from Old Sea Chest / In the East Riding of Yorkshire

-->By Jesse Halsey

Back to my whalers—and the fireside. Capt’n Guss (Halsey) would come and spend the day. He and my Uncle Will (a real uncle—Father’s brother) were my favorites. (When I was seven Uncle Will drowned before my eyes

one day when we were clamming—I was too young to understand what was happening but not too little to help had I only known.)  Well, Cap’t Guss would come from Watermill two miles away, and once or twice a year father would go and spend the day with Cap’t Guss (and take me with him). Most Cap’ns’ who came would pat me on the head and straightway forget (I caught on to what they were saying to themselves-“poor child, with no mother”). But Captain Guss thought it worthwhile to talk to a boy. So did Uncle Will who lived across the street. He and father had married sisters. I’d go across the street after our early farm breakfast, in time for theirs. My aunt would try to send me home, but I can hear Uncle Will now . . . “Feed him . . . feed him.” Between Uncle Will and Aunt Libbie I was well supplied.

Captain Guss had a story about how a half dozen whalers were caught for weeks in the doldrums of some harbor on the west African coast. At last a breeze stirred and all made sail trying to be first out. Capt. Jerry Jennings neared the narrow opening and started to tack. One of his crew—an Indian—failed to loosen a line and the Captain boomed out so all the harbor heard—“Let go that clew line, you damned painted angel.” That Indian always thereafter went by that nickname, “Painted Angel.”

In our village only two men are now living who have made whaling voyages; when I was a boy every other man in the town was a Captain. Capt. Jethur Rose and his wife used to come to dinner occasionally. (Most people in the town were somewhat related.) I heard him tell father one day that when he first started out on a new voyage that he was always seasick for a few days. That gave me courage when in after years I went to sea.  Always sick and very sick, I thought of Capt. Jethur and would keep at my task if and when I had one.

 

On the first trip I made to Europe, among my steamer letters marked “first day out” was a package “From Cap’n Hugh (White).” I opened it. The inside box was inscribed—“Sure cure for sea sickness.” I was sick—very sick. With difficulty I opened the box. It was a half dozen pieces of salt pork the size of a quarter, strung on a stout string and with directions “Swallow while you hold the string, regurgitate) (those old fellows, many of them knew the dictionary, the Bible, by heart) “regurgitate and try again until cured.” Disgusted, I threw the contraption out the porthole, but in the box I found a note—a real cure. “Get some soda crackers, eat all you can, when they come up, eat some more and so on—the only cure.” And I have found it works, time on end.

Memorials of the North End | Part One

49 No. Main Street | 1833-1940 | Southampton | Abigail Fithian Halsey

by Lizbeth Halsey White

Paper read before a meeting of Southampton Colony Chapter, Daughters of the American Revolution, on March 19, by Mrs. Edward (Lizbeth) P. White, 1929

In the earliest days of the village the triangle of land bounded by Main Street, Bowden Square and North Sea Road was common land, for some time after that on every side had been occupied.

Early in 1700 this was bought by Abner Howell, son of Col Josiah, who lived on he Bowden property. Abner Howell divided it between his two sons. To David he gave the south portion which included the plot where in the early 1840s Capt. Daniel Jagger built his home. This is now the home of Wm. L. Donnelly. To Phineas Howell was given the north portion of the Triangle. On the west half of his lot he built a tan-yard, which he afterwards sold to Ebenezer Jagger and removed from the village.

The Main Street part of the lot was purchased in 1788 by Annanias Halsey, whose son Urah lived across the street in the Wilman Halsey house and whose daughter, Susan, lived to very old age in the little house which stood on the front of the lot now owned by Abigail Halsey. This house and also the Nancy Sayre house is now in Tuckahoe.

On the Seven Ponds road to the Water Mill, on the edge of the Piggery Golf Links, is a very charming little old house which about the year 1800 stood beside the mill stream just opposite to the old Water Mill. Into it came a young bride Phebe Rogers and her husband Charles Fithian Halsey. They purchased a farm and he was miller in the windmill, (still standing) not far from their home. Three boys and three girls came to them and the father died. Desiring to give her boys a trade Phebe sold the farm and moved her family to New York City—then a three-days journey by stage-coach. She apprenticed the boys for four years to learn the mason’s trade. At that time (1820) New York City had begun its phenomenal growth, thought it was still a country village as compared with the city of today. Wall and Canal Streets were being built up, and Greenwich Village was a residential suburb.

There in Grove Street in 1827 the youthful masons built a home for their family use, and when Henry, the eldest son, returned to Water Mill for his bride, it was in the Grove Street house that they made their first home. But eastern Long Island beckoned and the family returned.

“Capt. Harry” Halsey in 1831 bought the plot on the triangle owned by Annanias Halsey and built his home thereon. The house in Grove Street is still standing and the wooden mantels and paneled and reeded casings of doors and windows were exactly copied in the little parlor of their home in the North End. In a room, now a part of the kitchen, “Miss Amanda” kept her Dame school and there are a few still with us who remember her as their first teacher. Opening out from the school room was a dark stairway where her pupils were banished by way of punishment. While she was having recitations they would pull off their shoes and steal to the kitchen chamber above and have no end of fun, as children do, when they can find an attic to play in.

“Miss Amanda” loved poetry and flowers and the perennials she planted still bloom in the little old garden. Some of her punishments, after she had tried them out on herself, she abandoned. A big pewter horn hung high in its place on the wall and nothing was allowed to break the routine of the little schoolroom except when a whale-rally was on at the beach and “Capt. Harry,” without ceremony, rushed in for the horn that he might do his part in passing the signal which meant “Whale off shore! All hands to the beach!”

Both of Capt. Harry’s brothers became whaling captains but he bought a farm and worked on at his mason’s trade. His title of “Captain” came to him as wrecking master. Before the Life-Saving Service was established (1876) and nearly all ships were sailing vessels, wrecks along the shore were not infrequent and the wrecking crews were a necessary and important organization.

For so many years when Sag Harbor was a prominent whaling port and her harbor was busy with ships it became the Mecca of every man, and especially of every boy, to go to the Harbor and see the ships.

Capt. Harry Halsey, when a boy of twelve years, had been permitted to pay a visit to his cousins living there. A ship came in bringing the news of the signing of the Peace between England and the United States, after the War of 1812-14. His first impulse was to carry home the good news as quickly as possible. So, in his boyish enthusiasm, he ran all the way to this home crying “Peace! Peace!” and this is the way the news was brought to Water Mill. The boy had been named for his great-uncle Henry Halsey who was Capt. of a Privateer during the Revolution and who lost his life in the Battle of Groton Heights. His name with other patriots who fell at that time is engraved on the monument there. He with his brother Jesse, after hearing the news of the Battle of Lexington, rowed across Long Island Sound in a row-boat and enlisted in the Continental Army. Jesse Halsey served throughout the war and won the rank of Captain.

In the April number of the Scribner’s magazine (1929) is an article written by Thomas Boyd entitled, “How Mad Was Anthony Wayne?” The article describes the evacuation of the City of Philadelphia by the British Forces and the Battle of Monmouth Court-house. The incident described on page 436 verifies a tradition cherished by the numerous descendants of Jesse Halsey, the Patriot, who at the time was near Gen. Washington and heard his reprimand of Gen. Charles Lee for his disobedience of orders and his cowardly retreat. He felt the reprimand, though severe, was just and well deserved.

He told also of the severe heat of that eventful day and said that more men die from the intense heat than from the guns. This favored the Americans for though many had frozen in their homespun garments during the previous severe winter at Valley Forge, on this hottest of July days the homespun-clad army had the advantage over the enemy. In their heavy and much-decorated cloth uniforms.

Capt. Jesse Halsey, brother of Capt. Harry, built the house which is now the home of Dr. David Hallock. The sister, Elizabeth, married Capt. William Fowler and settled just north of the Burying Ground. Her husband was a whaling Captain and he also spent several years in California during the gold-rush. Three of their sons went on whaling voyages and never returned. Dear Aunt Libbie Fowler! Who never heard the click of the gate without a throb! She had an overwhelming sympathy for others in time of need. In sorrow and in illness she became the neighborhood mother, and there are many who remember her for her kindly deeds.

To return to the Triangle, the southern half of which had been given to David Howell. It was he who about 1750 built the well-preserved old house which long since became the home of the Herricks. David Howell was a silversmith and just when he left Southampton we have no record. It is certain that his house was occupied by the British officers during the Revolution, and it is safe to assume that he was one of the many refugees to Conn. So many of the homes of the villagers changed ownership after the Revolution. This, in 1772, was purchased by Col. Josiah Smith of Moriches for his daughter, Hannah, who had married Elias Pelletreau. He was a merchant and the store which he built remained for many years attached to the house on the south. His wife, Hannah, was very deaf, caused by the effects of cold and exposure when endeavoring to relieve her father who for some time was imprisoned by the enemy in the Provost Prison in New York City.

She made very possible effort to relieve his distress, for imagination would fail to reveal the miseries of an enemy prison during those bitter years.

Courtesy Lizbeth Halsey White Files, Southampton Historical Museum Archives and Research Center 

Hatchment

by Jesse Halsey

“They heard not the voice of Him that spake to me.”

{Jack Gardner [is a] soldier who joins church on return because of sunset experience; boy at the wood-pile.}

Hog—swine

Pig—Pork

Cow—beef

Hash—Popui; Webster in one of his definitions of hash, frankly says “A mess.”

Not to tarry over definition—a best this is, but popui—with sauce or without, a hash of experience. No horse meat, we trust—though we can testify it’s not so bad when you don’t know it. We had a sausage factory improvised in Siberia during the War, supposedly and actually we used reindeer meat, but I have a suspicion that ex cavalry equines go in at times, rabbits (arctic hares that is), and when one is skun a mongrel Eskimo dog looks just the same and if you don’t know it—tastes the same or similar. (I have eaten snakes in Japan, didn’t know the difference, thinking they were eels—which I catch thru the ice on Long Island, skin and fry—a delectable morsel.)

Why this dietetic metaphor—I can’t say; we started with hash. And this is just a sample here and there out of an oldster’s reminiscences of things grave and gay; res sacra and res secularia, unrelated likely to any logic, but tied into the stream of life for better or for worse, for richer, for poorer, till death doth part soul and body and memory fades out of fructifies into heavenly harvest—or hellish (most hells of any gripping reality to men since Dante are constructed of memories).

But to get on; or rather to go back. Some one asked Duncan Spaeth, coach of the Princeton Crew why it was that rowing was his favorite sport—“Only thing I know where by looking back you can get ahead.” (Parenthesis, no two. The very time that Henry Ford called all history “bunk” he, nonetheless, was putting little concave mirrors on the front of the drivers [side] so he could see the road behind; that’s the only way to drive safely to at least glance on the road behind.)

With this recurring justification or alibi or reminiscence, we start again. A new England kitchen, big fireplace, brick oven, Saturday night and baked beans and brown bread. A red damask spic and span table cloth on a square walnut table; four persons seated. Kerosene lamp, flickers from the smoldering fireplace; the lazy hum of the tea kettle, now that the tea is brewed. A boy maybe twelve, and his older sister back to the wall, facing the fire; bewildered father at one end of the table, elderly aunt at the other.

Melvina Terry Halsey, 1842-1887

Father seemed old to the boy whose mother was dead, he himself as one born out of due time; father seemed old, he was old, looked old, felt old (rheumatism; its antidote a jug of hard cider with whittlings of barberry in it; the boy often went a mile down the lane to Uncle Harvey's barberry for twigs and bark for the decoction). Mother had died, quite young, when boy was five or less; father lived ever under its shadow; older sisters always thought that if father had been less stubborn (loyal) and had the new doctor who had come fresh from Ann Arbor and never lost a case of pneumonia, likely mother would have lived--who knows.

Aunt Gussie’s (her husband father's brother, she was mother's sister) husband, Uncle Will, our favorite out of a baker's dozen, at least, of uncles, had taken the boy, od six, his adult brother (and a neighbor's boy of five—Lewis Hildreth—on a clamming expedition. One horse box wagon, two wash tubs with ropes attached and down to Sebonac "gut" where the tide cuts in and out between the big bay and the cold spring, scallop bond—Ram Island and other ramifying creeks. (They say cricks down east, our way.) . . .

The men go out on the flats and beyond, the crop is plentiful and the tubs soon filled—a long hour or so—the boys play on the shore, shells and stones in many shapes and colors collected and arranged, and houses built and paddling in the lapping wash of the tiny waves; swimming lessons will come later when the men get back. Uncle Will is nearing the shore, crossing the channel, when he throws up his hands and flounders in the tide rip. The boys think he is playing a trick to amuse them. (He was always up to making them laugh—our favorite uncle.) He goes down “for the third time” as the saying goes and Lewis says (I can hear his lisp now), “I guess he’s gone down to look for his hat.” Alarmed, they begin to run up and down the beach wafting their coats like the old folks do when they sight a whale, shouting till finally Harry comes slowly thru the teeming water but fast he can, reaching the flat he kicks off the tub handle half of it, thus free from the rope and tub he plunges in the deep water of the gut and though the tide has carried tub and body far into the inlet he reaches the tub, now empty, tied to uncle Will and brings the body to the shore; the boys following the shoreline come to the place and stand helpless by while Harry rolls the body on the tub trying to extract the water from the lungs. (No Red Cross training in those days; only sailor’s methods.) Some furtive clam diggers from another township across the bay whose sloop is hidden behind Ram Island, hearing the boys’ shouts finally come and they and Harry work on half an hour without avail. The boy hears his brother now, across the intervening half century plus, as Harry lifts our uncle’s lifeless body into the one horse farm wagon, carefully bedded with dry seaweed from the shore—a fitting coach for an old whaler, but still (brothers sob) it seems inappropriate for a man just entering middle life. The long slow drive home, Harry and the boys on the seat, the body in the wagon shrouded in the horse blanket. The boys eat the lunch—wondering why Harry doesn’t. (They were six and five.) We stop at the first house from the shore and tell Cap’n ‘Lias (White), he saddles his horse and rides to the village to find Father, who like the elder brother of the parable only in this one regard was “in the field,” after going to tell his sister-in-law and her daughter, joins us at the foot of the lane as we come up to the house.

No professional morticians in those days—not there at least—and old Aunt Libbie who had ushered us all into the world and our parents before us—Aunt Libbie takes over. The boy at her direction goes across the street to Father’s barn to show the men where to find the rough pine plank 48’’ x 6’ on which his mother had been “laid out” some months before; stored up there in the hay mow (the east end where a great round shiny ships spar tied the hand hewn oak rafters together. What a job for a boy—or boys, for “Little Lewis” went along, too. (He died the next year.) But that’s another story; we wander too far; let’s get back to the kitchen table. There are shadows in the room you see; not of westerning sun’s making for the flicker of the fireplace logs—Father at one end of the table, Aunt Gussie at the other, going their best for the others’ sake to be cheerful.

. . . No levity; but much wisdom in the meagre conversation. Meagre is the gossip ("Gossip" says father, who studies the dictionary and knew his Latin from Academy days, "'Gossip' was once a good word akin to Gospel"--let's make it that and when some really unpleasant sure enough bit of unsavory morsel of truth filtered in, Father would say, "As Biney (his wife, my mother) used to say, 'Maye, for we all have a crook in the elbow.'" Then he would add as was his Scriptural custom, "Charity covereth a multitude of sins."

Aunt Libby

from In the East Riding of Yorkshire:

(Quasi-Auto-Biographical. Written for one’s children.)

by Jesse Halsey 

There was the remains of an old fort not far from our house and adjoining our farm. It was near enough the little school house, where we went, that during recess all the boys would run there to play war. On lucky days I commanded the attacking party. That was the American army—the attacking one for the fort had been built by the British when they occupied East Riding after the battle of Long Island.

The house where the British General Sir Wm. Erskine dined still stands next door, but one, to mine. It is a veritable museum of the accumulated colonial wealth of many generations. Its present owner is one of my closest friends. Likewise our children, as were our father and their fathers before them. This kind of consanguinity of the spirit is thicker than blood and defies time.

Of an evening neighbors would come in, Uncle Bill Fowler who had been to California in ’49, had mortgaged his farm to go; came home penniless and had to go back to his masons trade. His nephew John Fowler who mixed mortar for him lived on for many years. He would come to help my father hoe corn. I would be given one row between the two men, Father with two rows on one side and uncle John two rows on the other. He was short and fat but could hoe his own roe as the saying goes and help with mine. “Hi by golly” I can hear him now . . . then he’d start off on some whaling yarn.

This was always the theme of conversation and while the old men would sit spinning yarns little Jess quiet for once, sat listening.

“The year the ‘Old Sabina sailed,’ or the ‘Old Neptune,’ or the ‘Old—“ that careening adjective prefixed all ships’ names. Ten miles away was the Harbor. The hurricane of last month [ed note: Wednesday, September 21, 1938] toppled over the lovely towering spire from the old church that the whale oiled money built a hundred years ago. There for a century it has stood a beacon by night and spire by day. The little village has now sunk to diminutive economic proportions. It cannot be rebuilt. Ichabod—the glory hath departed.

But even in my boyhood a vessel occasionally sailed for the whale fishery and across the sound from New Bedford whalers put out until ten years ago. Every Long Island boy with few exceptions went to sea, all through the years from the Revolution till after the Civil War.

Two years, three years, a hard life but they loved it. And the tales they could tell! I have listened by the hour. Captain Austin Herrick wrecked on the coast of Patagonia and working his way along the coast among the savages and coming home long after he was given up for lost. Willie and Eddie Fowler never heard from, and their mother, my great aunt, telling me in a moment of confidence one day as I went through her yard on the way to school that though they had been gone for fifty years that her gate never clicked but that she went to the window or the door to look and see if they might yet be coming home.

[Great] Aunt Libbie [ed note: Elizabeth P Halsey Fowler 4 Jul 1815] —she gave me my first bath and first spanking I imagine the spanking came first)—was the village midwife and practical nurse, the adviser of its gentry and poor folk alike. Her cookie jar (with raised doughnuts in the winter) was accessible to all the boys of the North End. Her yard (next to the graveyard) was the short way to school. In the Cemetery—and only there—was I allowed to stroll on Sunday. (I can take you on the darkest night to any stone you name.) After the walk in the cemetery, father and I would slip through the back gate to Aunt Libbie’s. He was her favorite nephew. She nursed him when he was a baby, too. And I have one little cloth shoe (beautifully made) that she fabricated for little Charles Henry. In her old age she was still active. I can remember her helping my mother in the care of a sick neighbor—or my mother helping her. They came to our house one morning before daylight, went to the attic and got a pig’s bladder that hung on the rafters. (It had been inflated at butchering time.) This was before the day of rubber water bottles. The bladders of slaughtered animals were always preserved. (Sometimes when the old crop was not exhausted, we boys were allowed to have a new one for a football—not often, however.) My brother was sent off into the night to get ice from the one ice house in the community, over a mile away. Birth and death and all the occasions in between Aunt Libby was always there and most welcome.

Back to my whalers—and the fireside. Capt’n Guss (Halsey) would come and spend the day. He and my Uncle Will (a real uncle—Father’s brother) were my favorites. (When I was seven Uncle Will drowned before my eyes one day when we were clamming—I was too young to understand what was happening but not too little to help had I only known.)  Well, Cap’t Guss would come from Watermill two miles away, and once or twice a year father would go and spend the day with Cap’t Guss (and take me with him). Most Cap’ns’ who came would pat me on the head and straightway forget (I caught on to what they were saying to themselves-“poor child, with no mother”). But Captain Guss thought it worthwhile to talk to a boy. So did Uncle Will who lived across the street. He and father had married sisters. I’d go across the street after our early farm breakfast, in time for theirs. My aunt would try to send me home, but I can hear Uncle Will now . . . “Feed him . . . feed him.” Between Uncle Will and Aunt Libbie I was well supplied.