Hampton, New Hampshire, in Poem

Bill West created the Great Genealogy Poetry Challenge. The challenge now in its eleventh year asks participants to blog a poem about a region where an ancestor resided and to tell how it relates to the ancestor.

This poem mentions my ancestor Rev. Stephen Bachiler as "Father Bachiler." His Puritan-leaning teachings led to his arrival in Boston in 1632. He pastored in Saugus (now Lynn) and Newbury before helping establish the town of Hampton. He returned to England in 1653 and died near London in 1656.¹

The poem lacks historical accuracy. The actual wreck mentioned in this poem occurred in the autumn, rather than summer, of 1657, after Bachiler's return to England and death.² Goody Cole, also mentioned in the poem, was imprisoned in 1656.³ While the poem does not report the number aboard the vessel, Joseph Dow's town history reports the deaths of eight Hampton residents in the disaster.⁴

The Wreck of Rivermouth
by John Greenleaf Whittier

Rivermouth Rocks are fair to see,
By dawn or sunset shone across,
When the ebb of the sea has left them free,
To dry their fringes of gold-green moss
For there the river comes winding down,
From salt sea-meadows and uplands brown,
And waves on the outer rocks afoam
Shout to its waters, "Welcome home!"

And fair are the sunny isles in view
East of the grisly Head of the Boar,
And Agamenticus lifts its blue
Disk of a cloud the woodlands o'er;
And southerly, when the tide is down,
'Twixt white sea-waves and sand-hills brown,
The beach-birds dance and the gray gulls wheel
Over a floor of burnished steel.

Once, in the old Colonial days,
Two hundred years ago and more,
A boat sailed down through the winding ways
Of Hampton River to that low shore,
Full of a goodly company
Sailing out on the summer sea,
Veering to catch the land-breeze light,
With the Boar to left and the Rocks to right.

In Hampton meadows, where mowers laid
Their scythes to the swaths of salted grass,
"Ah, well-a-day! our hay must be made!"
A young man sighed, who saw them pass.
Loud laughed his fellows to see him stand
Whetting his scythe with a listless hand,
Hearing a voice in a far-off song,
Watching a white hand beckoning long.

"Fie on the witch!" cried a merry girl,
As they rounded the point where Goody Cole
Sat by her door with her wheel atwirl,
A bent and blear-eyed poor old soul.
"Oho!" she muttered, "ye 're brave to-day!
But I hear the little waves laugh and say,
'The broth will be cold that waits at home;
For it 's one to go, but another to come!'"

"She's cursed," said the skipper; "speak her fair:
I'm scary always to see her shake
Her wicked head, with its wild gray hair,
And nose like a hawk, and eyes like a snake."
But merrily still, with laugh and shout,
From Hampton River the boat sailed out,
Till the huts and the flakes on Star seemed nigh,
And they lost the scent of the pines of Rye.

They dropped their lines in the lazy tide,
Drawing up haddock and mottled cod;
They saw not the Shadow that walked beside,
They heard not the feet with silence shod.
But thicker and thicker a hot mist grew,
Shot by the lightnings through and through;
And muffled growls, like the growl of a beast,
Ran along the sky from west to east.

Then the skipper looked from the darkening sea
Up to the dimmed and wading sun;
But he spake like a brave man cheerily,
"Yet there is time for our homeward run."
Veering and tacking, they backward wore;
And just as a breath-from the woods ashore
Blew out to whisper of danger past,
The wrath of the storm came down at last!

The skipper hauled at the heavy sail
"God be our help!" he only cried,
As the roaring gale, like the stroke of a flail,
Smote the boat on its starboard side.
The Shoalsmen looked, but saw alone
Dark films of rain-cloud slantwise blown,
Wild rocks lit up by the lightning's glare,
The strife and torment of sea and air.

Goody Cole looked out from her door
The Isles of Shoals were drowned and gone,
Scarcely she saw the Head of the Boar
Toss the foam from tusks of stone.
She clasped her hands with a grip of pain,
The tear on her cheek was not of rain
"They are lost," she muttered, "boat and crew!
Lord, forgive me! my words were true!"

Suddenly seaward swept the squall;
The low sun smote through cloudy rack;
The Shoals stood clear in the light, and all
The trend of the coast lay hard and black.
But far and wide as eye could reach,
No life was seen upon wave or beach;
The boat that went out at morning never
Sailed back again into Hampton River.

O mower, lean on thy bended snath,
Look from the meadows green and low
The wind of the sea is a waft of death,
The waves are singing a song of woe!
By silent river, by moaning sea,
Long and vain shall thy watching be
Never again shall the sweet voice call,
Never the white hand rise and fall!

O Rivermouth Rocks, how sad a sight
Ye saw in the light of breaking day
Dead faces looking up cold and white
From sand and seaweed where they lay.
The mad old witch-wife wailed and wept,
And cursed the tide as it backward crept
"Crawl back, crawl back, blue water-snake
Leave your dead for the hearts that break!"

Solemn it was in that old day
In Hampton town and its log-built church,
Where side by side the coffins lay
And the mourners stood in aisle and porch.
In the singing-seats young eyes were dim,
The voices faltered that raised the hymn,
And Father Dalton, grave and stern,
Sobbed through his prayer and wept in turn.

But his ancient colleague did not pray;
Under the weight of his fourscore years
He stood apart with the iron-gray
Of his strong brows knitted to hide his tears;
And a fair-faced woman of doubtful fame,
Linking her own with his honored name,
Subtle as sin, at his side withstood
The felt reproach of her neighborhood.

Apart with them, like them forbid,
Old Goody Cole looked drearily round,
As, two by two, with their faces hid,
The mourners walked to the burying-ground.
She let the staff from her clasped hands fall
"Lord, forgive us! we're sinners all!"
And the voice of the old man answered her
"Amen!" said Father Bachiler.

So, as I sat upon Appledore
In the calm of a closing summer day,
And the broken lines of Hampton shore
In purple mist of cloudland lay,
The Rivermouth Rocks their story told;
And waves aglow with sunset gold,
Rising and breaking in steady chime,
Beat the rhythm and kept the time.

And the sunset paled, and warmed once more
With a softer, tenderer after-glow;
In the east was moon-rise, with boats off-shore
And sails in the distance drifting slow.
The beacon glimmered from Portsmouth bar,
The White Isle kindled its great red star;
And life and death in my old-time lay
Mingled in peace like the night and day!⁵

---

1 “Stephen Bachiler,” Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Bachiler : accessed 1 November 2019).^↩
2 Joseph Dow, History of the Town of Hampton, New Hampshire: From Its Settlement in 1638, to the Autumn of 1892 (Salem, Massachusetts: Salem Press, 1894), 1:57; Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/historyoftownofh00dowj/ : accessed 1 November 2019.^↩
3 Dow, History of the Town of Hampton, New Hampshire, 1:54.^↩
4 Joseph Dow, History of the Town of Hampton, New Hampshire, 1:57.^↩
5 John Greenleaf Whittier, The Complete Poetical Works of John Greenleaf Whittier (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1894), 245-247.^↩

Rev. Stephen Bachiller: Ministry and Adultery at a Ripe Old Age

By most accounts, Rev. Stephen Bachiller (spelled various ways including Bachiller, Batchellor, Batchelder, Bachiler, etc.) was born somewhere in England around 1560. (He is my 10th great grandfather.) He is said to have graduated from Oxford in 1586. He was an Anglican minister who became involved in the Puritan movement. After a brief period in Holland, he came to America after the age of seventy in 1632. He became the minister at Saugus (later Lynn), Massachusetts that same year. He was dismissed as minister in 1636, his ministry there having been embroiled in controversy. In 1638 he and others settled Winnicunnet (which became Hampton in 1639) in New Hampshire. He was the first minister. Controversy again followed him. He was accused of adultery with his neighbor's wife. He was excommunicated at first, but then the excommunication was removed; however, he was no longer allowed to serve as pastor. This didn't stop him from occasionally preaching, even after moving to Portsmouth at the age of 88. He married again in 1650. His wife had a child by a man named George Rogers. Her sentence was to receive 39 stripes and to be branded with the letter "A." (Many people believe she is the inspiration for Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter.) He returned to England, accompanied by a grandson, in 1654 (about age 94). I've seen dates of death ranging from 1656 to 1661 for him. The apparent date of death is 31 October 1656. We do know that Mary attempted to divorce him on grounds of abandonment in 1656 but was unsuccessful. Stephen is also said to have married a woman after returning to England which would have been yet another adulterous act.

It amazes me that he was as vigorous as he must have been at so late an age. It further amazes me that he was able to travel across the ocean in his 90s. It is interesting that a woman of child-bearing age would marry a 90-year-old man. He's one of those interesting characters that seems more like a legend that a historical person. While I haven't attempted to go back and document his life as I really have further work on generations between what I do have proven and him, he's one of those that I'm looking forward to researching just to try to see what is true and what is false about all the published reports of his life.

For more information on this fascinating ancestor, check out Lane Public Library's pages on him.

Update (7/20): I have had an email from the author of the book on Goody Wing that Miriam mentioned in her comments. Beverly has done more research on Bachiler than I have and says that some of the information that I've acquired I will find to be erroneous when I begin researching it with primary source documents. Let me just quickly say that much of the basis for my account above came from a book entitled The Eastern Frontier. I did acknowledge that I'd found a lot of variant information in just reading the accounts of Bachiler. Beverly says that Mary Beedle who is the wife who received that brand of "A" was the fourth wife of Bachiler instead of the third and that he did not remarry when he returned to England. I know that I'm going to have lots of "conflicting information" to resolve when I do begin my primary research on this fascinating ancestor.

Some have asked through which child of his I'm descended. It is through his daughter Ann who married John Sanborn.

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?

When Jasia first announced the topic for this edition’s Carnival of Genealogy, I thought, “that will be easy.” The more I thought about the topic (inviting 4 ancestors for dinner), the more challenging it was to decide which four to invite. As I’ve read all the responses from other bloggers, I’ve realized that a lot of their thoughts are along the same lines as mine . . . “which 4 will be able to get me past that brick wall?” However, I also have some very interesting and colorful characters that I’d just like to ask a few questions.


I think that I’m going to choose Abraham Lantz, my great-great grandfather, as the first ancestor, and we’ll dine at his house because I’ve heard he always insisted on seven courses at each meal. I suspect his wife Laura was an excellent cook, having grown up on a farm in Illinois. I’d like to know what it was like for him when he, being an Amish man, chose to marry Laura, a Methodist woman. I’d like to hear him tell stories of moving around in his childhood, his days as postmaster, his store in Carlock, Illinois, and about his move to Monroe County, Mississippi. I’ve always been intrigued that he moved down with some of his Amish friends when they established the failed settlement at Gibson even though he was no longer one of them. While I realize that his Amish group was one of the more progressive ones of that faith, it just goes against everything you hear about shunning.


Next, I’d like to invite Rev. Stephen Bachiler (or Batchelder). If you don’t know about this colorful character, read a few of these articles at Lane Memorial Library in Hampton, New Hampshire. You will immediately know that our conversation will not be lacking that evening. I want to know all about his struggles with the church, about his time in Holland, about his trip to America, about his troubles in Lynn (and elsewhere) and his establishing the church in Hampton, about his return to England, and, for lack of a better way to state this, about his women, especially his third wife who appears to have been the inspiration for The Scarlet Letter. I’d also like to know whether or not he married the woman in England that Mary (wife #3) claimed he had.


As much as I’d like to invite a few of my other colonial New England ancestors who all have such fascinating stories, I think I’ll head south and pick up a few “loose ends” for the rest of my dinner party. My next dining companion will be Gabriel Fowlkes, the immigrant. He is supposed to have been born in Wales about 1696. However, no one can find a record over there, so I want to know if he was born in Wales or not, and where it was. I’d also like to hear why he chose to migrate to Virginia. I’d like to know about his life in the British Isles and then about his trip to America. I’d like for him to tell me what he knows about his family history.


My final invitation is issued to Richard Thornton. I know that will make my cousin Terry very happy! I want to know the exact date (instead of my present range of 1790-1795) for when he was born and exactly where he was born, who his parents were, what he knows about his family’s history, his moves, and why his family liked to hide from record takers or burn courthouses so much! I want him to tell me all about his wife Agnes and her family. There seems to be a gap between the date for their marriage and the first known child so I’d like to know if I’m missing some of his kids and who they are. I’d like to have him talk about all his children and what they were like growing up, especially his sons who died in the Civil War. I’d like to ask him if he’s related to the David Thornton in Fayette County, Alabama and if so, how.