Hog Island, Virginia

NEXT to Jamestown, the first settlement made in Virginia, the most interesting spot in that State to the antiquarian is Hog Island, on the Atlantic coast.

It was the redoubtable John Smith who first discovered this place.

The second day after he landed at Smith Island and planted the English flag for the first time in the New World, he started out on a voyage along the coast, when a great storm arose and his boat filled and he escaped as he said "by ye mercy of God."

He named the island upon which he landed Shooting Bears Island; as the small species of bruin which to this day abound in the cane-brakes of the Dismal Swamp were numerous on the new found isle.

It is a great pity that this place did not retain its Indian name of Machipongo Island -- which, translated, means 'Fine dust and flies' -- literally, fine sand and mosquitoes, the two inflictions that plague the natives, and made the island uninhabitable to the thin-skinned, thinly clad Indians, who only visited it at certain periods of the year to fish and hunt.

The origin of the name "Hog Island," and the person or people who applied the harsh, ugly name to the place, is unknown. The islanders say that
in colonial days a vessel was wrecked near the shores, and a large number of hogs swam safely to land, and some matter-of-fact person named the spot Hog Island. There are certain antiquarians of Northampton County, however, who claim that the people of the mainland named the place Hog Island simply and solely because the inhabitants were more like hogs in looks, manners, and way of living than anything else. Certainly there never was, is not, and never will be anything like entiente cordiale between the people of the mainland and the islanders.

Hog Island is about four miles long and varies from one to two miles in width. On the south side runs the Great Machipongo Inlet, whose average depth is forty feet. It is a noble sheet of water. The life-saving station is built on the banks of this inlet, close to where it empties into the ocean. The chart of the Coast and Geodetic Survey shows that the sand shallows for one or two miles, making the place very dangerous to those "who go down to the sea in ships," and mariners give the place a wide berth. The beach is five miles long, with firm sand.

I have made many visits to this island, for the spot always had a peculiar charm; it excites the imagination, stimulates the fancy, and the old colonial ghosts haunt the spot. It is well worth a visit to the tourist.

The early history of the place is in the musty, worn and tattered records of Virginia, in the State Capitol. There is a document bearing date of 1672, which consists of a "letter patent" to Sir Henry Chinchley, of the island known as Machipongo, and his grant of the same to
certain colonists, whose names are Henry Patrick, Thomas Hewes, William Mainey, Henry Meadow, William Taylor, John Harbush, Thomas Cooke, Edward Young, George Griffin, John Parson, Richard Bagley, Thomas Shermingham, John Baker, William Bannister, Grace Winter, Abraham Hill, Matt Morgan, John Corry, Richard Hyde, Upham Holt and Ann Emmerson.

These settlers presumably had families, and they resided there no one knows how long. Certainly they must have had a different life and one in marked contrast with the colony at Jamestown, who were many times on the brink of actual starvation; for on the fruitful Machipongo Isle no man need work and no man need starve.

There were no newspapers in those days to chronicle events and to "show the very age and body of the times," nor was there any local historian among the lot; so that their lives and their adventures are not known. They were as isolated from the world as were the mutineers of the merchant ship Bounty on Pitcairn Island, and they were lost to the outside world, and in that lone, forgotten spot --

"The world forgetting and by the world forgot."

The colonists disappeared -- man, woman, and child. What they suffered, endured, or enjoyed will never be known. But doubtless the tale would bear telling and would make fascinating reading.

There must have been a conflict with the war-like tribes of Accomacs, who would not be likely to submit to having their most fruitful isle seized,
like the brightest jewel torn from a crown. The Indians may have closed in upon the island with a great fleet of canoes and massacred and tortured or slain the last one of the settlers; or the mosquitoes may have routed the colony; but if they left the island of their own accord, some of them would undoubtedly have remained in the vicinity. But there is not one of their descendants on the Atlantic Coast to-day. There is not the slightest clew to the fate of these people, and their disappearance is as unfathomable as that of the lost colony of Sir Walter Raleigh, which vanished from Roanoke Island. Certain it is that they left not a token or relic behind; nor is there a grave or mouldering bone to show that the white man lived there long before the Pilgrims built their first village.

The earliest settler of Hog Island who has a real record was a man by the name of Labin Phillips, who settled the place during the Revolutionary War.

Shortly after the surrender of Cornwallis, Labin built the first habitable home on the island, which is still standing and is an object of great interest to the sportsmen and tourists who visit the place.

The dwelling is built of red cedar and is of a quaint, odd style of architecture, such as the early colonists erected, and is worthy of preservation as an object-lesson in proof of the durability of the red cedar, which, after a hundred years, remains firm and sound; whereas, oak, pine, hemlock or black Jack would long since have rotted and fallen to pieces in the damp sea air.

The house would delight an antiquarian. The chimney takes in one entire side of the structure,
and is built of clay and wood, corn-cob fashion, and of course liable to catch fire at the smallest provocation. In this house was a barrel of water, and leaning near by was a long sapling with a great bunch of rags tied to one end, looking for all the world like the sweeps that the "chimney devils" of the last century used. Whenever the sticks in the chimney burst into a blaze the rags were plunged into the barrel, the pole was thrusts upwards and the incipient flame quenched.

There died on the island a short time ago an aged citizen named Samuel Kelly, aged eighty-two years. Even when a boy he showed a decided bent for making money, and for keeping it also. When he reached manhood he united the characteristics of Daniel Dancer, the miser, and that of the famous Captain Kidd; for he hoarded his money, and then buried it.

"Sam" Kelly became the most unique character on the island. He established a little store, but, paradoxical as it may seem, he could never be found there; no man's foot was allowed to cross the threshold. The owner would call on the natives every morning, get their orders, and deliver the goods in the evening. There never lived a more thorough miser. He visited nobody, never entered a church, never gave a cent to charity, never had a decent coat on his back, and probably never sat down to a well-prepared meal.

As there was no other store on the island, his neighbors knew that he must be making money and hoarding it. Every man, woman, and child was aware that there must be a fortune hid away somewhere in his cabin, for some of his neighbors had caught a passing glimpse through the window
of the miser gloating over a great pile of gold coin.

As the years glided by the hoard increased. Never spending a cent, and saving every dollar, it was a matter of much speculation among his neighbors as to how much he was worth.

But the talk was all among themselves; they never breathed a word of old Sam Kelly's hoard to the fishermen and lightermen who stopped at the island. It is marvelous that a decrepit, defenceless miser should live in a dilapidated cabin for years, his gold unsecured by safe, vault, or strong box, easy for the first strong hand to clutch, and yet there was never a single attempt made to rob him.

Samuel Kelly lived to see nearly all of his contemporaries buried, and that "fell sergeant, Death, so strict in his arrest," seemed to have forgotten him, but at last he was summoned to appear before the Bar. On his deathbed his friends and only surviving relative besought him to reveal the secret of the hiding place; but the ruling passion was strong in death. Shrouds have no pockets, but if the miser could not carry his treasure with him, no one else should, and so he died carrying his secret to the grave. The house was searched, and under the counter in his little store was found two boxes, one containing three thousand dollars in gold, the other, two thousand in currency. Then a thorough hunt was organized and every possible or likely spot was examined but not another cent was ever discovered. His only relative and heir was his sister, ninety-four years of age, and who is to-day the richest person on the island.

There are at this writing (1907) forty-two dwellings on the island, and every householder seems to be above want. Each year the island exports 150,000 bushels of oysters, the average price being fifty cents a bushel. The fish and game bring almost as much, so it appears that there is a good deal of money floating around Hog Island.

To a student or a thinker with archeological proclivities the people of Hog Island present a curious study. Here is a community of forty-two families, averaging six children to each. Most of these households have, father and son, existed on the island for three centuries. Now what kind of people has this intermingling and intermarrying produced? Living in a land where no one need work, and where Nature has given them a fine climate, the ocean and land, and food in plenty, we might expect to find as ideal a community as ever existed in Rasselas's Happy Valley; but such is not the fact. The islanders are below mediocrity. There are some bright examples, but the majority are slothful, and their dispositions mean and malicious. There are no criminals among them, for the reason that they have not the energy or spirit to commit a crime, except in the breaking of the game laws. They fish and hunt, and labor for a few weeks gathering oysters, and this labor gives them enough money to live in ease and comfort. Most of these islanders hibernate like an animal; they eat heavily, and then doze for hours. Some of them recline and repose twenty hours out of the twenty-four.

I had one hunting experience at Hog Island that I will never forget. I turn over the pages of my diary and find it was the 18th of December, 1905.
I was staying with the assistant light-house keeper. That morning we went to the blinds about a couple of miles from the island, and some three or four hundred yards from a sand spit that divided the ocean from the inlet.

We soon had the decoys spread, and the sport was good from the start, for the wind was blowing furiously, and the way the black-ducks came darting in from the ocean was good for the sportsman. We were both so busy shooting that we failed to notice that the tide was ebbing fast, and that meant being caught on the flats. When the little boat in the blind began to thump on the bottom we awoke to the fact that we would have to hustle if we were to get back to the island that day.

We jumped out and piled the decoys into the boat with frenzied haste, and then started to pull the boat through the shallow water a couple of hundred yards to where our sailboat was anchored in the channel; we had not gone half the distance when the batteau, heavily weighted by the decoys, stuck in the mud. The water was only a few inches deep, and we pulled and hauled with all our might until every sinew was strained; but all in vain. Now here was a nice state of affairs, a "purty predicament," as the keeper expressed it, in an open boat with the icy wind that came unchecked from Spitzbergen; the thermometer below the freezing point, and our wraps all left in the sailboat!

"Jerusalem! but it is cold," said the keeper, and he humped his spine, thrust his hands in his pockets as far as they would go, sank his neck between his shoulders until only the top of his cap was visible, and lapsed into gloomy silence.

There was nothing to do but sit on the side of the craft, and wait. The mud, black, plastic, and adhesive, was fully two feet deep, and only a web-footed bird could have stood upon it without sinking.

If my companion had been a congenial spirit we could have whiled the hours away, but as the keeper never vouchsafed any answer save a grunt or a groan, I might as well have attempted to philander with a "Marble Wenus" as to get up any conversation with him.

"A watched pot never boils," and measuring time -- waiting -- is worse than the most violent physical toil.

It is in just such situations that the sportsman's old brier-root becomes his best comforter; and, by the way, the art of lighting a pipe in a high wind, when everything is wet except the matches, is only known to old campaigners. How can one light a match when there is nothing dry to scratch it against? It is very simple. Take off your hat, open your knife and place it inside, and rub the match along the sharp edge; so there you are.

It is only in trying situations that the pipe is truly appreciated; like the jewel in the toad's head, it shines brightest in adversity. To those who face hardships tobacco is a boon; it banishes dull care, it soothes the nerves, it brings hope to the wearied heart and rest to the tired brain. The stem of the pipe is sweeter to the taste of the used-up sportsman than the kiss of the rosy-lipped maiden, and the odor of the smoke more fragrant than the odor from a bank covered with flowers. At least it appears that way when one is stuck in
a mud bank, with the mercury below freezing, and the wind blowing sixty miles an hour.

We remained in that spot for five hours, and I never felt more overjoyed to reach a well-warmed, well-lighted house, for we were half frozen and wholly starved.

"Quick the measure, dear the treasure,

Sweet is pleasure after pain."

That night the worst hurricane in the memory of man swept over the island. It was a little after two o'clock in the morning when the assistant keeper rushed into my room, clad in oil-skins, with a lantern in his hand, and told me in excited tones that the brant were flocking by the thousands around the light-house, and to dress and go with him to the tower.

I was soon ready, and reaching the four-acre enclosure in which the light-house stood, the full force of the raging wind, filled with sleet and snow, struck us with such force that we staggered like drunken men. Inch by inch we worked and battled our way until we reached the tower. Climbing the spiral steps we reached the keeper's room, just under the revolving light. The place was well-warmed by a red-hot stove, and a table of books and magazines gave the place a cozy, comfortable, homelike look. One of the keepers was keeping watch and ward, his head surrounded by a halo of tobacco smoke. It was a scene of peaceful content; but one step through the door and it was chaos on the rampage -- Old Boreas raging and running amuck. To stand, as it were, in mid air, enveloped in a hurricane, was certainly a new sensation. It seemed as though the final moment
had come, the "Dies Irae," the convulsive throes of Nature in the wreck of matter, and the crash in the crucible of the world.

The round tower was encircled by a narrow iron balcony just below the lantern. On the south side where we stood clutching the railing, the wind, which struck the tower on the north side, almost with the force of the ocean billows, was fended off. I doubt if any man could have lived for five minutes on the north side of the tower.

The brant, driven by the furious wind, and bewildered, buffeted and frightened by the warring of the elements, were naturally attracted by the flashing lamp high in the air, and they aimed for it from all points of the compass.

It was a sight worth taking a long journey to see. The brant, the shyest, wildest, most timid of water fowl, were within five feet of us, but, evidently blinded by the light, they could see nothing. Some would circle around the tower, others dart by; and wonderful to relate, some would remain stationary in the air, their wings moving so rapidly that they were blurred like wheel in rapid motion. I thought at the time what a tremendous power must lie in their wings to enable them to nullify the wind that the instrument inside indicated was blowing sixty-five miles an hour.

What a treat to be able to gaze on those wild birds and study them at close range, when they were free and unfettered in their native element two hundred feet above the earth!

The lamp in the tower revolved every forty-five seconds, and for a short time every bird was in the vivid glare, which displayed every graceful curve of neck and head, and the set and balance
of the body, and enabled one to look into their brilliant eyes.

The brant is not a glossy, showy bird like the wood-duck or mallard, but in the driving rain and under the powerful rays of the lamp they were exquisitely beautiful; their plumage looked like ebony, and the tints changed to many an iridescent hue. It was enthralling to watch them dart in the midst of the Argand's refulgent gleams, one second vivid and tangible, the next swallowed up in Cimmerian darkness. Every few seconds, above all the rush of the wind, would be heard a loud tinkling sound as a blinded brant, dazed by the rays, would strike the double two-inch plate-glass that surrounded the burner, and fall dead from the impact; sometimes dying on the platform of the tower, but more often falling to the ground.

Sterling, the keeper, picked up twenty-eight that night, and at the base of the tower there were several islanders with their dogs, who secured dozens of the water fowl, the exact number they never divulged.

Some of the islanders asked the keeper on duty to allow them to ascend the tower and shoot the hovering birds. Certainly a man using a small gauge gun could have killed hundreds that night. I told the keeper that if such a murderous act was permitted the government would dismiss every one of the light-house employees.

After two hours spent in the tower I returned to bed, and in my dreams I could still see the darting, circling brant.

Nature has richly endowed Hog Island. I question whether there is any other one spot on earth where fish, flesh, and fowl are more abundant. In
the winter the flats are the haunt of the brant, and the sloughs, of the black-duck; in the spring are the snipe, and in the summer and autumn the bay-birds. The oysters and clams are countless. In the creeks, channels, and inlets are found every variety of fish, especially the delicious sheepshead and hog-fish; and the garden produce is far superior to that of the mainland. The shooting around the island should be very fine; but the State game laws are treated with contempt, and the wild fowl are driven from the vicinity. When President Cleveland was serving his second term he visited Hog Island, and was much impressed with the game outlook, and some of his friends built a large commodious club-house a short distance from the life-saving station, and several sportsmen bought parcels of land and erected handsome shooting-lodges.

Then there was a golden chance for the Hog Islanders to make the place a great tourists', yachting and sportsmen's rendezvous, which would have yielded a handsome return without labor; but these people, actuated by jealousy or malice toward the strangers, instead of preserving the game, deliberately practiced night shooting, which of course drove the wild fowl from their feeding-grounds. It is a well-known fact that no matter how much shooting is done in the daytime, if the birds are undisturbed at night they will cling to their favorite flats during the whole season; on the other hand, if they are hunted in the night they rise high in the air and head for some distant point, often hundreds of miles away. The clubmen left the place in disgust, and the shooting-boxes are now rotting on the ground.

In 1905 I went there in the early part of the season, and there were immense flocks of brant all around the place. Standing on the tower I swept the broadwater with a powerful field-glass, and saw Machipongo Inlet black with wild fowl.

I expected to have fine sport, and was at the life-saving station early the next morning, when Harry Bowen, one of the crew, an exceptionally bright native of the island, was to take me to the blinds.

The captain of the station told me that there would be no sport, that he had heard the reports of the guns all night, and he called up several of the surfmen who had patrolled the beach, and they said that from ten o'clock P. M. until near daybreak some of the islanders were shooting the brant and black-duck.

Harry came to the station from his house about a half mile distant, and gave me the names of three of the islanders who had made a big killing, as he expressed it.

I went to the look-out and used the glass, and could not see a duck in the whole inlet. These islanders knew that the game laws expressly prohibited night-shooting in any form or manner, yet they contemptuously ignored the statutes.

Perhaps a word here about the game laws will not be untimely.

Until 1878 there were no game laws in Virginia, and any one could shoot at will all the week and Sundays too, day or night.

While a member of the Legislature, in 1875, I framed and formed the first game laws for the State, and met with a great deal of opposition, especially from the mountaineers. One member
gravely informing me that he would have to oppose me for the reason that the swallows tumbling down the chimney scared his children.

The Virginia sportsmen have succeeded in passing good, honest laws to protect the game, and that King of Sportsmen and Prince of Good Fellows, Polk Miller, has worked for years to not only enact laws to protect the game in Virginia, but to see that the enactments are carried out. It would be a good investment to have a game warden reside at Hog Island during six months of the year.

The game laws should be strictly enforced against night-shooting. All law-abiding citizens of both Virginia and the Carolinas agree to this, and the great majority agree that spring-shooting should be abolished.

Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina all have a navy to protect their fish and oysters, and if the same amount of money was spent in protecting their game there would be an abundance for the next half century.