An Old Town By the Sea | Page 2

a deeper
motive, led him to examine the neighboring shore lines. With eight of
his men in a small boat, a ship's yawl, he skirted the coast from
Penobscot Bay to Cape Cod, keeping his eye open. This keeping his
eye open was a peculiarity of the little captain; possibly a family trait. It
was Smith who really discovered the Isles of Shoals, exploring in
person those masses of bleached rock--those "isles assez hautes," of
which the French navigator Pierre de Guast, Sieur de Monts, had
caught a bird's-eye glimpse through the twilight in 1605. Captain Smith
christened the group Smith's Isles, a title which posterity, with singular
persistence of ingratitude, has ignored. It was a tardy sense of justice
that expressed itself a few years ago in erecting on Star Island a simple
marble shaft to the memory of JOHN SMITH--the multitudinous!
Perhaps this long delay is explained by a natural hesitation to label a
monument so ambiguously.
The modern Jason, meanwhile, was not without honor in his own
country, whatever may have happened to him in his own house, for the
poet George Wither addressed a copy of pompous verses "To his
Friend Captain Smith, upon his Description of New England." "Sir," he
says--
"Sir: your Relations I haue read: which shew Ther's reason I should
honor them and you: And if their meaning I have vnderstood, I dare to
censure thus: Your Project's good; And may (if follow'd) doubtlesse
quit the paine With honour, pleasure and a trebble gaine; Beside the
benefit that shall arise To make more happy our Posterities."
The earliest map of this portion of our seaboard was prepared by Smith
and laid before Prince Charles, who asked to give the country a name.
He christened it New England. In that remarkable map the site of
Portsmouth is call Hull, and Kittery and York are known as Boston.

It was doubtless owing to Captain John Smith's representation on his
return to England that the Laconia Company selected the banks of the
Piscataqua for their plantation. Smith was on an intimate footing with
Sir Ferinand Gorges, who, five years subsequently, made a tour of
inspection along the New England coast, in company with John Mason,
then Governor of Newfoundland. One of the results of this summer
cruise is the town of Portsmouth, among whose leafy ways, and into
some of whose old-fashioned houses, I purpose to take the reader, if he
have an idle hour on his hands. Should we meet the flitting ghost of
some old-time worthy, on the staircase or at a lonely street corner, the
reader must be prepared for it.

II. ALONG THE WATER SIDE
IT is not supposable that the early settlers selected the site of their
plantation on account of its picturesqueness. They were influenced
entirely by the lay of the land, its nearness and easy access to the sea,
and the secure harbor it offered to their fishing-vessels; yet they could
not have chosen a more beautiful spot had beauty been the sole
consideration. The first settlement was made at Odiorne's Point--the
Pilgrims' Rock of New Hampshire; there the Manor, or Mason's Hall,
was built by the Laconia Company in 1623. It was not until 1631 that
the Great House was erected by Humphrey Chadborn on Strawberry
Bank. Mr. Chadborn, consciously or unconsciously, sowed a seed from
which a city has sprung.
The town of Portsmouth stretches along the south bank of the
Piscataqua, about two miles from the sea as the crow flies--three miles
following the serpentine course of the river. The stream broadens
suddenly at this point, and at flood tide, lying without a ripple in a
basin formed by the interlocked islands and the mainland, it looks more
like an island lake than a river. To the unaccustomed eye there is no
visible outlet. Standing on one of the wharves at the foot of State Street
or Court Street, a stranger would at first scarcely suspect the contiguity
of the ocean. A little observation, however, would show him that he
was in a seaport. The rich red rust on the gables and roofs of ancient

buildings looking seaward would tell him that. There is a fitful saline
flavor in the air, and if while he gazed a dense white fog should come
rolling in, like a line of phantom breakers, he would no longer have any
doubts.
It is of course the oldest part of the town that skirts the river, though
few of the notable houses that remain are to be found there. Like all
New England settlements, Portsmouth was built of wood, and has been
subjected to extensive conflagrations. You rarely come across a brick
building that is not shockingly modern. The first house of the kind was
erected by Richard Wibird towards the