Today we did something I've always been shy about doing, we visited the town of Salem, Massachusetts. As we were told by our guides on the "hop on, hop off" trolley this morning, living in Salem around the year 1692 turned out to be a very bad choice for a couple of hundred folks. You probably have learned parts of the story over the years, so had we. In a frenzy of lethal religious nonsense, around two hundred innocent people were accused of being "witches" and nineteen were executed for supposed heinous crimes. Many, many of the remaining 180 souls were stripped of their money and property and imprisoned. Though they were not convicted of anything, if they weren't able to buy their way out of jail, they simply languished there until they died. It's ugly. It's gruesome. And I always turn the channel when the story comes on TV.
But we couldn't exactly drive right by the place, could we? I mean, we were in Maine just north of Salem, and tomorrow we'll be going to Boston just south of Salem. Academically speaking, it would have been less than intelligent to ignore the place. And so, this morning we caught the trolley that came right here to our camp, and spent the next forty minutes or so learning the story of Salem, both its dark past, and its more "civilized" accomplishments.
Oddly enough, as one of our trolley drivers put it, any mention of the witch trials was forbidden for at least one hundred and fifty years after the original 9-month-long event. Who wanted to be known as being from the town that murdered dozens of innocent citizens? Then, around the 1950s, the townspeople suddenly realized that lots and lots of money could be had by playing willing hosts to the hoards of tourists who seemed to be fascinated by the gruesome story. Today, the town's economy, at least the historic old part of the town, is largely built around those long-ago events. Now, everything from the Visitors Center gift shop, to dozens of restaurants and gift shops stock an ample supple of witch-related geegaws and tchotchkes.
Okay, so witch-related sensationalism is not my cup of tea. But I have to admit that touring the town, including the waterfront, a certain witch trial judge's home, and the famous House of Seven Gables, from the Hawthorne novel of the same name, was pretty interesting (photo below). And walking the narrow streets of ANY town built in the 1600s can't help but be fascinating, especially since Salem has managed to retain an unbelievable number of their oldest buildings. I'm not used to historic preservation at that level since in Nevada we tend to knock down anything that's in the way of development, no matter how historically significant. We even got to see the self-proclaimed "oldest ice cream store in America," which we passed on our way to the Seven Gables house.
At this point I'm going to reveal to you how close I am to this subject of witches. In my family tree, my 12th great Grandfather was a chap named "William Noyes." He lived from 1568 to 1622 in Wiltshire, England. William begat a son whose name was Nicholas. He also begat a daughter, my 11th great grandmother, Mowit. There were lots of other children, too. But son Nicholas also had a son who was called Nicholas, and it was this particular Noyes who figured prominently in the deaths of at least some of the witch trail's innocent victims.
As Wikipedia puts it, "Rev. Nicholas Noyes II was son of Rev. Nicholas Noyes and Mary Cutting Noyes, grandson of the Rev. William Noyes, and nephew of Rev. James Noyes. He graduated at Harvard in 1667, and, after preaching thirteen years in Haddam, Connecticut, he moved in 1683 to Salem, where he was minister until his death in Salem."
"Before the execution of one Sarah Good on July 19, 1692, Noyes asked her to confess. Her famous last words were, “You are a liar! I am no more a witch than you are a wizard, and if you take away my life God will give you blood to drink.” Twenty-five years later, Noyes died of a hemorrhage and literally did choke on his own blood. He was 9 days shy of his 70th birthday."
"On September 22, 1692, Noyes had officiated as clergyman at the final hangings of those accused of witchcraft. It is reported that he turned toward the suspended bodies of the victims and said, “What a sad thing it is to see eight firebrands of hell hanging there.”
So there you have it. Not a nice guy. Fortunately, since I am a descendant of Mowit Noyes, and not her younger brother Nicholas, I'm hoping that there was no member of my family tree who was directly involved with these murders most foul. But who knows? Most family trees will not stand up to much close scrutiny, and now we have the Internet to make it easy.
Since we had these events on our mind today, I guess it was fitting that it was cold, overcast, and gray for much of the day. Photography was dismal, but the light did make for great shooting when it came to tombstones, of which they have a rather prodigious supply right in the middle of town. I photographed the markers for the nineteen convicted and slain witches, and I walked through the cemetery just casually looking for anyone whose name might ring a bell as coming from my tree. But I didn't find anyone. The only name I remember is the surname, Bowditch. For some reason there were quite a few of those.
But you can tell that I was less than thrilled with the whole witches "visit," as I bought neither my usual "been there, done that" t-shirt, nor did I come away with any research material on the subject. I decided that I'd just let it suffice that my 12th great grandfather had a grandson who, along with eight or nine other misguided idiots, probably screwed up a lot of other family trees way back in 1692.
The thing I liked best today was lunch. Though we didn't have any initial luck in finding the two or three restaurants recommended by the trolley lady (the trolley had an attractions narrator as well as a driver), we did stumble over a small "hole-in-the-wall" bistro that was advertising "three shrimp tacos" on their outside menu board. I thought that sounded good, though I flirted with the possibility of clam chowder or the special burger as well.
In the end, Concetta and I both had the shrimp tacos. They used an awful lot of hot sauce, which Concetta did not like and I wasn't thrilled with, but I thought the tacos tasted pretty good and had lots of fresh ingredients. We had a couple of Coronas to drink, which served to cool off the hot sauce a bit. For desert our charming waitress talked me into the key lime pie, which I augmented with black coffee. Concetta shared my pie, and also had the coffee, which turned out to be her favorite part of the lunch. It was darn good and came in a cup large enough to use as a soup bowl.
There was one other high point of the day, at least for me. While we were still at camp this morning, we chanced to see a wooden sailing vessel (photo right), about forty feet long, beating its way up the channel towards us. Since it was sporting the old style "gaff" rigging so common in centuries gone by, I dashed over to the rocky shore and shot a number of photos of her. Today, when we got to the historic waterfront area of Salem, we spotted the same boat tied up at the quay. I decided to go talk to the captain and relive a bit of my childhood.
When I got to the boat's mooring, I soon discovered that you could not approach the boat because the entry was roped off. Being one of those people who lives by the mantra, "you don't ask, you don't get," I called over to the guys on the boat and asked if I could trespass and come photograph their craft. This they allowed me to do, and I proceeded to spend the next twenty minutes chatting with the captain and his two mates about the world of sailing (photo below).
Most of the time I don't miss living on the sea, but sometimes when I stand on the undulating deck of some tour boat, or if I see an old wooden boat with it's billowed sails hoisted, I do feel a certain longing for shipboard life.
Naturally, I told them that I had lived on just such a wooden boat when I was a lad. And then in the midst of a general discussion of wooden boats and their upkeep, I told them my tale of nearly sinking with the yacht Mar in the midnight waters of the Mediterranean back in the winter of 1973.
We were a hundred miles from the nearest land, and somehow our Danforth anchor got loose during some extremely heavy seas, and the next thing we knew we had water flooding our compartments. Long hours of working on the bilge pump in a flooded engine room, as well as some difficult temporary patching of the largest hole in the hull, did much to save us. But it's probably the closest I have come in this life to not reaching my next birthday.
If you want to read about it go to: http://www.tomdavis.me/memoirs.html#sinking
Tomorrow, we have a number of things on our agenda. First, we're planning on visiting the suburb of Boston known as Quincy, the home of President John Adams. There we hope to visit the Adams home as well as farm. Later we intend to try and track down Concetta's home when she was born, in a community known as Milford. Lastly, we've reserved a space in the Minuteman RV park near Boston, and we hope we'll be able to score a train ride into the city, because no one in their right mind tries to drive there.
So, until we meet again, we wish you the very best of Happy Traveling!
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