An Old Town By the Sea | Page 3

close of the seventeenth
century.
Though many of the old landmarks have been swept away by the
fateful hand of time and fire, the town impresses you as a very old town,
especially as you saunter along the streets down by the river. The
worm-eaten wharves, some of them covered by a sparse, unhealthy
beard of grass, and the weather-stained, unoccupied warehouses are
sufficient to satisfy a moderate appetite for antiquity. These deserted
piers and these long rows of empty barracks, with their sarcastic cranes
projecting from the eaves, rather puzzle the stranger. Why this great
preparation for a commercial activity that does not exist, and evidently
had not for years existed? There are no ships lying at the pier-heads;
there are no gangs of stevedores staggering under the heavy cases of
merchandise; here and there is a barge laden down to the bulwarks with
coal, and here and there a square-rigged schooner from Maine
smothered with fragrant planks and clapboards; an imported citizen is
fishing at the end of the wharf, a ruminative freckled son of Drogheda,
in perfect sympathy with the indolent sunshine that seems to be sole
proprietor of these crumbling piles and ridiculous warehouses, from
which even the ghost of prosperity has flown.
Once upon a time, however, Portsmouth carried on an extensive trade
with the West Indies, threatening as a maritime port to eclipse both
Boston and New York. At the windows of these musty counting-rooms
which overlook the river near Spring Market used to stand portly
merchants, in knee breeches and silver shoe-buckles and plum-colored

coats with ruffles at the wrist, waiting for their ships to come up the
Narrows; the cries of stevedores and the chants of sailors at the
windlass used to echo along the shore where all is silence now. For
reasons not worth setting forth, the trade with the Indies abruptly closed,
having ruined as well as enriched many a Portsmouth adventurer. This
explains the empty warehouses and the unused wharves. Portsmouth
remains the interesting widow of a once very lively commerce. I fancy
that few fortunes are either made or lost in Portsmouth nowadays.
Formerly it turned out the best ships, as it did the ablest ship captains,
in the world. There were families in which the love for blue water was
in immemorial trait. The boys were always sailors; "a grey-headed
shipmaster, in each generation, retiring from the quarter-deck to the
homestead, while a boy of fourteen took the hereditary place before the
mast, confronting the salt spray and the gale, which had blasted against
his sire and grandsire." (1. Hawthorne in his introduction to The Scarlet
Letter.) With thousands of miles of sea-line and a score or two of the
finest harbors on the globe, we have adroitly turned over our carrying
trade to foreign nations.
In other days, as I have said, a high maritime spirit was characteristic of
Portsmouth. The town did a profitable business in the war of 1812,
sending out a large fleet of the sauciest small craft on record. A
pleasant story is told of one of these little privateers--the Harlequin,
owned and commanded by Captain Elihu Brown. The Harlequin one
day gave chase to a large ship, which did not seem to have much fight
aboard, and had got it into close quarters, when suddenly the shy
stranger threw open her ports, and proved to be His Majesty's
Ship-of-War Bulwark, seventy-four guns. Poor Captain Brown!
Portsmouth has several large cotton factories and one or two corpulent
breweries; it is a wealthy old town, with a liking for first mortgage
bonds; but its warmest lover will not claim for it the distinction of
being a great mercantile centre. The majority of her young men are
forced to seek other fields to reap, and almost every city in the Union,
and many a city across the sea, can point to some eminent merchant,
lawyer, or what not, as "a Portsmouth boy." Portsmouth even furnished
the late king of the Sandwich Islands, Kekuanaoa, with a prime

minister, and his nankeen Majesty never had a better. The affection
which all these exiles cherish for their birthplace is worthy of remark.
On two occasions--in 1852 and 1873, the two hundred and fiftieth
anniversary of the settlement of Strawberry Bank--the transplanted sons
of Portsmouth were seized with an impulse to return home.
Simultaneously and almost without concerted action, the lines of
pilgrims took up their march from every quarter of the globe, and swept
down with music and banners on the motherly old town.
To come back to the wharves. I do not know of any spot with such a
fascinating air of dreams and idleness about it as the old wharf at the
end of Court Street. The very fact that it was once a noisy, busy place,