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Tales and Sketches

J >> John Greenleaf Whittier >> Tales and Sketches




How this great idea manifests itself in the, lives of the enthusiasts of
the days of Cromwell! Think of Sir Henry Vane, cool, sagacious
statesman as he was, waiting with eagerness for the foreshadowings of
the millennium, and listening, even in the very council hall, for the
blast of the last trumpet! Think of the Fifth Monarchy Men, weary with
waiting for the long-desired consummation, rushing out with drawn swords
and loaded matchlocks into the streets of London to establish at once
the rule of King Jesus! Think of the wild enthusiasts at Munster,
verily imagining that the millennial reign had commenced in their mad
city! Still later, think of Granville Sharpe, diligently laboring in
his vocation of philanthropy, laying plans for the slow but beneficent
amelioration of the condition of his country and the world, and at the
same time maintaining, with the zeal of Father Miller himself, that the
earth was just on the point of combustion, and that the millennium would
render all his benevolent schemes of no sort of consequence!

And, after all, is the idea itself a vain one? Shall to-morrow be as
to-day? Shall the antagonism of good and evil continue as heretofore
forever? Is there no hope that this world-wide prophecy of the human
soul, uttered in all climes, in all times, shall yet be fulfilled? Who
shall say it may not be true? Nay, is not its truth proved by its
universality? The hope of all earnest souls must be realized. That
which, through a distorted and doubtful medium, shone even upon the
martyr enthusiasts of the French revolution,--soft gleams of heaven's
light rising over the hell of man's passions and crimes,--the glorious
ideal of Shelley, who, atheist as he was through early prejudice and
defective education, saw the horizon of the world's future kindling with
the light of a better day,--that hope and that faith which constitute,
as it were, the world's life, and without which it would be dark and
dead, cannot be in vain.

I do not, I confess, sympathize with my Second Advent friends in their
lamentable depreciation of Mother Earth even in her present state. I
find it extremely difficult to comprehend how it is that this goodly,
green, sunlit home of ours is resting under a curse. It really does not
seem to me to be altogether like the roll which the angel bore in the
prophet's vision, "written within and without with mourning,
lamentation, and woe." September sunsets, changing forests, moonrise
and cloud, sun and rain,--I for one am contented with them. They fill
my heart with a sense of beauty. I see in them the perfect work of
infinite love as well as wisdom. It may be that our Advent friends,
however, coincide with the opinions of an old writer on the prophecies,
who considered the hills and valleys of the earth's surface and its
changes of seasons as so many visible manifestations of God's curse, and
that in the millennium, as in the days of Adam's innocence, all these
picturesque inequalities would be levelled nicely away, and the flat
surface laid handsomely down to grass.

As might be expected, the effect of this belief in the speedy
destruction of the world and the personal coming of the Messiah, acting
upon a class of uncultivated, and, in some cases, gross minds, is not
always in keeping with the enlightened Christian's ideal of the better
day. One is shocked in reading some of the "hymns" of these believers.
Sensual images,--semi-Mahometan descriptions of the condition of the
"saints,"--exultations over the destruction of the "sinners,"--mingle
with the beautiful and soothing promises of the prophets. There are
indeed occasionally to be found among the believers men of refined and
exalted spiritualism, who in their lives and conversation remind one of
Tennyson's Christian knight-errant in his yearning towards the hope set
before him:

"to me is given
Such hope I may not fear;
I long to breathe the airs of heaven,
Which sometimes meet me here.

"I muse on joys that cannot cease,
Pure spaces filled with living beams,
White lilies of eternal peace,
Whose odors haunt my dreams."

One of the most ludicrous examples of the sensual phase of Millerism,
the incongruous blending of the sublime with the ridiculous, was
mentioned to me not long since. A fashionable young woman in the
western part of this State became an enthusiastic believer in the
doctrine. On the day which had been designated as the closing one of
time she packed all her fine dresses and toilet valuables in a large
trunk, with long straps attached to it, and, seating herself upon it,
buckled the straps over her shoulders, patiently awaiting the crisis,--
shrewdly calculating that, as she must herself go upwards, her goods and
chattels would of necessity follow.

Three or four years ago, on my way eastward, I spent an hour or two at a
camp-ground of the Second Advent in East Kingston. The spot was well
chosen. A tall growth of pine and hemlock threw its melancholy shadow
over the multitude, who were arranged upon rough seats of boards and
logs. Several hundred--perhaps a thousand people--were present, and
more were rapidly coming. Drawn about in a circle, forming a background
of snowy whiteness to the dark masses of men and foliage, were the white
tents, and back of them the provision-stalls and cook-shops. When I
reached the ground, a hymn, the words of which I could not distinguish,
was pealing through the dim aisles of the forest. I could readily
perceive that it had its effect upon the multitude before me, kindling
to higher intensity their already excited enthusiasm. The preachers
were placed in a rude pulpit of rough boards, carpeted only by the dead
forest-leaves and flowers, and tasselled, not with silk and velvet, but
with the green boughs of the sombre hemlocks around it. One of them
followed the music in an earnest exhortation on the duty of preparing
for the great event. Occasionally he was really eloquent, and his
description of the last day had the ghastly distinctness of Anelli's
painting of the End of the World.

Suspended from the front of the rude pulpit were two broad sheets of
canvas, upon one of which was the figure of a man, the head of gold, the
breast and arms of silver, the belly of brass, the legs of iron, and
feet of clay,--the dream of Nebuchadnezzar. On the other were depicted
the wonders of the Apocalyptic vision,--the beasts, the dragons, the
scarlet woman seen by the seer of Patmos, Oriental types, figures, and
mystic symbols, translated into staring Yankee realities, and exhibited
like the beasts of a travelling menagerie. One horrible image, with its
hideous heads and scaly caudal extremity, reminded me of the tremendous
line of Milton, who, in speaking of the same evil dragon, describes him
as

"Swinging the scaly horrors of his folded tail."

To an imaginative mind the scene was full of novel interest. The white
circle of tents; the dim wood arches; the upturned, earnest faces; the
loud voices of the speakers, burdened with the awful symbolic language
of the Bible; the smoke from the fires, rising like incense,--carried me
back to those days of primitive worship which tradition faintly whispers
of, when on hill-tops and in the shade of old woods Religion had her
first altars, with every man for her priest and the whole universe for
her temple.

Wisely and truthfully has Dr. Channing spoken of this doctrine of the
Second Advent in his memorable discourse in Berkshire a little before
his death:--

"There are some among us at the present moment who are waiting for the
speedy coming of Christ. They expect, before another year closes, to
see Him in the clouds, to hear His voice, to stand before His judgment-
seat. These illusions spring from misinterpretation of Scripture
language. Christ, in the New Testament, is said to come whenever His
religion breaks out in new glory or gains new triumphs. He came in the
Holy Spirit in the day of Pentecost. He came in the destruction of
Jerusalem, which, by subverting the old ritual law and breaking the
power of the worst enemies of His religion, insured to it new victories.
He came in the reformation of the Church. He came on this day four
years ago, when, through His religion, eight hundred thousand men were
raised from the lowest degradation to the rights, and dignity, and
fellowship of men. Christ's outward appearance is of little moment
compared with the brighter manifestation of His spirit. The Christian,
whose inward eyes and ears are touched by God, discerns the coming of
Christ, hears the sound of His chariot-wheels and the voice of His
trumpet, when no other perceives them. He discerns the Saviour's advent
in the dawning of higher truth on the world, in new aspirations of the
Church after perfection, in the prostration of prejudice and error, in
brighter expressions of Christian love, in more enlightened and intense
consecration of the Christian to the cause of humanity, freedom, and
religion. Christ comes in the conversion, the regeneration, the
emancipation, of the world."






THE HEROINE OF LONG POINT.

[1869.]

LOOKING at the Government Chart of Lake Erie, one sees the outlines of a
long, narrow island, stretching along the shore of Canada West, opposite
the point where Loudon District pushes its low, wooded wedge into the
lake. This is Long Point Island, known and dreaded by the navigators of
the inland sea which batters its yielding shores, and tosses into
fantastic shapes its sandheaps. The eastern end is some twenty miles
from the Canada shore, while on the west it is only separated from the
mainland by a narrow strait known as "The Cut." It is a sandy, desolate
region, broken by small ponds, with dreary tracts of fenland, its ridges
covered with a low growth of pine, oak, beech, and birch, in the midst
of which, in its season, the dogwood puts out its white blossoms. Wild
grapes trail over the sand-dunes and festoon the dwarf trees. Here and
there are almost impenetrable swamps, thick-set with white cedars,
intertwisted and contorted by the lake winds, and broken by the weight
of snow and ice in winter. Swans and wild geese paddle in the shallow,
reedy bayous; raccoons and even deer traverse the sparsely wooded
ridges. The shores of its creeks and fens are tenanted by minks and
muskrats. The tall tower of a light-house rises at the eastern
extremity of the island, the keeper of which is now its solitary
inhabitant.

Fourteen years ago, another individual shared the proprietorship of Long
Point. This was John Becker, who dwelt on the south side of the island,
near its westerly termination, in a miserable board shanty nestled
between naked sand-hills. He managed to make a poor living by trapping
and spearing muskrats, the skins of which he sold to such boatmen and
small-craft skippers as chanced to land on his forlorn territory. His
wife, a large, mild-eyed, patient young woman of some twenty-six years,
kept her hut and children as tidy as circumstances admitted, assisted
her husband in preparing the skins, and sometimes accompanied him on his
trapping excursions.

On that lonely coast, seldom visited in summer, and wholly cut off from
human communication in winter, they might have lived and died with as
little recognition from the world as the minks and wildfowl with whom
they were tenants in common, but for a circumstance which called into
exercise unsuspected qualities of generous courage and heroic self-
sacrifice.

The dark, stormy close of November, 1854, found many vessels on Lake
Erie, but the fortunes of one alone have special interest for us. About
that time the schooner Conductor, owned by John McLeod, of the
Provincial Parliament, a resident of Amherstburg, at the mouth of the
Detroit River, entered the lake from that river, bound for Port
Dalhousie, at the mouth of the Welland Canal.

She was heavily loaded with grain. Her crew consisted of Captain
Hackett, a Highlander by birth, and a skilful and experienced navigator,
and six sailors. At nightfall, shortly after leaving the head of the
lake, one of those terrific storms, with which the late autumnal
navigators of that "Sea of the Woods" are all too familiar, overtook
them. The weather was intensely cold for the season; the air was filled
with snow and sleet; the chilled water made ice rapidly, encumbering the
schooner, and loading down her decks and rigging. As the gale
increased, the tops of the waves were shorn off by the fierce blasts,
clouding the whole atmosphere with frozen spray, or what the sailors
call "spoondrift," rendering it impossible to see any object a few rods
distant. Driving helplessly before the wind, yet in the direction of
her place of destination, the schooner sped through the darkness. At
last, near midnight, running closer than her crew supposed to the
Canadian shore, she struck on the outer bar off Long Point Island, beat
heavily across it, and sunk in the deeper water between it and the inner
bar. The hull was entirely submerged, the waves rolling in heavily, and
dashing over the rigging, to which the crew betook themselves. Lashed
there, numb with cold, drenched by the pitiless waves, and scourged by
the showers of sleet driven before the wind, they waited for morning.
The slow, dreadful hours wore away, and at length the dubious and
doubtful gray of a morning of tempest succeeded to the utter darkness of
night.

Abigail Becker chanced at that time to be in her hut with none but her
young children. Her husband was absent on the Canada shore, and she was
left the sole adult occupant of the island, save the light-keeper, at
its lower end, some fifteen miles off. Looking out at daylight on the
beach in front of her door, she saw the shattered boat of the Conductor,
east up by the waves. Her experience of storm and disaster on that
dangerous coast needed nothing more to convince her that somewhere in
her neighborhood human life had been, or still was, in peril. She
followed the southwesterly trend of the island for a little distance,
and, peering through the gloom of the stormy morning, discerned the
spars of the sunken schooner, with what seemed to be human forms
clinging to the rigging. The heart of the strong woman sunk within her,
as she gazed upon those helpless fellow-creatures, so near, yet so
unapproachable. She had no boat, and none could have lived on that wild
water. After a moment's reflection she went back to her dwelling, put
the smaller children in charge of the eldest, took with her an iron
kettle, tin teapot, and matches, and returned to the beach, at the
nearest point to the vessel; and, gathering up the logs and drift-wood
always abundant, on the coast, kindled a great fire, and, constantly
walking back and forth between it and the water, strove to intimate to
the sufferers that they were at least not beyond human sympathy. As the
wrecked sailors looked shoreward, and saw, through the thick haze of
snow and sleet, the red light of the fire and the tall figure of the
woman passing to and fro before it, a faint hope took the place of the
utter despair which had prompted them to let go their hold and drop into
the seething waters, that opened and closed about them like the jaws of
death. But the day wore on, bringing no abatement of the storm that
tore through the frail spars, and clutched at and tossed them as it
passed, and drenched them with ice-cold spray,--a pitiless, unrelenting
horror of sight, sound, and touch! At last the deepening gloom told
them that night was approaching, and night under such circumstances was
death.

All day long Abigail Becker had fed her fire, and sought to induce the
sailors by signals--for even her strong voice could not reach them--to
throw themselves into the surf, and trust to Providence and her for
succor. In anticipation of this, she had her kettle boiling over the
drift-wood, and her tea ready made for restoring warmth and life to the
half-frozen survivors. But either they did not understand her, or the
chance of rescue seemed too small to induce them to abandon the
temporary safety of the wreck. They clung to it with the desperate
instinct of life brought face to face with death. Just at nightfall
there was a slight break in the west; a red light glared across the
thick air, as if for one instant the eye of the storm looked out upon
the ruin it had wrought, and closed again under lids of cloud. Taking
advantage of this, the solitary watcher ashore made one more effort.
She waded out into the water, every drop of which, as it struck the
beach, became a particle of ice, and stretching out and drawing in her
arms, invited, by her gestures, the sailors to throw themselves into the
waves, and strive to reach her. Captain Hackett understood her. He
called to his mate in the rigging of the other mast: "It is our last
chance. I will try! If I live, follow me; if I drown, stay where you
are!" With a great effort he got off his stiffly frozen overcoat,
paused for one moment in silent commendation of his soul to God, and,
throwing himself into the waves, struck out for the shore. Abigail
Becker, breast-deep in the surf, awaited him. He was almost within her
reach, when the undertow swept him back. By a mighty exertion she
caught hold of him, bore him in her strong arms out of the water, and,
laying him down by her fire, warmed his chilled blood with copious
draughts of hot tea. The mate, who had watched the rescue, now
followed, and the captain, partially restored, insisted upon aiding him.
As the former neared the shore, the recoiling water baffled him.
Captain Hackett caught hold of him, but the undertow swept them both
away, locked in each other's arms. The brave woman plunged after them,
and, with the strength of a giantess, bore them, clinging to each other,
to the shore, and up to her fire. The five sailors followed in
succession, and were all rescued in the same way.

A few days after, Captain Hackett and his crew were taken off Long Point
by a passing vessel; and Abigail Becker resumed her simple daily duties
without dreaming that she had done anything extraordinary enough to win
for her the world's notice. In her struggle every day for food and
warmth for her children, she had no leisure for the indulgence of self-
congratulation. Like the woman of Scripture, she had only "done what
she could," in the terrible exigency that had broken the dreary monotony
of her life.

It so chanced, however, that a gentleman from Buffalo, E. P. Dorr, who
had, in his early days, commanded a vessel on the lake, found himself,
shortly after, at a small port on the Canada shore, not far from Long
Point Island. Here he met an old shipmate, Captain Davis, whose vessel
had gone ashore at a more favorable point, and who related to him the
circumstances of the wreck of the Conductor. Struck by the account,
Captain Dorr procured a sleigh and drove across the frozen bay to the
shanty of Abigail Becker. He found her with her six children, all
thinly clad and barefooted in the bitter cold. She stood there six feet
or more of substantial womanhood,--not in her stockings, for she had
none,--a veritable daughter of Anak, broad-bosomed, large-limbed, with
great, patient blue eyes, whose very smile had a certain pathos, as if
one saw in it her hard and weary life-experience. She might have passed
for any amiable giantess, or one of those much--developed maids of honor
who tossed Gulliver from hand to hand in the court of Brobdingnag. The
thing that most surprised her visitor was the childlike simplicity of
the woman, her utter unconsciousness of deserving anything for an action
that seemed to her merely a matter of course. When he expressed his
admiration with all the warmth of a generous nature, she only opened her
wide blue eyes still wider with astonishment.

"Well, I don't know," she said, slowly, as if pondering the matter for
the first time,--"I don't know as I did more 'n I'd ought to, nor more'n
I'd do again."

Before Captain Dorr left, he took the measure of her own and her
children's feet, and on his return to Buffalo sent her a box containing
shoes, stockings, and such other comfortable articles of clothing as
they most needed. He published a brief account of his visit to the
heroine of Long Point, which attracted the attention of some members of
the Provincial Parliament, and through their exertions a grant of one
hundred acres of land, on the Canada shore, near Port Rowan, was made to
her. Soon after she was invited to Buffalo, where she naturally excited
much interest. A generous contribution of one thousand dollars, to
stock her farm, was made by the merchants, ship-owners and masters of
the city, and she returned to her family a grateful and, in her own
view, a rich woman.

When the story of her adventure reached New York, the Life-Saving
Benevolent Association sent her a gold medal with an appropriate
inscription, and a request that she would send back a receipt in her own
name. As she did not know how to write, Captain Dorr hit upon the
expedient of having her photograph taken with the medal in her hand, and
sent that in lieu of her autograph.

In a recent letter dictated at Walsingham, where Abigail Becker now
lives,--a widow, cultivating with her own hands her little farm in the
wilderness,--she speaks gratefully of the past and hopefully of the
future. She mentions a message received from Captain Hackett, who she
feared had almost forgotten her, that he was about to make her a visit,
adding with a touch of shrewdness: "After his second shipwreck last
summer, I think likely that I must have recurred very fresh to him."

The strong lake winds now blow unchecked over the sand-hills where once
stood the board shanty of Abigail Becker. But the summer tourist of the
great lakes, who remembers her story, will not fail to give her a place
in his imagination with Perry's battle-line and the Indian heroines of
Cooper and Longfellow. Through her the desolate island of Long Point is
richly dowered with the interest which a brave and generous action gives
to its locality.

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