Evening Star Newspaper, June 8, 1930, Page 77

Fiction Books PART 7. he Sunday Stad [raos Magasine WASHINGTON, D. C., JUNE 8, 1930. Puzzles 24 PAGES. Salem Relives Days of Glory With Colorful Ceremony This Ancient Town by the Sea on Thursday Will Re-enact the Landing of the Arbella—Architectural Masterpieces of Other Years Recall the Glory of Old Salem, One of World’s Great Ports. N Thursday, June 12, 300 years after the event, the Arbella will again sail into Salem Harbor, and Gov. John Winthrop and his colonists will alight, thus commemorating three centuries of history in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. It was not at Boston, but at Salem, that this history began, for Salem was earlier settled and was originally the port for the colony. So the reproduction of Winthrop’s ship, the Arbella, will be seen first in Salem Harbor, before it is , taken to Boston, and the waterside of this sleepy old town will, for a day at least, be crowded with people, lively with color, gay with music and flags and guns, as Salem re-enacts, in pageant, that moment in American history when the new Bay Colony governor and charter arrived on these shores, and the Puritans started in to lay the foundations of democracy in New England. The pageant will last all day, and will include both land and water spectacles, with the com- ing of the Arbella, of course, the chief event. On her decks will be many descendants of the very people who originally stood there and watched a wild, rocky little spit of land, where a few rough houses huddled, draw nearer and nearer. Salem is making provision to handle 300,000 spectators during the day. But she is also preparing to entertain many visitors all Summer, and to furnish special exhibits in keeping with the year. There will be a hos- pitality center established in a seventeenth century house, there will be a reproduction of a Colonial store in full operation, and there will be an old-fashioned garden, craft shops and other reproductions of Colonial village life. The initial pageantry on June 12 will leave an echo through the entire Summer. Undoubtedly it will be peculiarly thrilling to stand on the Salem waterfront and see the quaint and tiny Arbella come sailing in, a symbol of that small beginning 300 years ago of the vast Nation of today. But it is always thrilling to stand in Salem at any time; for built into its walls and whispering in its very air are perpetual reminders of the birth of this republic. SUPPOSE you were taking one of those ase sociation tests, where a word is given you, and you then put down, instantly, the first word it suggests to you; and suppose the word given you was “Salem.” What would you write down? The vast majority of Americans would probably write “witches.” A literate minority might write “Hawthorne.” A few might put down “ships.” Still fewer “Samuel McIntire” (and they would be the architects). Probably not one in a million would put down “J. P. Morgan & Co.” No, the witches would win in a walk. That tragic decade at the end of the seventeenth century when Salem got touched by the strange witcheraft fever which was burning in Europe (witcheraft was not a Salem phenomenon, nor even a Puritan phenomenon; it was European), troubled the brooding Puritan conscience ever after, and threw a sort of lurid light over Salem in all our histories, so that the real con- tributions of this extraordinary little town to the life of the Nation are not generally em- phasized, while its one early and accidental blunder is never forgotten. Salem is, and always was, a seaport. It is now, to be sure, an almost totally abandoned one, but the approach by rail or road is through the back yard. Jutting into the bay between Marblehead and Beverly, flanked by tidal rivers and backed by marshes, the little peninsula originally called by its Indian name of Naum- keag was not capable of supporting a large population, and the population it did support had to get about by water. It was settled in 1626, under leadership of the Pilgrims from Plymouth, as a fishing station, but the Pilgrims were poor fishermen. In 1628 the Puritan, John Endicott, arrived with a new charter, to take over the colony, and in the year 1,500 settlers came from Eng- land. Among them was a certain Francis Hig- ginson, of St. John’s College, Cambridge, who was made the first teacher of the town, by popular election. The name is still good on a check anywhere in these United States. He lived but a year, and was followed by Roger Wil- liams, who was too liberal for Salem and was soon driven out. By 1633 it was said that almost every family BY WALTER PRICHARD EATON, Noted Author, Lecturer and Critic. Illustrated by E. H. Suydam. The Pierce-Johonnot-Nichols House. It is called the finest wooden residence in America, and one day will become a museum. in town had “a water horse or two,” meaning boats or canoes. These were used to get across to Marblehead, Beverly and more distant places. In the early days travel to Boston was by sea. Salem was the port of entry also for the great tide of Puritan migration which swept into New England, and this tide of migration, we are only too likely to forget, came largely from rural England, which had not yet yielded to the new fashions set by the court of James and Charles, and hence was Elizabethan in temper. These Puritans may have been stern and narrow, but they were also bold, adventurous and independent, full of vitality and initiative. The original Salem was an Elizabethan town— overhanging second stories, peaked gables, narrow streets, but with pine sheathing in- stead of half- timbered con- struction. The houses were close to the water, the docks were all important and every man, woman and child in the place could handle an oar and probably a sail N 1636 a ship of 129 tons was built The Old Witch House. in Salem. Four years later one of 300 tons was constructed. Two years later another was built, and Salem began to talk about becoming the seat of provincial government. It certainly was becoming a seat of commerce. The North River was navigable to ships of that period as far in- land as the present Peabody, and anybody who wanted to go into commerce could have his own wharf in his own back garden. Little is left, of course, of that early town. There is, to be sure, the famous House of Seven Gables (we once knew a man in Salem who had seven daughters, and named his dwelling the House of Seven Gables), but it has been “reconstructed” into what may or may not be its original aspect. Henry James refers to it as “the weak, vague iomicillary presence at the end of the lane,” which “may have ‘been’ (in our poor parlance) the idea of the admirable book.” In the grounds of the Essex Institute is a much better, though somewhatlater house, and there is the old Witch House, so call- ed (1635), as well as a few other relics. But the bulk of old Salem now standing dates from th4 eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, This Salem was built on the foundation of the old, with the proceeds of its commerce. Philip English, the first great shipping merchant of the Colonies, built his “great house” (a sketch of it is preserved in the Essex Institute) in 1685, It still followed the Elizabethan fashion, for in the isolation of the New World society fashions changed much more slowly than in the mother country. But what is left of the Benjamin Pickman house (1743) shows the new style al- ready come in, especially in the interior wood- work. Pickman made his fortune selling dried codfish to the West Indies, and he was so far from being ashamed of his trade that he had set at each end of his stairway a carved and gilded codfish, not only in grateful acknowledg= ment of the source of his fortune, but by way of rebuking, it is said, certain aristocratic pree tensions in his family. You may still see one of these fish in the Essex Institute. The stairs themselves are now built into a house in New= port. Philip English (whose money did not enable him to escape temporary banishment from Salem during the witchecraft flurry) owned a wharf, a warehouse, 21 vessels and 14 buildings in the town. He traded as far away as Spain, Shortly after his day one Richard Derby ap=- pears on the records as master of the ‘“slope Ranger, on a voyage to Cadiz and Malaga,” with a cargo of fish to be exchanged for fruit, oil and handkerchiefs. The Ranger later ap- pears as a ‘skoner”—the schooner being & Gloucester invention. Derby retired in 1761, and built himself & fine house, which still stands in a slum quarter of the town. His son, Elias Hasket Derby, starting with a fortune, carried on the trade, and at the outbreak of the Revolution was rated already as a very rich man. Much of his money he made feeding and supporting the French colonies during the seven years’ war, which for some quaint reason seems not to have been re« garded as treasonable in a British Colonial, but rather a sporting thing to do. The risks were great, the gains greater, and the success= ful conduct of the trade depended on fast ships and fine seamanship. i DURING the Revolution little Salem, under Derby's leadership, furnished and equipped 158 privateers, carrying 2,000 funs and manned by 6,000 men, equal to the entire population of the city. At the end of the war, naturally, Salem found itself with a large fleet, much toa large for coastwise trade, and a large staff of skippers and seamen trained to adventure and daring navigation. Besides the ships and sea< men, the little town possessed, in Derby and others, owners and merchants of imagination and initiative. She was all set for great things. And great things came with a rush. The Derbys, the Crowinshields and the rest senk their ships around Good Hope, to the ®a® Indies, and long before the East Indian traders knew the names of Philadelphia, New York, Baltimore or Boston, they knew well the name of Salem. Derby's famous ship, the Grand Turk, in 1784 was the first American merchant- man to round the Cape of Good Hope, but she was soon followed by many others, and the wharves and warehouses of little Salem town began to pile up with merchandise of great value, and the streets to rumble with carts and to echo with saw and hammer as the mnew wealth was employed to build new and larger and Iner houses. Silks from India and China, tea, gum copal from Zanzibar, cotton from Bombay, wines from Madeira and pepper from Sumatra were some of the prizes, not to mention porcelain from China (much of which is now collected under the name of Lowestoft, though it never saw England) and lacquer furniture and other exotic household adornments. For some tima pepper was a highly sought and profitable cargo. In- 1795 Capt. Jonathan Carnes made a secret voyage to Sumatra, taking with him brandy, gin, iron, tobacco and dried fish, and. hoping to find wild pepper on the north coast, where he had heard it grew. He was gone 18 months, and returned with a load of pepper which netted 700 per cent on the voyage. A second trip yielded 150,000 pounds of pepper. After that rival captains ran him down and discovered the source of his supply, and in the next 50 years about 200 shiploads of peppey came into Salem, being distributed through thé