273 



wolf, wliicli the settlers endeavored to fence out the same 

 year. But the efficacy of this mode must have been small, 

 or else a detachment was left in concealment on the penin- 

 sula, for five years later, the village train band were ordered 

 to devote their annual muster-day to the hunting of the 

 wolves that still infested it. xVs late as 1698, there were 

 five foxes killed there also, so that the stage of entire denu- 

 dation could not have been reached at that time. But the 

 process was vigorously begun some time before. 



In 1657 the town, with t'l.it zeal against the trees of the 

 forest always found in no,\ ly settled regions, ordered that 

 the planting-lots on Naliant should be cleared of wood in six 

 years thereafter, under pain of fine.* Another phase in the 

 destructive work was the liberty confirmed to 'J'homas Dex- 

 ter to tap the pines for the manufacture of tar : resulting, as 

 it must in that day of coarse and unsparing ways, in the 

 extermination of all the evergreens that escaped the more 

 summary ^'isitation of the axe.f 



But thirty or forty years shov/ed the people that they had 

 gone too far. Nahant had been stormed, as a castle, by the 

 forces of the cultivator, and now he found he had only de- 

 stroyed his prize in gaining it. The ameliorating influence 

 of the trees was gone, and the land lay at the mercy of the 

 wintry storms and the parching heats of August, without 

 protection. In 1698, a penalty of forty shillings was adjudg- 

 ed against every one who should cut more than seven trees 

 on Nahant ; and six years afterward, terrified to find that 

 there was " like to be no shade for the creatures" every one 

 was forbidden to " cut any tree or bush there on a penalty 

 of ten shillings. :|: They had enforced their vandalism by a 

 fine of fifty shillings, and they now sought to repair the harm 

 by threatening one of forty and thus saving twenty per cent, 

 from the cost of their folly, but even this comfort they had 

 forfeited, and nature seems to have sternly demanded the 

 yielding up of the other two. 



The woods were thus swept from Naliant as effectually as 

 the wolves and the Indians. For a hundred years it re- 

 mained, an empty, half worthless pasture : or as Lewis for- 

 cibly describes it, " a portion of foxes, a barren waste, cover- 

 ed with short brown grass, tenanted by grasshoppers and 



* Hist. Lynn, p. 144. f lb., p. 146. t lb., pp. 186, 187. 



ESSEX INST. PROCEED. VOL. ii. 35. 



