Φίν’ ἔφ’ ἁλὸς πολιῆς, ὁρόων ἐπὶ οἴνοπα πόντον.
Here and there was a darker spot on its surface, the shadow of a cloud,
though the sky was so clear that no cloud would have been noticed
otherwise, and no shadow would have been seen on the land, where a much
smaller surface is visible at once. So, distant clouds and showers may
be seen on all sides by a sailor in the course of a day, which do not
necessarily portend rain where he is. In July we saw similar dark-blue
patches where schools of Menhaden rippled the surface, scarcely to be
distinguished from the shadows of clouds. Sometimes the sea was spotted
with them far and wide, such is its inexhaustible fertility. Close at
hand you see their back fin, which is very long and sharp, projecting
two or three inches above water. From time to time also we saw the
white bellies of the Bass playing along the shore.
It was a poetic recreation to watch those distant sails steering for
half-fabulous ports, whose very names are a mysterious music to our
ears: Fayal, and Babelmandel, ay, and Chagres, and Panama,—bound to the
famous Bay of San Francisco, and the golden streams of Sacramento and
San Joaquin, to Feather River and the American Fork, where Sutter’s
Fort presides, and inland stands the City de los Angeles. It is
remarkable that men do not sail the sea with more expectation. Nothing
remarkable was ever accomplished in a prosaic mood. The heroes and
discoverers have found true more than was previously believed, only
when they were expecting and dreaming of something more than their
contemporaries dreamed of, or even themselves discovered, that is, when
they were in a frame of mind fitted to behold the truth. Referred to
the world’s standard, they are always insane. Even savages have
indirectly surmised as much. Humboldt, speaking of Columbus approaching
the New World, says: “The grateful coolness of the evening air, the
ethereal purity of the starry firmament, the balmy fragrance of
flowers, wafted to him by the land breeze, all led him to suppose (as
we are told by Herrara, in the Decades) that he was approaching the
garden of Eden, the sacred abode of our first parents. The Orinoco
seemed to him one of the four rivers which, according to the venerable
tradition of the ancient world, flowed from Paradise, to water and
divide the surface of the earth, newly adorned with plants.” So even
the expeditions for the discovery of El Dorado, and of the Fountain of
Youth, led to real, if not compensatory discoveries.
We discerned vessels so far off, when once we began to look, that only
the tops of their masts in the horizon were visible, and it took a
strong intention of the eye, and its most favorable side, to see them
at all, and sometimes we doubted if we were not counting our eyelashes.
Charles Darwin states that he saw, from the base of the Andes, “the
masts of the vessels at anchor in the bay of Valparaiso, although not
less than twenty-six geographical miles distant,” and that Anson had
been surprised at the distance at which his vessels were discovered
from the coast, without knowing the reason, namely, the great height of
the land and the transparency of the air. Steamers may be detected much
farther than sailing vessels, for, as one says, when their hulls and
masts of wood and iron are down, their smoky masts and streamers still
betray them; and the same writer, speaking of the comparative
advantages of bituminous and anthracite coal for war-steamers, states
that, “from the ascent of the columns of smoke above the horizon, the
motions of the steamers in Calais Harbor [on the coast of France] are
at all times observable at Ramsgate [on the English coast], from the
first lighting of the fires to the putting out at sea; and that in
America the steamers burning the fat bituminous coal can be tracked at
sea at least seventy miles before the hulls become visible, by the
dense columns of black smoke pouring out of their chimneys, and
trailing along the horizon.”
Though there were numerous vessels at this great distance in the
horizon on every side, yet the vast spaces between them, like the
spaces between the stars, far as they were distant from us, so were
they from one another,—nay, some were twice as far from each other as
from us,—impressed us with a sense of the immensity of the ocean, the
“unfruitful ocean,” as it has been called, and we could see what
proportion man and his works bear to the globe. As we looked off, and
saw the water growing darker and darker and deeper and deeper the
farther we looked, till it was awful to consider, and it appeared to
have no relation to the friendly land, either as shore or bottom,—of
what use is a bottom if it is out of sight, if it is two or three miles
from the surface, and you are to be drowned so long before you get to
it, though it were made of the same stuff with your native soil?—over
that ocean, where, as the Veda says, “there is nothing to give support,
nothing to rest upon, nothing to cling to,” I felt that I was a land
animal. The man in a balloon even may commonly alight on the earth in a
few moments, but the sailor’s only hope is that he may reach the
distant shore. I could then appreciate the heroism of the old
navigator. Sir Humphrey Gilbert, of whom it is related that, being
overtaken by a storm when on his return from America, in the year 1583,
far northeastward from where we were, sitting abaft with a book in his
hand, just before he was swallowed up in the deep, he cried out to his
comrades in the _Hind_, as they came within hearing, “We are as near to
Heaven by sea as by land.” I saw that it would not be easy to realize.
On Cape Cod, the next most eastern land you hear of is St. George’s
Bank (the fishermen tell of “Georges,” “Cashus,” and other sunken lands
which they frequent). Every Cape man has a theory about George’s Bank
having been an island once, and in their accounts they gradually reduce
the shallowness from six, five, four, two fathoms, to somebody’s
confident assertion that he has seen a mackerel-gull sitting on a
piece of dry land there. It reminded me, when I thought of the
shipwrecks which had taken place there, of the Isle of Demons, laid
down off this coast in old charts of the New World. There must be
something monstrous, methinks, in a vision of the sea bottom from over
some bank a thousand miles from the shore, more awful than its imagined
bottomlessness; a drowned continent, all livid and frothing at the
nostrils, like the body of a drowned man, which is better sunk deep
than near the surface.
I have been surprised to discover from a steamer the shallowness of
Massachusetts Bay itself. Off Billingsgate Point I could have touched
the bottom with a pole, and I plainly saw it variously shaded with
sea-weed, at five or six miles from the shore. This is “The
Shoal-ground of the Cape,” it is true, but elsewhere the bay is not
much deeper than a country pond. We are told that the deepest water in
the English Channel between Shakespeare’s Cliff and Cape Grinéz, in
France, is one hundred and eighty feet; and Guyot says that “the Baltic
Sea has a depth of only one hundred and twenty feet between the coasts
of Germany and those of Sweden,” and “the Adriatic between Venice and
Trieste has a depth of only one hundred and thirty feet.” A pond in my
native town, only half a mile long, is more than one hundred feet deep.
The ocean is but a larger lake. At midsummer you may sometimes see a
strip of glassy smoothness on it, a few rods in width and many miles
long, as if the surface there were covered with a thin pellicle of oil,
just as on a country pond; a sort of stand-still, you would say, at the
meeting or parting of two currents of air (if it does not rather mark
the unrippled steadiness of a current of water beneath), for sailors
tell of the ocean and land breeze meeting between the fore and aft
sails of a vessel, while the latter are full, the former being suddenly
taken aback. Daniel Webster, in one of his letters describing
blue-fishing off Martha’s Vineyard, referring to those smooth places,
which fishermen and sailors call “slicks,” says: “We met with them
yesterday, and our boatman made for them, whenever discovered. He said
they were caused by the blue-fish chopping up their prey. That is to
say, those voracious fellows get into a school of menhaden, which are
too large to swallow whole, and they bite them into pieces to suit
their tastes. And the oil from this butchery, rising to the surface,
makes the ‘slick.’”
Yet this same placid Ocean, as civil now as a city’s harbor, a place
for ships and commerce, will erelong be lashed into sudden fury, and
all its caves and cliffs will resound with tumult. It will ruthlessly
heave these vessels to and fro, break them in pieces in its sandy or
stony jaws, and deliver their crews to sea-monsters. It will play with
them like sea-weed, distend them like dead frogs, and carry them about,
now high, now low, to show to the fishes, giving them a nibble. This
gentle Ocean will toss and tear the rag of a man’s body like the father
of mad bulls, and his relatives may be seen seeking the remnants for
weeks along the strand. From some quiet inland hamlet they have rushed
weeping to the unheard-of shore, and now stand uncertain where a sailor
has recently been buried amid the sandhills.
It is generally supposed that they who have long been conversant with
the Ocean can foretell by certain indications, such as its roar and the
notes of sea-fowl, when it will change from calm to storm; but probably
no such ancient mariner as we dream of exists; they know no more, at
least, than the older sailors do about this voyage of life on which we
are all embarked. Nevertheless, we love to hear the sayings of old
sailors, and their accounts of natural phenomena, which totally ignore,
and are ignored by, science; and possibly they have not always looked
over the gunwale so long in vain. Kalm repeats a story which was told
him in Philadelphia by a Mr. Cock, who was one day sailing to the West
Indies in a small yacht, with an old man on board who was well
acquainted with those seas. “The old man sounding the depth, called to
the mate to tell Mr. Cock to launch the boats immediately, and to put a
sufficient number of men into them, in order to tow the yacht during
the calm, that they might reach the island before them as soon as
possible, as within twenty-four hours there would be a strong
hurricane. Mr. Cock asked him what reasons he had to think so; the old
man replied that, on sounding, he saw the lead in the water at a
distance of many fathoms more than he had seen it before; that
therefore the water was become clear all of a sudden, which he looked
upon as a certain sign of an impending hurricane in the sea.” The
sequel of the story is that, by good fortune and by dint of rowing they
managed to gain a safe harbor before the hurricane had reached its
height; but it finally raged with so much violence that not only many
ships were lost and houses unroofed, but even their own vessel in
harbor was washed so far on shore that several weeks elapsed before it
could be got off.
The Greeks would not have called the ocean ἀτρύγετος, or unfruitful,
though it does not produce wheat, if they had viewed it by the light of
modern science; for naturalists now assert that “the sea, and not the
land, is the principal seat of life,”—though not of vegetable life.
Darwin affirms that “our most thickly inhabited forests appear almost
as deserts when we come to compare them with the corresponding regions
of the ocean.” Agassiz and Gould tell us that “the sea teems with
animals of all classes, far beyond the extreme point of flowering
plants”; but they add that “experiments of dredging in very deep water
have also taught us that the abyss of the ocean is nearly a
desert”;—“so that modern investigations,” to quote the words of Desor,
“merely go to confirm the great idea which was vaguely anticipated by
the ancient poets and philosophers, that the Ocean is the origin of all
things.” Yet marine animals and plants hold a lower rank in the scale
of being than land animals and plants. “There is no instance known,”
says Desor, “of an animal becoming aquatic in its perfect state, after
having lived in its lower stage on dry land.” but as in the case of the
tadpole, “the progress invariably points towards the dry land.” In
short, the dry land itself came through and out of the water in its way
to the heavens, for, “in going back through the geological ages, we
come to an epoch when, according to all appearances, the dry land did
not exist, and when the surface of our globe was entirely covered with
water.” We looked on the sea, then, once more, not as ἀτρύγετος, or
unfruitful, but as it has been more truly called, the “laboratory of
continents.”
Though we have indulged in some placid reflections of late, the reader
must not forget that the dash and roar of the waves were incessant.
Indeed, it would be well if he were to read with a large conch-shell at
his ear. But notwithstanding that it was very cold and windy to-day, it
was such a cold as we thought would not cause one to take cold who was
exposed to it, owing to the saltness of the air and the dryness of the
soil. Yet the author of the old Description of Wellfleet says: “The
atmosphere is very much impregnated with saline particles, which,
perhaps, with the great use of fish, and the neglect of cider and
spruce-beer, may be a reason why the people are more subject to sore
mouths and throats than in other places.”
VII
ACROSS THE CAPE
When we have returned from the seaside, we sometimes ask ourselves why
we did not spend more time in gazing at the sea; but very soon the
traveller does not look as the sea more than at the heavens. As for the
interior, if the elevated sand-bar in the midst of the ocean can be
said to have any interior, it was an exceedingly desolate landscape,
with rarely a cultivated or cultivable field in sight. We saw no
villages, and seldom a house, for these are generally on the Bay side.
It was a succession of shrubby hills and valleys, now wearing an
autumnal tint. You would frequently think, from the character of the
surface, the dwarfish trees, and the bearberries around, that you were
on the top of a mountain. The only wood in Eastham was on the edge of
Wellfleet. The pitch-pines were not commonly more than fifteen or
eighteen feet high. The larger ones covered with lichens,—often hung
with the long gray _Usnea_. There is scarcely a white-pine on the
forearm of the Cape. Yet in the northwest part of Eastham, near the
Camp Ground, we saw, the next summer, some quite rural, and even sylvan
retreats, for the Cape, where small rustling groves of oaks and locusts
and whispering pines, on perfectly level ground, made a little
paradise. The locusts, both transplanted and growing naturally about
the houses there, appeared to flourish better than any other tree.
There were thin belts of wood in Wellfleet and Truro, a mile or more
from the Atlantic, but, for the most part, we could see the horizon
through them, or, if extensive, the trees were not large. Both oaks and
pines had often the same flat look with the apple-trees. Commonly, the
oak woods twenty-five years old were a mere scraggy shrubbery nine or
ten feet high, and we could frequently reach to their topmost leaf.
Much that is called “woods” was about half as high as this,—only
patches of shrub-oak, bayberry, beach-plum, and wild roses, overrun
with woodbine. When the roses were in bloom, these patches in the midst
of the sand displayed such a profusion of blossoms, mingled with the
aroma of the bayberry, that no Italian or other artificial rose-garden
could equal them. They were perfectly Elysian, and realized my idea of
an oasis in the desert. Huckleberry-bushes were very abundant, and the
next summer they bore a remarkable quantity of that kind of gall called
Huckleberry-apple, forming quite handsome though monstrous blossoms.
But it must be added, that this shrubbery swarmed with wood-ticks,
sometimes very troublesome parasites, and which it takes very horny
fingers to crack.
[Illustration: A Truro footpath]
The inhabitants of these towns have a great regard for a tree, though
their standard for one is necessarily neither large nor high; and when
they tell you of the large trees that once grew here, you must think of
them, not as absolutely large, but large compared with the present
generation. Their “brave old oaks,” of which they speak with so much
respect, and which they will point out to you as relics of the
primitive forest, one hundred or one hundred and fifty, ay, for aught
they know, two hundred years old, have a ridiculously dwarfish
appearance, which excites a smile in the beholder. The largest and most
venerable which they will show you in such a case are, perhaps, not
more than twenty or twenty-five feet high. I was especially amused by
the Liliputian old oaks in the south part of Truro. To the
inexperienced eye, which appreciated their proportions only, they might
appear vast as the tree which saved his royal majesty, but measured,
they were dwarfed at once almost into lichens which a deer might eat up
in a morning. Yet they will tell you that large schooners were once
built of timber which grew in Wellfleet. The old houses also are built
of the timber of the Cape; but instead of the forests in the midst of
which they originally stood, barren heaths, with poverty-grass for
heather, now stretch away on every side. The modern houses are built of
what is called “dimension timber,” _imported_ from Maine, all ready to
be set up, so that commonly they do not touch it again with an axe.
Almost all the wood used for fuel is imported by vessels or currents,
and of course all the coal. I was told that probably a quarter of the
fuel and a considerable part of the lumber used in North Truro was
drift-wood. Many get _all_ their fuel from the beach.
Of birds not found in the interior of the State,—at least in my
neighborhood,—I heard, in the summer, the Black-throated Bunting
(_Fringilla Americana_) amid the shrubbery, and in the open land the
Upland Plover (_Totanus Bartramius_), whose quivering notes were ever
and anon prolonged into a clear, somewhat plaintive, yet hawk-like
scream, which sounded at a very indefinite distance. The bird may have
been in the next field, though it sounded a mile off.
To-day we were walking through Truro, a town of about eighteen hundred
inhabitants. We had already come to Pamet River, which empties into the
Bay. This was the limit of the Pilgrims’ journey up the Cape from
Provincetown, when seeking a place for settlement. It rises in a hollow
within a few rods of the Atlantic, and one who lives near its source
told us that in high tides the sea leaked through, yet the wind and
waves preserve intact the barrier between them, and thus the whole
river is steadily driven westward butt-end foremost,—fountain-head,
channel, and light-house at the mouth, all together.
Early in the afternoon we reached the Highland Light, whose white tower
we had seen rising out of the bank in front of us for the last mile or
two. It is fourteen miles from the Nauset Lights, on what is called the
Clay Pounds, an immense bed of clay abutting on the Atlantic, and, as
the keeper told us, stretching quite across the Cape, which is here
only about two miles wide. We perceived at once a difference in the
soil, for there was an interruption of the desert, and a slight
appearance of a sod under our feet, such as we had not seen for the
last two days.
After arranging to lodge at the light-house, we rambled across the Cape
to the Bay, over a singularly bleak and barren-looking country,
consisting of rounded hills and hollows, called by geologists diluvial
elevations and depressions,—a kind of scenery which has been compared
to a chopped sea, though this suggests too sudden a transition. There
is a delineation of this very landscape in Hitchcock’s Report on the
Geology of Massachusetts, a work which, by its size at least, reminds
one of a diluvial elevation itself. Looking southward from the
light-house, the Cape appeared like an elevated plateau, sloping very
regularly, though slightly, downward from the edge of the bank on the
Atlantic side, about one hundred and fifty feet above the ocean, to
that on the Bay side. On traversing this we found it to be interrupted
by broad valleys or gullies, which become the hollows in the bank when
the sea has worn up to them. They are commonly at right angles with the
shore, and often extend quite across the Cape. Some of the valleys,
however, are circular, a hundred feet deep without any outlet, as if
the Cape had sunk in those places, or its sands had run out. The few
scattered houses which we passed, being placed at the bottom of the
hollows for shelter and fertility, were, for the most part, concealed
entirely, as much as if they had been swallowed up in the earth. Even a
village with its meeting-house, which we had left little more than a
stone’s throw behind, had sunk into the earth, spire and all, and we
saw only the surface of the upland and the sea on either hand. When
approaching it, we had mistaken the belfry for a summer-house on the
plain. We began to think that we might tumble into a village before we
were aware of it, as into an ant-lion’s hole, and be drawn into the
sand irrecoverably. The most conspicuous objects on the land were a
distant windmill, or a meeting-house standing alone, for only they
could afford to occupy an exposed place. A great part of the township,
however, is a barren, heath-like plain, and perhaps one third of it
lies in common, though the property of individuals. The author of the
old “Description of Truro,” speaking of the soil, says: “The snow,
which would be of essential service to it provided it lay level and
covered the ground, is blown into drifts and into the sea.” This
peculiar open country, with here and there a patch of shrubbery,
extends as much as seven miles, or from Pamet River on the south to
High Head on the north, and from Ocean to Bay. To walk over it makes on
a stranger such an impression as being at sea, and he finds it
impossible to estimate distances in any weather. A windmill or a herd
of cows may seem to be far away in the horizon, yet, after going a few
rods, he will be close upon them. He is also deluded by other kinds of
mirage. When, in the summer, I saw a family a-blueberrying a mile off,
walking about amid the dwarfish bushes which did not come up higher
than their ankles, they seemed to me to be a race of giants, twenty
feet high at least.
The highest and sandiest portion next the Atlantic was thinly covered
with Beach-grass and Indigo-weed. Next to this the surface of the
upland generally consisted of white sand and gravel, like coarse salt,
through which a scanty vegetation found its way up. It will give an
ornithologist some idea of its barrenness if I mention that the next
June, the month of grass, I found a night-hawk’s eggs there, and that
almost any square rod thereabouts, taken at random, would be an
eligible site for such a deposit. The kildeer-plover, which loves a
similar locality, also drops its eggs there, and fills the air above
with its din. This upland also produced _Cladonia_ lichens,
poverty-grass, savory-leaved aster (_Diplopappus linariifolius_),
mouse-ear, bear-berry, &c. On a few hillsides the savory-leaved aster
and mouse-ear alone made quite a dense sward, said to be very pretty
when the aster is in bloom. In some parts the two species of
poverty-grass (_Hudsonia tomentosa_ and _ericoides_), which deserve a
better name, reign for miles in littli hemispherical tufts or islets,
like moss, scattered over the waste. They linger in bloom there till
the middle of July. Occasionally near the beach these rounded beds, as
also those of the sea-sandwort (_Honkenya peploides_), were filled with
sand within an inch of their tops, and were hard, like large ant-hills,
while the surrounding sand was soft. In summer, if the poverty-grass
grows at the head of a Hollow looking toward the sea, in a bleak
position where the wind rushes up, the northern or exposed half of the
tuft is sometimes all black and dead like an oven-broom, while the
opposite half is yellow with blossoms, the whole hillside thus
presenting a remarkable contrast when seen from the poverty-stricken
and the flourishing side. This plant, which in many places would be
esteemed an ornament, is here despised by many on account of its being
associated with barrenness. It might well be adopted for the Barnstable
coat-of-arms, in a field _sableux_. I should be proud of it. Here and
there were tracts of Beach-grass mingled with the Sea-side Goldenrod
and Beach-pea, which reminded us still more forcibly of the ocean.
[Illustration: Truro meeting-house on the hill]
We read that there was not a brook in Truro. Yet there were deer here
once, which must often have panted in vain; but I am pretty sure that I
afterward saw a small fresh-water brook emptying into the south side of
Pamet River, though I was so heedless as not to taste it. At any rate,
a little boy near by told me that he drank at it. There was not a tree
as far as we could see, and that was many miles each way, the general
level of the upland being about the same everywhere. Even from the
Atlantic side we overlooked the Bay, and saw to Manomet Point in
Plymouth, and better from that side because it was the highest. The
almost universal bareness and smoothness of the landscape were as
agreeable as novel, making it so much the more like the deck of a
vessel. We saw vessels sailing south into the Bay, on the one hand, and
north along the Atlantic shore, on the other, all with an aft wind.
The single road which runs lengthwise the Cape, now winding over the
plain, now through the shrubbery which scrapes the wheels of the stage,
was a mere cart-track in the sand, commonly without any fences to
confine it, and continually changing from this side to that, to harder
ground, or sometimes to avoid the tide. But the inhabitants travel the
waste here and there pilgrim-wise and staff in hand, by narrow
footpaths, through which the sand flows out and reveals the nakedness
of the land. We shuddered at the thought of living there and taking our
afternoon walks over those barren swells, where we could overlook every
step of our walk before taking it, and would have to pray for a fog or
a snow-storm to conceal our destiny. The walker there must soon eat his
heart.
In the north part of the town there is no house from shore to shore for
several miles, and it is as wild and solitary as the Western
Prairies—used to be. Indeed, one who has seen every house in Truro will
be surprised to hear of the number of the inhabitants, but perhaps five
hundred of the men and boys of this small town were then abroad on
their fishing grounds. Only a few men stay at home to till the sand or
watch for blackfish. The farmers are fishermen-farmers and understand
better ploughing the sea than the land. They do not disturb their sands
much, though there is a plenty of sea-weed in the creeks, to say
nothing of blackfish occasionally rotting the shore. Between the Pond
and East Harbor Village there was an interesting plantation of
pitch-pines, twenty or thirty acres in extent, like those which we had
already seen from the stage. One who lived near said that the land was
purchased by two men for a shilling or twenty-five cents an acre. Some
is not considered worth writing a deed for. This soil or sand, which
was partially covered with poverty and beach grass, sorrel, &c., was
furrowed at intervals of about four feet and the seed dropped by a
machine. The pines had come up admirably and grown the first year three
or four inches, and the second six inches and more. Where the seed had
been lately planted the white sand was freshly exposed in an endless
furrow winding round and round the sides of the deep hollows, in a
vertical spiral manner, which produced a very singular effect, as if
you were looking into the reverse side of a vast banded shield. This
experiment, so important to the Cape, appeared very successful, and
perhaps the time will come when the greater part of this kind of land
in Barnstable County will be thus covered with an artificial pine
forest, as has been done in some parts of France. In that country
12,500 acres of downs had been thus covered in 1811 near Bayonne. They
are called _pignadas_, and according to Loudon “constitute the
principal riches of the inhabitants, where there was a drifting desert
before.” It seemed a nobler kind of grain to raise than corn even.
[Illustration: A herd of cows]
A few years ago Truro was remarkable among the Cape towns for the
number of sheep raised in it; but I was told that at this time only two
men kept sheep in the town, and in 1855, a Truro boy ten years old told
me that he had never seen one. They were formerly pastured on the
unfenced lands or general fields, but now the owners were more
particular to assert their rights, and it cost too much for fencing.
The rails are cedar from Maine, and two rails will answer for ordinary
purposes, but four are required for sheep. This was the reason assigned
by one who had formerly kept them for not keeping them any longer.
Fencing stuff is so expensive that I saw fences made with only one
rail, and very often the rail when split was carefully tied with a
string. In one of the villages I saw the next summer a cow tethered by
a rope six rods long, the rope long in proportion as the feed was short
and thin. Sixty rods, ay, all the cables of the Cape, would have been
no more than fair. Tethered in the desert for fear that she would get
into Arabia Felix! I helped a man weigh a bundle of hay which he was
selling to his neighbor, holding one end of a pole from which it swung
by a steel-yard hook, and this was just half his whole crop. In short,
the country looked so barren that I several times refrained from asking
the inhabitants for a string or a piece of wrapping-paper, for fear I
should rob them, for they plainly were obliged to import these things
as well as rails, and where there were no newsboys, I did not see what
they would do for waste paper.
The objects around us, the make-shifts of fishermen ashore, often made
us look down to see if we were standing on terra firma. In the wells
everywhere a block and tackle were used to raise the bucket, instead of
a windlass, and by almost every house was laid up a spar or a plank or
two full of auger-holes, saved from a wreck. The windmills were partly
built of these, and they were worked into the public bridges. The
light-house keeper, who was having his barn shingled, told me casually
that he had made three thousand good shingles for that purpose out of a
mast. You would sometimes see an old oar used for a rail. Frequently
also some fair-weather finery ripped off a vessel by a storm near the
coast was nailed up against an outhouse. I saw fastened to a shed near
the lighthouse a long new sign with the words “ANGLO SAXON” on it in
large gilt letters, as if it were a useless part which the ship could
afford to lose, or which the sailors had discharged at the same time
with the pilot. But it interested somewhat as if it had been a part of
the Argo, clipped off in passing through the Symplegades.
To the fisherman, the Cape itself is a sort of store-ship laden with
supplies,—a safer and larger craft which carries the women and
children, the old men and the sick; and indeed sea-phrases are as
common on it as on board a vessel. Thus is it ever with a sea-going
people. The old Northmen used to speak of the “keel-ridge” of the
country, that is, the ridge of the Doffrafield Mountains, as if the
land were a boat turned bottom up. I was frequently reminded of the
Northmen here. The inhabitants of the Cape are often at once farmers
and sea-rovers; they are more than vikings or kings of the bays, for
their sway extends over the open sea also. A farmer in Wellfleet, at
whose house I afterward spent a night, who had raised fifty bushels of
potatoes the previous year, which is a large crop for the Cape, and had
extensive salt-works, pointed to his schooner, which lay in sight, in
which he and his man and boy occasionally ran down the coast a-trading
as far as the Capes of Virginia. This was his market-cart, and his
hired man knew how to steer her. Thus he drove two teams a-field,
“ere the high _seas_ appeared
Under the opening eyelids of the morn.”
Though probably he would not hear much of the “gray fly” on his way to
Virginia.
A great proportion of the inhabitants of the Cape are always thus
abroad about their teaming on some ocean highway or other, and the
history of one of their ordinary trips would cast the Argonautic
expedition into the shade. I have just heard of a Cape Cod captain who
was expected home in the beginning of the winter from the West Indies,
but was long since given up for lost, till his relations at length have
heard with joy, that, after getting within forty miles of Cape Cod
light, he was driven back by nine successive gales to Key West, between
Florida and Cuba, and was once again shaping his course for home. Thus
he spent his winter. In ancient times the adventures of these two or
three men and boys would have been made the basis of a myth, but now
such tales are crowded into a line of shorthand signs, like an
algebraic formula in the shipping news. “Wherever over the world,” said
Palfrey in his oration at Barnstable, “you see the stars and stripes
floating, you may have good hope that beneath them some one will be
found who can tell you the soundings of Barnstable, or Wellfleet, or
Chatham Harbor.”
I passed by the home of somebody’s (or everybody’s) Uncle Bill, one day
over on the Plymouth shore. It was a schooner half keeled-up on the
mud: we aroused the master out of a sound sleep at noonday, by thumping
on the bottom of his vessel till he presented himself at the hatchway,
for we wanted to borrow his clam-digger. Meaning to make him a call, I
looked out the next morning, and lo! he had run over to “the Pines” the
evening before, fearing an easterly storm. He outrode the _great_ gale
in the spring of 1851, dashing about alone in Plymouth Bay. He goes
after rockweed, lighters vessels, and saves wrecks. I still saw him
lying in the mud over at “the Pines” in the horizon, which place he
could not leave if he would till flood tide. But he would not then
probably. This waiting for the tide is a singular feature in life by
the sea-shore. A frequent answer is, “Well! you can’t start for two
hours yet.” It is something new to a landsman, and at first he is not
disposed to wait. History says that “two inhabitants of Truro were the
first who adventured to the Falkland Isles in pursuit of whales. This
voyage was undertaken in the year 1774, by the advice of Admiral
Montague of the British navy, and was crowned with success.”
At the Pond Village we saw a pond three eighths of a mile long densely
filled with cat-tail flags, seven feet high,—enough for all the coopers
in New England.
[Illustration: Pond Village]
The western shore was nearly as sandy as the eastern, but the water was
much smoother, and the bottom was partially covered with the slender
grass-like seaweed (_Zostera_), which we had not seen on the Atlantic
side; there were also a few rude sheds for trying fish on the beach
there, which made it appear less wild. In the few marshes on this side
we afterward saw Samphire, Rosemary, and other plants new to us
inlanders.
In the summer and fall sometimes, hundreds of blackfish (the Social
Whale, _Globicephalus Melas_ of De Kay; called also Black Whale-fish,
Howling Whale, Bottlehead, etc.), fifteen feet or more in length, are
driven ashore in a single school here. I witnessed such a scene in
July, 1855. A carpenter who was working at the lighthouse arriving
early in the morning remarked that he did not know but he had lost
fifty dollars by coming to his work; for as he came along the Bay side
he heard them driving a school of blackfish ashore, and he had debated
with himself whether he should not go and join them and take his share,
but had concluded to come to his work. After breakfast I came over to
this place, about two miles distant, and near the beach met some of the
fishermen returning from their chase. Looking up and down the shore, I
could see about a mile south some large black masses on the sand, which
I knew must be blackfish, and a man or two about them. As I walked
along towards them I soon came to a huge carcass whose head was gone
and whose blubber had been stripped off some weeks before; the tide was
just beginning to move it, and the stench compelled me to go a long way
round. When I came to Great Hollow I found a fisherman and some boys on
the watch, and counted about thirty blackfish, just killed, with many
lance wounds, and the water was more or less bloody around. They were
partly on shore and partly in the water, held by a rope round their
tails till the tide should leave them. A boat had been somewhat stove
by the tail of one. They were a smooth shining black, like
India-rubber, and had remarkably simple and lumpish forms for animated
creatures, with a blunt round snout or head, whale-like, and simple
stiff-looking flippers. The largest were about fifteen feet long, but
one or two were only five feet long, and still without teeth. The
fisherman slashed one with his jackknife, to show me how thick the
blubber was,—about three inches; and as I passed my finger through the
cut it was covered thick with oil. The blubber looked like pork, and
this man said that when they were trying it the boys would sometimes
come round with a piece of bread in one hand, and take a piece of
blubber in the other to eat with it, preferring it to pork scraps. He
also cut into the flesh beneath, which was firm and red like beef, and
he said that for his part he preferred it when fresh to beef. It is
stated that in 1812 blackfish were used as food by the poor of
Bretagne. They were waiting for the tide to leave these fishes high and
dry, that they might strip off the blubber and carry it to their
try-works in their boats, where they try it on the beach. They get
commonly a barrel of oil, worth fifteen or twenty dollars, to a fish.
There were many lances and harpoons in the boats,—much slenderer
instruments than I had expected. An old man came along the beach with a
horse and wagon distributing the dinners of the fishermen, which their
wives had put up in little pails and jugs, and which he had collected
in the Pond Village, and for this service, I suppose, he received a
share of the oil. If one could not tell his own pail, he took the first
he came to.
As I stood there they raised the cry of “another school,” and we could
see their black backs and their blowing about a mile northward, as they
went leaping over the sea like horses. Some boats were already in
pursuit there, driving them toward the beach. Other fishermen and boys
running up began to jump into the boats and push them off from where I
stood, and I might have gone too had I chosen. Soon there were
twenty-five or thirty boats in pursuit, some large ones under sail, and
others rowing with might and main, keeping outside of the school, those
nearest to the fishes striking on the sides of their boats and blowing
horns to drive them on to the beach. It was an exciting race. If they
succeed in driving them ashore each boat takes one share, and then each
man, but if they are compelled to strike them off shore each boat’s
company take what they strike. I walked rapidly along the shore toward
the north, while the fishermen were rowing still more swiftly to join
their companions, and a little boy who walked by my side was
congratulating himself that his father’s boat was beating another one.
An old blind fisherman whom we met, inquired, “Where are they? I can’t
see. Have they got them?” In the mean while the fishes had turned and
were escaping northward toward Provincetown, only occasionally the back
of one being seen. So the nearest crews were compelled to strike them,
and we saw several boats soon made fast, each to its fish, which, four
or five rods ahead, was drawing it like a race-horse straight toward
the beach, leaping half out of water, blowing blood and water from its
hole, and leaving a streak of foam behind. But they went ashore too far
north for us, though we could see the fishermen leap out and lance them
on the sand. It was just like pictures of whaling which I have seen,
and a fisherman told me that it was nearly as dangerous. In his first
trial he had been much excited, and in his haste had used a lance with
its scabbard on, but nevertheless had thrust it quite through his fish.
I learned that a few days before this one hundred and eighty blackfish
had been driven ashore in one school at Eastham, a little farther
south, and that the keeper of Billingsgate Point light went out one
morning about the same time and cut his initials on the backs of a
large school which had run ashore in the night, and sold his right to
them to Provincetown for one thousand dollars, and probably
Provincetown made as much more. Another fisherman told me that nineteen
years ago three hundred and eighty were driven ashore in one school at
Great Hollow. In the Naturalists’ Library, it is said that, in the
winter of 1809-10, one thousand one hundred and ten “approached the
shore of Hralfiord, Iceland, and were captured.” De Kay says it is not
known why they are stranded. But one fisherman declared to me that they
ran ashore in pursuit of squid, and that they generally came on the
coast about the last of July.
About a week afterward, when I came to this shore, it was strewn, as
far as I could see with a glass, with the carcasses of blackfish
stripped of their blubber and their heads cut off; the latter lying
higher up. Walking on the beach was out of the question on account of
the stench. Between Provincetown and Truro they lay in the very path of
the stage. Yet no steps were taken to abate the nuisance, and men were
catching lobsters as usual just off the shore. I was told that they did
sometimes tow them out and sink them; yet I wondered where they got the
stones to sink them with. Of course they might be made into guano, and
Cape Cod is not so fertile that her inhabitants can afford to do
without this manure,—to say nothing of the diseases they may produce.
After my return home, wishing to learn what was known about the
Blackfish, I had recourse to the reports of the zoological surveys of
the State, and I found that Storer had rightfully omitted it in his
Report on the Fishes, since it is not a fish; so I turned to Emmons’s
Report of the Mammalia, but was surprised to find that the seals and
whales were omitted by him, because he had had no opportunity to
observe them. Considering how this State has risen and thriven by its
fisheries,—that the legislature which authorized the Zoological Survey
sat under the emblem of a codfish,—that Nantucket and New Bedford are
within our limits,—that an early riser may find a thousand or fifteen
hundred dollars’ worth of blackfish on the shore in a morning,—that the
Pilgrims saw the Indians cutting up a blackfish on the shore at
Eastham, and called a part of that shore “Grampus Bay,” from the number
of blackfish they found there, before they got to Plymouth,—and that
from that time to this these fishes have continued to enrich one or two
counties almost annually, and that their decaying carcasses were now
poisoning the air of one county for more than thirty miles,—I thought
it remarkable that neither the popular nor scientific name was to be
found in a report on our mammalia,—a catalogue of the productions of
our land and water.
We had here, as well as all across the Cape, a fair view of
Provincetown, five or six miles distant over the water toward the west,
under its shrubby sand-hills, with its harbor now full of vessels whose
masts mingled with the spires of its churches, and gave it the
appearance of a quite large seaport town.
The inhabitants of all the lower Cape towns enjoy thus the prospect of
two seas. Standing on the western or larboard shore, and looking
across to where the distant mainland looms, they can say, This is
Massachusetts Bay; and then, after an hour’s sauntering walk, they may
stand on the starboard side, beyond which no land is seen to loom, and
say, This is the Atlantic Ocean.
On our way back to the lighthouse, by whose white-washed tower we
steered as securely as the mariner by its light at night, we passed
through a graveyard, which apparently was saved from being blown away
by its slates, for they had enabled a thick bed of huckleberry-bushes
to root themselves amid the graves. We thought it would be worth the
while to read the epitaphs where so many were lost at sea; however, as
not only their lives, but commonly their bodies also, were lost or not
identified, there were fewer epitaphs of this sort than we expected,
though there were not a few. Their graveyard is the ocean. Near the
eastern side we started up a fox in a hollow, the only kind of wild
quadruped, if I except a skunk in a salt-marsh, that we saw in all our
walk (unless painted and box tortoises may be called quadrupeds). He
was a large, plump, shaggy fellow, like a yellow dog, with, as usual, a
white tip to his tail, and looked as if he fared well on the Cape. He
cantered away into the shrub-oaks and bayberry-bushes which chanced to
grow there, but were hardly high enough to conceal him. I saw another
the next summer leaping over the top of a beach-plum a little farther
north, a small arc of his course (which I trust is not yet run), from
which I endeavored in vain to calculate his whole orbit: there were too
many unknown attractions to be allowed for. I also saw the exuviae of a
third fast sinking into the sand, and added the skull to my collection.
Hence I concluded that they must be plenty thereabouts; but a traveller
may meet with more than an inhabitant, since he is more likely to take
an unfrequented route across the country. They told me that in some
years they died off in great numbers by a kind of madness, under the
effect of which they were seen whirling round and round as if in
pursuit of their tails. In Crantz’s account of Greenland, he says:
“They (the foxes) live upon birds and their eggs, and, when they can’t
get them, upon crowberries, mussels, crabs, and what the sea casts
out.”
Just before reaching the light-house, we saw the sun set in the
Bay,—for standing on that narrow Cape was, as I have said, like being
on the deck of a vessel, or rather at the masthead of a man-of-war,
thirty miles at sea, though we knew that at the same moment the sun was
setting behind our native hills, which were just below the horizon in
that direction. This sight drove everything else quite out of our
heads, and Homer and the Ocean came in again with a rush,—
Ἐν δ’ ἔπεσ’ Ὠκεανῷ λαμπρὸν φάος ἠελίοιο,
the shining torch of the sun fell into the ocean.
VIII
THE HIGHLAND LIGHT
This light-house, known to mariners as the Cape Cod or Highland Light,
is one of our “primary sea-coast lights,” and is usually the first seen
by those approaching the entrance of Massachusetts Bay from Europe. It
is forty-three miles from Cape Ann Light, and forty-one from Boston
Light. It stands about twenty rods from the edge of the bank, which is
here formed of clay. I borrowed the plane and square, level and
dividers, of a carpenter who was shingling a barn near by, and using
one of those shingles made of a mast, contrived a rude sort of
quadrant, with pins for sights and pivots, and got the angle of
elevation of the Bank opposite the light-house, and with a couple of
cod-lines the length of its slope, and so measured its height on the
shingle. It rises one hundred and ten feet above its immediate base, or
about one hundred and twenty-three feet above mean low water. Graham,
who has carefully surveyed the extremity of the Cape, makes it one
hundred and thirty feet. The mixed sand and clay lay at an angle of
forty degrees with the horizon, where I measured it, but the clay is
generally much steeper. No cow nor hen ever gets down it. Half a mile
farther south the bank is fifteen or twenty-five feet higher, and that
appeared to be the highest land in North Truro. Even this vast clay
bank is fast wearing away. Small streams of water trickling down it at
intervals of two or three rods, have left the intermediate clay in the
form of steep Gothic roofs fifty feet high or more, the ridges as sharp
and rugged-looking as rocks; and in one place the bank is curiously
eaten out in the form of a large semicircular crater.
[Illustration: Dragging a dory up on the beach]
According to the light-house keeper, the Cape is wasting here on both
sides, though most on the eastern. In some places it had lost many rods
within the last year, and, erelong, the light-house must be moved. We
calculated, _from his data_, how soon the Cape would be quite worn away
at this point, “for,” said he, “I can remember sixty years back.” We
were even more surprised at this last announcement,—that is, at the
slow waste of life and energy in our informant, for we had taken him to
be not more than forty,—than at the rapid wasting of the Cape, and we
thought that he stood a fair chance to outlive the former.
Between this October and June of the next year I found that the bank
had lost about forty feet in one place, opposite the light-house, and
it was cracked more than forty feet farther from the edge at the last
date, the shore being strewn with the recent rubbish. But I judged that
generally it was not wearing away here at the rate of more than six
feet annually. Any conclusions drawn from the observations of a few
years or one generation only are likely to prove false, and the Cape
may balk expectation by its durability. In some places even a wrecker’s
foot-path down the bank lasts several years. One old inhabitant told us
that when the light-house was built, in 1798, it was calculated that it
would stand forty-five years, allowing the bank to waste one length of
fence each year, “but,” said he, “there it is” (or rather another near
the same site, about twenty rods from the edge of the bank).
The sea is not gaining on the Cape everywhere, for one man told me of a
vessel wrecked long ago on the north of Provincetown whose “bones”
(this was his word) are still visible many rods within the present line
of the beach, half buried in sand. Perchance they lie alongside the
timbers of a whale. The general statement of the inhabitants is that
the Cape is wasting on both sides, but extending itself on particular
points on the south and west, as at Chatham and Monomoy Beaches, and at
Billingsgate, Long, and Race Points. James Freeman stated in his day
that above three miles had been added to Monomoy Beach during the
previous fifty years, and it is said to be still extending as fast as
ever. A writer in the Massachusetts Magazine, in the last century,
tells us that “when the English first settled upon the Cape, there was
an island off Chatham, at three leagues’ distance, called Webbs’
Island, containing twenty acres, covered with red-cedar or savin. The
inhabitants of Nantucket used to carry wood from it”; but he adds that
in his day a large rock alone marked the spot, and the water was six
fathoms deep there. The entrance to Nauset Harbor, which was once in
Eastham, has now travelled south into Orleans. The islands in Wellfleet
Harbor once formed a continuous beach, though now small vessels pass
between them. And so of many other parts of this coast.
Perhaps what the Ocean takes from one part of the Cape it gives to
another,—robs Peter to pay Paul. On the eastern side the sea appears to
be everywhere encroaching on the land. Not only the land is undermined,
and its ruins carried off by currents, but the sand is blown from the
beach directly up the steep bank where it is one hundred and fifty feet
high, and covers the original surface there many feet deep. If you sit
on the edge you will have ocular demonstration of this by soon getting
your eyes full. Thus the bank preserves its height as fast as it is
worn away. This sand is steadily travelling westward at a rapid rate,
“more than a hundred yards,” says one writer, within the memory of
inhabitants now living; so that in some places peat-meadows are buried
deep under the sand, and the peat is cut through it; and in one place a
large peat-meadow has made its appearance on the shore in the bank
covered many feet deep, and peat has been cut there. This accounts for
that great pebble of peat which we saw in the surf. The old oysterman
had told us that many years ago he lost a “crittur” by her being mired
in a swamp near the Atlantic side east of his house, and twenty years
ago he lost the swamp itself entirely, but has since seen signs of it
appearing on the beach. He also said that he had seen cedar stumps “as
big as cart-wheels”(!) on the bottom of the Bay, three miles off
Billingsate Point, when leaning over the side of his boat in pleasant
weather, and that that was dry land not long ago. Another told us that
a log canoe known to have been buried many years before on the Bay side
at East Harbor in Truro, where the Cape is extremely narrow, appeared
at length on the Atlantic side, the Cape having rolled over it, and an
old woman said,—“Now, you see, it is true what I told you, that the
Cape is moving.”
The bars along the coast shift with every storm, and in many places
there is occasionally none at all. We ourselves observed the effect of
a single storm with a high tide in the night, in July, 1855. It moved
the sand on the beach opposite the light-house to the depth of six
feet, and three rods in width as far as we could see north and south,
and carried it bodily off no one knows exactly where, laying bare in
one place a large rock five feet high which was invisible before, and
narrowing the beach to that extent. There is usually, as I have said,
no bathing on the back-side of the Cape, on account of the undertow,
but when we were there last, the sea had, three months before, cast up
a bar near this lighthouse, two miles long and ten rods wide, over
which the tide did not flow, leaving a narrow cove, then a quarter of a
mile long, between it and the shore, which afforded excellent bathing.
This cove had from time to time been closed up as the bar travelled
northward, in one instance imprisoning four or five hundred whiting and
cod, which died there, and the water as often turned fresh, and finally
gave place to sand. This bar, the inhabitants assured us, might be
wholly removed, and the water six feet deep there in two or three days.
The light-house keeper said that when the wind blowed strong on to the
shore, the waves ate fast into the bank, but when it blowed off they
took no sand away; for in the former case the wind heaped up the
surface of the water next to the beach, and to preserve its equilibrium
a strong undertow immediately set back again into the sea which carried
with it the sand and whatever else was in the way, and left the beach
hard to walk on; but in the latter case the undertow set on and carried
the sand with it, so that it was particularly difficult for shipwrecked
men to get to land when the wind blowed on to the shore, but easier
when it blowed off. This undertow, meeting the next surface wave on the
bar which itself has made, forms part of the dam over which the latter
breaks, as over an upright wall. The sea thus plays with the land
holding a sand-bar in its mouth awhile before it swallows it, as a cat
plays with a mouse; but the fatal gripe is sure to come at last. The
sea sends its rapacious east wind to rob the land, but before the
former has got far with its prey, the land sends its honest west wind
to recover some of its own. But, according to Lieutenant Davis, the
forms, extent, and distribution of sand-bars and banks are principally
determined, not by winds and waves but by tides.
Our host said that you would be surprised if you were on the beach when
the wind blew a hurricane directly on to it, to see that none of the
drift-wood came ashore, but all was carried directly northward and
parallel with the shore as fast as a man can walk, by the inshore
current, which sets strongly in that direction at flood tide. The
strongest swimmers also are carried along with it, and never gain an
inch toward the beach. Even a large rock has been moved half a mile
northward along-the beach. He assured us that the sea was never still
on the back-side of the Cape, but ran commonly as high as your head, so
that a great part of the time you could not launch a boat there, and
even in the calmest weather the waves run six or eight feet up the
beach, though then you could get off on a plank. Champlain and
Pourtrincourt could not land here in 1606, on account of the swell (_la
houlle_), yet the savages came off to them in a canoe. In the Sieur de
la Borde’s “Relation des Caraibes,” my edition of which was published
at Amsterdam in 1711, at page 530 he says:—
“Couroumon a Caraibe, also a star [_i.e._ a god], makes the great
_lames à la mer_, and overturns canoes. _Lames à la mer_ are the long
_vagues_ which are not broken (_entrecoupées_), and such as one sees
come to land all in one piece, from one end of a beach to another, so
that, however little wind there may be, a shallop or a canoe could
hardly land (_aborder terre_) without turning over, or being filled
with water.”
But on the Bay side the water even at its edge is often as smooth and
still as in a pond. Commonly there are no boats used along this beach.
There was a boat belonging to the Highland Light which the next keeper
after he had been there a year had not launched, though he said that
there was good fishing just off the shore. Generally the Life Boats
cannot be used when needed. When the waves run very high it is
impossible to get a boat off, however skilfully you steer it, for it
will often be completely covered by the curving edge of the approaching
breaker as by an arch, and so filled with water, or it will be lifted
up by its bows, turned directly over backwards, and all the contents
spilled out. A spar thirty feet long is served in the same way.
I heard of a party who went off fishing back of Wellfleet some years
ago, in two boats, in calm weather, who, when they had laden their
boats with fish, and approached the land again, found such a swell
breaking on it, though there was no wind, that they were afraid to
enter it. At first they thought to pull for Provincetown, but night was
coming on, and that was many miles distant. Their case seemed a
desperate one. As often as they approached the shore and saw the
terrible breakers that intervened, they were deterred. In short, they
were thoroughly frightened. Finally, having thrown their fish
overboard, those in one boat chose a favorable opportunity, and
succeeded, by skill and good luck, in reaching the land, but they were
unwilling to take the responsibility of telling the others when to come
in, and as the other helmsman was inexperienced, their boat was swamped
at once, yet all managed to save themselves.
Much smaller waves soon make a boat “nail-sick,” as the phrase is. The
keeper said that after a long and strong blow there would be three
large waves, each successively larger than the last, and then no large
ones for some time, and that, when they wished to land in a boat, they
came in on the last and largest wave. Sir Thomas Browne (as quoted in
Brand’s Popular Antiquities, p. 372), on the subject of the tenth wave
being “greater or more dangerous than any other,” after quoting Ovid,—
“Qui venit hic fluctus, fluctus supereminet omnes
Posterior nono est, undecimo que prior,”—
says, “Which, notwithstanding, is evidently false; nor can it be made
out either by observation either upon the shore or the ocean, as we
have with diligence explored in both. And surely in vain we expect
regularity in the waves of the sea, or in the particular motions
thereof, as we may in its general reciprocations, whose causes are
constant, and effects therefore correspondent; whereas its fluctuations
are but motions subservient, which winds, storms, shores, shelves, and
every interjacency, irregulates.”
We read that the Clay Pounds, were so called “because vessels have had
the misfortune to be pounded against it in gales of wind,” which we
regard as a doubtful derivation. There are small ponds here, upheld by
the clay, which were formerly called the Clay Pits. Perhaps this, or
Clay Ponds, is the origin of the name. Water is found in the clay quite
near the surface; but we heard of one man who had sunk a well in the
sand close by, “till he could see stars at noonday,” without finding
any. Over this bare Highland the wind has full sweep. Even in July it
blows the wings over the heads of the young turkeys, which do not know
enough to head against it; and in gales the doors and windows are blown
in, and you must hold on to the lighthouse to prevent being blown into
the Atlantic. They who merely keep out on the beach in a storm in the
winter are sometimes rewarded by the Humane Society. If you would feel
the full force of a tempest, take up your residence on the top of Mount
Washington, or at the Highland Light, in Truro.
It was said in 1794 that more vessels were cast away on the east shore
of Truro than anywhere in Barnstable County. Notwithstanding that this
light-house has since been erected, after almost every storm we read of
one or more vessels wrecked here, and sometimes more than a dozen
wrecks are visible from this point at one time. The inhabitants hear
the crash of vessels going to pieces as they sit round their hearths,
and they commonly date from some memorable shipwreck. If the history of
this beach could be written from beginning to end, it would be a
thrilling page in the history of commerce.
Truro was settled in the year 1700 as _Dangerfield_. This was a very
appropriate name, for I afterward read on a monument in the graveyard,
near Pamet River, the following inscription:—
Sacred
to the memory of
57 citizens of Truro,
who were lost in seven
vessels, which
foundered at sea in
the memorable gale
of Oct. 3d, 1841.
Their names and ages by families were recorded on different sides of
the stone. They are said to have been lost on George’s Bank, and I was
told that only one vessel drifted ashore on the backside of the Cape,
with the boys locked into the cabin and drowned. It is said that the
homes of all were “within a circuit of two miles.” Twenty-eight
inhabitants of Dennis were lost in the same gale; and I read that “in
one day, immediately after this storm, nearly or quite one hundred
bodies were taken up and buried on Cape Cod.” The Truro Insurance
Company failed for want of skippers to take charge of its vessels. But
the surviving inhabitants went a-fishing again the next year as usual.
I found that it would not do to speak of shipwrecks there, for almost
every family has lost some of its members at sea. “Who lives in that
house?” I inquired. “Three widows,” was the reply. The stranger and the
inhabitant view the shore with very different eyes. The former may have
come to see and admire the ocean in a storm; but the latter looks on it
as the scene where his nearest relatives were wrecked. When I remarked
to an old wrecker partially blind, who was sitting on the edge of the
bank smoking a pipe, which he had just lit with a match of dried
beach-grass, that I supposed he liked to hear the sound of the surf, he
answered: “No, I do not like to hear the sound of the surf.” He had
lost at least one son in “the memorable gale,” and could tell many a
tale of the shipwrecks which he had witnessed there.
In the year 1717, a noted pirate named Bellamy was led on to the bar
off Wellfleet by the captain of a _snow_ which he had taken, to whom he
had offered his vessel again if he would pilot him into Provincetown
Harbor. Tradition says that the latter threw over a burning tar-barrel
in the night, which drifted ashore, and the pirates followed it. A
storm coming on, their whole fleet was wrecked, and more than a hundred
dead bodies lay along the shore. Six who escaped shipwreck were
executed. “At times to this day” (1793), says the historian of
Wellfleet, “there are King William and Queen Mary’s coppers picked up,
and pieces of silver called cob-money. The violence of the seas moves
the sands on the outer bar, so that at times the iron caboose of the
ship [that is, Bellamy’s] at low ebbs has been seen.” Another tells us
that, “For many years after this shipwreck, a man of a very singular
and frightful aspect used every spring and autumn to be seen travelling
on the Cape, who was supposed to have been one of Bellamy’s crew. The
presumption is that he went to some place where money had been secreted
by the pirates, to get such a supply as his exigencies required. When
he died, many pieces of gold were found in a girdle which he constantly
wore.”
[Illustration: An old wrecker at home]
As I was walking on the beach here in my last visit, looking for shells
and pebbles, just after that storm, which I have mentioned as moving
the sand to a great depth, not knowing but I might find some cob-money,
I did actually pick up a French crown piece, worth about a dollar and
six cents, near high-water mark, on the still moist sand, just under
the abrupt, caving base of the bank. It was of a dark slate color, and
looked like a flat pebble, but still bore a very distinct and handsome
head of Louis XV., and the usual legend on the reverse. _Sit Nomen
Domini Benedictum_ (Blessed be the Name of the Lord), a pleasing
sentiment to read in the sands of the sea-shore, whatever it might be
stamped on, and I also made out the date, 1741. Of course, I thought at
first that it was that same old button which I have found so many
times, but my knife soon showed the silver. Afterward, rambling on the
bars at low tide, I cheated my companion by holding up round shells
(_Scutellæ_) between my fingers, whereupon he quickly stripped and came
off to me.
In the Revolution, a British ship of war called the Somerset was
wrecked near the Clay Pounds, and all on board, some hundreds in
number, were taken prisoners. My informant said that he had never seen
any mention of this in the histories, but that at any rate he knew of a
silver watch, which one of those prisoners by accident left there,
which was still going to tell the story. But this event is noticed by
some writers.
The next summer I saw a sloop from Chatham dragging for anchors and
chains just off this shore. She had her boats out at the work while
she shuffled about on various tacks, and, when anything was found, drew
up to hoist it on board. It is a singular employment, at which men are
regularly hired and paid for their industry, to hunt to-day in pleasant
weather for anchors which have been lost,—the sunken faith and hope of
mariners, to which they trusted in vain; now, perchance, it is the
rusty one of some old pirate’s ship or Norman fisherman, whose cable
parted here two hundred years ago; and now the best bower anchor of a
Canton or a California ship, which has gone about her business. If the
roadsteads of the spiritual ocean could be thus dragged, what rusty
flukes of hope deceived and parted chain-cables of faith might again be
windlassed aboard! enough to sink the finder’s craft, or stock new
navies to the end of time. The bottom of the sea is strewn with
anchors, some deeper and some shallower, and alternately covered and
uncovered by the sand, perchance with a small length of iron cable
still attached,—to which where is the other end? So many unconcluded
tales to be continued another time. So, if we had diving-bells adapted
to the spiritual deeps, we should see anchors with their cables
attached, as thick as eels in vinegar, all wriggling vainly toward
their holding-ground. But that is not treasure for us which another man
has lost; rather it is for us to seek what no other man has found or
can find,—not be Chatham men, dragging for anchors.
The annals of this voracious beach! who could write them, unless it
were a shipwrecked sailor? How many who have seen it have seen it only
in the midst of danger and distress, the last strip of earth which
their mortal eyes beheld. Think of the amount of suffering which a
single strand has witnessed. The ancients would have represented it as
a sea-monster with open jaws, more terrible than Scylla and Charybdis.
An inhabitant of Truro told me that about a fortnight after the _St.
John_ was wrecked at Cohasset he found two bodies on the shore at the
Clay Pounds. They were those of a man, and a corpulent woman. The man
had thick boots on, though his head was off, but “it was alongside.” It
took the finder some weeks to get over the sight. Perhaps they were man
and wife, and whom God had joined the ocean currents had not put
asunder. Yet by what slight accidents at first may they have been
associated in their drifting. Some of the bodies of those passengers
were picked up far out at sea, boxed up and sunk; some brought ashore
and buried. There are more consequences to a shipwreck than the
underwriters notice. The Gulf Stream may return some to their native
shores, or drop them in some out-of-the-way cave of Ocean, where time
and the elements will write new riddles with their bones.—But to return
to land again.
In this bank, above the clay, I counted in the summer, two hundred
holes of the Bank Swallow within a space six rods long, and there were
at least one thousand old birds within three times that distance,
twittering over the surf. I had never associated them in my thoughts
with the beach before. One little boy who had been a-birds-nesting had
got eighty swallows’ eggs for his share! Tell it not to the Humane
Society. There were many young birds on the clay beneath, which had
tumbled out and died. Also there were many Crow-blackbirds hopping
about in the dry fields, and the Upland Plover were breeding close by
the light-house. The keeper had once cut off one’s wing while mowing,
as she sat on her eggs there. This is also a favorite resort for
gunners in the fall to shoot the Golden Plover. As around the shores of
a pond are seen devil’s-needles, butterflies, etc., so here, to my
surprise, I saw at the same season great devil’s-needles of a size
proportionably larger, or nearly as big as my finger, incessantly
coasting up and down the edge of the bank, and butterflies also were
hovering over it, and I never saw so many dorr-bugs and beetles of
various kinds as strewed the beach. They had apparently flown over the
bank in the night, and could not get up again, and some had perhaps
fallen into the sea and were washed ashore. They may have been in part
attracted by the light-house lamps.