Part 2 (1/2)
=The Admiral's Stock Company.= Among other doc.u.ments belonging to the period of the Admiral's active life on the Island is a pamphlet printed in London in 1839, ent.i.tled ”The Campobello Mill and Manufacturing Company in New Brunswick, British North America.”
This Company was incorporated June 1, 1839, with a capital of $400,000 in two thousand shares at $200 each; interest at 6 per cent. was guaranteed on all sums actually paid on the shares, secured on the fixed property on the Islands and responsibility of the Company. The President was William Fitz-William Owen. There were also six Directors, who were all in official life, with the exception of ”John Burnett, Esq., of Campobello, Merchant.” The property, says the pamphlet, ”is valued at $100,000, and offers available means of employing five times the capital.” The returns in four or five years would probably be twenty-five per cent, on the capital. The situation of the Island ”is extremely commodious for commerce with Great Britain, the West Indies, and the United States.” An early prospectus of the Company's extols the situation, because, by order of His Majesty in Council, Campobello was const.i.tuted a free Warehousing Port. Jacob Allan, Deputy Surveyor and Commissioner of Crown Lands, ”certifies that there is now standing a sufficient quant.i.ty of spruce and pine of the finest growth for saw logs to keep four double saw-mills going for the s.p.a.ce of forty years; that is, perpetually.... The fisheries on the coasts of the Island were let this year by the Company for near 400, and fish were taken on the coasts to the amount of 3,000.” It is also ”stated that there is a large quant.i.ty of ore about Liberty Point.” The Company was incorporated ”for the purposes of erecting, using, and employing all descriptions of mills, mill-dams, fulling and carding machinery, and will have a decided advantage over any other spot in British America.” ”The population would thus grow rapidly, and the Company, having the property of the whole coast, must become the medium of all exchanges with all the population, which now amounts to six hundred only.”
Alas, the Admiral's dreams have never been realized. The saw-mills which were built long ago fell into decay. The ores, if there are any, are still unexplored; agriculture does not flourish; the fisheries have decreased, herring are scarce; and the various changes in the imposition of duties have perplexed and thwarted the business activity of the Islanders.
=Admiral's Second Marriage.= Year after year the Admiral saw his hopes deferred. Lady Owen had died. His daughter, Mrs. Robinson Owen, and her children, still lived in the Island home, helping, teaching, guiding all around them with kindliness and wisdom. But the Admiral spent most of the last five years of his life at St. John, for he married a Mrs.
Nicholson of that city, whose maiden name was Vennell.
=His Burial.= His strange, pioneer, semi-royal, administrative career ended in 1857. The boat that bore him back from St. John for the last time to his hermitage ran aground; for the great falling tides bade him wait, even in the pomp of death, until it was their hour to bear him aloft on his oft-trod pier. Men, women, and children, seized lantern, candle, or torch, and carried their hermit lord over the rough stones and the narrow ways to the cemetery, where they buried him at eventide, amid the waving trees and with the sound of falling tears.
His memory nestles in the hearts of the children who play around the weirs, and who have learned from their grandsires the tales of his jokes, his oddities, and his kindnesses. His children and his grandchildren stayed in the primitive ancestral home till 1881, when the Island was sold to an American syndicate. As long as any of the Owen family lived there they were beneficent rulers of the people, and maintained a courtly standard of manners and morals, the grace of which lingers among the Islanders.
=The Cannons again.= Tradition and fact still invest the Owen name with tenderness and homage, as was shown on July 10, 1890, when the great-grandson of the Admiral revisited Campobello. Never has the old cannon belched forth its volume of sound more loudly than it did for Archibald Cochrane, who, as a boy, had often sat astride of it. A ”middy” on board Her Majesty's flags.h.i.+p _Bellerophon_, he came back to his ancestral estates, accompanied by Bishop Medley. The boys' sunny blue eyes and gentle smile recalled his mother's beauty to the old Islanders. The Dominion Hag and the English flag waved from every s.h.i.+p in port and from the neighboring houses, to welcome him back. As the steamer came in sight, the aged cannon, mounted on four huge logs of wood, gave forth its welcome. Each time the cotton had to be rammed down, and the cannon had to be propped up. Each time the match and the lighted paper were protected by a board held across the breech at arm's length; but the bra.s.s piece did its duty, and the people called ”well done” to it, as if it had been a resuscitated grandsire. The steamer answered whistle for cannon blast, and the children's laugh was echoed back across the water.
It was dead low tide--and the tide falls twenty feet--when the venerable bishop came up the long flight of steps, slippery and damp with seaweed.
Guarded on each side and before and behind, with umbrella in his hand for his walking-stick, the metropolitan of eighty-four years accepted the unneeded protection which Church of England reverence dictated.
=The Great-Grandson.= But as the boy ran quickly up the same steps, there was not a man who did not rush forward to greet him. The band played, while the women crept out from among the piles of lumber and waited for recognition. It came as the boy was led from one to another, bowing low in his shy, frank manner, cap in hand, to the women and girls, who had known him as a child, and shaking hands heartily with all the men, young and old. Away off stood two old ladies, who blessed the morn which had brought back their young master. Up to them he went with pretty timidity, and then, boy-like, hurried off to look at the cannon.
He put his finger on it with a loving touch and a lingering smile, which to the older ones who saw it told of hidden emotion, which, perhaps, he himself scarcely recognized.
Silence fell as the Metropolitan rose from the chair where he had been resting and thanked the people for their greeting to the boy, because of his grandparents. The mids.h.i.+pman's eyes shone as they fell on the faces, lighted up as they had not been for years, to see that the fair, five-year old boy who had left them had grown into the straight-limbed, graceful, manly, modest youth, whose greeting was as unaffectedly frank as their own. After a while mids.h.i.+pman and bishop stole silently away up to the graves of the old Admiral and his wife, of the captain grandfather, and the cousin, all of whom had been naval heroes.
=The Old Home.= On to the Owen house went the boy and found his old haunts,--first, the nursery, then his mother's room, and next his grandmother's; out among the pines to the places where he had played, on to the sun-dial and the quarter-deck. All were revisited, with none of the sadness which comes in middle life, but with the sure joy of a child who has found again his own. He clicked the unc.o.c.ked pistols of the Admiral, and took up the battered, three-cornered hat.
In the afternoon a game of baseball was played in his honor; and never did his great-grandfather watch more eagerly for victory over the pirates than did this descendant watch that the game might be won by the Campobello boys. At evening, in the little English Church, where the bishop blessed the people and told of Lady Owen's deeds of mercy, the boy bent his head over the narrow bookrest, and after the service was over he again shook hands with those who had so easily and quickly become his friends.
The next day the people gathered again at the wharf. The mids.h.i.+pman was a new old friend by this time. Once more the bra.s.s-piece sounded farewell as he crossed the bay. It had been the playmate of his boyhood, his imaginary navy, his cavalry horse, his personal friend. By its side he had never wanted to rest on chairs or sofas. Once more he turned to look at it as he went down the steps to the water's edge, and waved adieu to those who loved him for his mother's sake, with a fondness and pride and sense of personal owners.h.i.+p unknown in ”the States,” where ancestry counts for but little.
The old cannon still stands upright in Mr. Batson's store. No one would ever steal it again. No one can ever buy it away. From father to child it will descend, to tell of the English-American feudalism of a hundred years ago, and of the happy, bright boy, who found his father's house turned into a modern hotel.
The wonderful loveliness of Campobello can never be taken from it by any possessor. It is a beauty partly its own, and partly borrowed from the soft rounded headlands, the toy-like islands, the vanis.h.i.+ng rivers, and the far reaches up the bay, which make the opposite sh.o.r.e. Busy s.h.i.+ning Eastport, with its New England steeples, spreads itself gently in a long line down to the water's edge.
=The Sunsets.= At evening the sunset sends its glory over the waters and the land, blending all into the wondrous charm of changing, glowing color. The sunsets of the Island have been likened to those of Italian skies and Swiss lakes. They need no comparison. They make their hours those of exceeding beauty and reverent silence.
=Treat Island.= Treat Island is one of the places which enhance the enjoyment of Campobello. It lies between Lubec and Eastport. Its first owner was Colonel John Allan, who gave it the name of Dudley Island, in recognition of his friend, Paul Dudley Sargent, a descendant of the Earl of Leicester. As Colonel Allan's revolutionary sentiments compelled him to leave Nova Scotia, his American patriotism eventually led to his appointment of Superintendent of the Indians. He thus became involved in perplexities and hairbreadth escapes. At the end of the war he went into business on Dudley Island, and counted among his guests Albert Gallatin.
Allan was buried on the island in 1805. In 1860 two hundred of his descendants gathered there, and dedicated to his memory the marble column which the antiquarian and the picnic lover alike visit. After a while the island began to be known as ”Treat's,” for a gentleman of that name had bought it, and carried on there a large fish-curing business.
He was also the successful pioneer of the canning industry. But with the scarcity of herring and multiplicity of duties, the weirs became disjointed and the houses dilapidated. Alas! now the land is hired for pasturage, and excellent thereof is the milk.
=Benedict Arnold.= Among Allan's customers when he lived on the island was Bened.i.c.k Arnold; for Allan spelt the name with a _k_, as his account book shows. Arnold at that time, though in business at St. John, N.B., was living for a short time in Campobello, at Snug Cove. In the Centennial year this account book was exhibited at Dennysville, as one of its curiosities. In 1786 Arnold bought a new vessel, which he called the ”Lord Sheffield,” and made trading voyages in her along the coast and to the West Indies. Once, while cruising in Pa.s.samaquoddy Bay, he invited Colonel Crane to dine with him on board his vessel. But the Colonel, who was a revolutionary veteran, stamping his foot, wounded at the siege of New York, furiously replied, ”Before I would dine with that traitor I would run my sword through his body.” Arnold went to England in 1787, where he insured his St. John store and stock for 6,000. The next year he came back; a fire consumed all, and Arnold collected the insurance. Two years later Arnold's partner accused him of setting fire to the store. Arnold sued for slander, and claimed 5,000 damages. The jury awarded twenty s.h.i.+llings! When he left St. John his house was sold at public auction. ”A quant.i.ty of household furniture,” reads the advertis.e.m.e.nt: ”excellent feather beds: mahogany four-post bedsteads, with furniture; a set of elegant Cabriole chairs covered with blue damask; sofas and curtains to match; an elegant set of Wedgewood Gilt Ware; two Tea-Table sets of Nankeen china; Terrestrial Globe; a double Wheel Jack; a lady's elegant Saddle and Bridle, etc.” Yet whoever now owns them must be glad that they are not family heirlooms. Auction sales are more honorable for some china.
=Smuggling.= Whether Arnold was attracted to the Pa.s.samaquoddy region by its opportunities for smuggling can never be known. But certain is it that the embargo law of 1807 had put a stop to foreign trade, and in 1808 destroyed the coasting trade. Before then it had been easy to carry breadstuffs and provisions across the line. Thousands of barrels thus reached Eastport; and many thousands were brought to Campobello and Indian Island, at one dollar a barrel. Smuggling began, or, if it did not then begin, it increased. Sudden wealth and bad habits kept pace with each other. At first the price for smuggling was twelve and one-half cents a barrel, which quickly rose to three dollars a barrel.
One man is said to have earned forty-seven dollars in twenty-four hours.
Fogs helped,--”that's why they were made”.
In the war of 1812, Indian Island and Campobello were very busy in s.h.i.+pping English goods and wares from the large colonial ports. Neutral voyages were constantly made. American vessels had a Swedish registrar, and went from Sweden to Eastport in three or four hours. Silk, wool, cotton, metals, were thus carried up the bays and streams, and s.h.i.+pped in wagons to the Pen.o.bscot, then to Portland, Boston, etc.
Provincial trade was peculiar. British vessels, laden with gypsum and grindstones, because they came from ports not open to American vessels, sailed to the frontier out on the lines, and transferred their cargo to American vessels waiting there. Slaves from Norfolk, Virginia, were sent to some neutral island, from there transported to an English s.h.i.+p again out on the lines, and then carried to the West Indies.
=Rice Island.= One of the islands which was cognizant of some of the smuggling was Tuttle's, now called Rice Island, after Solomon Rice, who kept store there. It is a little round spot of beauty in the chain of islands bridged by fallen weirs, between Lubec and Eastport.
=Lubec.= Lubec itself owes its existence to the attempt of five citizens of Eastport to avoid the payment of duty bonds to the British. Lubec Point was then only a forest. Though by 1818 it had become a rival of Eastport, it is now but a small town. Yet it is more picturesquely situated than almost any other town in New England. Its single steeple and its flagstaff dominate the steep hill down which run two gra.s.sy streets to the water's edge, where stretch out into the Narrows the piers, which change their aspect with each rising and falling tide. When the fog sets in over the bay, the last point it hides is Lubec steeple.