Nooks and Corners of the New England CoastDrake, Samuel Adams
History
Nooks and Corners of the New England Coast
Drake, Samuel Adams
New England -- Description and travel
I noticed that the waves, after churning themselves into foam, assumed
emerald tints, and caught a momentary gleam of sapphire, melting into
amethyst, during the rapid changes from the bluish-green of solid water
to its greatest state of disintegration. The same change of color has
been observed in the Hebrides, and elsewhere.
The place that held for me more of fascination and sublimity than others
was the bluff that looks out upon the vast ocean. I was often there. The
swell of the Atlantic is not like the long regular roll of the Pacific,
but it beats with steady rhythm. The grandest effects are produced after
a heavy north-east blow, when the waves assume the larger and more
flattened form known as the ground-swell. I was fortunate enough to
stand on the cliff after three or four days of "easterly weather" had
produced this effect. Such billows as poured with solid impact on the
rocks, leaping twenty feet in the air, or heaped themselves in fountains
of boiling foam around its base, give a competent idea of resistless
power! The shock and recoil seemed to shake the foundations of the
island.
Upon a shelf or platform of this cliff a young lady-teacher lost her
life in September, 1848. Since then the rock on which she was seated has
been called "Miss Underhill's Chair." Other accidents have occurred on
the same spot, insufficient, it would seem, to prevent the foolhardy
from risking their lives for a seat in this fatal chair.
There are circumstances that cast a melancholy interest around the fate
of Miss Underhill. In early life she had been betrothed, and the banns,
as was then the custom, had been published in the village church. Her
father, a stern old Quaker, opposed the match, threatening to tear down
the marriage intention rather than see his daughter wed with one of
another sect. Whether from this or other cause, the suitor ceased his
attentions, and not long after took another wife in the same village.
The disappointment was believed to have made a deep impression on a girl
of Miss Underhill's strength of character. She was a Methodist, deeply
imbued with the religious zeal of that denomination. Hearing from one
who had been at the Isles of Shoals that the people were in as great
need of a missionary as those of Burmah or of the Gold Coast, it became
an affair of conscience with her to go there and teach.
She came to the islands, and applied herself with ardor to the work
before her, a labor from which any but an enthusiast would have
recoiled. It is asserted that no spot of American soil contained so
debased a community as this.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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