Israel Potter by Herman Melville

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ISRAEL POTTER

His Fifty Years of Exile

BY HERMAN MELVILLE

AUTHOR OF "TYPEE," "OMOO," ETC.

1855

Dedication

TO HIS HIGHNESS THE Bunker-Hill Monument

Biography, in its purer form, confined to the ended lives of the true
and brave, may be held the fairest meed of human virtue--one given and
received in entire disinterestedness--since neither can the biographer
hope for acknowledgment from the subject, nor the subject at all avail
himself of the biographical distinction conferred.

Israel Potter well merits the present tribute--a private of Bunker Hill,
who for his faithful services was years ago promoted to a still deeper
privacy under the ground, with a posthumous pension, in default of any
during life, annually paid him by the spring in ever-new mosses and
sward.

I am the more encouraged to lay this performance at the feet of your
Highness, because, with a change in the grammatical person, it
preserves, almost as in a reprint, Israel Potter's autobiographical
story. Shortly after his return in infirm old age to his native land, a
little narrative of his adventures, forlornly published on sleazy gray
paper, appeared among the peddlers, written, probably, not by himself,
but taken down from his lips by another. But like the crutch-marks of
the cripple by the Beautiful Gate, this blurred record is now out of
print. From a tattered copy, rescued by the merest chance from the
rag-pickers, the present account has been drawn, which, with the
exception of some expansions, and additions of historic and personal
details, and one or two shiftings of scene, may, perhaps, be not unfitly
regarded something in the light of a dilapidated old tombstone
retouched.

Well aware that in your Highness' eyes the merit of the story must be in
its general fidelity to the main drift of the original narrative, I
forbore anywhere to mitigate the hard fortunes of my hero; and
particularly towards the end, though sorely tempted, durst not
substitute for the allotment of Providence any artistic recompense of
poetical justice; so that no one can complain of the gloom of my closing
chapters more profoundly than myself.

Such is the work, and such, the man, that I have the honor to present to
your Highness. That the name here noted should not have appeared in the
volumes of Sparks, may or may not be a matter for astonishment; but
Israel Potter seems purposely to have waited to make his, popular advent
under the present exalted patronage, seeing that your Highness,
according to the definition above, may, in the loftiest sense, be deemed
the Great Biographer: the national commemorator of such of the anonymous
privates of June 17, 1775, who may never have received other requital
than the solid reward of your granite.

Your Highness will pardon me, if, with the warmest ascriptions on this
auspicious occasion, I take the liberty to mingle my hearty
congratulations on the recurrence of the anniversary day we celebrate,
wishing your Highness (though indeed your Highness be somewhat
prematurely gray) many returns of the same, and that each of its
summer's suns may shine as brightly on your brow as each winter snow
shall lightly rest on the grave of Israel Potter.

Your Highness' Most devoted and obsequious,

THE EDITOR.

JUNE 17th, 1854.

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER

I. The birthplace of Israel

II. The youthful adventures of Israel

III. Israel goes to the wars; and reaching Bunker Hill in time to be of
service there, soon after is forced to extend his travels across the sea
into the enemy's land

IV. Further wanderings of the Refugee, with some account of a good
knight of Brentford who befriended him

V. Israel in the Lion's Den

VI. Israel makes the acquaintance of certain secret friends of America,
one of them being the famous author of the "Diversions of Purley." These
despatch him on a sly errand across the Channel

VII. After a curious adventure upon the Pont Neuf, Israel enters the
presence of the renowned sage, Dr. Franklin, whom he finds right
learnedly and multifariously employed

VIII. Which has something to say about Dr. Franklin and the Latin
Quarter

IX. Israel is initiated into the mysteries of lodging-houses in the
Latin Quarter

X. Another adventurer appears upon the scene

XI. Paul Jones in a reverie

XII. Recrossing the Channel, Israel returns to the Squire's abode--His
adventures there

XIII. His escape from the house, with various adventures following

XIV. In which Israel is sailor under two flags, and in three ships, and
all in one night

XV. They sail as far as the Crag of Ailsa

XVI. They look in at Carrickfergus, and descend on Whitehaven

XVII. They call at the Earl of Selkirk's, and afterwards fight the
ship-of-war Drake

XVIII. The Expedition that sailed from Groix

XIX. They fight the Serapis.

XX. The Shuttle

XXI. Samson among the Philistines

XXII. Something further of Ethan Allen; with Israel's flight towards the
wilderness

XXIII. Israel in Egypt

XXIV. Continued

XXV. In the City of Dis

XXVI Forty-five years

XXVII. Requiescat in pace

ISRAEL POTTER

Fifty Years of Exile

CHAPTER I.

THE BIRTHPLACE OF ISRAEL.

The traveller who at the present day is content to travel in the good
old Asiatic style, neither rushed along by a locomotive, nor dragged by
a stage-coach; who is willing to enjoy hospitalities at far-scattered
farmhouses, instead of paying his bill at an inn; who is not to be
frightened by any amount of loneliness, or to be deterred by the
roughest roads or the highest hills; such a traveller in the eastern
part of Berkshire, Massachusetts, will find ample food for poetic
reflection in the singular scenery of a country, which, owing to the
ruggedness of the soil and its lying out of the track of all public
conveyances, remains almost as unknown to the general tourist as the
interior of Bohemia.

Travelling northward from the township of Otis, the road leads for
twenty or thirty miles towards Windsor, lengthwise upon that long broken
spur of heights which the Green Mountains of Vermont send into
Massachusetts. For nearly the whole of the distance, you have the
continual sensation of being upon some terrace in the moon. The feeling
of the plain or the valley is never yours; scarcely the feeling of the
earth. Unless by a sudden precipitation of the road you find yourself
plunging into some gorge, you pass on, and on, and on, upon the crests
or slopes of pastoral mountains, while far below, mapped out in its
beauty, the valley of the Housatonie lies endlessly along at your feet.
Often, as your horse gaining some lofty level tract, flat as a table,
trots gayly over the almost deserted and sodded road, and your admiring
eye sweeps the broad landscape beneath, you seem to be Bootes driving in
heaven. Save a potato field here and there, at long intervals, the whole
country is either in wood or pasture. Horses, cattle and sheep are the
principal inhabitants of these mountains. But all through the year lazy
columns of smoke, rising from the depths of the forest, proclaim the
presence of that half-outlaw, the charcoal-burner; while in early spring
added curls of vapor show that the maple sugar-boiler is also at work.
But as for farming as a regular vocation, there is not much of it here.
At any rate, no man by that means accumulates a fortune from this thin
and rocky soil, all whose arable parts have long since been nearly
exhausted.

Yet during the first settlement of the country, the region was not
unproductive. Here it was that the original settlers came, acting upon
the principle well known to have regulated their choice of site, namely,
the high land in preference to the low, as less subject to the
unwholesome miasmas generated by breaking into the rich valleys and
alluvial bottoms of primeval regions. By degrees, however, they quitted
the safety of this sterile elevation, to brave the dangers of richer
though lower fields. So that, at the present day, some of those mountain
townships present an aspect of singular abandonment. Though they have
never known aught but peace and health, they, in one lesser aspect at
least, look like countries depopulated by plague and war. Every mile or
two a house is passed untenanted. The strength of the frame-work of
these ancient buildings enables them long to resist the encroachments of
decay. Spotted gray and green with the weather-stain, their timbers seem
to have lapsed back into their woodland original, forming part now of
the general picturesqueness of the natural scene. They are of
extraordinary size, compared with modern farmhouses. One peculiar
feature is the immense chimney, of light gray stone, perforating the
middle of the roof like a tower.

On all sides are seen the tokens of ancient industry. As stone abounds
throughout these mountains, that material was, for fences, as ready to
the hand as wood, besides being much more durable. Consequently the
landscape is intersected in all directions with walls of uncommon
neatness and strength.

The number and length of these walls is not more surprising than the
size of some of the blocks comprising them. The very Titans seemed to
have been at work. That so small an army as the first settlers must
needs have been, should have taken such wonderful pains to enclose so
ungrateful a soil; that they should have accomplished such herculean
undertakings with so slight prospect of reward; this is a consideration
which gives us a significant hint of the temper of the men of the
Revolutionary era.

Nor could a fitter country be found for the birthplace of the devoted
patriot, Israel Potter.

To this day the best stone-wall builders, as the best wood-choppers,
come from those solitary mountain towns; a tall, athletic, and hardy
race, unerring with the axe as the Indian with the tomahawk; at
stone-rolling, patient as Sisyphus, powerful as Samson.

In fine clear June days, the bloom of these mountains is beyond
expression delightful. Last visiting these heights ere she vanishes,
Spring, like the sunset, flings her sweetest charms upon them. Each tuft
of upland grass is musked like a bouquet with perfume. The balmy breeze
swings to and fro like a censer. On one side the eye follows for the
space of an eagle's flight, the serpentine mountain chains, southwards
from the great purple dome of Taconic--the St. Peter's of these
hills--northwards to the twin summits of Saddleback, which is the
two-steepled natural cathedral of Berkshire; while low down to the west
the Housatonie winds on in her watery labyrinth, through charming
meadows basking in the reflected rays from the hill-sides. At this
season the beauty of every thing around you populates the loneliness of
your way. You would not have the country more settled if you could.
Content to drink in such loveliness at all your senses, the heart
desires no company but Nature.

With what rapture you behold, hovering over some vast hollow of the
hills, or slowly drifting at an immense height over the far sunken
Housatonie valley, some lordly eagle, who in unshared exaltation looks
down equally upon plain and mountain. Or you behold a hawk sallying from
some crag, like a Rhenish baron of old from his pinnacled castle, and
darting down towards the river for his prey. Or perhaps, lazily gliding
about in the zenith, this ruffian fowl is suddenly beset by a crow, who
with stubborn audacity pecks at him, and, spite of all his bravery,
finally persecutes him back to his stronghold. The otherwise dauntless
bandit, soaring at his topmost height, must needs succumb to this sable
image of death. Nor are there wanting many smaller and less famous fowl,
who without contributing to the grandeur, yet greatly add to the beauty
of the scene. The yellow-bird flits like a winged jonquil here and
there; like knots of violets the blue-birds sport in clusters upon the
grass; while hurrying from the pasture to the grove, the red robin seems
an incendiary putting torch to the trees. Meanwhile the air is vocal
with their hymns, and your own soul joys in the general joy. Like a
stranger in an orchestra, you cannot help singing yourself when all
around you raise such hosannas.

But in autumn, those gay northerners, the birds, return to their
southern plantations. The mountains are left bleak and sere. Solitude
settles down upon them in drizzling mists. The traveller is beset, at
perilous turns, by dense masses of fog. He emerges for a moment into
more penetrable air; and passing some gray, abandoned house, sees the
lofty vapors plainly eddy by its desolate door; just as from the plain
you may see it eddy by the pinnacles of distant and lonely heights. Or,
dismounting from his frightened horse, he leads him down some scowling
glen, where the road steeply dips among grim rocks, only to rise as
abruptly again; and as he warily picks his way, uneasy at the menacing
scene, he sees some ghost-like object looming through the mist at the
roadside; and wending towards it, beholds a rude white stone, uncouthly
inscribed, marking the spot where, some fifty or sixty years ago, some
farmer was upset in his wood-sled, and perished beneath the load.

In winter this region is blocked up with snow. Inaccessible and
impassable, those wild, unfrequented roads, which in August are
overgrown with high grass, in December are drifted to the arm-pit with
the white fleece from the sky. As if an ocean rolled between man and
man, intercommunication is often suspended for weeks and weeks.

Such, at this day, is the country which gave birth to our hero:
prophetically styled Israel by the good Puritans, his parents, since,
for more than forty years, poor Potter wandered in the wild wilderness
of the world's extremest hardships and ills.

How little he thought, when, as a boy, hunting after his father's stray
cattle among these New England hills he himself like a beast should be
hunted through half of Old England, as a runaway rebel. Or, how could he
ever have dreamed, when involved in the autumnal vapors of these
mountains, that worse bewilderments awaited him three thousand miles
across the sea, wandering forlorn in the coal-foes of London. But so it
was destined to be. This little boy of the hills, born in sight of the
sparkling Housatonic, was to linger out the best part of his life a
prisoner or a pauper upon the grimy banks of the Thames.

CHAPTER II.

THE YOUTHFUL ADVENTURES OF ISRAEL.

Imagination will easily picture the rural day of the youth of Israel.
Let us pass on to a less immature period.

It appears that he began his wanderings very early; moreover, that ere,
on just principles throwing off the yoke off his king, Israel, on
equally excusable grounds, emancipated himself from his sire. He
continued in the enjoyment of parental love till the age of eighteen,
when, having formed an attachment for a neighbor's daughter--for some
reason, not deemed a suitable match by his father--he was severely
reprimanded, warned to discontinue his visits, and threatened with some
disgraceful punishment in case he persisted. As the girl was not only
beautiful, but amiable--though, as will be seen, rather weak--and her
family as respectable as any, though unfortunately but poor, Israel
deemed his father's conduct unreasonable and oppressive; particularly as
it turned out that he had taken secret means to thwart his son with the
girl's connections, if not with the girl herself, so as to place almost
insurmountable obstacles to an eventual marriage. For it had not been
the purpose of Israel to marry at once, but at a future day, when
prudence should approve the step. So, oppressed by his father, and
bitterly disappointed in his love, the desperate boy formed the
determination to quit them both for another home and other friends.

It was on Sunday, while the family were gone to a farmhouse church near
by, that he packed up as much of his clothing as might be contained in a
handkerchief, which, with a small quantity of provision, he hid in a
piece of woods in the rear of the house. He then returned, and continued
in the house till about nine in the evening, when, pretending to go to
bed, he passed out of a back door, and hastened to the woods for his
bundle.

It was a sultry night in July; and that he might travel with the more
ease on the succeeding day, he lay down at the foot of a pine tree,
reposing himself till an hour before dawn, when, upon awaking, he heard
the soft, prophetic sighing of the pine, stirred by the first breath of
the morning. Like the leaflets of that evergreen, all the fibres of his
heart trembled within him; tears fell from his eyes. But he thought of
the tyranny of his father, and what seemed to him the faithlessness of
his love; and shouldering his bundle, arose, and marched on.

His intention was to reach the new countries to the northward and
westward, lying between the Dutch settlements on the Hudson, and the
Yankee settlements on the Housatonic. This was mainly to elude all
search. For the same reason, for the first ten or twelve miles,
shunning the public roads, he travelled through the woods; for he knew
that he would soon be missed and pursued.

He reached his destination in safety; hired out to a farmer for a month
through the harvest; then crossed from the Hudson to the Connecticut.
Meeting here with an adventurer to the unknown regions lying about the
head waters of the latter river, he ascended with this man in a canoe,
paddling and pulling for many miles. Here again he hired himself out for
three months; at the end of that time to receive for his wages two
hundred acres of land lying in New Hampshire. The cheapness of the land
was not alone owing to the newness of the country, but to the perils
investing it. Not only was it a wilderness abounding with wild beasts,
but the widely-scattered inhabitants were in continual dread of being,
at some unguarded moment, destroyed or made captive by the Canadian
savages, who, ever since the French war, had improved every opportunity
to make forays across the defenceless frontier.

His employer proving false to his contract in the matter of the land,
and there being no law in the country to force him to fulfil it,
Israel--who, however brave-hearted, and even much of a dare-devil upon a
pinch, seems nevertheless to have evinced, throughout 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, and supplied with every necessary. At the end of a
week, while unsophisticated Israel was sitting in the maintop, thinking
what should befall him in Holland, and wondering what sort of unsettled,
wild country it was, and whether there was any deer-shooting or
beaver-trapping there, lo! an American brig, bound from Piscataqua to
Antigua, comes in sight. The American took them aboard, and conveyed
them safely to her port. There Israel shipped for Porto Rico; from
thence, sailed to Eustatia.

Other rovings ensued; until at last, entering on board a Nantucket ship,
he hunted the leviathan off the Western Islands and on the coast of
Africa, for sixteen months; returning at length to Nantucket with a
brimming hold. From that island he sailed again on another whaling
voyage, extending, this time, into the great South Sea. There, promoted
to be harpooner, Israel, whose eye and arm had been so improved by
practice with his gun in the wilderness, now further intensified his
aim, by darting the whale-lance; still, unwittingly, preparing himself
for the Bunker Hill rifle.

In this last voyage, our adventurer experienced to the extreme all the
hardships and privations of the whaleman's life on a long voyage to
distant and barbarous waters--hardships and privations unknown at the
present day, when science has so greatly contributed, in manifold ways,
to lessen the sufferings, and add to the comforts of seafaring men.
Heartily sick of the ocean, and longing once more for the bush, Israel,
upon receiving his discharge at Nantucket at the end of the voyage, hied
straight back for his mountain home.

But if hopes of his sweetheart winged his returning flight, such hopes
were not destined to be crowned with fruition. The dear, false girl was
another's.

CHAPTER III.

ISRAEL GOES TO THE WARS; AND REACHING BUNKER HILL IN TIME TO BE OF
SERVICE THERE, SOON AFTER IS FORCED TO EXTEND HIS TRAVELS ACROSS THE SEA
INTO THE ENEMY'S LAND.

Left to idle lamentations, Israel might now have planted deep furrows in
his brow. But stifling his pain, he chose rather to plough, than be
ploughed. Farming weans man from his sorrows. That tranquil pursuit
tolerates nothing but tranquil meditations. There, too, in mother earth,
you may plant and reap; not, as in other things, plant and see the
planting torn up by the roots. But if wandering in the wilderness, and
wandering upon the waters, if felling trees, and hunting, and shipwreck,
and fighting with whales, and all his other strange adventures, had not
as yet cured poor Israel of his now hopeless passion, events were at
hand for ever to drown it.

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