Mr. Cleveland's Gunning Trip to Broadwater Island
After the excitement of the campaign Mr. Grover Cleveland, President-elect of the United States, felt the need of quiet and rest. He was beset by office-seekers, by invitations to public dinners and by friends who wanted to "advise" him. He made his escape, on November 22d, into a land where the spirit of the sportsman never tires and the place-hunter is not. The genial L. Clark Davis, of Philadelphia, was his pilot, and Exmore the station at which they left the railway.
The Broadwater Island Club, of which Mr. Davis is a member, is an exclusive coterie of wealthy Philadelphians, located in a very quaint and interesting region on the Chesapeake. A special artist of ONCE A WEEK accompanied the President-elect, and we are thus enabled to present views of the locality.
It now lacks only fifteen years of a full trio of centuries since the redoubtable Captain John Smith, who stands canonized -- at least, in Virginia -- came drifting, with Captain Christopher Newport and certain other venturers, along the uncharted shoals in front of the Virginia peninsular, and, with better fortune than that attending many a modern voyager, cleared the dangerous coast, passing between the jaws of the capes and through the estuary of the James River, to cast anchor just where, nearly three decades ago, was fought the most important naval combat of modern times.
The description of this region, as penned by the energetic and observant Smith, stands, in the main, equally well for to-day: "There is only one entrance by sea into this country, and that is at the mouth of a very goodly bay, eighteen or twenty miles broad. The cape at the south is called Cape Henry, in honor of our most noble prince. The land is white, hilly sands, like unto the Downs, and all along the shores are a great plenty of pines and firs. The north cape is called Charles, in honor of the worthy Duke of York. The island before it is named Smith's Island, the name of its discoverer. Within is a country that may have the prerogative over the most pleasant places known for large and navigable rivers. Heaven and earth never agreed better to frame a place for man's habitation were it fully inhabited by an industrious people. In the bays and rivers are many islands, great and small. Some are woody, some and plain and most of them low and uninhabited."
Captain John Smith was right. Old Point Comfort has become a fashionable resort. Newport News, where once the camps of a great army whitened the untilled fields, has developed into a grain and coal terminal and a vast shipbuilding city; but Northampton County, over upon the cape, which shields this genial region from the rigor of the sea winds, is almost unknown to the outside world, which only traverses it, generally at dawn or after dark, in hurrying Pullman cars to and from its town of Cape Charles [City], and recalls it as a trucking patch famous for early strawberries and abundant peaches. Fully half of this maritime corner of the Old Dominion is a maze of channels and islands upon its oceanward side, wherein the hunting and the fishing is altogether delightful, and the amphibious population are still so primitive in their ways that they are actually contented with the plenty which the sea and the soil readily affords them.
The greatest of these island-girt bays is the Broadwater, and its most hospitable island hovered twelve miles away to the eastward, like a phantom in the morning radiance, as the distinguished guest, Mr. Cleveland, and his party, embarking upon the steam-yacht Sunshine at Exmore Landing, swiftly left the little Machipongo River behind and threaded among the myriad oyster beds in the open bay.
Like many another early voyager along this stormy coast, Mr. Cleveland's eyes were set upon the dark forest that rose above Broadwater Island, where breakfast awaited him.
The Broadwater Club House stands in the midst of a pine woodland, and its most important functionary (not even excepting Captain J. L. Ferrell, the resident owner and lord of the manor) is the dusky cook, Joe, who knows no peer when it comes to broiling a canvas-back or baking a Spanish mackerel. Between the clubhouse and the sea are lofty sand drifts, a wind-break in the shelter of which are several cottages built by the members. Out upon the sands is the candle-like light tower. Two miles down the shore is a life-saving station, and over upon the bay side, along a sandy bit of road, twenty or more families of the native population are scattered.
Mr. Cleveland did not go shooting on Thanksgiving Day. The weather was very bad, and the President-elect passed most of the morning strolling about Broadwater Island. The afternoon he spent in the cottage in which he is quartered. Messrs. Cleveland, Davis, Jefferson, and Ferrell ate their Thanksgiving Dinner at five o'clock. All the guests retired early, and had the ducks known what was in store for them, they would have migrated southward. At daylight of Friday wild fowl were passing overhead in large flocks.
The Broadwater Club numbers about thirty prominent citizens of Philadelphia, and membership guarantees to them the exclusive shooting and fishing rights of the island. From January until June, the steam-yacht is in constant use, for it is only seven or eight hours at most between Broad street station and one of Joe's incomparable breakfasts.
The business of oyster planting occupies a large fleet of craft that lends the Broadwater a certain picturesque air on week days, but on Sunday it is as wanting invisible life as when Captain Smith sailed by, for these islanders are great sticklers for the strict observance of the Sabbath. That is the day to sit upon the leeward slope of Rum Hill, a vast heap of sand, and gaze out over the blue ocean, streaked here and there with breakers curling over the shoals where many a noble ship whose bleaching ribs break the monotony of the beach has met its fate.