Weymouth Historical Society

[No. 3.J WEYMOUTH HISTORICAL SOCIETY. WESSAGUSSET Al~D WEYMOUTH, AN IDSTORICAL ADDBESS BY CHARLES ~,RANOIS ADAMS, JR., DELIVERED AT WEYMOUTH, JULY 4, 1874, ON THE OCCASION OF THE CELEBltA.TION OF THE TWO ~TJ>RED AND FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF THE PERMANENT SETTLEMENT OF THE TOWN. WEYMOUTH IN ITS FIRST TWENTY YEARS, A PAPEB READ BEFOBE THE SOCIETY BY GILBERT NASH, NOVEMBER 1, 1882. WEYMOUTH THIRTY YEARS LATER, A PAPER BEAD BY CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS, BEFORE THE WEYMOUTH HISTORICAL SOCIETY, SEPTEMBER 23, 1904. Pu.BLISHED BY THE WEYMOUTH HISTORICAL SOCIETY. 1905. CONTENTS. WESSAGUSSET AND WEYMOUTH • . 5 WEYMOUTH'S FIRST TWENTY YEARS. 87 WEYMOUTH THIRTY YEARS LATER . 114 INDEX • • . • • . 157 APPENDIX . 164 HISTORICAL ADDRESS BY CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS, JR., JULY 4, 1874. FuLL in sight of the spot where we are now gath ered,- almost at the _foot of King-Oak Hill,-stands that portion of the ancient town of Weymouth, known from .time immemorial as the village of Old Spain. When or why it was first so called is wholly unknown, - scarcely a tradition even remains to suggest to us an origin of the name. None the less Old ·spain well deserved a portion at least of that familiar title, for, next to the town of Plymouth, it is the oldest settle ment in Massachusetts. And when we speak of the oldest settlements in Massachusetts, we speak of com n1unities which may fairly lay claim to a very respecta ble degree of antiquity; not of the greatest, it is true, for all antiquity is relative, and that of America scarcely deserves the name by the side of what En gland has to show; bnt. what is the antiquity of England compared with that of Rome? - and Rome, again, seems young and crude when we speak of Greece; while even those who fought upon the ringing plains of windy Troy are but as prattling children in presence of the hoary age of the Pharaohs. The set tlement of Old Spain and of Weymouth is, therefore, 6 TWO HUNDRED ~ FIFTIETH ancient only as thing, ..A,nerican are ancient; but still two hundred and ,fifty \Y-e&rS of time carry us back to events and men which seem sufficiently remote. When the first European made his home in Old Spain,-when the earliest rude hut was framed on yonder north shore of Phillips Creek,-the modern world in which we live ·was just assuming shape. Few now realize how little of that which makes up the vast accumulated store of human possessions which ·we have inherited from our fathers - which to us is as the air we breathe,-had then existence. The Reformation was then young, Luther and Calvin and Erasmus were men of yester day; the life-and-death struggle with Catholicism still tortured eastern Europe. The thirty years' war in Germany was just commenced, and the youthful Gus tavus Adolphus had yet to win his spurs. The blood of St. Bartholomew was but half a century old, and the murder of Henry IV. was as near- to the men of 1622 as is that of Abraham Lincoln to us. The great Cardinal-Duke was then organizing modern France; Charles I. had not yet ascended the English throne; ·Hampdeu was a young country gentleman, and O~iver Cromwell an unpretending English squire. While men still believed that the sun moved rouncl the earth, Galileo and Kepler were gradually ascertaining those laws which guide the planets in their paths; Bacon was meditating his philosophy; Don Quixote was a newly published work, with a local· reputation; and ·Milton, not yet a Cambridge pensioner, was making his first essays at verse. Shakespeare had died -but six years before, and, indeed, the first edition of his plays did not appear until the very year in which Weymouth was settled. Thus, in 1622, our world of literature, of science, almost of history, was yet to be created. Hardly a single volume of our current English litera ture was then in existence, and people might well con ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS. 7 their Bibles, for, in the English tongue, there was little else to read. Meanwhile the North American continent was an unbroken wilderness, with here and there, few and far between, from the St. Lawrence to the Gulf, scattered specks of struggling civilization, hundreds of leagues apart, dotting the skirts of the green, primeval forest. It was at not the least famous of these scattered specks,-at the neighboring town of Plymouth,-that the history of Weymouth opened on a day towards the latter part of the month of May, in the year 1622. The· little colony had then been established in its new home some seventeen months. They had just struggled through their second winter, and now, sadly reduced in number, with supplies wholly exhausted, and sorely distressed in spirit, the Pilgrims were anxiously look-· ing for the arrival of some ship from England. The Mayflower had left them, starting on her homeward voyage a year_ before, and once only during their weary sojourn, in the month of the previous November, had these homesick wanderers on the sandy Plymouth shor~s been cheered_ by any tidings from the living world. On this particular day, however, the whole settlement was alive with excitement. There had been great trouble with the neighboring Indians, and the magistrates were on the point of delivering one of them up to the emissaries .of his sachem to be put to death, when suddenly a boat was seen to cross the mouth of the bay and disappear behind the next head land.1 There had been rumors of trouble between the English and the French, and the first idea of the set tlers was that some connection existed between the sachem's emissaries and those on board the boat. The delivery of the prisoner was consequently deferred. At the same time, a shot was fired as a signal, in re- 1 Winslow's Good Newes; Young's Chron. of Pilg., p. 291. 8 TWO HUNDRED A.ND FIFTIETH sponse to which the boat changed her course, and came into the bay. When at last it touched the shore it was found to contain· ten persons, who announced them selves as being in the service of one Mr. Thomas Wes ton, a London merchant, well known to the elders of Plymouth. They were- cordially welcomed with a salute of three volleys of musketry, and thus finished a somewhat dangerous voyage.1 It appeared they had been dispatched from England some months before, on board a vessel named the Sparrow, which belonged to lfr. Weston, and was bound to the fishing grounds off the coast of Maine : they were, in fact, the forerunners of a larger party which Weston was organizing in London, with the· design of establishing a trading set tlement somewhere on the shores of Massachusetts Bay. They brought with them letters to the Plymouth magistrates, but they were wholly unprovided with either food or outfit. The Sparrow was one of the fishing fleet which yearly visited those waters, and ap parently Weston's plan had been for these people to leave her near the Damariscove Islands, and thence to :fiild their way by sea to Plymouth, examining the coast as they went along with a view to settlement. There was something curiously reckless in the methods of those old ex~rers. Weston himself afterwards sought to reach Ply~outh in the same way, and encountered . .. - many strange adventures by sea and land before he got there. In the present case his messengers do not ap pear either to have been s~afaring men, or _especially selected for the work they had to do. It was not until they were actually leaving the Sparrow for their voyage of one hundred and fifty miles in the North Atlantic that they seemed to realize their own utter helplessness, and the extreme vagueness of their errand. Fortunately for them, however, the mate of 1 Phinehas Pratt's Nanative; IV. Mass. Hist. Soc. Coll., v. 4, p. 478. ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS. 9 that vessel was a daring fellow, and volunteered to venture his life as their pilot. They accordingly set sail in th-eir shallop, skirting along the coast. T_hey touched at the Isle of Shoals a11d at Cape Ann, and thence they ran for Boston harbor, where they passed some four or five days exploring. They selected the southerly side of the bay as the best place for the pro posed settlement, as in these parts there seemed to be the· fewest natives, and made a bargain with the sachem Aberdecest for what land they needed ;1 but, getting uneasy at the smallness of their number, they determined to go to Plym.011th, in hopes of getting news of the larger enterprise. Disappointed in this, they landed to await events. The shallop, accompa nied by a Plymouth boat in search of supplies, returned to the fishing fleet, and its seven passengers were, for the time being, incorporated with the colony, and fared no worse than others. · Meanwhile Mr. Weston had organized his larger ex pedition, and it was already on the sea, having sailed from London about the 1st of April. Thus Thomas Weston played a very prominent part in the early set tlement of Weymouth, as he had already done in that of Plymouth. He was always called a merchant, but in fact be was a pure sixteenth century adventurer of the Smith and Raleigh stamp,-a man whose brain teemed with schemes for the deriving of sudden gain from the settlement of the new continent. We first get sight of him in Leyden in connection with the Pilgrim fathers,..:_ the treasurer, the representative, the active, moving spirit of the company of Merchant Adventurers of_ London, who then· were looking for the material with which to effect a settlement within the Virginia patent.

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