“Till, in sheltered coves and reaches
Of sandy beaches,
All have found repose again.”
_These_ weeds were the symbols of those grotesque and fabulous thoughts
which have not yet got into the sheltered coves of literature.
“Ever drifting, drifting, drifting
On the shifting
Currents of the restless heart,”
_And not yet_ “in books recorded
They, like hoarded
Household words, no more depart.”
The beach was also strewn with beautiful sea-jellies, which the
wreckers called Sun-squall, one of the lowest forms of animal life,
some white, some wine-colored, and a foot in diameter. I at first
thought that they were a tender part of some marine monster, which the
storm or some other foe had mangled. What right has the sea to bear in
its bosom such tender things as sea-jellies and mosses, when it has
such a boisterous shore that the stoutest fabrics are wrecked against
it? Strange that it should undertake to dandle such delicate children
in its arm. I did not at first recognize these for the same which I had
formerly seen in myriads in Boston Harbor, rising, with a waving
motion, to the surface, as if to meet the sun, and discoloring the
waters far and wide, so that I seemed to be sailing through a mere
sunfish soup. They say that when you endeavor to take one up, it will
spill out the other side of your hand like quicksilver. Before the land
rose out of the ocean, and became _dry_ land, chaos reigned; and
between high and low water mark, where she is partially disrobed and
rising, a sort of chaos reigns still, which only anomalous creatures
can inhabit. Mackerel-gulls were all the while flying over our heads
and amid the breakers, sometimes two white ones pursuing a black one;
quite at home in the storm, though they are as delicate organizations
as sea-jellies and mosses; and we saw that they were adapted to their
circumstances rather by their spirits than their bodies. Theirs must be
an essentially wilder, that is, less human, nature than that of larks
and robins. Their note was like the sound of some vibrating metal, and
harmonized well with the scenery and the roar of the surf, as if one
had rudely touched the strings of the lyre, which ever lies on the
shore; a ragged shred of ocean music tossed aloft on the spray. But if
I were required to name a sound the remembrance of which most perfectly
revives the impression which the beach has made, it would be the dreary
peep of the piping plover (_Charadrius melodus_) which haunts there.
Their voices, too, are heard as a fugacious part in the dirge which is
ever played along the shore for those mariners who have been lost in
the deep since first it was created. But through all this dreariness we
seemed to have a pure and unqualified strain of eternal melody, for
always the same strain which is a dirge to one household is a morning
song of rejoicing to another.
A remarkable method of catching gulls, derived from the Indians, was
practised in Wellfleet in 1794. “The Gull House,” it is said, “is built
with crotchets, fixed in the ground on the beach,” poles being
stretched across for the top, and the sides made close with stakes and
seaweed. “The poles on the top are covered with lean whale. The man
being placed within, is not discovered by the fowls, and while they are
contending for and eating the flesh, he draws them in, one by one,
between the poles, until he has collected forty or fifty.” Hence,
perchance, a man is said to be _gulled_, when he is _taken in_. We read
that one “sort of gulls is called by the Dutch _mallemucke, i.e._ the
foolish fly, because they fall upon a whale as eagerly as a fly, and,
indeed, all gulls are foolishly bold and easy to be shot. The
Norwegians call this bird _havhest_, sea-horse (and the English
translator says, it is probably what we call boobies). If they have
eaten too much, they throw it up, and eat it again till they are tired.
It is this habit in the gulls of parting with their property
[disgorging the contents of their stomachs to the skuas], which has
given rise to the terms gull, guller, and gulling, among men.” We also
read that they used to kill small birds which roosted on the beach at
night, by making a fire with hog’s lard in a frying-pan. The Indians
probably used pine torches; the birds flocked to the light, and were
knocked down with a stick. We noticed holes dug near the edge of the
bank, where gunners conceal themselves to shoot the large gulls which
coast up and down a-fishing, for these are considered good to eat.
We found some large clams of the species _Mactra solidissima_, which
the storm had torn up from the bottom, and cast ashore. I selected one
of the largest, about six inches in length, and carried it along,
thinking to try an experiment on it. We soon after met a wrecker, with
a grapple and a rope, who said that he was looking for tow cloth, which
had made part of the cargo of the ship _Franklin_, which was wrecked
here in the spring, at which time nine or ten lives were lost. The
reader may remember this wreck, from the circumstance that a letter was
found in the captain’s valise, which washed ashore, directing him to
wreck the vessel before he got to America, and from the trial which
took place in consequence. The wrecker said that tow cloth was still
cast up in such storms as this. He also told us that the clam which I
had was the sea-clam, or hen, and was good to eat. We took our nooning
under a sand-hill, covered with beach-grass, in a dreary little hollow,
on the top of the bank, while it alternately rained and shined. There,
having reduced some damp drift-wood, which I had picked up on the
shore, to shavings with my knife, I kindled a fire with a match and
some paper and cooked my clam on the embers for my dinner; for
breakfast was commonly the only meal which I took in a house on this
excursion. When the clam was done, one valve held the meat and the
other the liquor. Though it was very tough, I found it sweet and
savory, and ate _the whole_ with a relish. Indeed, with the addition of
a cracker or two, it would have been a bountiful dinner. I noticed that
the shells were such as I had seen in the sugar-kit at home. Tied to a
stick, they formerly made the Indian’s hoe hereabouts.
At length, by mid-afternoon, after we had had two or three rainbows
over the sea, the showers ceased, and the heavens gradually cleared up,
though the wind still blowed as hard and the breakers ran as high as
before. Keeping on, we soon after came to a Charity-house, which we
looked into to see how the shipwrecked mariner might fare. Far away in
some desolate hollow by the sea-side, just within the bank, stands a
lonely building on piles driven into the sand, with a slight nail put
through the staple, which a freezing man can bend, with some straw,
perchance, on the floor on which he may lie, or which he may burn in
the fireplace to keep him alive. Perhaps this hut has never been
required to shelter a ship-wrecked man, and the benevolent person who
promised to inspect it annually, to see that the straw and matches are
here, and that the boards will keep off the wind, has grown remiss and
thinks that storms and shipwrecks are over; and this very night a
perishing crew may pry open its door with their numbed fingers and
leave half their number dead here by morning. When I thought what must
be the condition of the families which alone would ever occupy or had
occupied them, what must have been the tragedy of the winter evenings
spent by human beings around their hearths, these houses, though they
were meant for human dwellings, did not look cheerful to me. They
appeared but a stage to the grave. The gulls flew around and screamed
over them; the roar of the ocean in storms, and the lapse of its waves
in calms, alone resounds through them, all dark and empty within, year
in, year out, except, perchance, on one memorable night. Houses of
entertainment for shipwrecked men! What kind of sailors’ homes were
they?
[Illustration: Wreckage under the sand-bluff]
“Each hut,” says the author of the “Description of the Eastern Coast of
the County of Barnstable,” “stands on piles, is eight feet long, eight
feet wide, and seven feet high; a sliding door is on the south, a
sliding shutter on the west, and a pole, rising fifteen feet above the
top of the building, on the east. Within it is supplied either with
straw or hay, and is further accommodated with a bench.” They have
varied little from this model now. There are similar huts at the Isle
of Sable and Anticosti, on the north, and how far south along the coast
I know not. It is pathetic to read the minute and faithful directions
which he gives to seamen who may be wrecked on this coast, to guide
them to the nearest Charity-house, or other shelter, for, as is said of
Eastham, though there are a few houses within a mile of the shore, yet
“in a snow-storm, which rages here with excessive fury, it would be
almost impossible to discover them either by night or by day.” You hear
their imaginary guide thus marshalling, cheering, directing the
dripping, shivering, freezing troop along; “at the entrance of this
valley the sand has gathered, so that at present a little climbing is
necessary. Passing over several fences and taking heed not to enter the
wood on the right hand, at the distance of three-quarters of a mile a
house is to be found. This house stands on the south side of the road,
and not far from it on the south is Pamet River, which runs from east
to west through body of salt marsh.” To him cast ashore in Eastham, he
says, “The meeting-house is without a steeple, but it may be
distinguished from the dwelling-houses near it by its situation, which
is between two small groves of locusts, one on the south and one on the
north,—that on the south being three times as long as the other. About
a mile and a quarter from the hut, west by north, appear the top and
arms of a windmill.” And so on for many pages.
We did not learn whether these houses had been the means of saving any
lives, though this writer says, of one erected at the head of Stout’s
Creek in Truro, that “it was built in an improper manner, having a
chimney in it; and was placed on a spot where no beach-grass grew. The
strong winds blew the sand from its foundation and the weight of the
chimney brought it to the ground; so that in January of the present
year [1802] it was entirely demolished. This event took place about six
weeks before the _Brutus_ was cast away. If it had remained, it is
probable that the whole of the unfortunate crew of that ship would have
been saved, as they gained the shore a few rods only from the spot
where the hut had stood.”
This “Charity-house,” as the wrecker called it, this “Humane-house,” as
some call it, that is, the one to which we first came, had neither
window nor sliding shutter, nor clapboards, nor paint. As we have said,
there was a rusty nail put through the staple. However, as we wished to
get an idea of a Humane house, and we hoped that we should never have a
better opportunity, we put our eyes, by turns, to a knot-hole in the
door, and after long looking, without seeing, into the dark,—not
knowing how many shipwrecked men’s bones we might see at last, looking
with the eye of faith, knowing that, though to him that knocketh it may
not always be opened, yet to him that looketh long enough through a
knot-hole the inside shall be visible,—for we had had some practice at
looking inward,—by steadily keeping our other ball covered from the
light meanwhile, putting the outward world behind us, ocean and land,
and the beach,—till the pupil became enlarged and collected the rays of
light that were wandering in that dark (for the pupil shall be enlarged
by looking; there never was so dark a night but a faithful and patient
eye, however small, might at last prevail over it),—after all this, I
say, things began to take shape to our vision,—if we may use this
expression where there was nothing but emptiness,—and we obtained the
long-wished-for insight. Though we thought at first that it was a
hopeless case, after several minutes’ steady exercise of the divine
faculty, our prospects began decidedly to brighten, and we were ready
to exclaim with the blind bard of “Paradise Lost and Regained,”—
“Hail, holy Light! offspring of Heaven first born,
Or of the Eternal co-eternal beam.
May I express thee unblamed?”
A little longer, and a chimney rushed red on our sight. In short, when
our vision had grown familiar with the darkness, we discovered that
there were some stones and some loose wads of wool on the floor, and an
empty fireplace at the further end; but it _was not_ supplied with
matches, or straw, or hay, that we could see, nor “accommodated with a
bench.” Indeed, it was the wreck of all cosmical beauty there within.
Turning our backs on the outward world, we thus looked through the
knot-hole into the Humane house, into the very bowels of mercy; and for
bread we found a stone. It was literally a great cry (of sea-mews
outside), and a little wool. However, we were glad to sit outside,
under the lee of the Humane house, to escape the piercing wind; and
there we thought how cold is charity! how inhumane humanity! This,
then, is what charity hides! Virtues antique and far away with ever a
rusty nail over the latch; and very difficult to keep in repair,
withal, it is so uncertain whether any will ever gain the beach near
you. So we shivered round about, not being able to get into it, ever
and anon looking through the knot-hole into that night without a star,
until we concluded that it was not a _humane_ house at all, but a
sea-side box, now shut up. belonging to some of the family of Night or
Chaos, where they spent their summers by the sea, for the sake of the
sea breeze, and that it was not proper for us to be prying into their
concerns.
My companion had declared before this that I had not a particle of
sentiment, in rather absolute terms, to my astonishment; but I suspect
he meant that my legs did not ache just then, though I am not wholly a
stranger to that sentiment. But I did not intend this for a sentimental
journey.
[Illustration: Herring River at Wellfleet]
[1] We have no word in English to express the sound of many waves,
dashing at once, whether gently or violently, πολυφλοίσβοιος to the
ear, and, in the ocean’s gentle moods, an ἀνάριθμον γέλασμα to the
eye.
V
THE WELLFLEET OYSTERMAN
Having walked about eight miles since we struck the beach, and passed
the boundary between Wellfleet and Truro, a stone post in the sand,—for
even this sand comes under the jurisdiction of one town or another,—we
turned inland over barren hills and valleys, whither the sea, for some
reason, did not follow us, and, tracing up a Hollow, discovered two or
three sober-looking houses within half a mile, uncommonly near the
eastern coast. Their garrets were apparently so full of chambers, that
their roofs could hardly lie down straight, and we did not doubt that
there was room for us there. Houses near the sea are generally low and
broad. These were a story and a half high; but if you merely counted
the windows in their gable-ends, you would think that there were many
stories more, or, at any rate, that the half-story was the only one
thought worthy of being illustrated. The great number of windows in the
ends of the houses, and their irregularity in size and position, here
and elsewhere on the Cape, struck us agreeably,—as if each of the
various occupants who had their _cunabula_ behind had punched a hole
where his necessities required it, and, according to his size and
stature, without regard to outside effect. There were windows for the
grown folks, and windows for the children,—three or four apiece; as a
certain man had a large hole cut in his barn-door for the cat, and
another smaller one for the kitten. Sometimes they were so low under
the eaves that I thought they must have perforated the plate beam for
another apartment, and I noticed some which were triangular, to fit
that part more exactly. The ends of the houses had thus as many muzzles
as a revolver, and, if the inhabitants have the same habit of staring
out the windows that some of our neighbors have, a traveller must stand
a small chance with them.
Generally, the old-fashioned and unpainted houses on the Cape looked
more comfortable, as well as picturesque, than the modern and more
pretending ones, which were less in harmony with the scenery, and less
firmly planted.
[Illustration: A characteristic gable with many windows]
These houses were on the shores of a chain of ponds, seven in number,
the source of a small stream called Herring River, which empties into
the Bay. There are many Herring Rivers on the Cape; they will, perhaps,
be more numerous than herrings soon. We knocked at the door of the
first house, but its inhabitants were all gone away. In the meanwhile,
we saw the occupants of the next one looking out the window at us, and
before we reached it an old woman came out and fastened the door of her
bulkhead, and went in again. Nevertheless, we did not hesitate to knock
at her door, when a grizzly-looking man appeared, whom we took to be
sixty or seventy years old. He asked us, at first, suspiciously, where
we were from, and what our business was; to which we returned plain
answers.
“How far is Concord from Boston?” he inquired.
“Twenty miles by railroad.”
“Twenty miles by railroad,” he repeated.
“Didn’t you ever hear of Concord of Revolutionary fame?”
“Didn’t I ever hear of Concord? Why, I heard the guns fire at the
battle of Bunker Hill. [They hear the sound of heavy cannon across the
Bay.] I am almost ninety; I am eighty-eight year old. I was fourteen
year old at the time of Concord Fight,—and where were you then?”
We were obliged to confess that we were not in the fight.
“Well, walk in, we’ll leave it to the women,” said he.
So we walked in, surprised, and sat down, an old woman taking our hats
and bundles, and the old man continued, drawing up to the large,
old-fashioned fireplace,—
“I am a poor good-for-nothing crittur, as Isaiah says; I am all broken
down this year. I am under petticoat government here.”
The family consisted of the old man, his wife, and his daughter, who
appeared nearly as old as her mother, a fool, her son (a
brutish-looking, middle-aged man, with a prominent lower face, who was
standing by the hearth when we entered, but immediately went out), and
a little boy of ten.
While my companion talked with the women, I talked with the old man.
They said that he was old and foolish, but he was evidently too knowing
for them.
“These women,” said he to me, “are both of them poor good-for-nothing
critturs. This one is my wife. I married her sixty-four years ago. She
is eighty-four years old, and as deaf as an adder, and the other is not
much better.”
He thought well of the Bible, or at least he _spoke_ well, and did not
_think_ ill, of it, for that would not have been prudent for a man of
his age. He said that he had read it attentively for many years, and he
had much of it at his tongue’s end. He seemed deeply impressed with a
sense of his own nothingness, and would repeatedly exclaim,—
“I am a nothing. What I gather from my Bible is just this: that man is
a poor good-for-nothing crittur, and everything is just as God sees fit
and disposes.”
“May I ask your name?” I said.
“Yes,” he answered, “I am not ashamed to tell my name. My name is——. My
great-grandfather came over from England and settled here.”
He was an old Wellfleet oysterman, who had acquired a competency in
that business, and had sons still engaged in it.
Nearly all the oyster shops and stands in Massachusetts, I am told, are
supplied and kept by natives of Wellfleet, and a part of this town is
still called Billingsgate from the oysters having been formerly planted
there; but the native oysters are said to have died in 1770. Various
causes are assigned for this, such as a ground frost, the carcasses of
blackfish kept to rot in the harbor, and the like, but the most common
account of the matter is,—and I find that a similar superstition with
regard to the disappearance of fishes exists almost everywhere,—that
when Wellfleet began to quarrel with the neighboring towns about the
right to gather them, yellow specks appeared in them, and Providence
caused them to disappear. A few years ago sixty thousand bushels were
annually brought from the South and planted in the harbor of Wellfleet
till they attained “the proper relish of Billingsgate”; but now they
are imported commonly full-grown, and laid down near their markets, at
Boston and elsewhere, where the water, being a mixture of salt and
fresh, suits them better. The business was said to be still good and
improving.
The old man said that the oysters were liable to freeze in the winter,
if planted too high; but if it were not “so cold as to strain their
eyes” they were not injured. The inhabitants of New Brunswick have
noticed that “ice will not form over an oyster-bed, unless the cold is
very intense indeed, and when the bays are frozen over the oyster-beds
are easily discovered by the water above them remaining unfrozen, or as
the French residents say, _degèle_.” Our host said that they kept them
in cellars all winter.
“Without anything to eat or drink?” I asked.
“Without anything to eat or drink,” he answered.
“Can the oysters move?”
“Just as much as my shoe.”
[Illustration: A Welfleet oysterman]
But when I caught him saying that they “bedded themselves down in the
sand, flat side up, round side down,” I told him that my shoe could not
do that, without the aid of my foot in it; at which he said that they
merely settled down as they grew; if put down in a square they would be
found so; but the clam could move quite fast. I have since been told by
oystermen of Long Island, where the oyster is still indigenous and
abundant, that they are found in large masses attached to the parent in
their midst, and are so taken up with their tongs; in which case, they
say, the age of the young proves that there could have been no motion
for five or six years at least. And Buckland in his Curiosities of
Natural History (page 50) says: “An oyster who has once taken up his
position and fixed himself when quite young can never make a change.
Oysters, nevertheless, that have not fixed themselves, but remain loose
at the bottom of the sea, have the power of locomotion; they open their
shells to their fullest extent, and then suddenly contracting them, the
expulsion of the water forwards gives a motion backwards. A fisherman
at Guernsey told me that he had frequently seen oysters moving in this
way.”
Some still entertain the question “whether the oyster was indigenous in
Massachusetts Bay,” and whether Wellfleet harbor was a “natural
habitat” of this fish; but, to say nothing of the testimony of old
oystermen, which, I think, is quite conclusive, though the native
oyster may now be extinct there, I saw that their shells, opened by the
Indians, were strewn all over the Cape. Indeed, the Cape was at first
thickly settled by Indians on account of the abundance of these and
other fish. We saw many traces of their occupancy after this, in Truro,
near Great Hollow, and at High-Head, near East Harbor River,—oysters,
clams, cockles, and other shells, mingled with ashes and the bones of
deer and other quadrupeds. I picked up half a dozen arrow-heads, and in
an hour or two could have filled my pockets with them. The Indians
lived about the edges of the swamps, then probably in some instances
ponds, for shelter and water. Moreover, Champlain in the edition of his
“Voyages” printed in 1613, says that in the year 1606 he and
Poitrincourt explored a harbor (Barnstable Harbor?) in the southerly
part of what is now called Massachusetts Bay, in latitude 42°, about
five leagues south, one point west of _Cap Blanc_ (Cape Cod), and there
they found many good oysters, and they named it “_le Port aux
Huistres_” (Oyster Harbor). In one edition of his map (1632), the _“R.
aux Escailles_” is drawn emptying into the same part of the bay, and on
the map “_Novi Belgii_,” in Ogilby’s “America” (1670), the words “_Port
aux Huistres_” are placed against the same place. Also William Wood,
who left New England in 1633, speaks, in his “New England’s Prospect,”
published in 1634, of “a great oyster-bank” in Charles River, and of
another in the Mistick, each of which obstructed the navigation of its
river. “The oysters,” says he, “be great ones in form of a shoehorn;
some be a foot long; these breed on certain banks that are bare every
spring tide. This fish without the shell is so big, that it must admit
of a division before you can well get it into your mouth.” Oysters are
still found there. (Also, see Thomas Morton’s “New English Canaan,”
page 90.)
Our host told us that the sea-clam, or hen, was not easily obtained; it
was raked up, but never on the Atlantic side, only cast ashore there in
small quantities in storms. The fisherman sometimes wades in water
several feet deep, and thrusts a pointed stick into the sand before
him. When this enters between the valves of a clam, he closes them on
it, and is drawn out. It has been known to catch and hold coot and teal
which were preying on it. I chanced to be on the bank of the Acushnet
at New Bedford one day since this, watching some ducks, when a man
informed me that, having let out his young ducks to seek their food
amid the samphire (_Salicornia_) and other weeds along the river-side
at low tide that morning, at length he noticed that one remained
stationary, amid the weeds, something preventing it from following the
others, and going to it he found its foot tightly shut in a quahog’s
shell. He took up both together, carried them to his home, and his wife
opening the shell with a knife released the duck and cooked the quahog.
The old man said that the great clams were good to eat, but that they
always took out a certain part which was poisonous, before they cooked
them. “People said it would kill a cat.” I did not tell him that I had
eaten a large one entire that afternoon, but began to think that I was
tougher than a cat. He stated that pedlers came round there, and
sometimes tried to sell the women folks a skimmer, but he told them
that their women had got a better skimmer than _they_ could make, in
the shell of their clams; it was shaped just right for this
purpose.—They call them “skim-alls” in some places. He also said that
the sun-squall was poisonous to handle, and when the sailors came
across it, they did not meddle with it, but heaved it out of their way.
I told him that I had handled it that afternoon, and had felt no ill
effects as yet. But he said it made the hands itch, especially if they
had previously been scratched, or if I put it into my bosom I should
find out what it was.
He informed us that no ice ever formed on the back side of the Cape, or
not more than once in a century, and but little snow lay there, it
being either absorbed or blown or washed away. Sometimes in winter,
when the tide was down, the beach was frozen, and afforded a hard road
up the back side for some thirty miles, as smooth as a floor. One
winter when he was a boy, he and his father “took right out into the
back side before daylight, and walked to Provincetown and back to
dinner.”
When I asked what they did with all that barren-looking land, where I
saw so few cultivated fields,—“Nothing,” he said.
“Then why fence your fields?”
“To keep the sand from blowing and covering up the whole.”
“The yellow sand,” said he, “has some life in it, but the white little
or none.”
When, in answer to his questions, I told him that I was a surveyor, he
said that they who surveyed his farm were accustomed, where the ground
was uneven, to loop up each chain as high as their elbows; that was the
allowance they made, and he wished to know if I could tell him why they
did not come out according to his deed, or twice alike. He seemed to
have more respect for surveyors of the old school, which I did not
wonder at. “King George the Third,” said he, “laid out a road four rods
wide and straight the whole length of the Cape,” but where it was now
he could not tell.
This story of the surveyors reminded me of a Long-Islander, who once,
when I had made ready to jump from the bow of his boat to the shore,
and he thought that I underrated the distance and would fall
short,—though I found afterward that he judged of the elasticity of my
joints by his own,—told me that when he came to a brook which he wanted
to get over, he held up one leg, and then, if his foot appeared to
cover any part of the opposite bank, he knew that he could jump it.
“Why,” I told him, “to say nothing of the Mississippi, and other small
watery streams, I could blot out a star with my foot, but I would not
engage to jump that distance,” and asked how he knew when he had got
his leg at the right elevation. But he regarded his legs as no less
accurate than a pair of screw dividers or an ordinary quadrant, and
appeared to have a painful recollection of every degree and minute in
the arc which they described; and he would have had me believe that
there was a kind of hitch in his hip-joint which answered the purpose.
I suggested that he should connect his two ankles by a string of the
proper length, which should be the chord of an arc, measuring his
jumping ability on horizontal surfaces,—assuming one leg to be a
perpendicular to the plane of the horizon, which, however, may have
been too bold an assumption in this case. Nevertheless, this was a kind
of geometry in the legs which it interested me to hear of.
Our host took pleasure in telling us the names of the ponds, most of
which we could see from his windows, and making us repeat them after
him, to see if we had got them right. They were Gull Pond, the largest
and a very handsome one, clear and deep, and more than a mile in
circumference, Newcomb’s, Swett’s, Slough, Horse-Leech, Round, and
Herring Ponds, all connected at high water, if I do not mistake. The
coast-surveyors had come to him for their names, and he told them of
one which they had not detected. He said that they were not so high as
formerly. There was an earthquake about four years before he was born,
which cracked the pans of the ponds, which were of iron, and caused
them to settle. I did not remember to have read of this. Innumerable
gulls used to resort to them; but the large gulls were now very scarce,
for, as he said, the English robbed their nests far in the north, where
they breed. He remembered well when gulls were taken in the gull-house,
and when small birds were killed by means of a frying-pan and fire at
night. His father once lost a valuable horse from this cause. A party
from Wellfleet having lighted their fire for this purpose, one dark
night, on Billingsgate Island, twenty horses which were pastured there,
and this colt among them, being frightened by it, and endeavoring in
the dark to cross the passage which separated them from the neighboring
beach, and which was then fordable at low tide, were all swept out to
sea and drowned. I ob-served that many horses were still turned out to
pasture all summer on the islands and beaches in Wellfleet, Eastham,
and Orleans, as a kind of common. He also described the killing of what
he called “wild hens” here, after they had gone to roost in the woods,
when he was a boy. Perhaps they were “Prairie hens” (pinnated grouse).
He liked the Beach-pea (_Lathyrus maritimus_), cooked green, as well as
the cultivated. He had seen it growing very abundantly in Newfoundland,
where also the inhabitants ate them, but he had never been able to
obtain any ripe for seed. We read, under the head of Chatham, that “in
1555, during a time of great scarcity, the people about Orford, in
Sussex (England) were preserved from perishing by eating the seeds of
this plant, which grew there in great abundance on the sea-coast. Cows,
horses, sheep, and goats eat it.” But the writer who quoted this could
not learn that they had ever been used in Barnstable County.
He had been a voyager, then? O, he had been about the world in his day.
He once considered himself a pilot for all our coast; but now they had
changed the names so he might be bothered.
He gave us to taste what he called the Summer Sweeting, a pleasant
apple which he raised, and frequently grafted from, but had never seen
growing elsewhere, except once,—three trees on Newfoundland, or at the
Bay of Chaleur, I forget which, as he was sailing by. He was sure that
he could tell the tree at a distance.
At length the fool, whom my companion called the wizard, came in,
muttering between his teeth, “Damn book-pedlers,—all the time talking
about books. Better do something. Damn ’em. I’ll shoot ’em. Got a
doctor down here. Damn him, I’ll get a gun and shoot him”; never once
holding up his head. Whereat the old man stood up and said in a loud
voice, as if he was accustomed to command, and this was not the first
time he had been obliged to exert his authority there: “John, go sit
down, mind your business,—we’ve heard you talk before,—precious little
you’ll do,—your bark is worse than your bite.” But, without minding,
John muttered the same gibberish over again, and then sat down at the
table which the old folks had left. He ate all there was on it, and
then turned to the apples, which his aged mother was paring, that she
might give her guests some apple-sauce for breakfast, but she drew them
away and sent him off.
[Illustration: Welfleet]
When I approached this house the next summer, over the desolate hills
between it and the shore, which are worthy to have been the birthplace
of Ossian, I saw the wizard in the midst of a cornfield on the
hillside, but, as usual, he loomed so strangely, that I mistook him for
a scarecrow.
This was the merriest old man that we had ever seen, and one of the
best preserved. His style of conversation was coarse and plain enough
to have suited Rabelais. He would have made a good Panurge. Or rather
he was a sober Silenus, and we were the boys Chromis and Mnasilus, who
listened to his story.
“Not by Hæmonian hills the Thracian bard.
Nor awful Phœbus was on Pindus heard
With deeper silence or with more regard.”
There was a strange mingling of past and present in his conversation,
for he had lived under King George, and might have remembered when
Napoleon and the moderns generally were born. He said that one day,
when the troubles between the Colonies and the mother country first
broke out, as he, a boy of fifteen, was pitching hay out of a cart, one
Doane, an old Tory, who was talking with his father, a good Whig, said
to him, “Why, Uncle Bill, you might as well undertake to pitch that
pond into the ocean with a pitchfork, as for the Colonies to undertake
to gain their independence.” He remembered well General Washington, and
how he rode his horse along the streets of Boston, and he stood up to
show us how he looked.
“He was a r—a—ther large and portly-looking man, a manly and
resolute-looking officer, with a pretty good leg as he sat on his
horse.”—“There, I’ll tell you, this was the way with Washington.” Then
he jumped up again, and bowed gracefully to right and left, making show
as if he were waving his hat. Said he, _“That_ was Washington.”
He told us many anecdotes of the Revolution, and was much pleased when
we told him that we had read the same in history, and that his account
agreed with the written.
“O,” he said, “I know, I know! I was a young fellow of sixteen, with my
ears wide open; and a fellow of that age, you know, is pretty wide
awake, and likes to know everything that’s going on. O, I know!”
He told us the story of the wreck of the _Franklin_, which took place
there the previous spring: how a boy came to his house early in the
morning to know whose boat that was by the shore, for there was a
vessel in distress, and he, being an old man, first ate his breakfast,
and then walked over to the top of the hill by the shore, and sat down
there, having found a comfortable seat, to see the ship wrecked. She
was on the bar, only a quarter of a mile from him, and still nearer to
the men on the beach, who had got a boat ready, but could render no
assistance on account of the breakers, for there was a pretty high sea
running. There were the passengers all crowded together in the forward
part of the ship, and some were getting out of the cabin windows and
were drawn on deck by the others.
“I saw the captain get out his boat,” said he; “he had one little one;
and then they jumped into it one after another, down as straight as an
arrow. I counted them. There were nine. One was a woman, and she jumped
as straight as any of them. Then they shoved off. The sea took them
back, one wave went over them, and when they came up there were six
still clinging to the boat; I counted them. The next wave turned the
boat bottom upward, and emptied them all out. None of them ever came
ashore alive. There were the rest of them all crowded together on the
forecastle, the other parts of the ship being under water. They had
seen all that happened to the boat. At length a heavy sea separated the
forecastle from the rest of the wreck, and set it inside of the worst
breaker, and the boat was able to reach them, and it saved all that
were left, but one woman.”
He also told us of the steamer _Cambria’s_ getting aground on his shore
a few months before we were there, and of her English passengers who
roamed over his grounds, and who, he said, thought the prospect from
the high hill by the shore “the most delightsome they had ever seen,”
and also of the pranks which the ladies played with his scoop-net in
the ponds. He spoke of these travellers with their purses full of
guineas, just as our provincial fathers used to speak of British bloods
in the time of King George the Third.
_Quid loquar?_ Why repeat what he told us?
“Aut Scyllam Nisi, quam fama secuta est,
Candida succinctam latrantibus inguina monstris,
Dulichias vexâsse rates, et gurgite in alto
Ah timidos nautas canibus lacerâsse marinis?”
In the course of the evening I began to feel the potency of the clam
which I had eaten, and I was obliged to confess to our host that I was
no tougher than the cat he told of; but he answered, that he was a
plain-spoken man, and he could tell me that it was all imagination. At
any rate, it proved an emetic in my case, and I was made quite sick by
it for a short time, while he laughed at my expense. I was pleased to
read afterward, in Mourt’s Relation of the landing of the Pilgrims in
Provincetown Harbor, these words: “We found great muscles (the old
editor says that they were undoubtedly sea-clams) and very fat and full
of sea-pearl; but we could not eat them, for they made us all sick that
did eat, as well sailors as passengers, ... but they were soon well
again.” It brought me nearer to the Pilgrims to be thus reminded by a
similar experience that I was so like them. Moreover, it was a valuable
confirmation of their story, and I am prepared now to believe every
word of Mourt’s Relation. I was also pleased to find that man and the
clam lay still at the same angle to one another. But I did not notice
sea-pearl. Like Cleopatra, I must have swallowed it. I have since dug
these clams on a flat in the Bay and observed them. They could squirt
full ten feet before the wind, as appeared by the marks of the drops on
the sand.
“Now I’m going to ask you a question,” said the old man, “and I don’t
know as you can tell me; but you are a learned man, and I never had any
learning, only what I got by natur.”—It was in vain that we reminded
him that he could quote Josephus to our confusion.—“I’ve thought, if I
ever met a learned man I should like to ask him this question. Can you
tell me how _Axy_ is spelt, and what it means? _Axy_,” says he;
“there’s a girl over here is named _Axy_. Now what is it? What does it
mean? Is it Scripture? I’ve read my Bible twenty-five years over and
over, and I never came across it.”
“Did you read it twenty-five years for this object.’” I asked.
“Well, _how_ is it spelt? Wife, how is it spelt?” She said: “It is in
the Bible; I’ve seen it.”
“Well, how do you spell it?”
“I don’t know. A c h, ach, s e h, seh,—Achseh.”
“Does that spell Axy? Well, do _you_ know what it means?” asked he,
turning to me.
“No,” I replied, “I never heard the sound before.”
“There was a schoolmaster down here once, and they asked him what it
meant, and he said it had no more meaning than a bean-pole.”
I told him that I held the same opinion with the schoolmaster. I had
been a schoolmaster myself, and had had strange names to deal with. I
also heard of such names as Zoleth, Beriah, Amaziah, Bethuel, and
Shearjashub, hereabouts.
At length the little boy, who had a seat quite in the chimney-corner,
took off his stockings and shoes, warmed his feet, and having had his
sore leg freshly salved, went off to bed; then the fool made bare his
knotty-looking feet and legs, and followed him; and finally the old man
exposed his calves also to our gaze. We had never had the good fortune
to see an old man’s legs before, and were surprised to find them fair
and plump as an infant’s, and we thought that he took a pride in
exhibiting them. He then proceeded to make preparations for retiring,
discoursing meanwhile with Panurgic plainness of speech on the ills to
which old humanity is subject. We were a rare haul for him. He could
commonly get none but ministers to talk to, though sometimes ten of
them at once, and he was glad to meet some of the laity at leisure. The
evening was not long enough for him. As I had been sick, the old lady
asked if I would not go to bed,—it was getting late for old people; but
the old man, who had not yet done his stories, said, “You ain’t
particular, are you?”
“O, no,” said I, “I am in no hurry. I believe I have weathered the Clam
cape.”
“They are good,” said he; “I wish I had some of them now.”
“They never hurt me,” said the old lady.
“But then you took out the part that killed a cat,” said I.
At last we cut him short in the midst of his stories, which he promised
to resume in the morning. Yet, after all, one of the old ladies who
came into our room in the night to fasten the fire-board, which
rattled, as she went out took the precaution to fasten us in. Old women
are by nature more suspicious than old men. However, the winds howled
around the house, and made the fire-boards as well as the casements
rattle well that night. It was probably a windy night for any locality,
but we could not distinguish the roar which was proper to the ocean
from that which was due to the wind alone.
The sounds which the ocean makes must be very significant and
interesting to those who live near it. When I was leaving the shore at
this place the next summer, and had got a quarter of a mile distant,
ascending a hill, I was startled by a sudden, loud sound from the sea,
as if a large steamer were letting off steam by the shore, so that I
caught my breath and felt my blood run cold for an instant, and I
turned about, expecting to see one of the Atlantic steamers thus far
out of her course, but there was nothing unusual to be seen. There was
a low bank at the entrance of the Hollow, between me and the ocean, and
suspecting that I might have risen into another stratum of air in
ascending the hill,—which had wafted to me only the ordinary roar of
the sea,—I immediately descended again, to see if I lost _hearing_ of
it; but, without regard to my ascending or descending, it died away in
a minute or two, and yet there was scarcely any wind all the while. The
old man said that this was what they called the “rut,” a peculiar roar
of the sea before the wind changes, which, however, he could not
account for. He thought that he could tell all about the weather from
the sounds which the sea made.
Old Josselyn, who came to New England in 1638, has it among his
weather-signs, that “the resounding of the sea from the shore, and
murmuring of the winds in the woods, without apparent wind, sheweth
wind to follow.”
Being on another part of the coast one night since this, I heard the
roar of the surf a mile distant, and the inhabitants said it was a sign
that the wind would work round east, and we should have rainy weather.
The ocean was heaped up somewhere at the eastward, and this roar was
occasioned by its effort to preserve its equilibrium, the wave reaching
the shore before the wind. Also the captain of a packet between this
country and England told me that he sometimes met with a wave on the
Atlantic coming against the wind, perhaps in a calm sea, which
indicated that at a distance the wind was blowing from an opposite
quarter, but the undulation had travelled faster than it. Sailors tell
of “tide-rips” and “ground-swells,” which they suppose to have been
occasioned by hurricanes and earthquakes, and to have travelled many
hundred, and sometimes even two or three thousand miles.
[Illustration: Hunting for a Leak]
Before sunrise the next morning they let us out again, and I ran over
to the beach to see the sun come out of the ocean. The old woman of
eighty-four winters was already out in the cold morning wind,
bareheaded, tripping about like a young girl, and driving up the cow to
milk. She got the breakfast with despatch, and without noise or bustle;
and meanwhile the old man resumed his stories, standing before us, who
were sitting, with his back to the chimney, and ejecting his tobacco
juice right and left into the fire behind him, without regard to the
various dishes which were there preparing. At breakfast we had eels,
buttermilk cake, cold bread, green beans, doughnuts, and tea. The old
man talked a steady stream; and when his wife told him he had better
eat his breakfast, he said: “Don’t hurry me; I have lived too long to
be hurried.” I ate of the apple-sauce and the doughnuts, which I
thought had sustained the least detriment from the old man’s shots, but
my companion refused the apple-sauce, and ate of the hot cake and green
beans, which had appeared to him to occupy the safest part of the
hearth. But on comparing notes afterward, I told him that the
buttermilk cake was particularly exposed, and I saw how it suffered
repeatedly, and therefore I avoided it; but he declared that, however
that might be, he witnessed that the apple-sauce was seriously injured,
and had therefore declined that. After breakfast we looked at his
clock, which was out of order, and oiled it with some “hen’s grease,”
for want of sweet oil, for he scarcely could believe that we were not
tinkers or pedlers; meanwhile he told a story about visions, which had
reference to a crack in the clock-case made by frost one night. He was
curious to know to what religious sect we belonged. He said that he had
been to hear thirteen kinds of preaching in one month, when he was
young, but he did not join any of them,—he stuck to his Bible. There
was nothing like any of them in his Bible. While I was shaving in the
next room, I heard him ask my companion to what sect he belonged, to
which he answered:—
“O, I belong to the Universal Brotherhood.”
“What’s that?” he asked, “Sons o’ Temperance?”
Finally, filling our pockets with doughnuts, which he was pleased to
find that we called by the same name that he did, and paying for our
entertainment, we took our departure; but he followed us out of doors,
and made us tell him the names of the vegetables which he had raised
from seeds that came out of the _Franklin_. They were cabbage,
broccoli, and parsley. As I had asked him the names of so many things,
he tried me in turn with all the plants which grew in his garden, both
wild and cultivated. It was about half an acre, which he cultivated
wholly himself. Besides the common garden vegetables, there were
Yellow-Dock, Lemon Balm, Hyssop, Gill-go-over-the-ground. Mouse-ear,
Chick-weed, Roman Wormwood, Elecampane, and other plants. As we stood
there, I saw a fish-hawk stoop to pick a fish out of his pond.
“There,” said I, “he has got a fish.”
“Well,” said the old man, who was looking all the while, but could see
nothing, “he didn’t dive, he just wet his claws.”
And, sure enough, he did not this time, though it is said that they
often do, but he merely stooped low enough to pick him out with his
talons; but as he bore his shining prey over the bushes, it fell to the
ground, and we did not see that he recovered it. That is not their
practice.
Thus, having had another crack with the old man, he standing bareheaded
under the eaves, he directed us “athwart the fields,” and we took to
the beach again for another day, it being now late in the morning.
It was but a day or two after this that the safe of the Provincetown
Bank was broken open and robbed by two men from the interior, and we
learned that our hospitable entertainers did at least transiently
harbor the suspicion that we were the men.
VI
THE BEACH AGAIN
Our way to the high sand-bank, which I have described as extending all
along the coast, led, as usual, through patches of Bayberry bushes
which straggled into the sand. This, next to the Shrub-oak, was perhaps
the most common shrub thereabouts. I was much attracted by its
odoriferous leaves and small gray berries which are clustered about the
short twigs, just below the last year’s growth. I know of but two
bushes in Concord, and they, being staminate plants, do not bear fruit.
The berries gave it a venerable appearance, and they smelled quite
spicy, like small confectionery. Robert Beverley, in his “History of
Virginia,” published in 1705, states that “at the mouth of their
rivers, and all along upon the sea and bay, and near many of their
creeks and swamps, grows the myrtle, bearing a berry, of which they
make a hard brittle wax, of a curious green color, which by refining
becomes almost transparent. Of this they make candles, which are never
greasy to the touch nor melt with lying in the hottest weather; neither
does the snuff of these ever offend the smell, like that of a tallow
candle; but, instead of being disagreeable, if an accident puts a
candle out, it yields a pleasant fragrancy to all that are in the room;
insomuch that nice people often put them out on purpose to have the
incense of the expiring snuff. The melting of these berries is said to
have been first found out by a surgeon in New England, who performed
wonderful things with a salve made of them.” From the abundance of
berries still hanging on the bushes, we judged that the inhabitants did
not generally collect them for tallow, though we had seen a piece in
the house we had just left. I have since made some tallow myself.
Holding a basket beneath the bare twigs in April, I rubbed them
together between my hands and thus gathered about a quart in twenty
minutes, to which were added enough to make three pints, and I might
have gathered them much faster with a suitable rake and a large shallow
basket. They have little prominences like those of an orange all
creased in tallow, which also fills the interstices down to the stone.
The oily part rose to the top, making it look like a savory black
broth, which smelled much like balm or other herb tea. You let it cool,
then skim off the tallow from the surface, melt this again and strain
it. I got about a quarter of a pound weight from my three pints, and
more yet remained within the berries. A small portion cooled in the
form of small flattish hemispheres, like crystallizations, the size of
a kernel of corn (nuggets I called them as I picked them out from amid
the berries), Loudon says, that “cultivated trees are said to yield
more wax than those that are found wild.” (See Duplessy, _Végetaux
Résineux_, Vol. II. p. 60.) If you get any pitch on your hands in the
pine-woods you have only to rub some of these berries between your
hands to start it off. But the ocean was the grand fact there, which
made us forget both bay berries and men.
To-day the air was beautifully clear, and the sea no longer dark and
stormy, though the waves still broke with foam along the beach, but
sparkling and full of life. Already that morning I had seen the day
break over the sea as if it came out of its bosom:—
“The saffron-robed Dawn rose in haste from the streams
Of Ocean, that she might bring light to immortals and to mortals.”
The sun rose visibly at such a distance over the sea that the
cloud-bank in the horizon, which at first concealed him, was not
perceptible until he had risen high behind it, and plainly broke and
dispersed it, like an arrow. But as yet I looked at him as rising over
land, and could not, without an effort, realize that he was rising over
the sea. Already I saw some vessels on the horizon, which had rounded
the Cape in the night, and were now well on their watery way to other
lands.
We struck the beach again in the south part of Truro. In the early part
of the day, while it was flood tide and the beach was narrow and soft,
we walked on the bank, which was very high here, but not so level as
the day before, being more interrupted by slight hollows. The author of
the Description of the Eastern Coast says of this part, that “the bank
is very high and steep. From the edge of it west, there is a strip of
sand a hundred yards in breadth. Then succeeds low brushwood, a quarter
of a mile wide, and almost impassable. After which comes a thick,
perplexing forest, in which not a house is to be discovered. Seamen,
therefore, though the distance between these two hollows (Newcomb’s and
Brush Hollows) is great, must not attempt to enter the wood, as in a
snowstorm they must undoubtedly perish.” This is still a true
description of the country, except that there is not much high wood
left.
[Illustration: Truro—Starting on a voyage]
There were many vessels, like gulls, skimming over the surface of the
sea, now half concealed in its troughs, their dolphin-strikers
ploughing the water, now tossed on the top of the billows. One, a bark
standing down parallel with the coast, suddenly furled her sails, came
to anchor, and swung round in the wind, near us, only half a mile from
the shore. At first we thought that her captain wished to communicate
with us, and perhaps we did not regard the signal of distress, which a
mariner would have understood, and he cursed us for cold-hearted
wreckers who turned our backs on him. For hours we could still see her
anchored there behind us, and we wondered how she could afford to
loiter so long in her course. Or was she a smuggler who had chosen that
wild beach to land her cargo on? Or did they wish to catch fish, or
paint their vessel? Erelong other barks, and brigs, and schooners,
which had in the mean while doubled the Cape, sailed by her in the
smacking breeze, and our consciences were relieved. Some of these
vessels lagged behind, while others steadily went ahead. We narrowly
watched their rig, and the cut of their jibs, and how they walked the
water, for there was all the difference between them that there is
between living creatures. But we wondered that they should be
remembering Boston and New York and Liverpool, steering for them, out
there; as if the sailor might forget his peddling business on such a
grand highway. They had perchance brought oranges from the Western
Isles; and were they carrying back the peel? We might as well transport
our old traps across the ocean of eternity. Is _that_ but another
“trading-flood,” with its blessed isles? Is Heaven such a harbor as the
Liverpool docks?
Still held on without a break, the inland barrens and shrubbery, the
desert and the high sand bank with its even slope, the broad white
beach, the breakers, the green water on the bar, and the Atlantic
Ocean; and we traversed with delight new reaches of the shore; we took
another lesson in sea-horses’ manes and sea-cows’ tails, in sea-jellies
and sea-clams, with our new-gained experience. The sea ran hardly less
than the day before. It seemed with every wave to be subsiding, because
such was our expectation, and yet when hours had elapsed we could see
no difference. But there it was, balancing itself, the restless ocean
by our side, lurching in its gait. Each wave left the sand all braided
or woven, as it were, with a coarse woof and warp, and a distinct
raised edge to its rapid work. We made no haste, since we wished to see
the ocean at our leisure; and indeed that soft sand was no place in
which to be in a hurry, for one mile there was as good as two
elsewhere. Besides, we were obliged frequently to empty our shoes of
the sand which one took in in climbing or descending the bank.
As we were walking close to the water’s edge this morning we turned
round, by chance, and saw a large black object which the waves had just
cast up on the beach behind us, yet too far off for us to distinguish
what it was; and when we were about to return to it, two men came
running from the bank, where no human beings had appeared before, as if
they had come out of the sand, in order to save it before another wave
took it. As we approached, it took successively the form of a huge
fish, a drowned man, a sail or a net, and finally of a mass of
tow-cloth, part of the cargo of the _Franklin_, which the men loaded
into a cart.
Objects on the beach, whether men or inanimate things, look not only
exceedingly grotesque, but much larger and more wonderful than they
actually are. Lately, when approaching the seashore several degrees
south of this, I saw before me, seemingly half a mile distant, what
appeared like bold and rugged cliffs on the beach, fifteen feet high,
and whitened by the sun and waves; but after a few steps it proved to
be low heaps of rags,—part of the cargo of a wrecked vessel,—scarcely
more than a foot in height. Once also it was my business to go in
search of the relics of a human body, mangled by sharks, which had just
been cast up, a week after a wreck, having got the direction from a
light-house: I should find it a mile or two distant over the sand, a
dozen rods from the water, covered with a cloth, by a stick stuck up. I
expected that I must look very narrowly to find so small an object, but
the sandy beach, half a mile wide, and stretching farther than the eye
could reach, was so perfectly smooth and bare, and the mirage toward
the sea so magnifying, that when I was half a mile distant the
insignificant sliver which marked the spot looked like a bleached spar,
and the relics were as conspicuous as if they lay in state on that
sandy plain, or a generation had labored to pile up their cairn there.
Close at hand they were simply some bones with a little flesh adhering
to them, in fact, only a slight inequality in the sweep of the shore.
There was nothing at all remarkable about them, and they were
singularly inoffensive both to the senses and the imagination. But as I
stood there they grew more and more imposing. They were alone with the
beach and the sea, whose hollow roar seemed addressed to them, and I
was impressed as if there was an understanding between them and the
ocean which necessarily left me out, with my snivelling sympathies.
That dead body had taken possession of the shore, and reigned over it
as no living one, could, in the name of a certain majesty which
belonged to it.
We afterward saw many small pieces of tow-cloth washed up, and I learn
that it continued to be found in good condition, even as late as
November in that year, half a dozen bolts at a time.
We eagerly filled our pockets with the smooth round pebbles which in
some places, even here, were thinly sprinkled over the sand, together
with flat circular shells (_Scutellæ?_); but, as we had read, when they
were dry they had lost their beauty, and at each sitting we emptied our
pockets again of the least remarkable, until our collection was well
culled. Every material was rolled into the pebble form by the waves;
not only stones of various kinds, but the hard coal which some vessel
had dropped, bits of glass, and in one instance a mass of peat three
feet long, where there was nothing like it to be seen for many miles.
All the great rivers of the globe are annually, if not constantly,
discharging great quantities of lumber, which drifts to distant shores.
I have also seen very perfect pebbles of brick, and bars of Castile
soap from a wreck rolled into perfect cylinders, and still spirally
streaked with red, like a barber’s pole. When a cargo of rags is washed
ashore, every old pocket and bag-like recess will be filled to bursting
with sand by being rolled on the beach; and on one occasion, the
pockets in the clothing of the wrecked being thus puffed up, even after
they had been ripped open by wreckers, deluded me into the hope of
identifying them by the contents. A pair of gloves looked exactly as if
filled by a hand. The water in such clothing is soon wrung out and
evaporated, but the sand, which works itself into every seam, is not so
easily got rid of. Sponges, which are picked up on the shore, as is
well known, retain some of the sand of the beach to the latest day, in
spite of every effort to extract it.
I found one stone on the top of the bank, of a dark gray color, shaped
exactly like a giant clam (_Mactra solidissima_), and of the same size;
and, what was more remarkable, one-half of the outside had shelled off
and lay near it, of the same form and depth with one of the valves of
this clam, while the other half was loose, leaving a solid core of a
darker color within it. I afterward saw a stone resembling a razor
clam, but it was a solid one. It appeared as if the stone, in the
process of formation, had filled the mould which a clam-shell
furnished; or the same law that shaped the clam had made a clam of
stone. Dead clams, with shells full of sand, are called sand clams.
There were many of the large clamshells filled with sand; and sometimes
one valve was separately filled exactly even, as if it had been heaped
and then scraped. Even among the many small stones on the top of the
bank, I found one arrow-head.
Beside the giant clam and barnacles, we found on the shore a small clam
(_Mesodesma arctata_), which I dug with my hands in numbers on the
bars, and which is sometimes eaten by the inhabitants, in the absence
of the _Mya arenaria_, on this side. Most of their empty shells had
been perforated by some foe.—Also, the
_Astarte castanea_.
The Edible Mussel (_Mytilus edulis_) on the few rocks, and washed up in
curious bunches of forty or fifty, held together by its rope-like
_byssus_.
The Scollop Shell (_Pecten concentricus_), used for card-racks and
pin-cushions.
Cockles, or Cuckoos (_Natica heros_), and their remarkable _nidus_,
called “sand-circle,” looking like the top of a stone jug without the
stopple, and broken on one side, or like a flaring dickey made of
sand-paper. Also,
_Cancellaria Couthouyi_ (?), and
Periwinkles (?) (_Fusus decemcostatus_).
We afterward saw some other kinds on the Bay-side. Gould states that
this Cape “has hitherto proved a barrier to the migrations of many
species of Mollusca.”—“Of the one hundred and ninety-seven species
[which he described in 1840 as belonging to Massachusetts],
eighty-three do not pass to the South shore, and fifty are not found on
the North shore of the Cape.”
Among Crustacea, there were the shells of Crabs and Lobsters, often
bleached quite white high up the beach; Sea or Beach Fleas
(_Amphipoda_); and the cases of the Horse-shoe Crab, or Saucepan Fish
(_Limulus Polyphemus_), of which we saw many alive on the Bay side,
where they feed pigs on them. Their tails were used as arrow-heads by
the Indians.
Of Radiata, there were the Sea Chestnut or Egg (_Echinus granulatus_),
commonly divested of its spines; flat circular shells (_Scutella
parma?_) covered with chocolate-colored spines, but becoming smooth and
white, with five petal-like figures; a few Star-fishes or Five-fingers
(_Asterias rubens_); and Sun-fishes or Sea-jellies (_Aureliæ_).
There was also at least one species of Sponge.
The plants which I noticed here and there on the pure sandy shelf,
between the ordinary high-water mark and the foot of the bank, were Sea
Rocket (_Cakile Americana_), Saltwort (_Salsola kali_), Sea Sandwort
(_Honkenya peploides_), Sea Burdock (_Xanthium echinatum_), Sea-side
Spurge (_Euphorbia poylgonifolia_); also, Beach Grass (_Arundo,
Psamma_, or _Calamagrostis arenaria_), Sea-side Golden-rod (_Solidago
sempervirens_), and the Beach Pea (_Lathyrus maritimus_).
Sometimes we helped a wrecker turn over a larger log than usual, or we
amused ourselves with rolling stones down the bank, but we rarely could
make one reach the water, the beach was so soft and wide; or we bathed
in some shallow within a bar, where the sea covered us with sand at
every flux, though it was quite cold and windy. The ocean there is
commonly but a tantalizing prospect in hot weather, for with all that
water before you, there is, as we were afterward told, no bathing on
the Atlantic side, on account of the undertow and the rumor of sharks.
At the lighthouse both in Eastham and Truro, the only houses quite on
the shore, they declared, the next year, that they would not bathe
there “for any sum,” for they sometimes saw the sharks tossed up and
quiver for a moment on the sand. Others laughed at these stories, but
perhaps they could afford to because they never bathed anywhere. One
old wrecker told us that he killed a regular man-eating shark fourteen
feet long, and hauled him out with his oxen, where we had bathed; and
another, that his father caught a smaller one of the same kind that was
stranded there, by standing him up on his snout so that the waves could
not take him. They will tell you tough stories of sharks all over the
Cape, which I do not presume to doubt utterly,—how they will sometimes
upset a boat, or tear it in pieces, to get at the man in it. I can
easily believe in the undertow, but I have no doubt that one shark in a
dozen years is enough to keep up the reputation of a beach a hundred
miles long. I should add, however, that in July we walked on the bank
here a quarter of a mile parallel with a fish about six feet in length,
possibly a shark, which was prowling slowly along within two rods of
the shore. It was of a pale brown color, singularly film-like and
indistinct in the water, as if all nature abetted this child of ocean,
and showed many darker transverse bars or rings whenever it came to the
surface. It is well known that different fishes even of the same
species are colored by the water they inhabit. We saw it go into a
little cove or bathing-tub, where we had just been bathing, where the
water was only four or five feet deep at that time, and after exploring
it go slowly out again; but we continued to bathe there, only observing
first from the bank if the cove was preoccupied. We thought that the
water was fuller of life, more aerated perhaps than that of the Bay,
like soda-water, for we were as particular as young salmon, and the
expectation of encountering a shark did not subtract anything from its
life-giving qualities.
Sometimes we sat on the wet beach and watched the beach birds,
sand-pipers, and others, trotting along close to each wave, and waiting
for the sea to cast up their breakfast. The former (_Charadrius
melodus_) ran with great rapidity and then stood stock still remarkably
erect and hardly to be distinguished from the beach. The wet sand was
covered with small skipping Sea Fleas, which apparently make a part of
their food. These last are the little scavengers of the beach, and are
so numerous that they will devour large fishes, which have been cast
up, in a very short time. One little bird not larger than a sparrow,—it
may have been a Phalarope,—would alight on the turbulent surface where
the breakers were five or six feet high, and float buoyantly there like
a duck, cunningly taking to its wings and lifting itself a few feet
through the air over the foaming crest of each breaker, but sometimes
outriding safely a considerable billow which hid it some seconds, when
its instinct told it that it would not break. It was a little creature
thus to sport with the ocean, but it was as perfect a success in its
way as the breakers in theirs. There was also an almost uninterrupted
line of coots rising and falling with the waves, a few rods from the
shore, the whole length of the Cape. They made as constant a part of
the ocean’s border as the pads or pickerel-weed do of that of a pond.
We read the following as to the Storm Petrel (_Thalassidroma
Wilsonii_), which is seen in the Bay as well as on the outside. “The
feathers on the breast of the Storm Petrel are, like those of all
swimming birds, water-proof; but substances not susceptible of being
wetted with water are, for that very reason, the best fitted for
collecting oil from its surface. That function is performed by the
feathers on the breast of the Storm Petrels as they touch on the
surface; and though that may not be the only way in which they procure
their food, it is certainly that in which they obtain great part of it.
They dash along till they have loaded their feathers and then they
pause upon the wave and remove the oil with their bills.”
Thus we kept on along the gently curving shore, seeing two or three
miles ahead at once,—along this ocean side-walk, where there was none
to turn out for, with the middle of the road the highway of nations on
our right, and the sand cliffs of the Cape on our left. We saw this
forenoon a part of the wreck of a vessel, probably the _Franklin_, a
large piece fifteen feet square, and still freshly painted. With a
grapple and a line we could have saved it, for the waves repeatedly
washed it within cast, but they as often took it back. It would have
been a lucky haul for some poor wrecker, for I have been told that one
man who paid three or four dollars for a part of the wreck of that
vessel, sold fifty or sixty dollars’ worth of iron out of it. Another,
the same who picked up the Captain’s valise with the memorable letter
in it, showed me, growing in his garden, many pear and plum trees which
washed ashore from her, all nicely tied up and labelled, and he said
that he might have got five hundred dollars’ worth; for a Mr. Bell was
importing the nucleus of a nursery to be established near Boston. His
turnip-seed came from the same source. Also valuable spars from the
same vessel and from the _Cactus_ lay in his yard. In short the
inhabitants visit the beach to see what they have caught as regularly
as a fisherman his weir or a lumberer his boom; the Cape is their boom.
I heard of one who had recently picked up twenty barrels of apples in
good condition, probably a part of a deck load thrown over in a storm.
Though there are wreck-masters appointed to look after valuable
property which must be advertised, yet undoubtedly a great deal of
value is secretly carried off. But are we not all wreckers contriving
that some treasure may be washed up on our beach, that we may secure
it, and do we not infer the habits of these Nauset and Barnegat
wreckers from the common modes of getting a living?
The sea, vast and wild as it is, bears thus the waste and wrecks of
human art to its remotest shore. There is no telling what it may not
vomit up. It lets nothing lie; not even the giant clams which cling to
its bottom. It is still heaving up the tow-cloth of the _Franklin_, and
perhaps a piece of some old pirate’s ship, wrecked more than a hundred
years ago, comes ashore to-day. Some years since, when a vessel was
wrecked here which had nutmegs in her cargo, they were strewn all along
the beach, and for a considerable time were not spoiled by the salt
water. Soon afterward, a fisherman caught a cod which was full of them.
Why, then, might not the Spice-Islanders shake their nutmeg trees into
the ocean, and let all nations who stand in need of them pick them up?
However, after a year, I found that the nutmegs from the _Franklin_ had
become soft.
You might make a curious list of articles which fishes have
swallowed,—sailors’ open clasp-knives, and bright tin snuff-boxes, not
knowing what was in them,—and jugs, and jewels, and Jonah. The other
day I came across the following scrap in a newspaper.
“A Religious Fish.—A short time ago, mine host Stewart, of the Denton
Hotel, purchased a rock-fish, weighing about sixty pounds. On opening
it he found in it a certificate of membership of the M. E. Church,
which we read as follows:—
Member Methodist E. Church. Founded
A. D. 1784. Quarterly Ticket. 18
Minister.
‘For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a
far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory.’—2 Cor. iv. 17.
‘O what are all my sufferings here,
If, Lord, thou count me meet
With that enraptured host t’ appear,
And worship at thy feet!’
“The paper was of course in a crumpled and wet condition, but on
exposing it to the sun, and ironing the kinks out of it, it became
quite legible.—_Denton_ (_Md._) _Journal_.”
From time to time we saved a wreck ourselves, a box or barrel, and set
it on its end, and appropriated it with crossed sticks; and it will lie
there perhaps, respected by brother wreckers, until some more violent
storm shall take it, really lost to man until wrecked again. We also
saved, at the cost of wet feet only, a valuable cord and buoy, part of
a seine, with which the sea was playing, for it seemed ungracious to
refuse the least gift which so great a personage offered you. We
brought this home and still use it for a garden line. I picked up a
bottle half buried in the wet sand, covered with barnacles, but
stoppled tight, and half full of red ale, which still smacked of
juniper,—all that remained I fancied from the wreck of a rowdy
world,—that great salt sea on the one hand, and this little sea of ale
on the other, preserving their separate characters. What if it could
tell us its adventures over countless ocean waves! Man would not be man
through such ordeals as it had passed. But as I poured it slowly out on
to the sand, it seemed to me that man himself was like a half-emptied
bottle of pale ale, which Time had drunk so far, yet stoppled tight for
a while, and drifting about in the ocean of circumstances; but destined
erelong to mingle with the surrounding waves, or be spilled amid the
sands of a distant shore.
In the summer I saw two men fishing for Bass hereabouts. Their bait was
a bullfrog, or several small frogs in a bunch, for want of squid. They
followed a retiring wave and whirling their lines round and round their
heads with increasing rapidity, threw them as far as they could into
the sea; then retreating, sat down, flat on the sand, and waited for a
bite. It was literally (or _littorally_) walking down to the shore, and
throwing your line into the Atlantic. I should not have known what
might take hold of the other end, whether Proteus or another. At any
rate, if you could not pull him in, why, you might let him go without
being pulled in yourself. And _they_ knew by experience that it would
be a Striped Bass, or perhaps a Cod, for these fishes play along near
the shore.
From time to time we sat under the lee of a sand-hill on the bank,
thinly covered with coarse Beach-grass, and steadily gazed on the sea,
or watched the vessels going south, all Blessings of the Bay of course.
We could see a little more than half a circle of ocean, besides the
glimpses of the Bay which we got behind us; the sea there was not wild
and dreary in all respects, for there were frequently a hundred sail in
sight at once on the Atlantic. You can commonly count about eighty in a
favorable summer day and pilots sometimes land and ascend the bank to
look out for these which require their services. These had been waiting
for fair weather, and had come out of Boston Harbor together. The same
is the case when they have been assembled in the Vineyard Sound, so
that you may see but few one day, and a large fleet the next. Schooners
with many jibs and stay-sails crowded all the sea road; square-rigged
vessels with their great height and breadth of canvas were ever and
anon appearing out of the far horizon, or disappearing and sinking into
it; here and there a pilot-boat was towing its little boat astern
toward some distant foreigner who had just fired a gun, the echo of
which along the shore sounded like the caving of the bank. We could see
the pilot looking through his glass toward the distant ship which was
putting back to speak with him. He sails many a mile to meet her; and
now she puts her sails aback, and communicates with him
alongside,—sends some important message to the owners, and then bids
farewell to these shores for good and all; or, perchance a propeller
passed and made fast to some disabled craft, or one that had been
becalmed, whose cargo of fruit might spoil. Though silently, and for
the most part incommunicatively, going about their business, they were,
no doubt, a source of cheerfulness and a kind of society to one
another.
[Illustration: Unloading the day’s catch]
To-day it was the Purple Sea, an epithet which I should not before have
accepted. There were distinct patches of the color of a purple grape
with the bloom rubbed off. But first and last the sea is of all colors.
Well writes Gilpin concerning “the brilliant hues which are continually
playing on the surface of a quiet ocean,” and this was not too
turbulent at a distance from the shore. “Beautiful,” says he, “no doubt
in a high degree are those glimmering tints which often invest the tops
of mountains; but they are mere coruscations compared with these marine
colors, which are continually varying and shifting into each other in
all the vivid splendor of the rainbow, through the space often of
several leagues.” Commonly, in calm weather, for half a mile from the
shore, where the bottom tinges it, the sea is green, or greenish, as
are some ponds; then blue for many miles, often with purple tinges,
bounded in the distance by a light almost silvery stripe; beyond which
there is generally a dark-blue rim, like a mountain-ridge in the
horizon, as if, like that, it owed its color to the intervening
atmosphere. On another day it will be marked with long streaks,
alternately smooth and rippled, light-colored and dark, even like our
inland meadows in a freshet, and showing which way the wind sets.