The Island of Chincoteague
The attitude of most island folk toward their sea is that of the primitive savage toward his god, whom he fears, craves forgetfulness of, and if he loves, loves perforce. Men need the sea, which gives generously, but takes a heavy toll of the bodies of drowned fishers and the hearts of sad wives. When the hours of fishing are over, island people usually turn their backs and pay an unsought homage to the earth in little gardens, sheltered against the angry, scouting winds of the sea.
But if she is a bitter step-dame to most of the land she rules, the sea has taken for a favorite child the Island of Chincoteague. She cherishes the islanders from babyhood to old age, offering them her choicest fruits, asking of them only the lightest labor, tempering the winds, subduing the tidal waves, so that almost nobody is sick or poor, and even the old are not sad. And from babyhood to old age they love her and belittle the earth, so that their gardens are few, and tended, if tended at all, by women and girls, who, more conservative than the men, are carrying out the Old World tradition that the fruits of the earth shall sustain man.
Chincoteague is counted as part of the eastern shore of Virginia, that peninsula which bounds the Chesapeake Bay. The island, which is nine miles long by perhaps a mile and a half wide, is sheltered not only by the long mainland to the west, but to the east by Assoteague, which is called an island, but which is really a slim peninsula running up through Maryland. There is scarcely any place in the country where the traditions are older; but they are not, as in the other parts of Virginia, the traditions of the aristocrats whose ancestors came early to Jamestown and who can show old tombstones, old silver of King Charles's time, and old chairs made in the reign of Queen Anne. Behind the voice and views of the average Southern aristocrats there is always the flavor of another land and other sentiments than our own. But these Chincoteague people have kept the flavor of American pioneer conditions, of a simple living that made its own precedents and accepted its own ideals without consciousness that these might have limitations.
Moreover, in other parts of Virginia, poverty is housemate with gentility. The silver was more plentiful before the war; many of the chairs were sold to buy food. One sees high-bred faces touched with the inalienable shadow of privation and sacrifice, and often with a sorrow that reaches beyond the personal. But in the fortunate island there is nothing of this. Living has come easily always; simplicity, primitiveness have gone hand in hand with standards of plenty. The great national crisis, the Revolutionary War and the Civil war, have apparently left no impressions of grief; they have afforded not one tale of death, no fireside tragedy, only some humorous tales and a few flattering pensions. Some gracious chance has lined out for these people a pleasant plane of living marked only faintly with any crossing of evil or pain.
It is supposed that the eastern shore of Virginia began to be settled as early as 1615, for the records show that in 1622 there was a population of seventy-six whites. The planters started at the lower end of the peninsula and extended upward along the watercourses, each finding some wide creek so as to have a landing of his own. Old dim traditions still hold of the visiting that was carried on by boat among families who would travel a whole day to see one another and prolong a call for weeks. But for some decades no one sought Chincoteague. The island has never been a great plantation, nor has it ever sheltered any of the famous families of the South.
Some of the islanders vigorously oppose the tradition that Chincoteague was originally settled by convicts, but the evidence tends in that direction. In the old days a planter was allowed fifty acres of land for each settler he introduced. In 1687 Captain Daniel Jenifer brought over a number of convicts, perhaps seven perhaps thirty-five, and in return Chincoteague and Assoteague were patented to him. Twice the patent of Chincoteague lapsed, but finally, in 1692, twenty-five hundred acres of the lower half were given to John Robbins and twenty-five hundred of the upper half to William Kendall, and from these two men almost all the people now on the island got their titles. For more than a century only a few people lived on the island whose old names still survive -- Jesters and Birches, Thorntons, Bowdens, and Wheeltons. Seventy years ago, the oldest inhabitant says the settlers numbered five hundred. Then, the story goes, an islander was cast away from a fishing-boat on the New Jersey coast, and a few families, lured by his stories of the island paradise, came down to settle. After the Civil War others came, so that the population must have reached a thousand. Since then the islanders have multiplied rapidly. There are now more than three thousand, about a thousand being children of school age.
This is not so surprising as it seems, for the people marry early, the girls sometimes at the age of fourteen, the men at eighteen, and they have large families. One woman is pointed to as the mother of eighteen children; another was a grandmother at thirty. In such a kindly climate it would be strange indeed if life did not flourish. The very hens and turkeys have larger families than can be seen elsewhere. These people are encompassed by the poetry of life -- by the three most ancient cries in the world: the cry of the sea-bird, the call of the wind, and the sighing of the sea. Yet they live according to a happy prose kept resolutely in their blood by the strong Anglo-Saxon strain in them, which has come down as unchanged perhaps as in any community in the world. And allowing for surface change they live much as their fathers did.
Surface changes, however, there have been. Fifteen years ago when one went to Chincoteague one crossed from Franklin City in a little steam-yacht. The flat, green marshes gave way to the sea; then Wallop's Island sprang into view, and then out of the mists came shaping the slim foot of
Once on the dock, in those old days one was greeted with smiles, if not words, by a number of inhabitants to whom a stranger was so much of an agreeable rarity that he seemed like a household guest. One walked a few steps and looked up and down a slightly irregular street paved with oyster-shells, a street with somehow a shirt-sleeve or Mother-Hubbard-wrapper effect, but very appealing in its homely and comfortable quality. One entered the hotel, which needed painting and sweeping, but one didn't mind. One had to find the proprietor, who was not expecting a traveler. A baby on the stairway smiled and dropped a cracker -- and the cracker stayed there five days. One went into the dining-room in which there was but a single long table loaded (although the month had no "r" in it) with all sorts of sea food. Never was a more opulent table; never a more kindly set of people than the few men who sat about it, exchanging personal repartee and eating heartily. Obeying some sort of premonition, one crimped the edge of one's napkin to be sure of getting it again; one didn't for fifteen meals, but one had all the others. One wandered in the streets and a perfect stranger offered to lend a row-boat and upon acceptance half a dozen goodly people saw one off with
warnings to avoid the oyster-beds. One drifted into a shop where the stock was arranged in hit-or-miss fashion on the shelves, the boxes half open and the contents peeping over the edges. It took the proprietor some time to find what one wanted; he laid the box out on the counter, and there it still lay a month later, the dust leisurely sifting in. There was no mayor and no prison, and, after the first rage, people forgave easily whatever crime was committed. Never surely was there such tolerance.
That was fifteen years ago, and on visiting one feared at first that the island was changed. One crossed the same water, but now in a gasoline-launch that screamed and pounded out the wonders of advanced civilization. The same green flats were there, the same mist that shaped itself into Chincoteague Island with the gay-colored houses. But over the oyster-beds were reared at intervals square boxes for watchmen who guarded the stock of the sea. Around the docks were no longer the few water craft with weather-beaten holiday faces, but many large, neat schooners, and instead of the row-boats and lighters everywhere were gasoline launches. One walked along the dock and people only looked casually; no longer are tourists rarities. One reached the hotel, and a chambermaid met one and led one up to the register. But she had a long memory, for as she showed one to one's room she said:
"Things hain't like they were when you came before. We have a bathroom now; you can lie right down in the tub and let the water go all over you" She pushed contemptuously aside a lamp that stood on the table and explained, "We have gas, of course; we just keep a lamp in case." At the door she added: "If you want to telephone to any of your friends you can. We could have a telegraft if we wanted, but I reckon the telephone is quicker."
Quicker! Had haste come to Chincoteague!
She lingered in the doorway hospitably. "Want anything more?"
"I'll ring if I do, thank you."
The pang was unconsciously delivered, but she surely should have been spared it!
"We hain't got no bells yet," she admitted, reluctantly. "You'll have to holler over the banisters." Then she made a struggle for supremacy. "We got two five-cent theaters; be sure you go to-night." Her parting shot was: "We got five ladies' lodges now besides all the men have, and a mayor, and an iron pen to jail 'em."
The dining-room was enlarged and full of small tables, and evidently a clean napkin was intended for each meal. But, at any rate, the gas wouldn't burn, and the bath-room was out of repair, and the people who went to the five-cent theatre were the same happy-go-lucky folk of years before. Three-quarters of a mile of Chincoteague has indeed been incorporated into a town for the sake of law and order, and the population within the limits pay fifteen percent of taxes and give their affairs into the hands of a council of six, and a mayor, a clerk, and a sergeant.
It is by the largess of the sea that the islanders live. This is not the strenuous toil of fishing so much as the gentler work with oysters and clams. There is a shoal abreast of Chincoteague about seven miles out which drives the fish off shore, so that most of the fishing is done in the deep sea. Nowadays many tourists come down in the autumn for the bluefish and the mackerel, and in winter for cod. In the traps great sturgeons are caught, sometimes weighing as much as two hundred and fifty pounds, and there is abundance of trout and halibut, roach, perch, and flounders. But the real sea harvest is oysters and clams. There are always people whom the past is the only golden age, and even in Chincoteague there are old men who say that in the days when there were no oyster laws, and no hundred and fifty watchtowers in a long chain from the island to Cape Charles, and when the oysters multiplied the best way they could -- then there was more than a man could gather, and no neighbors that had to be kept from stealing. Yet most of the inhabitants consider the laws a protection and a benefit.
Clamming and oystering almost seem like door-yard occupations. Each householder living by the shore has riparian rights as far down as the low-tide mark.
In his sands the clams are much surer produce than garden stuff, and are raised with almost no personal trouble to himself. Beyond, lie the oyster "meadows" which the government rents to the islander for fifty cents an acre. Oyster-shells (or "rock") are washed clean and "planted," and from the 20th of March to the middle of September the spawn comes to the surface and catches on the rough substance. It is considered better to plant, if possible, in shallow water for the sake of sunlight twice in twenty-four hours. If a thousand bushels of unshucked oysters are planted, in two years they double. The planters have to reckon on some losses. Perhaps the young oysters "sand" or "mud" or refuse to grow. Perhaps the transplanting, done a few months before the oysters are ready to sell, may have unfortunate results. Perhaps the market fails, and the islanders lose fifty thousand dollars in the season -- to them a great sum. But on the whole, oysters are a safe investment; a man with an acre should make from three hundred to five hundred dollars a season, besides what he gets from clams and from the once scorned "scallops," which now bring a dollar and a half a gallon.
The time was when almost every householder in Chincoteague had his plot of water, but by degrees the acreage had passed into the hands of just a few people. Perhaps a man would have a year of bad luck and would sell his rights for some ready money, or perhaps he would think that he could make steadier money by working for one of the large planters by the day. There are now about forty planters on the island, a dozen of them large and the rest small. No one is colossally rich; the greatest man commands possibly three hundred thousand dollars; most of the other "rich" men are worth from twenty to forty thousand dollars, which they have made in twenty or twenty-five years. The population is growing, and the acreage of water stands still, but so far the sea promises an abundant living to all her island children.
Those who work for the planters are called "tongers," because they get the oysters out of two or three fathoms of water with tongs. In shallow water they manage it with fee and hands. They are paid on the average twenty-five cents a bushel for the oysters they bring in, and it goes without saying that they appropriate for themselves anything from a peck to a half-bushel. The oysters are divided according to size into three classes: primaries, culls, and cullenteens. Formerly the oysters were "drinked," or put into fresh water to whiten and "plumpen." There seems to be a pure-food law against this now, but some planters maintain that oysters should be "drinked" to purify them, and that without such fresh water they will not live to reach Baltimore or Philadelphia.
Work with the oysters lasts only about seven months a year, but clamming continues all the year round. It is here that the small man can make a comfortable living even if he works only half a week. Perhaps a further reason, besides a natural love of leisure, why the islanders do not like to spend many days in succession at any of this work is that the tide affects their habits. Sometimes they breakfast at four and sometimes at nine; they do not like to rise early. Some of them have a special gift for clamming. They recognize immediately the little key-like holes made by the clams and can quickly dig them out; or, in their own vernacular, such a man is "right quick to sign and wade them out." There are stories of a man who sometimes makes seven dollars a day clamming at one tide. Many a little boy stays out of school to earn fifty cents or a dollar a day, which he is allowed to spend as he pleases. The clammer sells to the island dealer, who pays by the hundred and according to size -- the three-hundred size or four-hundred size, reckoned really by the number which fill a sack.
Thus every one in Chincoteague mints the sea into treasure ample for his use. And money comes in other ways. The government furnishes at least fifty thousand dollars a year, for there are four life-saving stations close at hand: on Wallop's Island, on Assoteague, on Pope's Island, and at Green Run, each with a crew of eight men whose families, as a rule, live on Chincoteague. Besides these are the people from the two neigh-
boring light-houses and the light-ship, who spend their money and their holidays on Chincoteague. Then there are thirty or more old Federal soldiers who draw pensions.
For even in the Civil War the islanders showed their characteristic curious mixture of a laisser-faire attitude and a tendency to take enough care for the morrow to be sure of a good living. Chincoteague was one of the first places to be visited by the Federal troops, and something like forty men enlisted; but the island luck held, and it seems that they saw no active fighting. Some houses flew the Confederate flag, two or three men joined the Southern forces; a few sympathizers put out the lighthouse lamp, but it was promptly lighted again by islanders who wanted permits for their oyster-boats to run up to Pennsylvania and New York. The Federal soldiers tore up a few fence stakes belonging to old ladies and demolished the benches of the Methodist Church. A negro company came, but even they were not resented deeply. Chincoteague is almost the only part of Virginia where there are no wounds left, physical or mental, to mark the signs of a civil war. Since there is so much comfort, no real poverty, and very little sickness, it is no wonder that Chincoteague has been called the island Paradise.
A seeker for causes might argue that the comfortable attitude of the natives toward living and work and even crime is due in part to their ancestry and in part to the ease with which any man can get a living. One or two outsiders, emigrants or travelers, imbued with a spirit of grain, deplore the fact that there is no cotton factory or shirt factory on Chincoteague; the reason is that there is no man who will work ten hours in a factory. Even the laborers who are supposed to carry on the work of the two saw-mills take holiday whenever they please. The oysterers and clammers, working two or four days a week, can usually, besides earning their living, save enough to buy a home and to keep it neatly painted, but their ambition rarely extends beyond this. They like to talk in their free hours about smart boats and horse-races, and to tell stories to the tourists, growing numerous now,
who come down for deep-sea fishing and to shoot brant or various kinds of duck and shore birds. They are deeply interested in one another's personal affairs, especially love affairs. It is almost impossible for any one on the island to conduct a love affair secretly. Sometimes they so prolong their day of loafing that they can no longer run bills at the shops, and then they have to respect the shopkeeper's scruples and go to work again.
It is said that a few of the younger people are getting ideas of saving. Perhaps this is due to the advance in educational ideas. In the old days there was no public school at all; there was a private school conducted, when a teacher could be found, for four moths a year, and there was a literary fund (kindly term) collected for students who could not afford to pay. About half of the older people on Chincoteague cannot read or write. Nowadays, however, there is an excellent central school with four teachers, and in other parts of the island three primary schools. Various shops sell magazines and books, and a boy cries a Philadelphia newspaper in the streets. Yet he generously tells most of the news in it, and in any case it is bought chiefly for the weather predictions.
In certain ways the people of Chincoteague show a moral strictness. They do not believe in cards or dancing. Their six churches, four white and two colored, are well attended. They believe in a personal god who rewards and punishes, and a personal devil who pesters, and they keep Sunday with the sternness of Scotch covenanters. Indeed, church and prayer-meetings are their chief social relaxation; to church they wear their best clothes, and very fine they are, and here, especially in the Baptist Church, they have revivals, when their motions rise high, and they shout and dance to the glory of the Lord. One of the most poetic memories one could possess would be the vision of a negro revival on Chincoteague at night before the religious feeling ran too high. The meeting is held in a clearing in the great pine woods through which time has gone so grandly. The more earthly light is given by great pitch-pine torches flaring at the four corners of the in-
closure. The soft negro voices sing plaintively"
"Leanin', leanin', safe and secure from all alarm;
Leanin', leanin', leanin' on the everlasting Arm."
The tender, soft-throated music, the deep dome of the sky against which are defined the solemn, still trees, the large southern stars, the subdued sounds of birds and insects, and the flames flickering over the devoted, dull faces -- it all forms a harmony gracious to the soul.
When the outside world hears of Chincoteague, it is usually on account of the half-wild horses that roam over the stretches of the island and of
They came to a good haven, for there are five different kinds of natural grass to feed them, and for drink little pools of slightly brackish water in the sands. Some of the cleverest ones make little reservoirs for themselves by digging with their hoofs.
They belong to a few of the islanders, who own from one to seventy-five each. Once a year in July the horses are rounded up in Assoteague and in Chincoteague and are driven down into the town, where they are penned, and the colts are branded. Then some of them are sold to men from the mainland who will give as much as a hundred or a hundred and twenty-five dollars for a "stylish" horse. When the horses are fed with oats and their rough coats are properly curried, they present a very attractive appearance. They are very strong and long-lived; one old inhabitant boasts of a mare, most prolific of colts, which lived to be forty years old and worked almost to the end. No wonder they are hardy, fending for themselves, as they do, and having no other shelter than the pine and myrtle trees. It is a pretty sight to see them roaming past the magnolia-trees of the marsh or through the noble pine woods in the interior of the island, while their little fellow-creatures, the mocking-bird, the cardinal grosbeak, the oriole, and the marsh-wren fly past them fearlessly.
Except through the horses, and through the fishing and shooting stories of a few tourists, Chincoteague is un-
known, and to the casual spectator its annals seem simple enough. Yet when one talks to the old inhabitants, the past and the present seem to blend together to form an impression of common but significant living. They tell of the time when the girls and women helped the men fish, and when they spun and wove, and perhaps there is lament that to-day the women do not even knit stockings. Then the women wore simple garments of dyed homespun and the men short jackets with trousers, with long coats for Sunday. One old man mentions a time, ninety years ago, when his father bought five hundred acres of land for five hundred dollars, and when many of the neighbors belonged to the Quaker faith, though every one went to the same church on the rare occasions when a preacher could be had from the mainland. Another speaks of the old days before the islanders gave full allegiance to the sea, depending then on the land, raising corn and wheat and rye, apples and pears, which lasted a long time and were larger than one sees nowadays. And such cooking, done in Dutch ovens! Sea food was as now, but one could buy any amount of it for a few cents; salt-rising bread; crackling bread made at hog-killing time; corn-bread hung up all night on a crane; thick Johnny-cake baked on a board; great pot-pies made of goose and chicken cooked together and hanging on the crane; puddings every day; honey that they made vinegar from; and dried beef which they had killed in the autumn. The children hunted for plovers' eggs and marsh-hens' eggs, much better than the gulls' eggs the people eat now.
In those early days they had log houses a story and a half in height, boarded outside, plastered inside, and supported on great cedar blocks. Most of the houses had great hearths which would hold logs as large as a man, and fine brick chimneys; the poorer people, however, had "andiron" chimneys made of lime and laths. In 1840 there were about five hundred people living in twenty-six houses. They did not build more, for in those times the young people would "win away" to Delaware and Pennsylvania.
They tell of the time when there was a forest on the island a mile long and
half a mile wide, and the logs were so valuable that the man who bought them to sell again was able to light his pipe with a hundred dollar bill! There are stories of Old George Connor, the hermit of little Piney Island, who had traveled all around the world, but found the pines and the sea better company than people. Their great curiosity was the old Guinea negro, Ocher Binney, said at his death to be a hundred and thirty years old, the tattooed son of an African prince; stole by Arabs and sold in Virginia, he was freed at last to live with other free people on the fortunate island, for there were no slaves in Chincoteague till just before the war -- a fact due perhaps to the Quaker traditions. And yet the old life they talk of, with their quaint phraseology, such as, "It weren't the custom," "Ten head of children," "I was then seven year old, just in my eight" -- this old life is only the life of to-day translated, as it were, into slightly older dialect. The past and then present are as unified as the eastern and western waters, rising and falling in deep suspiration on each side of the island.
One old man can send his memory back especially far in the past, and, repeating the stories of his grandfather and great-grandfather, he speaks of the Revolutionary War almost as if it were an event of yesterday. He loves to talk of ancient times, sitting erect in his tall chair against a background of old-fashioned wall-paper with narrow lines of flowers running up and down in widely separated stripes. His white hair is combed straight back and his nose is aquiline. One could almost fancy that the white hair is fastened in a queue behind. It is a Revolutionary face. It would not be hard to believe that he had lived in his great-grandfather's time.
This man's memory is a storehouse of the common, every-day living of the island, the little tragedies loom especially large to him, though he was no adequate feeling for the wars. He speak as if he remembers the hurricane of 1822 which made prey of the island, formed a great tidal wave, capsized a house or two, drowned five people, and terrified several into moving to the mainland. He knows every detail, it would seem, of the four murders that have happened in one hundred and twenty years, and even talks about the first one as if he had been an eye-witness. One can see the real New York "bully" (pugilist) in his silver sleeve-links and silver shoe-
buckles, who could carry in his arms to the mill a horse-load of corn and who challenged Tunnell, "of powerful manhood," to a fight. He makes one see the bully drinking rum, and the great Tunnell, enraged at last, saying he wanted no liquor, but just the heart's blood of his enemy; the "second," "supple as an eel," who made a ring with his foot and said that any one who crossed it would lose his sight of the sun; then the fight, "right to the tumble," the bully falling at last with the cry that he was not only whipped but killed.
He makes one see the desolate young man who committed the second murder, killing his friend over a girl, and, in spite of acquittal, thereafter finding life on the fortunate island too melancholy. On the last murders, which led to the departure from Chincoteague of the Sanctificationists, he touches briefly, as if he did not like to think of blood being shed in the name of religion.
His favorite story is of the four islanders who fought in the Revolution, two of them serving among Washington's life-guards.
"Them two, Chase and Smallwood, were at Yorktown and wonderin' how much longer the irregular fightin' would last. Yere stood Lafayette and Washington watchin', and somehow yere come a shell they were not expectin', and dirt flew into their bosoms.
"'A leetle too close, General,' says Lafayette.
"'Give no heed to a little dirt,' says Washington.
"So yere come the redcoats, closer and closer till you could see the buckles on their shoes, and Chase and Smallwood they didn't like it, not knowin' what it meant. Washington then made these yere life-guards present arms and fire blank cartridges into the air. Then Cornwallis and his staff come out with a little white flag. Washington started out with his guards and met them. Cornwallis handed his sword point foremost, and Washington turned his head away and all were still as death. Then Cornwallis gave the sword handle foremost. Washington took it and was quiet a minute, studyin' what to say. Then he gave Cornwallis the sword and said, 'Take that as a memorial and never draw it again to fight America.'
"Afterward Smallwood and Chase saw the river was filled with the French fleet. Washington gave them three days' feastin' and casks of liquor, with the understandin' that if one man got drunk nobody else could taste anything. Chase had had just one little sup, with the intention of takin' several more, when he looked up to see two soldiers fightin'. Him and Smallwood were so mad they liked to killed them both.
"At last the troops were dismissed. Washington stood there about to enter his carriage, but first he turned to Chase, and, handin' him the old torn flag, gave him a dollar to carry it to Mount Vernon. So the war was well over before Chase won home."
A simple tale and simple people. They do not see life in a large historical perspective; their sense is not epic; they cannot generalize further than the limits of their commonplace axioms of religion and morality. They have increased their freedom by reducing their wants, and for them life has few complexities. Birth, a little work, marriage, quiet home life, and again a little work, and after many years death, withal a faith in God and in the future He grants them in time and in eternity. Surely it is a sufficient heritage. Surely the sea and their own traditions and ideals have given them a certain wealth of content which is lacking to many more sophisticated communities.