Swampscott Beach

As printed in Samuel Adams Drake (1884)

Told by unattributed — the collector names no informant · collected by Samuel Adams Drake · 1884 · Boston and eastern Massachusetts

SWAMPSCOTT is a succession of hard sand-beaches and rocky, picturesque headlands, forming with Nahant, Nahaut Bay. It was formerly, as we remember, a part of Lynn ; and so closely are they united to-day, that it would require a surveyor to tell where the one ends or the otlier begins. In making a tour of the shores one crosses successively King's Beach, Whale Beach, and Phillips Beach, — all of which are the summer playground of the multitudes who in that season come here for health or recrea- tion, or for both. The high and glittering shore sweeps gracefully around toward the east, far out into tlie ocean, until it is frittered away in a cluster of foam-crested ledges that lie in treacherous ambuscade at its extreme point. That curving shore is Phillips Point, and the reef is Dread Ledge. There is a handsome villa or cottage for every elevated site along the two miles of shore. The extremity of Phillips Point is a wicked-looking shore, and Dread Ledge is the synonyme for danger to the mariner. The surrounding waters are thickly sown Avith half-submerged rocks, which in the delirium of a gale seem rooted in hell itself. Here, in January, 1857, the ill-fated Tedesco was swallowed up, with every soul on board ; and such was the mastery of the tempest over things terrestrial, that the disaster was not known in tlie neighboring village until the following day. In that memorable gale the sea inundated the marshes, swept unchecked over its ordinary barriers, and heaped a rampart of frozen surf upon the beaches, in Avhich the broken masts of wrecks were left sticking. Streets and roads were so blocked up by immense snowdrifts, that all travel was suspended for several days. The ponderous anchors of the Tedesco were found lying, where the seas had thrown them, upon the top of a rock ; and they were all that was left to tell the tale, for not a vestige of the hull remained. Another vessel was afterward wrecked here ; but, being driven nearer the land, her crew, one by one, walked to the shore over the bowsprit. Swampscott was, and still is, a typical JSTew-England fishing- village ; that is its true estate. The summer visitors are mere birds of passage ; but the men who are native here pursue their hazardous calling the whole year through. Nothing can be more curious than to see the old life of a place thus preserved in the midst of the wealth and fashion that have grown up around it and overshadowed it. But in this fact we think lies one great charm of such a place. There is no dif&culty whatever in placing the scene of Haw- thorne's " Village Uncle" here. That sketch is in truth only a series of pictures of the surroundings and of the plain fisherfolk, taken from life, to which, from the snug chimney-corner of a fisherman's humble cottage, the garrulous old "Uncle" adds his own store of gossip and of sea-lore. Hear him : — " Toss on an armful of those dry oak-chips, — the last relics of the ' Mermaid's ' knee-timbers, the bones of your namesake, Susan. Higher yet, and clearer, be the blaze, till our cottage windows glow the rud- diest in the village, and the hght of our household mirth flash far across the bay to Nahant. " Now, Susan, for a sober picture of our village ! It was a small collection of dwellings that seemed to have been cast up by the sea, with the rock-weed and marine plants that it vomits after a storm, or to have come ashore among the pipe-staves and other lumber which had been washed from the deck of an Eastern schooner. There was just space for the narrow and sandy street between the beach in front and a precipitous hill that lifted its rocky forehead in the rear, among a waste of juniper-bushes and the wild growth of a broken pastiu-e. The village was picturesque in the variety of its edifices, though all were rude. Here stood a little old hovel, built perhaps of driftwood ; there a row of boat-houses ; and beyond them a two-story dwelhng of dark and weatherbeaten aspect, — the whole intermixed with one or two snug cottages painted white, a sufficiencj' of pigsties, and a shoe- maker's shoi^." NEW-ENGLAND LEGENDS. By the same family resemblance is Philips Beach recognized as the scene of those wayward reveries, " Footprints on the Sea- shore/' in which this author thinks aloud, rather than talks, betraying the old truant impulse which occasionally mastered him to get away from that world in which it is true he lived and moved, but could hardly be said to have had liis being. We here find him in one of his own creation. SALEM LEGENDS. SALEM LEGENDS. IN" 'New England no town except Plymouth takes precedence of Salem in the order of settlement, — a fact of which her citizens are naturally as proud as an old family is of its pedigree going back to the Conquest, or the Creation. And really, in the creation of the Puritan Commonwealth, one represents the First Day, and the other the Second. The political and commercial fortunes of Salem have been singularly alike. Eoger Conant, the founder, and leader of a forlorn hope, was eclipsed by Endicott, who was in turn over- shadowed by Winthrop, — a man quick to see that no place was large enough to contain three governors, two of them deposed, one in authority, and all ambitious to lead the Puritan vanguard in the great crusade of the century. The site was not approved. ' He therefore sought out a new one, to which the seat of govern- ment was presently removed, leaving Salem, by the course of these events, a modest reflection of the Puritan capital, and nothing more. The halls of the Essex Institute contain many interesting relics of the time when Salem played an important part in Colonial history. In respect to its commercial importance, which at one time was very great, — ships in the Hooghly and the Yang-tse, ships at Ceylon and Madagascar, ships on the Gold Coast, in Polynesia and Vancouver ; you can hardly put a thought on the wide seas 168 NEW-ENGLAND LEGENDS. where there were not ships flying like a swarm of industrious bees…

Samuel Adams Drake, A Book of New England Legends and Folk Lore in Prose and Poetry (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1884)