The keel is all that’s left of the four-masted schooner “Dorothy.” It makes a puzzling figure in the waters of Shackford Cove, regardless of the tide. I had supposed it might have been a section of a rail track used at one of the four shipyards that once lined the shore. On a really low tide, this is how it looks up-close.
I’m guessing the keel flipped over, yet all of the iron rods are still impressive. The work of blacksmiths, no doubt.
Been in the same position at least as long as the old-timers around here can remember.
Massachusetts Bay authorities are in an anti-Quaker frenzy even before two small groups of Friends set forth for Boston in 1656. Fifteen in all, they meet a harsh reception from the Puritan leadership, even banishment on pain of death, but return anyway, some after having an ear cut off. Their one haven is in Rhode Island, a colony founded by Roger Williams and augmented by Anne Hutchinson’s followers, who had almost ousted the Puritans from their governance of Massachusetts only two decades earlier.
Some of the most intense persecution comes down in Salem, north of Boston, already the second largest city in the English colonies, where a small circle of newly converted Quakers boldly holds firm. By 1658, their influence seeps into New Hampshire at Hampton and Dover and across the Piscataqua River into today’s Eliot, Maine. In 1659, a Dover court fines 15 residents for non-attendance at the Puritan services, and one of them is specifically convicted of having attended a Quaker meeting. Six of the surnames are among those active in the earliest surviving Dover Friends records four decades later. Most prominent among them is Thomas Roberts, one of the town’s first two settlers and later the colony’s governor.
This occurs before Quaker missionaries William Robinson and Marmaduke Stephenson are arrested three weeks after visiting Piscataqua. It’s possible that William Leddra and William Brend were here the previous year, before their apprehension in Salem on their way back to Boston, or perhaps Christopher Holder and John Copeland, before that, in 1657 – that would be a plausible reason for some Dover residents to be worshiping “after the manner of Friends” by early 1659.
Three of the four Quakers hanged in Boston had visited Dover. Mary Dyer was the exception.
Early Friends activity along the Piscataqua is confirmed in early 1660 when Anthony Emory, an innkeeper and ferryman at Sturgeon Creek in Eliot/Kittery, was fined and disenfranchised on charges of “entertaining” Quakers. His ferry route connected to Bloody Point (Newington) and Hilton Point across the Piscataqua River. Whether Emory had merely transported the Quakers as passengers or allowed them to stay at the inn or been more active in welcoming them is unclear, but his independent streak was well established. He was a signer of the Dover Combination before moving to Eliot/Kittery in 1649, where he was fined five pounds in 1656 for “mutinous courage” in challenging the authority of the town’s court. The disenfranchisement was too much. He sold the property on May 12, 1660, to his son and relocated with his wife to the Quaker stronghold of Portsmouth, Rhode Island.
The earlier controversies over the ministry of the town’s church had no doubt left dissenting locals, joined by eccentrics, whom the itinerant Quakers then galvanize into an assembly. Quite simply, Dover is out on the frontier of English settlement and relatively far from the Puritan mainstream.
Significantly, Robinson, Stephenson, and Leddra are among the four Quakers hanged in Boston in the years before three women arrive in Dover in 1662 and are whipped out of town, an event that has long been considered the start of Dover Friends Meeting. Traditional histories even say there was no Quaker presence in town before that. Instead, I’m certain the women and two male companions arrived to nurture a previously gathered circle.
Three Quaker women are whipped out of town, December 1662.
~*~
How dangerous are they? Here’s a brief life story Stevenson wrote a week before his execution – that is, just days after being in Dover.
In the beginning of the year 1655, I was at the plough in the east parts of Yorkshire in Old England, near the place where my outward being was; and, as I walked after the plough, I was filled with the love and presence of the living God, which did ravish my heart when I felt it, for it did increase and abound in me like a living stream, so did the life and love of God run through me like precious ointment giving a pleasant smell, which mad me to stand still. And, as I stood a little still, with my heart and mind stayed upon the Lord, the word of the Lord came to me in a still, small voice, which I did hear perfectly, saying to me in the secret of my heart and conscience, “I have have ordained thee a prophet unto the nations,” and, at the hearing of the word of the Lord, I was put to a stand, seeing that I was but a child for such a weighty matter. So, at the time appointed, Barbados was set before me, unto which I was required of the Lord to go and leave my dear and loving wife and tender children; for the Lord said unto me, immediately by HIs Spirit, that He would be as an husband to my wife and as a father to my children, and they should not want in my absence, for He would provide for them when I was gone. And I believed the Lord would perform what He had spoken, because I was made willing to give up myself to His work and service, to leave all and follow Him, whose presence and life is with me, where I rest in peace and quietness of spirit, with my dear brother [William Robinson] under the shadow of His wings, who hath made us willing to lay down our lives for His name’s sake, if unmerciful men be suffered to take them from us. And, if they do, we know we shall have rest and peace with the Lord for ever in His holy habitation, when they shall have torment night and day.
So, in obedience to the living God, I made preparation to pass to Barbados in the Fourth month [June] 1658. So, after some time that I had been on the said island in the service of God, I heard that New England had made a law to put the servants of the living God to death if they returned after they were sentenced away, which did come near me at that time; and, as I considered the thing and pondered it in my heart, immediately came to word of the Lord unto me, saying, “Thou knowest not but that thou mayst go thither.”
But I kept this word in my heart and did not declare it to any until the time appointed, so, after that, a vessel was made ready for Rhode Island, which I passed in. So, after a little time that I had been there, visiting the seed which the Lord had blessed, the word of the Lord came to me saying, “Go to Boston with thy brother William Robinson,” and at His command I was obedient and gave up to His will, that so His work and service may be accomplished. for He had said unto me that He had a great work for me to do, which is now come to pass. And, for yielding obedience to and for obeying the voice and command of the everlasting God, which created heaven and earth and the foundations of waters, do I, with my dear brother, suffer outward bonds near unto death.
And this is given forth to be upon record, that all people may know who hear it, that we came not in our own will but in the will of God.
Given forth by me, whom am know to men by the name of MARMADUKE STEVENSON, but have a new name given me, which the world knows not of, written in the book of life.
~*~
His tone and content are quite different than that of the leading Puritans of the time.
Cochecho or Piscataqua plantation, for a while Bristol or Bristow, and even Northam, but the one that stuck was Dover.
Just as the names Hilton Point and Dover Point keep bouncing around, for the same place, though the latter has also largely replaced Dover Neck.
Neighboring Strawbery Banke did get renamed Portsmouth, after the harbor town in Devonshire, but Dover was never named for the village with the famed white cliffs in Kent.
No, the inspiration’s better than that.
The name comes through Dover’s second minister, George Burdet, who was more Anglican than Puritan, though apparently not outwardly. The proprietors of the colony at the time, Lord Saye and Lord Brooke, are both staunch Puritans, and the cleric works for them. In fact, he even manages to become the colony’s governor, or agent – a dual role forbidden to ministers in Massachusetts. Some even see him as trying to become a little pope in his power.
In calling the settlement Dover, Burdet pays honor to the anti-Puritan wit and attorney Robert Dover, who created the Cotswold Olympick Games near Cambridge in the heart of the Puritans’ East Anglia.
Meet Robert Dover.
As my upcoming book details, there’s a long list of reasons the neighboring Puritan landlords forbid their servants from attending the pagan festivities. Besides, Dover was likely a secret Roman Catholic while openly ridiculing the Puritans. We can imagine what he would have said of Quakers.
Burdet, however, winds up fleeing Dover amid sexual scandal, only to generate more where he lands in Maine. Yes, the plot keeps thickening.
As for, “Roll over, Dover,” if we put it up for a vote, which inspiration would you chose? The picturesque cliffs or the scoundrel in the pulpit?
A fair number of the Piscataqua’s early settlers were from prosperous, even well-connected, families.
The question is just what prompted them to relocate to the primitive, even harsh, conditions along the Piscataqua River.
David Thomson, the son of a Scottish minister, has the King’s ear and a debt of gratitude.
The Hiltons are part of an extensive and prosperous fishmonger clan.
Thomas Roberts’ father, by some accounts, becomes a baron. Even if he didn’t, Thomas still becomes a member of the powerful fishmonger guild.
The Hilton brothers weren’t exactly out of the loop, either.
~*~
Powerful? Take Francis Champernowne, a 1640 signer of the Dover Combination, a remarkable document stating the residents’ desire to be freed from being subjected to company-town decisions being made in England. While I see scant evidence that Francis actually resided in today’s Dover, he did have extensive landholdings in New Hampshire, including the current towns of Greenland – named for his Green Land farm – and Madbury, then part of Dover and named after his ancestral home, Modbury, in Devon, England.
His father, Sir Arthur Champernowne, owned at least eight merchant ships or privateers and had fished New England since 1622. In 1635, Sir Arthur financed a settlement under his son, Francis – likely the southern part of Kittery, Maine, which became known as Champernowne’s Island, today’s Cutt’s or Gerrish islands – as well as another on Braveboat Harbor in York. Francis may have also lived at Strawbery Banke (today’s Portsmouth) until 1640.
Sir Walter Raleigh. His nephew was a big settler along the Piscataqua, Did he dress anything like this?
Captain Francis was well-placed. His great-aunt Catherine was the mother of both Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Ralegh/Raleigh Gilbert, an important explorer and adventurer of the New England and Canadian coastline. Captain Francis was also a “beloved” nephew of Sir Ferdinando Gorges, proprietor of Maine and unofficial godfather of New England itself.
Francis was often at sea, to England and Barbados, especially. During the early part of the English civil war, his Royalist leanings led him to join King Charles I’s fleet under the Earl of Marlborough. Returning to Dover by 1646, he left for the Caribbean in 1649 but returned to Maine in the early 1650s, where he later became a commissioner and justice under Charles II. In April of 1678, he signed the articles of peace with the Abenaki at Casco. He was an ardent Anglican and died in Kittery.
It’s enough to make me think living conditions back in merry old England weren’t that great, either.
~*~
The Waldron family that soon comes to dominate the growth around the Lower Falls, or today’s downtown Dover, came from wealth in Warwickshire, England. William drowns, but brother Richard turns Dover into something of a personal fiefdom while rising to become Speaker of the Assembly once New Hampshire is under Massachusetts rule. He builds the first saw mill and grist mill at the falls, has extensive shipping connections, dominates the fur trade with the native Pennacooks. He didn’t exactly start from scratch.
You’ll be hearing a lot more about him. Man, will you.
Fishing is dangerous, hard work, done in all seasons and kinds of weather. It’s also an inescapable source of livelihood for many families along the Maine coast.
The two stones in the Lost Fishermen’s Memorial in Lubec rise like waves beside each other, one representing fishermen from the Canadian side of the channel and the other, from the American side. Three flags fly over the site – Old Glory, the Maple Leaf, and the Passamaquoddy Nation’s.The inscribed names of those lost since the year 1900 are mesmerizing – women and men, some of the surnames repeated. As people say respectfully, so-and-so has the sea in his blood, and it seems to run in families.Maine granite sculptor Jesse Salisbury created the monument in 2016, and names have been added since.
Some people and places just get bad raps for no reason. That used to be the case for the neighborhood just south of Battery Street. Or Assault and Battery, as the ditty went.
Or, in the more salacious version, Sodom and Gomorrah.
You can read the street sign yourself.
Residents of the allegedly more reputable North End of town, meanwhile, got dubbed Dog Islanders, after the tiny island at its tip, one that once had a lighthouse nobody in town could see.
The neighborhood viewed from South Street.
Definitively, the two parts of the village were separated by Shackford Cove (aka Huston’s) , which ran further inland than it does today, as well as a seemingly nameless stream at the bottom of some steep banks. And the cove did have four shipyards at one time as well as the world’s largest sardine cannery a bit later.
There are also some steep streets that end in the ocean.
Today, though, it has some fine homes mixed in, a few with some of the most spectacular views in town.
The literary great Samuel Johnson once quipped, “No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money,” but he also ascribed to the pejorative term of “hack writer” for those who set down words as an income. It makes for an impossible bind. After all, he was a stickler for quality literature.
That perspective could generate guilt among some of us who did our best to defend the language in what Johnson would have considered grub work – in my case, daily journalism, with its effort at an anonymous style and universal voice. And yet, for me, at least, there remained an aspiration for something loftier, more lasting, more artistically and intellectually demanding but which, as I’ve found, had no monetary value.
Do I regret the effort? Not when I sit down and reread the published but largely neglected fiction and poetry. Pointedly, it has come at a heavy personal cost in time and foreclosed opportunities, no matter any satisfaction I feel.
CURIOUSLY, I DOUBT that anyone has felt the pain of this dichotomy more than novelist Stephen King, even though I’m certain he’s never heard of me. He has, though, articulated the gap between the writing for wide readership and for critical acclaim better than anyone else. Writing under pseudonyms, he has demonstrated a mastery of the craft, and under his own name, some deep insights into the art of crafting a novel. He deserves great credit for getting a public reading books, against all odds.
MY CURRENT QUANDARY comes in trying to decide which course to take regarding my latest – and likely last – manuscript. I’ve found researching it to be exciting; my findings, provocative and original; and the current voice that’s resulted, lively and entertaining. I get animated just talking about its content, and the listeners catch on. The problem is that it’s still a niche product, as far as marketing goes.
I mean, a history of the Quaker Meeting in Dover, New Hampshire?
Yes, it has the freaky potential to break out, but that’s a gamble.
The book moves novelistically. There are some big villains, a contrarian take on New England itself, a long period of frontier violence, historical surprises, a look at a subculture something like today’s Amish, and political dissent. What a volatile mix!
I’ve approached a couple of regional publishers but heard nothing from one. Not that I’m surprised. They survive by being conservative and cautious. Still, it would relieve me of a lot of effort in production and distribution that I just don’t feel up for. I’m more optimistic, cautiously, about the other. As I posted earlier, I’m ready for a break. Let them keep some of the change.
Plan two would be to issue it as an ebook, like my novels, and via Amazon’s KDP, where it would also be available as a print-on-demand paperback. I’m not sure how to include the maps in those formats, though, and the work wouldn’t be available in bookstores. Much of the sales of the paper edition would be, as they say, from the trunk of my car – after readings and talks, essentially. As for libraries? Marketing of an ebook remains, from my experience, very difficult. People want something physical to examine, even if they buy otherwise.
The third option is through one of several self-publishing programs that distribute to bookstores. (The stores won’t touch the Amazon editions, since they would have to sell at a higher price to cover their added costs.) For reviewers, it’s more respectable than Amazon. You might even pick up some book clubs. The bigger problem is that this route would require me to invest some big bucks. At this time, I have no way of knowing whether the investment would be offset by sales in bookstores, mostly in New England. Or, put another way, I’m feeling way out of my league or field of expertise. Yes, I would have a product I could feel proud of. But could I make the numbers add up? My wife advises me to consider it like joining a country club. Hmm. One involves dropping balls into holes.
A fourth alternative is to shelve it altogether, maybe even taking the money I would have spent and finally traveling off to Europe. Let myself be content with the overview I’m presenting in weekly installments here at the Barn.
One thing I’m not doing here, contrary to Johnson, is being mercenary.
One of my key insights into Dover’s early character came after noticing that the majority of its early residents came from Devonshire – or Devon – rather than the East Anglia shires of Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, and Cambridge that dominated New England’s Puritan migration, construction, and social order.
And that holds for even the Puritans who take over Dover in 1633 (or so).
In his groundbreaking Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (Oxford University Press, 1989), David Hackett Fischer elaborates on what he calls the various folkways of four distinctly different regions of Britain, which in turn gave Colonial Massachusetts, Virginia, the Delaware Valley, and the Backcountry their unique natures – divergences that continue, to various degrees, today.
I had already observed that Dover and, for that matter, New Hampshire’s only other towns of the first 70 years – Hampton, Exeter, and Portsmouth – weren’t built around a definitive town square with its church, town hall, and common, as were typical towns in Massachusetts. It’s a hint that the differences run much deeper.
While Fischer goes into great detail on East Anglia’s impact on Massachusetts, he does not in turn examine Devon. At most, he touches on it as he turns to a larger and vaguer area that provided the Cavalier migration into Virginia, one with a center more in South England rather than the South West of Devon. And much of his presentation focuses on the ways they evolved in Virginia, contrasting life in Massachusetts.
Still, he points to differences that go back into antiquity. The language and laws of Devon and its neighboring shires for example, were shaped by West Saxons to the east and Celts to the north and west. In contrast, East Anglia’s are rooted in its Danish occupation.
From the little I’ve been able to glean thus far comes statements that Devon was regarded as backward by many, a repository of the “old England” of superstition and legend. It was a place of seafaring, with Plymouth as a principal port and Bristol just to the north, and of large manors with their landed gentry.
The merchants of Devon sent ships far on the sea. It was in their blood.
There are also suggestions of crucial ways its social manners and religious affinities deviated, affecting how Dover residents interacted with the itinerant Quakers.
No, the English weren’t all alike, not by a long shot. Often, they couldn’t even understand the dialect from another part of Britain.
I would love to see a comprehensive study of those Devon folkways along the lines of Fischer’s earlier work. It would no doubt give us a much more detailed picture of life along the Piscataqua in those seminal decades of settlement. How they cooked and dressed, for instance, or raised their children or treated illnesses or buried their dead, as starters.
Still, my upcoming book shares what I’ve found so far.
The conventional explanation that the Puritans migrated to New England for religious freedom misses the obvious.
When the Puritans first arrive in 1629, followed the next year with the beginning of their great flood of migration, theirs is a well-orchestrated and well-financed scheme to establish a utopia, one based on their Calvinist Protestant worldview. In many ways, it ranges well beyond the confines of religion.
They set forth in droves.
Crucially, sensing that their mission could be corrupted by false teachings and practices, they squelch unorthodoxy and dissent early on. Within the first decade of their arrival along Massachusetts Bay, they banish Samuel Gorton, Roger Williams, and Anne Hutchinson, who find refuge in Williams’ new colony of Rhode Island. Early Quaker history turns its focus there and neighboring Cape Cod, for good reason, though much also happens north of Boston in Salem, Hampton, and Dover.
Hutchinson’s brother-in-law, the Reverend John Wheelwright, also takes flight and founds the town of Exeter, on the other end of Great Bay from Dover, in New Hampshire.
The Arabella, one of the Puritan fleet. Imagine spending two months confined to a vessel like this in often turbulent waters.
Others head more or less straight to Dover. Among them is Hansard Knollys, a minister whose evolving theology will lead him to being a founder of the Baptist denomination when he returns to England. He’s not quite there yet when he formally organizes the church in Dover as a congregational society just six years after its first services. Had he been a bit clearer in his theological evolution, Dover could have established the first Baptist church in America, a year before Williams in Providence. Oh, well.
But that does leave an opening for the Quakers a decade later.
Yes, Puritans. They do look like a smug, judgmental lot. Of course, that’s a judgmental view on my part. I’d hate to get in an argument with them. Ahem.
All the more, I sense that Knollys leaves enough nonconformist thought in his wake to lead some independent spirits in Dover to privately question the ongoing Puritan preaching. As my new book will note, there are hints of that in the town records – supposedly subversive thinking that has to await the arrival of the itinerant Quakers for confirmation and action.
As we’ll see, it’s a volatile mix awaiting the spark for explosion.
Jnana's Red Barn 