Hawaiian feather caps, which are only worn on special occasions, the feathers go from the forehead to the back instead of encircling the head as an Indian's does. It is in the shape of a helmet.
"He waited there proudly until all his boats were as- sembled. Then he raised one arm and motioned them on to Oahu."
"What did he do when he saw your ship?"
"He waited until his boats had all started. Then he came down to the shore and was rowed out to my ship. He wanted to trade for some more guns for his warriors. Every time he went down into the hold, his men had to jump overboard so that their king would not be lower down than they, so great was their respect and fear of him. After a few moments, he left the ship and went on to Oahu himself."
"And did he win the battle and capture the island?"
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"Oh, yes! He won a great victory that day. Hundreds of the defeated army were killed. The rest were driven over the cliffs to death on the rocks below."
"Did he capture the king of Oahu?"
"Not that day. King Kalanikupule escaped. He wandered about the mountains for months, but he was finally captured and sacrificed to the War God, Kukailimoku."
"What was that?"
"A hideous black grinning head mounted on a pole. It was considered very sacred. Before Kamehameha became king, his uncle appointed him to be the guardian of the war god."
"Was that their only god?"
"No. They worshipped a Fire Goddess called Pele.1 When the volcanoes sent out flaming streams of lava that destroyed all in their path, the people thought that Pele was angry. They often sacrificed animals or even captive people to keep the gods from being angry. In Kamehameha's last illness, his priests said that a human being must be sacrificed to the gods be- fore he could get well, but Kamehameha would not permit it. They also believed in a higher god called Io who was above all other spirits and images. He was so sacred that no one but a priest could speak his name, and a priest could say it only when alone in the depths of the forest. The Hawaiians did not become Christians until after the death of Kamehameha the First.
"Later, after the battle, we were entertained at a banquet in the village of grassy huts. Many of the houses have no walls, but only grass roofs on a circle of square poles."
"And whatever did the likes of them give you to eat?"
"There was plenty to eat2-roast dog which they ate every day, and in honor of the occasion, roast pork, chicken, wild birds, and birds' eggs. For vegetables we had sweet potatoes of which they raise many ; taro, a kind of plant of which they eat the leaves and stems ; seaweeds, which they ate raw ; cocoa-
1. Carpenter-The Pacific. Its Lands and People
2. Kuykendall-History of Hawaii.
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nut sprouts and leaves ; pandurus seeds ; and breadfruit, a big round fruit that grows on tall trees. Then there was 'poi.' That is a kind of starchy paste made from taro roots. For desserts we had cocoanuts, bananas, pandanus nuts, chestnuts, and berries. We drank the water of green cocoanuts. In honor of the occasion, Kamehameha wore white men's pants which he had bought from the traders, a tapa shirt, and a dark vest.
The women were dressed up, too. They wore grass skirts or skirts made by simply draping long pieces of cloth about their waists. Their only blouses were strips of cloth hung about their necks and tucked into the skirts at the waist. They wore sandals, coral jewelry, and strings of bright flowers about their necks and flowers in their long, dark hair.
During the feast many riddles were told and guessed.
Afterward we were entertained by poetry, wrestling, and dangerous spear throwing contests. Later in the evening, chanted or musical stories were told by special story tellers. These stories were mostly about gods and goddesses and heroes. The only animal stories were about turtles, snails, and whales. They also told fairy tales and mystery stories."
"What do the children do there?"
"The children play a bowling game with stones. They are very daring. They dive from high cliffs, swim like fish, and ride surf boards."
"They wouldn't be having to go to school there, would they?"
"Oh, yes, indeed. They have good minds. Boys are taught to be warriors. A young man who is trained to be a leader must learn history, language, geography, nature, and especially as- tronomy, because when they make long sea voyages they are guided by the stars. On almost every island a boy has to learn some trade so that he can become a wood-carver, a sailor, a farmer, a story teller, or a house builder. While learning to recite the history of his tribe or carving in stone, a young man must go off by himself away from his family and friends and go without eating for many days while he is studying. Everyone except a chief or priest has to work with his hands. They drag very heavy loads about the islands,"
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"Why wouldn't they use their horses for that?"
"They have no horses. According to legend, the ances- tors of the Hawaiians came from Asia originally. They could carry only small animals like dogs in their canoes."
"Why have they not bought horses from the trading ships?"
Captain Trotter chuckled. "Once a trader brought some horses to sell them. The people were much excited over the 'big dogs'. When Kamehameha found out that the strange things were to ride on, he said that he would not be that lazy."
"How could you understand what the Hawaiian king was after sayin' to you?" asked the boy.
"He had an interpreter, a Spaniard who knew both Ha- waiian and English. He also had two other white men living with him, Isaac Davis and John Young. These men held posi- tions of responsibility and trust in the government. They were loyal to the king and he was kind to them, but I have heard it said that when he was angry at one of these favorities the white man feared him so that he crawled on his hands and knees before Kamehameha."
"How did the white men come to live there, I wonder ?"
"They were captured by Kamehameha. Isaac Davis was bo'sun of the English ship 'Eleanora.' He went ashore to visit and found out that John Young, the only man left alive on the 'Fair American', was a captive. Kamehameha did not dare to let Davis go after that for fear that he would tell of John Young. If he told, the English might be angry and punish all the islands."
"Why did Kamehameha capture John Young?"
"Another chief was angry because he had once been whip- ped by the former captain of the 'Fair American,' so he de- cided to destroy the ship and all on it. Young escaped, and Kamehameha captured and protected him to save his life. After a while the white men no longer wanted to leave the island.
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"I also talked with a Hawaiian boy who guided me about the island. He had once been a cabin boy on an English ship for a short time. He told me about the children's games and about the 'manu' or spirits who live in each mountain, animal, plant, stone, star, hill, and valley. He told me of a Sky Father and an Earth Mother. He told me that Hawaiian children are taught to be brave and to fear nothing. He also told me of tapu."
"What is that-tapu?"
"A tapu is something that is forbidden by their religion. There are many tapus. All work is tapu during a religious serv- ice. Fish are tapu until some have been offered to a god. It is tapu for women to eat bananas. It is tapu to step on the sha- dow of a king. It is tapu to eat berries sacred to the goddess, Pele. A tapu disobeyed is punished by death.
"And now it is tapu for you to ask me any more questions tonight for it is time you were in bed !"
"Sure, and it's happy I am to be with you, Captain, and to hear so fine a story. I hope I'll be having such fine adven- tures meself some day," Francis said as he reluctantly put the spear back in its place, took his kerosene lamp, and followed the Captain up the broad staircase to his room.
A few days later Mr. Kelley arrived, inquiring worriedly about a lost boy. He thanked Captain Trotter warmly for the care that he had given his son. Probably the little Irish boy never forgot his visit at Trotter House.
The next time Jack and Jimmy saw the Captain, they heard the jingle of sleigh bells, and soon he was flashing past them in his red sleigh. Mrs. Trotter was not with him for he was on his way to town meeting, so he stopped and took the boys in. -
On the way he told them that Mr. Ford, a poor man of Bradford, had lost his only cow. Before they had reached townmeeting, Captain Trotter who sometimes when aboard his ship had amused himself by recording the weather and the position of his sails in poetry had made a poem about Mr. Ford.
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"Charity never knocked louder than now. A poor old couple have lost their cow, The cow belonged to Deacon Ford, Give to the poor, and lend to the Lord."
After town meeting had begun, Captain Trotter stood up and read his poem and asked the people to write down the amount of money that each could give toward a new cow. The Captain, himself, wrote down a generous sum beside his own name. At the end of the meeting, Mr. Ford had been given enough money to buy a new cow and to buy hay for it for the rest of the winter.
The Reverend Mr. McKeen thought that a man as gen- erous and kind hearted as Captain Trotter should openly de- clare himself to be a Christian. He thought so especially be- cause Captain Trotter had given a beautiful solid silver communion set to the Bradford Congregational Church. On the tankard of this set had been inscribed Captain Trotter's thanks to God for bringing him safely back from all his voy- ages. Mr. McKeen thought that he should go and speak about this matter to the Captain and ask him about his beliefs and prayers.
As Mr. McKeen talked, Captain Trotter became straight- er and taller than ever. His face flamed until it was nearly the color of his short, crisp red hair. "What right have you to ask me such questions?"* he demanded.
He looked so angry that without another word McKeen put his beaver hat upon his head and went to the door. Just then he felt the Captain pull at his coat and he turned back.
Captain Trotter was smiling now. "Reverend McKeen." he said, "if at any time you should want any favor of me, be assured I will esteem it a pleasure to oblige you."
Mr. McKeen said that he received many favors from Cap- tain Trotter after this. At one time the minister even lived as a guest in the Trotter House and had his grain ground free at the grist mill.
Captain Trotter has been dead now for over a hundred and thirty years, but you may still see the silver communion
* Trotter's answer to McKeen direct quotation from McKeen's History.
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set which he gave to the Congregational Church. Behind the locked glass doors of a cabinet in the Bradford Public Library, you may glimpse Captain Trotter's sea logs with the records of his voyages written in his own handwriting. In the read- ing room, also, you may touch the Hawaiian spear which King Kamehameha gave to his friend, Captain Trotter.
James Wilson Taken from a daguerreotype by C. Davis (Notice the thick glass and antique frame.)
THE GLOBE MAKER
An old man stood alone in the grassy yard of his former hillside farm and looked at the stars in the evening sky. He was an alert-looking old man with a thick shock of white hair and keen eyes that looked as if they had long been in the habit of looking off to far horizons .* It was a clear, cool June night. Far to the West he could see Gemini, the twin stars, and the starry outline of the Big Bear. High over his head in the dark velvety sky, he could see Leo, the lion. He had a very good view of the sky for he was on the West Newbury road, about a mile from Bradford, Vermont. You can see where the house stood by crossing what is sometimes called "the old fair- grounds" and continuing up the hillside until you reach the last house before the "Four Corners". The farm house is no longer there. A newer house stands in its place, but you can still find the old cellar hole, partially hidden amongst a clump of lilac and poplars which are growing from the rock-strewn, earthen floor.
The old man was very tired, but he was happy, for his life-long dream had come true. In his little shop he had just finished his latest invention. This evening it had seemed fitting to him to return, for a while, to his former hillside farm, now owned by his good friend and neighbor, where this dream had first begun to take shape. This last invention was an instru- ment which he hoped would be of great help to future school boys and girls in their study of geography. It showed the daily and yearly changes of the earth which cause the changes of season, giving us spring, summer, autumn, winter. This instru- ment, which is called an orrery, shows where the sun is during every season of the year.
The old man had worked long, hard, and patiently to make this model which he hoped would be used in the factory to make many thousands of the same machine, so that people all over the United States could buy or see these instruments and understand what causes day and night and the changes of seasons.
James Wilson's dream had started about seventy or sev- enty-five years before the time that our story begins, just a
*From looking at another picture of James Wilson, not published in this book.
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few years after the Revolutionary War. He had been a small boy of about ten, living in a shabby farmhouse in London- derry, New Hampshire. On clear nights he had often left his bedroom and crept out into the night to look at the stars. He liked to find the animal shapes in the sky about which his grandmother had told him. In the early summer he hunted for Leo, the lion, and Orion, the hunter. On the crispy cold winter nights when he had to stamp his feet and beat his mit- tened hands against the cold, he would look for Pegasus, the horse. At all times of the year on clear nights he could see the Big and Little Dippers and the Big and Little Bears. The last star in the handle of the little Dipper, he learned, was the North Star and the handles of the dippers were also the tails of the bears.
As he looked at the bears, James remembered a story his grandmother had told him. This story had been made up and told by the ancient Greeks back in the times when they were the most learned and wise of all the peoples on the earth.
"Most of the Greeks at that time did not believe in one God, as we do now." James' grandmother had told him. "In- stead, they believed in many gods and women-gods or god- desses. They called the king of these gods Jupiter and the queen Juno .*
"According to the story, there lived at that time a very beautiful woman named Callisto. She was so beautiful that Juno, the queen of the gods, was jealous of her. Juno did not want another woman, even a human-being, to be as beautiful or even more beautiful than she. So Juno decided to get rid of Callisto by turning her into a bear.
"After Callisto disappeared, her little son, Arcus, spent many long, weary hours hunting for her. But although several times during his search he met a bear in the woods, Arcus never dreamed that the bear was his own mother ! Jupiter, feel- ing sorry for the little boy, wanted to help him. He could not turn Callisto back into a woman. Anyway, that would make Jupiter's wife, Juno, so angry that she would not be pleasant to live with. However, he could and did turn Arcus into a little bear so that he could recognize his mother.
*Their Greek names were Zeus and Hera, but most people are more fa- miliar with the Roman names, Jupiter and Juno.
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"When Juno heard about this, she was angry and had the two bears placed in the sky where they could be watched.
"So, there's the mother bear and there's the little bear cub !" James' grandmother pointed up at the evening sky.
But James was not satisfied with mere fairy tales. He wished so much to know more about this strange, exciting world in which we live. He wished he could travel over the hills and mountains, past the distant horizon lines and see what lay beyond. He wished he could know more about the strange lands on the other side of the world. He wished that he could meet someone who was wise enough to answer the many ques- tions that fretted him because he could not find the answers. Always since he could remember there had been questions in James' mind.
"What makes day and night?" he wanted to know.
"God makes day and night," his busy mother had ans- wered.
"But how does He go about making it?" James had won- dered.
"What makes summer and winter?" he had once asked his father.
"Don't ask such foolish questions! God planned the sea- sons," his father had reproved him.
James thought to himself, "When I lie in the sun it is hot. Summer is the warmest time of the year. If the sun gives the earth heat, then the part of the earth that I live in must be closer to the sun in the summer than in winter. The sun also gives light. Therefore, the sun may have something to do with causing our day."
It was not until he was a man that James learned what boys and girls know today, that day and night are caused by the rotation or whirling of the earth about the sun and that seasons are caused by the tipping of the earth. When the part on which we live tips towards the sun we have summer ; when it tips away from the sun we have winter.
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When James was about eleven, he began to notice a very exciting thing. He noticed that in June the Big Bear was to be found in the Western part of the sky and the Little Bear in the East. By December the Big Bear had worked around to the East, and the Little Bear was in the center. He began to notice that other stars and other groups of stars also gradually changed their positions in the sky so that they were found in different places at different seasons of the year. All these dis- coveries and the reasons for them excited the boy. He hoped that someday when he was grown up he would get to under- stand these things. He wondered if there were not other boys and girls who wondered about them as he did.
It took him a long time to find his answers to these ques- tions. In those days there were no laws to see that all boys and girls, whether rich or poor, got an equal chance to get a grade- school education. Schools were often poor and too far away for a child to attend. Often James' father needed him to help with the chores at home, so there were many things which you study about today that James did not have a chance to learn.
After James grew up, there was still less time to study. He went to live in Francistown, N. H., where he built him- self a log cabin. Here he farmed and learned the blacksmith trade.
In 1796, when he was thirty-three years old, he moved his family to Bradford, Vermont. Here he was still busy working on his farm and at his trade of shoeing horses. All this time he never stopped studying by himself. He enjoyed working with hot metals to fashion and shape shoes to the horses' feet. One day while working with hot metals, he had an idea. He would make a globe. This was a daring idea as no one yet had ever made a globe in America. But he had learned about globes which had been made in Europe. These globes, he thought, could be made in such a way that they would answer many of the questions which had puzzled him as a boy.
He learned that the first globe had been made about one hundred and fifty years before the time of Christ. It had been made by those same Greek people who had made up the story about the bears. It had taken between a thousand and two thousand years, however, to perfect these early globes and
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make them similar to the fine ones which we have today. Ben- jamin Franklin, it seemed, had owned a pair of globes, which he had ordered from Europe about eleven years before James Wilson was born.
"How I wish I could see one of those globes !" James Wil- son thought.
Copied by C. Patch from a photograph by Bachrach of the miniature of James Wilson, the globe maker, said to be by his son, David West Wilson, the minature painter. The original is in the Archives Depart- ment, Dartmouth College Library, Hanover, N. H.
When he was about thirty-seven years old, he suddenly had his wish. A Mr. Miltmore visited Dartmouth College. He brought with him, to show the Dartmouth College students, two globes showing the stars in the sky. From far and near people who were interested and were able to do so hurried to Hanover to see these wonderful new globes, the first globes that they had ever seen. James Wilson was among those who went to see them.
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After he returned home to Bradford, he longed more than ever to learn more about geography.
"Well," his wife said sympathetically, "the only way that I can see that you could manage to do that is for you to go to school down at Bradford."
"But would not the children think it queer to see a grown man nearly forty years old studying with them? How I wish that as a child I might have had the chance to study that children now have !"
Then he thought of another plan. About twelve years be- fore, the first set of books of knowledge called encyclopedias had been published. Mr. Wilson had heard that such a set of books could be bought from a man living at Ryegate, Vermont, but Mr. Wilson was a poor farmer and blacksmith. Where could he get the money to buy an expensive set of books? He talked it over with his wife.
"Perhaps I could sell some of the farm stock," he sug- gested.
Early one morning, before it was daylight, James Wilson left his farm in the care of his wife and children and set out in the buckboard behind Pegasus, his old brown horse. He had his newspaper-wrapped lunch and $130 in hard-earned bills in the pocket of his carefully mended best suit.
He was very much excited when he returned home late at night after his long ride. He could hardly wait to put Peggy into the barn before looking at his new books. His family was excited, too. His children gathered around him to admire the wonderful books. But Mr. Wilson wanted to learn still more, especially about engraving, so he could make models and moulds to copy his globes. So he made another trip, this time a long one to Boston, to study from an engraver. He was astonished when after the lessons the teacher charged him $100. He did not have so much money with him. It took him a long time to earn the money to finish paying for the lessons.
At last he finished making his first globe. First he made a big, round, wooden ball. Next he cut some paper into sections and fitted and pasted it to the big ball. Then he drew in the
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countries of the world with pen and ink. He tried to make the mold so that he could copy many more globes like the first one without having to make them. It was hard to find just the right kind of paper that would fit nicely and stick to the clumsy ball. A man named Nathan Bowen tried to help him by mak- ing a special kind of paper for his globes. Nathan Bowen made the paper in the Bradford paper mill which stood at that time along the northern bank of Waits River, between the Prim- ary school on the Barre road and the grist mill on the Fair- lee road.
It was difficult to fit the cut pieces of paper together so that they lay smooth and even without cracks between the pieces. It was slow, painstaking work. Mr. Wilson worked hard and carefully in his little shop on the West Newbury road .* But still the results of his work did not suit him. He did not care so much then about how well the globe looked be- cause he knew that the looks could be improved later, but he did know that if he were to make the globes so that they would sell all over the United States, as he wished, the machine for copying must be perfect. He decided to go to see another man who knew more about engraving. This man had made two maps for the first geography book that was ever published in the United States.
This man lived far away in New Haven, Connecticut. It was too far for Mr. Wilson to drive Peggy even if he stopped along the way at wayside taverns, as hotels or overnight places were then called. This was in the days before cars and rail- roads. Mr. Wilson could not afford to pay much money for his trip. So he packed a few necessary clothes and his globe in a carpet bag and set out to walk-a distance of about 235 miles.
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