Part 13 (1/2)
Meanwhile the colonists had not followed up their good beginning at Mount Malado. Hospitals had not grown with the growth of the community. Doctors had none of the advantages of the study of surgery and medicine which are given by the hospital system, but the sick were tenderly cared for, nevertheless. In Jefferson's notes on the advantages enjoyed by the Virginians, he speaks of: ”their condition too when sick, in the family of a good farmer where every member is emulous to do them kind offices, where they are visited by all the neighbors, who bring them the little rarities which their sickly appet.i.tes may crave, and who take by rotation the nightly watch over them, without comparison better than in a general hospital where the sick, the dying and the dead are crammed together in the same room, and often in the same bed.” When we read the accounts of hospitals in the eighteenth century, antiseptics unknown, and even ordinary cleanliness uncommon, we can readily agree with the conclusion that ”Nature and kind nursing save a much greater proportion in our plain way, at a smaller expense, and with less abuse.”
Every wind that swept the sick-room in those colonial farm houses, brought balm from the pines, or vigor from the sea. Three thousand miles of uncontaminated air stretched behind them and before. This pure, balmy, bracing air cured the sick, and kept the well in health, in spite of general disregard of hygiene, which prevailed almost universally, especially in all matters of diet. ”We may venture to affirm,” exclaims a horrified Frenchman, fresh from the land of scientific cookery, ”that if a premium were offered for a regimen most destructive to the teeth, the stomach and the health in general, none could be desired more efficacious for these ends than that in use among this people. At breakfast they deluge the stomach with a pint of hot water slightly impregnated with tea, or slightly tinctured, or rather coloured with coffee; and they swallow, without mastication, hot bread half-baked, soaked in melted b.u.t.ter, with the grossest cheese and salt or hung beef, pickled pork, or fish, all which can with difficulty be dissolved. At dinner, they devour boiled pastes, called absurdly puddings, garnished with the most luscious sauces.
Their turnips and other vegetables are floated in lard or b.u.t.ter. Their pastry is nothing but a greasy paste imperfectly baked.”
The entire day, according to this cheerful observer, is pa.s.sed in heaping one indigestible ma.s.s on another, and spurring the exhausted stomach to meet the strain, by wines and liquors of all sorts. The population who lived on such a diet, ought to have died young, to point the moral of the hygienist; but Nature pardons much to those who live in the open air. If digestions were taxed, nerves remained unstrained. Even in our age of hurry and bustle, anything like nervous prostration is rare, south of Mason and Dixon's line. The soft air and the easy life soothe the susceptibilities, and oil the wheels of existence. It is for these reasons, perchance, that the records of the burying-grounds in the Southern colonies show such a proportion of names of octogenarians who had survived to a ripe old age, in spite of hot breads washed down with hotter liquors.
These burying-grounds of the old South are robbed of much of the dreariness of their kind by being generally laid out in close proximity to the living world, as if the chill of the tomb were beaten back by the fire-light falling on it from the familiar hearth stone close at hand. It is a comfort to think of genial Colonel Byrd, who loved so well the good things of this world, resting under a monument which duly sets forth his virtues, on the edge of the garden at Westover, beneath an arbor screened only by vines from the door where he pa.s.sed in and out for so many years.
Hugh Jones, that conservative son of the church, lamented that the Virginians did not prefer to lie in the church-yard for their last long sleep. ”It is customary,” he says regretfully, ”to bury in garden, or orchards, where whole families lye interred together, in a spot, generally handsomely enclosed, planted with evergreens, and the graves kept decently. Hence, likewise, arises the occasion of preaching funeral sermons in houses where, at funerals, are a.s.sembled a great congregation of neighbors and friends; and if you insist on having the service and ceremony at church, they'll say they will be without it, unless performed after their own manner.”
Here we have a flash of the spirit of resistance to undue encroachments from church or state, which flamed up half a century later into open revolt. There is something touching in this clinging to the home round which so many memories cl.u.s.ter, in this desire to lay the dead there close to all they had loved, and when their own time came, to lie down beside them under the shadow of the old walls which had sheltered their infancy, and youth, and age.
If the burying-grounds were cheerful, still more so were the funerals.
They partook, in fact, of the nature of an Irish wake. Wine was freely drunk, and funeral baked meats demolished, while the firing of guns was so common that many asked by will that it be omitted, as friends to-day are ”kindly requested to omit flowers.”
The funeral expenses of a gentleman of Baltimore town in the eighteenth century were somewhat heavy, as any one may judge from an itemized account preserved to us, which includes: ”Coffin 6 16s, 41 yds. c.r.a.pe, 32 yds.
black Tiffany, 11 yds. black c.r.a.pe, 5-1/2 broadcloth, 7-1/2 yards of black Shaloon, 16-1/2 yds. linen, 3 yds. sheeting, 3 doz. pairs men's black silk gloves, 2 doz. pairs women's do., 6 pairs men's blk. gloves (cheaper), 1 pr. women's do., black silk handkerchiefs, 8-1/2 yards calamanco, mohair and buckram, 13-1/2 yds. ribbon, 47-1/2 lbs. loaf sugar, 14 doz. eggs, 10 oz. nutmegs, 1-1/2 pounds alspice, 20-5/8 gallons white wine, 12 bottles red wine, 10-3/8 gallons rum.” The total cost of these preparations amounts to upward of fifty pounds sterling, besides the two pounds to be paid to Dame Hannah Gash and Mr. Ireland for attendance, while ten s.h.i.+llings additional were allowed for ”coffin furniture.”
When a Thomas Jefferson, ancestor of _the_ Thomas Jefferson, died in Virginia in 1698, his funeral expenses included the items:
To Benj. Branch for a Mutton for the funerall 60lbs. tobacco.
To Ann Carraway and Mary Harris for mourning Rings 1 To Sam'll Branch for makeing y{e} coffin 10{s} For plank for y{e} coffin 2{s} 6{d}
The list of expenses closes with unconscious satire, thus: ”Previous item--to Dr. Bowman for Phisick, 60 lbs. tobacco,” showing that every arrangement for the taking under was complete.
These inventories and wills cast wonderful sidelights on the manners and customs of ”y{e} olden tyme.” To our age, accustomed to endless post-mortem litigation, there is a refres.h.i.+ng simplicity in these old doc.u.ments, which seem to take for granted that it is only necessary to state the wishes of the testator. Richard Lightfoote, ancestor of the Virginia Lightfoots, who made his will in 1625, ”in the first yeare of the raigne of our Soveraigne Lord King Charles,” feeling perhaps a little fearful of disputes among his heirs, appoints Thomas Jones ”to bee overseer herof, to see the same formed in all things accordinge to my true meaninge; hereby requestinge all the parties legatees aforenamed to make him judge and decider of all controversies which shall arise between them or anie of them.” But there is no record that the services of Thomas Jones were needed as mediator, and when Jane Lightfoote, his wife, makes her will, she goes about it in a still more childlike and trustful fas.h.i.+on.
She leaves her ”little cottage pott” to one, and her ”little bra.s.se pan”
to another. No object is too trifling to be disposed of individually. The inventory of Colonel Ludlow, who departed this life in 1660, is a curious jumble of things small and large. Here we have ”one rapier, one hanger, and black belt, three p'r of new gloves and one p'r of horn buckskin gloves, one small silver Tankard, one new silver hat-band, two pair of silver breeches b.u.t.tons, one wedding Ring, one sealed Ring, a pcell of sweet powder and 2 p'r of band strings,” besides which is specially mentioned: ”Judge Richardson to y{e} Wast in a picture,” valued at fifty pounds of tobacco. In addition to these, Colonel Ludlow died possessed of ”12 white servants and ten negroes, 43 cattle, 54 sheep and 4 horses.”
The favorite testimonial of affection to survivors was the mourning ring or seal. These gifts figure in almost every will we examine, one mentioning a bequest of money for the purchase of ”thirty rings for relatives.” The keepsakes were carefully cherished, and the survivors in turn set up the memorial tablet, or carved the tombstone, or presented some piece of plate to the parish church, to keep fresh the name and memory of the deceased. In Christ Church, at Norfolk, is an old Alms Bason marked with a Lion Pa.s.sant and a Leopard's Head crowned, in the centre a coat of arms, three Griffins' heads erased, and the inscription:
”The gift of Capt. Whitwell in memory of Mrs. Whitwell who was intered in the church at Norfolk, y{e} 8{th} of March, 1749.”
The same church owns a flagon with a crest, ”a demi-man ppr-crowned in dexter three ostrich feathers,” given by Charles Perkins as a memorial to his wife, Elizabeth, who died in 1762.
It was a pleasant thought thus to renew the memory of departed friends by flagon, and plate, and alms-basin--a wiser way, one feels, than the carving of long epitaphs on gloomy stones surmounted by skull and cross-bones. How often, as we read these dreary tributes, we long for some shock of truth to nature, among all this decorous conventionalism! What tales these old colonial graveyards might have told us if they would! Here lie men who, perchance, supped with Shakespeare, or jested with Jonson and Marlow at _The Mermaid_.
Here rest gallants who closed round the royal standard on the fatal field of Marston Moor, or danced at Buckingham Palace with the free and fair dames of the merry court of Charles Second after the Restoration; but not a word of all this appears on the stones that represent them. Their epitaphs plaster them over with all the Christian virtues, and obscure their individuality as completely as the whitewash brushes of Cromwell's soldiers obliterated the dark, quaintly carved oak of the cathedrals. _De mortuis nil nisi bonum_ makes churchyard literature very dull reading, when it should be the most interesting and instructive in the world. Had the stones set forth the lives of those who rest beneath, we might learn much of such a man as Sir George Somers, whose strange experiences on the _Sea-Venture_ and his adventures on the Bermudas make me want to know more of him. I want to know what caused the trouble between him and Gates; how he built his cedar s.h.i.+ps; how he looked, and walked, and talked; and what manner of man he was, all in all. Instead of gratifying my innocent curiosity, his tombstone in Whitchurch, where he is buried, puts me off with a florid verse of poor poetry, and I am little better helped when I turn to the records of the island where he died. Here Capt. Nathaniel Butler, ”finding accidentally” (so runs the old chronicle) ”a little crosse erected in a by-place amongst a great many of bushes, understanding there was buried the heart and intrailes of Sir George Somers, hee resolved to have a better memory of so worthy a Souldier than that. So, finding also a great Marble Stone brought out of England, hee caused it to bee wrought handsomely, and laid over the place, which he invironed with a square wall of hewen stone, tombe-like, wherein hee caused to be graven this epitaph he had composed, and fixed it on the Marble Stone and thus it was: