SAINT ASPINQUID  (continued)

The story of the great congregation is probably based on Passaconaway's farewell meeting with his tribes near modern Concord or Manchester, NH in which he strongly advised them not to make war on the Europeans. Passaconaway may or may not have converted to Christianity. That fact is in dispute despite John Eliot's claims. A wholly different Indian leader, an historic "Bashaba", also conflated with Passaconaway, may be the source for the Agamenticus legend.

Like witch and Viking tales at nearby Hampton Beach, the story was certainly a boon to early tourism. But not everyone bought the Agamenticus legend promulgated by white male writers, most of them members of the Masonic order that delighted in religious allegory, secret codes and mystical rituals. One 1874 guide to York notes that Aspinquid was "a profound mystery" and says "some deny that he ever existed."

Sarah Orne Jewett, the 19^th century writer from nearby South Berwick, said that people living near the base of Mt. Agamenticus had many vague superstitions about giant cats and mysterious pathways. Asked frequently about the Aspinquid story she once wrote:

…I never could trace this legend beyond a story in one of the county newspapers, and I have never heard any tradition among the people that bear the least likeness to it.

Clearly Mount Agamenticus had spiritual significance to natives over thousands of years. It is the tallest point of land near the sea for a great distance. The European tendency to simultaneously romanticize and analyze the past, especially when it comes to Native Americans during the Colonial Revival period, may be all the explanation we need. Aspinquid may simply be Passaconaway, re-engineered for polite Christian readers who enjoyed local history.

After his conversion, for example, Aspinquid "wanders" the nation on foot, Drake says, north and south, east and west, traveling as far as California. His wanderings in the great American desert, borrowing from a scriptural time frame, lasted 40 years. He did this, reportedly, in the 1600s as Europeans were settling in the New World. But the story is really about the westward expansion of white explorers in the mid-1800s. While the historic Passaconaway performed feats of magic that astounded his Indian followers, Aspinquid went a step further and healed the sick. His supernatural powers, a potent element in Indian tradition, were then explained away as a byproduct of his Christian conversion.

But the legend has one more twist. In Nova Scotia, Indians and whites in the Halifax area once attended an annual "Feast of St. Aspenquid of Agamenticus". The event appears in May in some Canadian almanacs printed from 1774 until 1786. May, according to legend, was the month of the saint's birth and death. In 1786, the story goes, at the height of the annual feast and under the influence of a great deal of wine, someone hauled down the Union Jack and replaced it with the Stars and Stripes. Since Nova Scotia was a British colony and a haven for British Loyalists many from New England, the festival was forever banned in the Halifax area.

In 1971, novelist Thomas Raddall tried to unravel the story while researching an historical novel, The Governor's Lady, set in Portsmouth. His quest led him to Portsmouth librarian Dorothy Vaughan who turned him on to the life of Passaconaway.

In an article published in a Nova Scotian magazine, Raddall theorized that the seed of the St. Aspinquid legend was transferred to Halifax from the Piscataqua region before the American Revolution. It may have been a local Indian tradition, or it may have been invented by whites as an aid to converting Canadian Indians to Christianity. It is interesting to note that 1774, the year that St. Aspinquid Day first appears in the Canadian almanac, is the same year that John Wentworth, New Hampshire's last British governor, was driven from his home in Portsmouth. He later became governor of Nova Scotia at Halifax.

We know nothing about the historical death of Passaconaway. According to Indian legend, he rode a great sled pulled by wolves to the top of the tallest peak in the White Mountains and disappeared into the sky. Christlike, after his teaching and wandering, Aspinquid is entombed in a cave and sealed with stones. The pagan sacrifice of the animals reminds readers, however, that Aspinquid was born into a very different culture. 

Romantic literary inventions created by white Christian authors make for interesting footnotes to history -- but they are not history. Aspinquid is equivalent to Longfellow's Hiawatha, or Whittier's Bashaba in "The Bridal of Pennacook". He is not, it appears, equivalent to Passaconaway, whose life was all the more spectacular because it was real.

VISIT Mount Agamenticus

Photos by J. Dennis Robinson. Illustrations adapted from The Book of the Indians of North America by Samuel Gardner Drake, 1834 from The Portsmouth Athenaeum.