There Is Always
Room And Occasion Enough For A True Book On Any Subject; As There
Is Room For More Light The Brightest Day And More Rays Will Not
Interfere With The First.
We thus worked our way up this river, gradually adjusting our
thoughts to novelties, beholding from its placid bosom
A new
nature and new works of men, and, as it were with increasing
confidence, finding nature still habitable, genial, and
propitious to us; not following any beaten path, but the windings
of the river, as ever the nearest way for us. Fortunately we had
no business in this country. The Concord had rarely been a
river, or _rivus_, but barely _fluvius_, or between _fluvius_ and
_lacus_. This Merrimack was neither _rivus_ nor _fluvius_ nor
_lacus_, but rather _amnis_ here, a gently swelling and stately
rolling flood approaching the sea. We could even sympathize with
its buoyant tide, going to seek its fortune in the ocean, and,
anticipating the time when "being received within the plain of
its freer water," it should "beat the shores for banks," -
"campoque recepta
Liberioris aquae, pro ripis litora pulsant."
At length we doubled a low shrubby islet, called Rabbit Island,
subjected alternately to the sun and to the waves, as desolate as
if it lay some leagues within the icy sea, and found ourselves in
a narrower part of the river, near the sheds and yards for
picking the stone known as the Chelmsford granite, which is
quarried in Westford and the neighboring towns. We passed
Wicasuck Island, which contains seventy acres or more, on our
right, between Chelmsford and Tyngsborough. This was a favorite
residence of the Indians. According to the History of Dunstable,
"About 1663, the eldest son of Passaconaway [Chief of the
Penacooks] was thrown into jail for a debt of (pounds)45, due to John
Tinker, by one of his tribe, and which he had promised verbally
should be paid. To relieve him from his imprisonment, his
brother Wannalancet and others, who owned Wicasuck Island, sold
it and paid the debt." It was, however, restored to the Indians
by the General Court in 1665. After the departure of the Indians
in 1683, it was granted to Jonathan Tyng in payment for his
services to the colony, in maintaining a garrison at his house.
Tyng's house stood not far from Wicasuck Falls. Gookin, who, in
his Epistle Dedicatory to Robert Boyle, apologizes for presenting
his "matter clothed in a wilderness dress," says that on the
breaking out of Philip's war in 1675, there were taken up by the
Christian Indians and the English in Marlborough, and sent to
Cambridge, seven "Indians belonging to Narragansett, Long Island,
and Pequod, who had all been at work about seven weeks with one
Mr. Jonathan Tyng, of Dunstable, upon Merrimack River; and,
hearing of the war, they reckoned with their master, and getting
their wages, conveyed themselves away without his privity, and,
being afraid, marched secretly through the woods, designing to go
to their own country." However, they were released soon after.
Such were the hired men in those days.
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