Pilgrim Trails Part 2

CHAPTER II

JOHN ALDEN AND MILES STANDISH

THEIR LAND

Duxbury, Duxberie, Duxborough, Ducksborrow: the early writers spelled it as they pleased. But the Duxbury Light, Duxbury s.h.i.+ps, and Duxbury clam-flats have standardized the spelling for all time. This town, across the harbor from Plymouth, where grants of land were settled by Myles Standish, Elder Brewster, and John Alden, has been the home port of notable s.h.i.+ps and men. Merchant-s.h.i.+ps, brigs, and schooners--the Eliza Warwick and the Mary Chilton, the Oriole, the Lion, Boreas, and Seadrift, the Triton, Mattakeeset, and the Hitty Tom,--these and hundreds of sail besides were built here in the s.h.i.+pyards and manned by Duxbury boys. Among the early men of Duxbury were Benjamin Church, who captured Philip the Sachem; Major Judah Alden and Colonel Ichabod, descendants of John Alden and Priscilla; Colonel Gamaliel Bradford and Captain Gamaliel, his son; George Partridge, one of George Was.h.i.+ngton's Congressmen; and Ezra Weston, the King Caesar of the s.h.i.+pyards.

At one end of the town used to be the Ezra Weston ropewalk; and not too far away was the famous Duxbury Ordinary, the tavern where, in 1678, Mr.

Seabury the landlord had license to "sell liquors unto such sober-minded naighbors, as hee shall think meet, so as he sell not less than the quantie of a gallon att a time to one prson and not in smaller quant.i.ties to the occationing of drunkenes." Mr. Seabury was evidently to use his own judgment as to which "naighbors" were sufficiently sober-minded to sustain the gallon.

But doubtless the oldest Duxbury settlers were the clams. The colonists called them, first, "sandgapers," then clamps, then clambs, clambes, slammes, and clammes. We surmise that the clam was not at first the Pilgrims' favorite dish, when we read Mr. John Pory's account of his visit to Plymouth in 1622. "Muskles and slammes they have all the yeare long, which being the meanest of G.o.d's blessings here, and such as these people fat their hogs with at low water, if ours upon any extremitie did enjoy in the South Colonie, they would never complain of famine or want, although they wanted bread." When we read this remark of Mr. Pory's, we wonder how it happened that the Pilgrims were reduced at one time to five grains of parched corn per meal per person. But suppose that you yourself had never tasted a clamb at a clam-bake, and had never been introduced to it in the right circ.u.mstances by the right people--would it naturally occur to you to steam it, and discard its little neck, and make a chowder of its straps? This would call for the strictly pioneering spirit, especially if, in the words of an early explorer, these clamps were ofttimes "as big as ye penny white loafe." In fact, the only Pilgrim who at all adequately celebrates the clam is Edward Winslow. "Indeed," says he, "had we not been in a place where divers sort of sh.e.l.l-fish are, that may be taken with the hand, we must have perished, unless G.o.d had raised up some unknown or extraordinary means for our preservation." And to-day, in certain spots along the Duxbury coast, from the Gurnet to the Nook, you may still find the descendants of those early sandgapers drawing down their necks at your approach, lest peradventure you take them with the hand.

Barbara and I explored Duxbury, not for clams, but for another sort of oldest inhabitant, the trailing arbutus. We did not explain to Alexander the object of our quiet trips to the woods, for it was the middle of winter, and we felt that he might not sympathize with our simple-minded quest. Of course, we did not expect to find flowers, but we thought that we might find a root or two of mayflower from John Alden's land, to transplant on our hill at home. We know that it does grow in Duxbury, but we must have looked in all the wrong places. Like many other great explorers, we found all sorts of things other than the thing we sought: charming patches of checkerberry and mosses; blueberry bushes growing where blueberries ought not to grow and arbutus ought; many pleasant views of Captain Standish's tall monument on the Hill, but not one stiff rusty leaf of a mayflower. Finally we decided to go to the present Mr.

John Alden and inquire.

We hail from a part of the country where you would no sooner ask a person to direct you to his patch of trailing arbutus than you would ask him the combination of his safe. We therefore planned to word our question discreetly. "Do you know," we planned to say to Mr. John Alden, "whether any mayflower, or trailing arbutus, ever used to grow in Duxbury?"

That ought to give him a chance to tell us about contemporary mayflowers, if he cared to, at the same time giving him plenty of leeway if he preferred to dwell upon the past.

We were putting the finis.h.i.+ng touches on our speech as we went up the path to the old John Alden house, when a great touring-car, with an Indiana number, went rocking past us up the uneven lane, and stopped.

"Can you tell us," said a gentleman, leaning out of the car and calling back to us, "whether this house is open to visitors?"

"We don't know," said I, "but we know that Mr. John Alden lives here."

"I'll ask him," said the gentleman from Indiana; and he went to the door.

"He says it's open to-day," reported our new guide in a moment, helping his family out of the car, and giving the youngest child a big jump up into his arms.

Barbara and I, abandoning trailing arbutus, merged ourselves with the family group, and went in at the front door.

The little hallway is papered with the kind of paper you sometimes see in houses where "George Was.h.i.+ngton spent the night"--gray, with landscapes. But, in addition to the landscapes in this paper, there are slender pillars in groups, a design that makes you think of a miniature Alma Tadema picture, all in gray. This wall-paper is, of course, not as old as the house, but it is old-fas.h.i.+oned enough to be interesting.

We threaded our way in single file around the door, into the hallway, and our host invited us first to go upstairs.

The stairs go straight up beside the great chimney, very steep and narrow, each stair twice as tall as a modern stair and half as deep. At the top, we went around the slope of the chimney and into the rooms above. Here, in these low square rooms, with the supporting beams still showing the marks of the broad-axe, and the wide boards of the floor attesting the size of timber-growth in the early days, we found a perfect paradise of old-time furniture stored away. We were allowed to stop and prowl among the old possessions. None of the things used by Priscilla are here, of course; these are the acc.u.mulations of generations that followed her.

[Ill.u.s.tration: John Alden's House, Duxbury, (1653)]

In the corner by the chimney, we saw a small wooden cradle, with its wooden roof sloping in three sections over the top. On the wall hung an old lantern made to hold a candle, the kind of "lanthorn" that might have been used by Moon in "A Midsummer Night's Dream."

We were looking at the churn and the yarn-winder, when one of the ladies called us to look at the strap-hinges on the door. These hinges, handmade of iron, long and narrow and pennant-shaped, run out almost a third of the way across the door. The iron latch, also hand-wrought, is worn where the bar slips into the hasp, and the downward curve of the lift of the latch is bent into a thin twisted shape. One of the doors, a curious, three-paneled affair, is supposed to have been saved from a former house of John Alden's.

The present house, built in 1653, was the place where John Alden spent his later years. Here he lived to the age of eighty-nine, holding important offices in Plymouth Colony up to the time of his death. He was one of the eight Purchasers who bought from the Merchant Adventurers their interest in the colony, after the expiration of seven years'

copartners.h.i.+p. And in paying the required sum of eighteen hundred pounds, he, with Myles Standish and the other "Undertakers," must have been very busy managing the Plymouth trade, and "fraighting the White Angell, Frinds.h.i.+p and others" with saxafra.s.s, clapboards, and beaver.

They were a busy brood, those old-comers; and John Alden, whom Bradford called "a hopfull young man," fulfilled the promise of his youth.

Ever since his death, his house has been lived in by Aldens. The present John Alden is a Grand Army veteran, son of a veteran of the Civil War, grandson of veterans of the Revolution, and grandfather of a veteran of the World War.

He led us downstairs, and out to the large room where they used to do their fireplace cooking. The fireplace is closed now, but the spirit of the house is still one of comfort and hospitable good cheer. From its windows you cannot quite see the place where Myles Standish lived; it is too far away. But it is pleasant to know that the Captain and John Alden were near neighbors, and that one of Myles Standish's sons married one of the daughters of Priscilla. All of Priscilla's eleven children turned out well; many of them were later called to "act in publick stations;"

and the old house has been the homestead of her descendants all these years.

When we had signed our names in the big register, and turned to go, Barbara said, "Do you know why the Aldens and Standishes left Plymouth and came over here so far?"

"Why, they came over to settle it," said Mr. John Alden kindly; "to open it up."

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Myles Standish Monument]

As we went out down the lane, we turned to take one more look at John Alden's land. There, in the middle foreground, we saw the artist, sketching busily.

"How did _you_ get here?" we asked in a breath.

"In the car. How did _you_ get here?"

"We walked," said Barbara with emphasis.

"Like to go the rest of the way by stage?" inquired the artist affably, hoisting his sketching kit over his shoulder and pointing to the car at the foot of the lane. "I'm going over to the Standish house next."

"Did you know," said Barbara dreamily to the artist, as she seated herself in the car, "that the four most famous descendants of John Alden and Priscilla were John Quincy Adams, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, William Cullen Bryant, and Tom Thumb?"

"Barbara," said the artist gravely, "did you make that up?"

"No," said Barbara, clutching the seat as we went around the corner on one wheel, "I looked it up."

Country over which you have just been prowling on foot looks very different when viewed from a car. The blackberry tangles and wild rose-bushes, through which we had waded on our way to the woods, were now simply part of the scenery. And the Myles Standish monument, which had been our mariner's needle, one of the necessities of life, was now only a forsaken watch-tower, with a solitary figure on top of it against the sky. We went careening up the side-road to the Standish house, which was built in 1666, not by the captain himself, but by one of his sons.

It was closed. An old house, locked, with an open field around it and the sea below; a perfect place for sketching, and the rising wind from the sea. Barbara went softly up to the doorway and touched the rusty latch. On one side of the doorstep was a lilac bush, and on the other a wild birch.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Standish House, Duxbury, (1666)]

This is probably the oldest of the gambrel-roofed houses on the harbor.

There is something very strong and homely about the pitch of the roof--a balanced, firm old line, in splendid proportions with the huge chimney and low walls. A weathered gambrel has a way of looking at home in the fields, a sort of boulder-shape firmly settled. And the Standish house, with its flat field-rock for a doorstep, looks like a very old settler indeed.

For a long time we sat on the doorstep and watched the outline of Plymouth Town across the harbor, and the white gulls flying, and the crows. The son of Standish of Standish knew where to pitch a house.

Th.o.r.eau criticizes the Pilgrims for lacking the explorer's instinct.

They were not woodsmen, he says, nor, except spiritually, pioneers at heart. He calls attention to the fact that it was long after the landing before they explored the woods and ponds back of Plymouth, territory "within the compa.s.s of an afternoon's ramble." "A party of emigrants to California or Oregon," says he, "with no less work on their hands and more hostile Indians, would do as much exploring the first afternoon, and the Sieur de Champlain would have sought an interview with the savages, and examined the country as far as the Connecticut, and made a map of it, before Billington had climbed his tree."

Well, the Sieur de Champlain had not with him such little travelers as Ocea.n.u.s Hopkins and Peregrine White. After the deaths of the first winter, every one of the few grown men left in the colony was needed for immediate affairs. They could not afford to go exploring overmuch. With the exception of the madcap Billingtons and one boy Crackston, they ran very little risk of losing themselves in the woods. They went, as much as possible by sea, to Kennebeck, to Boston, to all parts of Cape Cod.

But as to wandering through the woods on foot, that was done only for good and warrantable reasons, not to see what they could see.

Yet even here we find a paradox. They were so thinned in numbers that they had to be cautious, but in an emergency they knew how to be perfectly reckless and perfectly adequate to the occasion. In March, 1623, when news came that their friend Ma.s.sasoit was "like to die," they knew that, if they were to be accounted loyal friends, they must follow the Indian custom of paying a visit to the chief in his last days.

Therefore, Edward Winslow, with one Master John Hampden of London, and the Indian Hobbomock for guide, set out on foot around across the Cape, through what is now Eastham, to Mattapoisett, and thence to "Sowams,"

now the town of Warren, Rhode Island, the home of Ma.s.sasoit. In spite of the protests of Hobbomock, part of the journey through the woods was made after nightfall, so eager were they to arrive before "Ma.s.sa.s.sowat"

died. And the accurate Winslow records and translates for us a sentence in Ma.s.sasoit's own language, the very words of the great friendly sachem: "Matta neen wonckanet namen, Winsnow!" that is to say, 'O Winslow, I shall never see thee again.' Winslow tells us how he revived Ma.s.sasoit by giving him a "confection of comfortable conserves on the point of my knife," and by performing other helpful offices, "which he took marvelous kindly"; and how he then set out on his homeward journey, after learning from the convalescent Ma.s.sasoit of the plans of other tribes to destroy the paleface colony. On Winslow's return trip through the woods, the Indians themselves, he says, "demanded further how we durst, being but two, come so far into the country. I answered, where was true love, there was no fear."

They did explore. But their exploring was always for community purpose, whether for "true love," or for parleys with the French and Dutch, or for trade with Squanto's friends at Chatham, or for pasturage for their "katle," or for fish.