Thoughts from Crow Cottage (My Main Blog.)

crowbelle's Diaryland Diary

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Early Visitor Not Impressed

Early Visitor to Cape Ann and Salem Was Not Impressed

by Jim McAllister, �Essex County Chronicles�


"Another Columbus Day, and a beautiful one at that, has come and gone, and it�s unlikely many of us gave more than a passing thought to the exploits of the famed explorer.

Part of the reason for our ennui may be the fact that the America Columbus discovered was, and is, so geographically and culturally removed from New England. Perhaps locally we should designate one day out of each year as �Smith Day� in honor of another explorer, John Smith (1580-1631), the man who not only named New England, but who also brought the glories and possibilities of this part of the New World to the attention of 17th century England.

It's probably safe to say that no one deserves more credit for the eventual colonization of our North Shore than John Smith.

In 1614, the perpetually restless adventurer left England to explore the North American coast north of Virginia. Smith had been an important figure in the settling of Jamestown in Virginia in 1607 and, as leader of that colony, he put it, however briefly, on a stable footing. Tradition has it that, thanks to Pocahontas, the adolescent daughter of the great Chief Powhatan, Smith�s life was spared after his capture by local Native Americans. He returned to England a short time following that incident.

Smith�s return voyage in 1614 took his party to the coast of Maine and then south to what is now Massachusetts. The Englishman was not the first explorer to survey the area; he had been preceded by Martin Ring, Bartholomew Gosnold and George Weymouth, all of whom had separately visited the coast a decade earlier. So had the noted French adventurer, Samuel de Champlain.

Champlain had stopped in Gloucester in 1605 to replenish his food and water supplies. He stayed only a short time, as he wasn�t sure he could trust the Native Americans whom he encountered on his visit. Gloucester Harbor appears on the Frenchman�s map of Massachusetts Bay � deemed to be �reasonably accurate� by local historian James Duncan Phillips � as �Le Beau Port.�

But it was John Smith�s map, based on observations made on his 1614 visit to the area, that Phillips calls �the masterpiece of them all.� On it, Smith fairly faithfully depicts the coastline from Maine to Cape Cod, including many of the islands in Massachusetts Bay. The names that appeared on that map were chosen by Smith himself or by the young Prince Charles of England. Beverly is called �Bastable,�, Salem is �Bristow,� and Portsmouth, New Hampshire appears as �Boston.�

Prince Charles bestowed a certain level of local immortality upon himself by naming the river that bisects Boston the Charles, and naming Cape Ann for his mother, the queen.

Smith had originally called the latter �Tragabigzanda� in honor of a lovely woman who had befriended him when Smith was enslaved by a Turk during his brief career as a soldier of fortune. His experiences in that colorful period of his life also inspired Smith � who, while fighting in Transylvania, according to legend, took on three Turks mano a mano and decapitated each of them � to name what are now Sraitsmouth, Thacher�s and Milk Islands off the coast of Cape Ann. �Turks� Heads.�

Even more important than Smith�s map was the publication of his �Description of New England� in London in 1616. In this brief work, Smith describes the many local landmarks. The sandy shore of �Angoam� (now Ipswich), he notes, is hardly ideal as a port but offers many thriving �corne fields and delightfull groves.� �Naimkeck� to the southeast, now Salem, he found to be rockier than Angoam but �not much inferior.�

Nearby islands, Smith observed, boasted an abundance of �corne, groves, mulberries, salvage gardens, and good harbors.� He praised the area for its bountiful and varied fish and shellfish stock and for its vast quantities of timber. In his pamphlet, Smith estimated the Native American population on the North Shore to be about three thousand.

Between 1616 and his death in 1631, Smith continued to write about the New World. His �Generall Historie of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles� (1624) was described by Rockport historian Marshall W. S. Swan as a �combination Baedeker and bible� for many early North Shore settlers and an inspiration to many of those who followed in the colonization of Massachusetts.�

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I have lived in quite a few places, including W. Medford, MA, Marblehead, MA, Boston, MA, Arlington, VA, Hyattsville, MD, Bloomington, IN, Marblehead, MA (again), Salem, MA, Marblehead, MA (again!), Salem, MA (again), Marblehead (again for the last time!), and Salem, MA (for the last and present time). In all these places, the roar and smell of the Atlantic Ocean has always been embedded in my memory, and when I was far away from it, I yearned to be near it. When I was near it, I took it for granted, but still loved it.

I don�t think I ever want to be far from this dear Ocean again for as long as I live in this lifetime. In the next lifetime, well, maybe I�ll settle for living on the edge of the North Sea, preferably in a little fishing town called Whitby in North Yorkshire.

But for now, I am happy to live here in this hub of history, in a place where the ghosts of our ancestors haunt the old cobblestone streets still, and stories of the old days abound. I love it here. Even if John Smith wasn�t quite so enthralled with it way back then.

Cheers.

Bex

12:47 pm - 18 October 2004

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