Thorwaldsen

See the hovering ships on the wharves! The Dannebrog waves, the
workmen sit in circle under the shade at their frugal breakfasts;
but foremost stands the principal figure in this picture; it is a
boy who cuts with a bold hand the lifelike features in the wooden
image for the beakhead of the vessel. It is the ship's guardian
spirit, and, as the first image from the hand of Albert Thorwaldsen,
it shall wander out into the wide world. The swelling sea shall
baptize it with its waters, and hang its wreaths of wet plants
around it; nor night, nor storm, nor icebergs, nor sunken rocks
shall lure it to its death, for the Good Angel that guards the boy
shall, too, guard the ship upon which with mallet and chisel he has
set his mark.
--Hans Christian Andersen

The real businesslike biographer begins by telling when his subject
"first saw the light"--by which he means when the man was born. In
this instance we will go a bit further back and make note of the
interesting fact that Thorwaldsen was descended from an ancestor who
had the rare fortune to be born in Rhode Island, in the year Ten
Hundred Seven.

Wiggling, jiggling, piggling individuals with quibbling
proclivities, and an incapacity for distinguishing between fact and
truth, may maintain that there was no Rhode Island in the year Ten
Hundred Seven. Emerson has written, "Nothing is of less importance
on account of its being small." And so I maintain that, in the year
Ten Hundred Seven, Rhode Island was just where it is now, and the
Cosmos quite as important. Let Pawtucket protest and Providence bite
the thumb--no retraction will be made!

About the year Eighteen Hundred Fifteen the Secretary of the Rhode
Island Historical Society wrote Thorwaldsen, informing him that he
had been elected an honorary member of the Society, on account of
his being the only known living descendant of the first European
born in America. Thorwaldsen replied, expressing his great delight
in the honor conferred, and touched feelingly on the fact that while
he had been elected to membership in various societies in
consideration of what he had done, this was the first honor that had
come his way on account of his ancestry. To a friend he said, "How
would we ever know who we are, or where we come from, were it not
for the genealogical savants!" In a book called "American
Antiquities," now in the Library at Harvard College, and I suppose
accessible in various other libraries, there is a genealogical table
tracing the ancestry of Thorwaldsen. It seems that, in the year Ten
Hundred Six, one Thorfinne, an Icelandic whaler, commanded a ship
which traversed the broad Atlantic, and skirted the coast of New
England. Thorfinne