Israel Potter | Page 5

many
parts of his career, a singular patience and mildness--was obliged to look round for other
means of livelihood than clearing out a farm for himself in the wilderness. A party of
royal surveyors were at this period surveying the unsettled regions bordering the
Connecticut river to its source. At fifteen shillings per month, he engaged himself to this
party as assistant chain-bearer, little thinking that the day was to come when he should
clank the king's chains in a dungeon, even as now he trailed them a free ranger of the
woods. It was midwinter; the land was surveyed upon snow-shoes. At the close of the day,
fires were kindled with dry hemlock, a hut thrown up, and the party ate and slept.
Paid off at last, Israel bought a gun and ammunition, and turned hunter. Deer, beaver, etc.,
were plenty. In two or three months he had many skins to show. I suppose it never
entered his mind that he was thus qualifying himself for a marksman of men. But thus
were tutored those wonderful shots who did such execution at Bunker's Hill; these, the
hunter-soldiers, whom Putnam bade wait till the white of the enemy's eye was seen.
With the result of his hunting he purchased a hundred acres of land, further down the
river, toward the more settled parts; built himself a log hut, and in two summers, with his
own hands, cleared thirty acres for sowing. In the winter seasons he hunted and trapped.
At the end of the two years, he sold back his land--now much improved--to the original
owner, at an advance of fifty pounds. He conveyed his cash and furs to Charlestown, on
the Connecticut (sometimes called No. 4), where he trafficked them away for Indian

blankets, pigments, and other showy articles adapted to the business of a trader among
savages. It was now winter again. Putting his goods on a hand-sled, he started towards
Canada, a peddler in the wilderness, stopping at wigwams instead of cottages. One
fancies that, had it been summer, Israel would have travelled with a wheelbarrow, and so
trundled his wares through the primeval forests, with the same indifference as porters roll
their barrows over the flagging of streets. In this way was bred that fearless self-reliance
and independence which conducted our forefathers to national freedom.
This Canadian trip proved highly successful. Selling his glittering goods at a great
advance, he received in exchange valuable peltries and furs at a corresponding reduction.
Returning to Charlestown, he disposed of his return cargo again at a very fine profit. And
now, with a light heart and a heavy purse, he resolved to visit his sweetheart and parents,
of whom, for three years, he had had no tidings.
They were not less astonished than delighted at his reappearance; he had been numbered
with the dead. But his love still seemed strangely coy; willing, but yet somehow
mysteriously withheld. The old intrigues were still on foot. Israel soon discovered, that
though rejoiced to welcome the return of the prodigal son--so some called him--his father
still remained inflexibly determined against the match, and still inexplicably
countermined his wooing. With a dolorous heart he mildly yielded to what seemed his
fatality; and more intrepid in facing peril for himself, than in endangering others by
maintaining his rights (for he was now one-and-twenty), resolved once more to retreat,
and quit his blue hills for the bluer billows.
A hermitage in the forest is the refuge of the narrow-minded misanthrope; a hammock on
the ocean is the asylum for the generous distressed. The ocean brims with natural griefs
and tragedies; and into that watery immensity of terror, man's private grief is lost like a
drop.
Travelling on foot to Providence, Rhode Island, Israel shipped on board a sloop, bound
with lime to the West Indies. On the tenth day out, the vessel caught fire, from water
communicating with the lime. It was impossible to extinguish the flames. The boat was
hoisted out, but owing to long exposure to the sun, it needed continual bailing to keep it
afloat. They had only time to put in a firkin of butter and a ten-gallon keg of water. Eight
in number, the crew entrusted themselves to the waves, in a leaky tub, many leagues from
land. As the boat swept under the burning bowsprit, Israel caught at a fragment of the
flying-jib, which sail had fallen down the stay, owing to the charring, nigh the deck, of
the rope which hoisted it. Tanned with the smoke, and its edge blackened with the fire,
this bit of canvass helped them bravely on their way. Thanks to kind Providence, on the
second day they were picked up by a Dutch ship, bound from Eustatia to Holland. The
castaways were humanely received,