patches of roots and corn here. As generally on the Cape, the plants
had little stalk or leaf, but ran remarkably to seed. The corn was
hardly more than half as high as in the interior, yet the ears were
large and full, and one farmer told us that he could raise forty
bushels on an acre without manure, and sixty with it. The heads of the
rye also were remarkably large. The Shadbush (_Amelanchier_), Beach
Plums, and Blueberries (_Vaccinium Pennsylvanicum_), like the
apple-trees and oaks, were very dwarfish, spreading over the sand, but
at the same time very fruitful. The blueberry was but an inch or two
high, and its fruit often rested on the ground, so that you did not
suspect the presence of the bushes, even on those bare hills, until you
were treading on them. I thought that this fertility must be owing
mainly to the abundance of moisture in the atmosphere, for I observed
that what little grass there was was remarkably laden with dew in the
morning, and in summer dense imprisoning fogs frequently last till
midday, turning one’s beard into a wet napkin about his throat, and the
oldest inhabitant may lose his way within a stone’s throw of his house
or be obliged to follow the beach for a guide. The brick house attached
to the light-house was exceedingly damp at that season, and,
writing-paper lost all its stiffness in it. It was impossible to dry
your towel after bathing, or to press flowers without their mildewing.
The air was so moist that we rarely wished to drink, though we could at
all times taste the salt on our lips. Salt was rarely used at table,
and our host told us that his cattle invariably refused it when it was
offered them, they got so much with their grass and at every breath,
but he said that a sick horse or one just from the country would
sometimes take a hearty draught of salt water, and seemed to like it
and be the better for it.
It was surprising to see how much water was contained in the terminal
bud of the sea-side golden-rod, standing in the sand early in July, and
also how turnips, beets, carrots, etc., flourished even in pure sand. A
man travelling by the shore near there not long before us noticed
something green growing in the pure sand of the beach, just at
high-water mark, and on approaching found it to be a bed of beets
flourishing vigorously, probably from seed washed out of the
_Franklin_. Also beets and turnips came up in the sea-weed used for
manure in many parts of the Cape. This suggests how various plants may
have been dispersed over the world to distant islands and continents.
Vessels, with seeds in their cargoes, destined for particular ports,
where perhaps they were not needed, have been cast away on desolate
islands, and though their crews perished, some of their seeds have been
preserved. Out of many kinds a few would find a soil and climate
adapted to them, become naturalized, and perhaps drive out the native
plants at last, and so fit the land for the habitation of man. It is an
ill wind that blows nobody any good, and for the time lamentable
shipwrecks may thus contribute a new vegetable to a continent’s stock,
and prove on the whole a lasting blessing to its inhabitants. Or winds
and currents might effect the same without the intervention of man.
What indeed are the various succulent plants which grow on the beach
but such beds of beets and turnips, sprung originally from seeds which
perhaps were cast on the waters for this end, though we do not know the
_Franklin_ which they came out of? In ancient times some Mr. Bell (?)
was sailing this way in his ark with seeds of rocket, salt-wort,
sandwort, beachgrass, samphire, bayberry, poverty-grass, etc., all
nicely labelled with directions, intending to establish a nursery
somewhere; and did not a nursery get established, though he thought
that he had failed?
About the light-house I observed in the summer the pretty _Polygala
polygama_, spreading ray-wise flat on the ground, white pasture
thistles (_Cirsium pumilum_), and amid the shrubbery the _Smilax
glauca_, which is commonly said not to grow so far north; near the edge
of the banks about half a mile southward, the broom crow-berry
(_Empetrum Conradii_), for which Plymouth is the only locality in
Massachusetts usually named, forms pretty green mounds four or five
feet in diameter by one foot high,—soft, springy beds for the wayfarer.
I saw it afterward in Provincetown, but prettiest of all the scarlet
pimpernel, or poor-man’s weather-glass (_Anagallis-arvensis_), greets
you in fair weather on almost every square yard of sand. From Yarmouth,
I have received the _Chrysopsis falcata_ (golden aster), and _Vaccinium
stamineum_ (Deerberry or Squaw Huckleberry), with fruit not edible,
sometimes as large as a cranberry (Sept. 7).
[Illustration: The Highland Light]
The Highland Light-house,[1] where we were staying, is a
substantial-looking building of brick, painted white, and surmounted by
an iron cap. Attached to it is the dwelling of the keeper, one story
high, also of brick, and built by government. As we were going to spend
the night in a light-house, we wished to make the most of so novel an
experience, and therefore told our host that we would like to accompany
him when he went to light up. At rather early candle-light he lighted a
small Japan lamp, allowing it to smoke rather more than we like on
ordinary occasions, and told us to follow him. He led the way first
through his bedroom, which was placed nearest to the light-house, and
then through a long, narrow, covered passage-way, between whitewashed
walls like a prison entry, into the lower part of the light-house,
where many great butts of oil were arranged around; thence we ascended
by a winding and open iron stairway, with a steadily increasing scent
of oil and lamp-smoke, to a trap-door in an iron floor, and through
this into the lantern. It was a neat building, with everything in
apple-pie order, and no danger of anything rusting there for want of
oil. The light consisted of fifteen argand lamps, placed within smooth
concave reflectors twenty-one inches in diameter, and arranged in two
horizontal circles one above the other, facing every way excepting
directly down the Cape. These were surrounded, at a distance of two or
three feet, by large plate-glass windows, which defied the storms, with
iron sashes, on which rested the iron cap. All the iron work, except
the floor, was painted white. And thus the light-house was completed.
We walked slowly round in that narrow space as the keeper lighted each
lamp in succession, conversing with him at the same moment that many a
sailor on the deep witnessed the lighting of the Highland Light. His
duty was to fill and trim and light his lamps, and keep bright the
reflectors. He filled them every morning, and trimmed them commonly
once in the course of the night. He complained of the quality of the
oil which was furnished. This house consumes about eight hundred
gallons in a year, which cost not far from one dollar a gallon; but
perhaps a few lives would be saved if better oil were provided. Another
light-house keeper said that the same proportion of winter-strained oil
was sent to the southernmost light-house in the Union as to the most
northern. Formerly, when this light-house had windows with small and
thin panes, a severe storm would sometimes break the glass, and then
they were obliged to put up a wooden shutter in haste to save their
lights and reflectors,—and sometimes in tempests, when the mariner
stood most in need of their guidance, they had thus nearly converted
the light-house into a dark lantern, which emitted only a few feeble
rays, and those commonly on the land or lee side. He spoke of the
anxiety and sense of responsibility which he felt in cold and stormy
nights in the winter; when he knew that many a poor fellow was
depending on him, and his lamps burned dimly, the oil being chilled.
Sometimes he was obliged to warm the oil in a kettle in his house at
midnight, and fill his lamps over again,—for he could not have a fire
in the light-house, it produced such a sweat on the windows. His
successor told me that he could not keep too hot a fire in such a case.
All this because the oil was poor. The government lighting the mariners
on its wintry coast with summer-strained oil, to save expense! That
were surely a summer-strained mercy.
This keeper’s successor, who kindly entertained me the next year stated
that one extremely cold night, when this and all the neighboring lights
were burning summer oil, but he had been provident enough to reserve a
little winter oil against emergencies, he was waked up with anxiety,
and found that his oil was congealed, and his lights almost
extinguished; and when, after many hours’ exertion, he had succeeded in
replenishing his reservoirs with winter oil at the wick end, and with
difficulty had made them burn, he looked out and found that the other
lights in the neighborhood, which were usually visible to him, had gone
out, and he heard afterward that the Pamet River and Billingsgate
Lights also had been extinguished.
Our host said that the frost, too, on the windows caused him much
trouble, and in sultry summer nights the moths covered them and dimmed
his lights; sometimes even small birds flew against the thick plate
glass, and were found on the ground beneath in the morning with their
necks broken. In the spring of 1855 he found nineteen small
yellow-birds, perhaps goldfinches or myrtle-birds, thus lying dead
around the light-house; and sometimes in the fall he had seen where a
golden plover had struck the glass in the night, and left the down and
the fatty part of its breast on it.
Thus he struggled, by every method, to keep his light shining before
men. Surely the light-house keeper has a responsible, if an easy,
office. When his lamp goes out, he goes out; or, at most, only one such
accident is pardoned.
I thought it a pity that some poor student did not live there, to
profit by all that light, since he would not rob the mariner. “Well,”
he said, “I do sometimes come up here and read the newspaper when they
are noisy down below.” Think of fifteen argand lamps to read the
newspaper by! Government oil!—light, enough, perchance, to read the
Constitution by! I thought that he should read nothing less than his
Bible by that light. I had a classmate who fitted for college by the
lamps of a light-house, which was more light, we think, than the
University afforded.
When we had come down and walked a dozen rods from the light-house, we
found that we could not get the full strength of its light on the
narrow strip of land between it and the shore, being too low for the
focus, and we saw only so many feeble and rayless stars; but at forty
rods inland we could see to read, though we were still indebted to only
one lamp. Each reflector sent forth a separate “fan” of light,—one
shone on the windmill, and one in the hollow, while the intervening
spaces were in shadow. This light is said to be visible twenty nautical
miles and more from an observer fifteen feet above the level of the
sea. We could see the revolving light at Race Point, the end of the
Cape, about nine miles distant, and also the light on Long Point, at
the entrance of Provincetown Harbor, and one of the distant Plymouth
Harbor Lights, across the Bay, nearly in a range with the last, like a
star in the horizon. The keeper thought that the other Plymouth Light
was concealed by being exactly in a range with the Long Point Light. He
told us that the mariner was sometimes led astray by a mackerel
fisher’s lantern, who was afraid of being run down in the night, or
even by a cottager’s light, mistaking them for some well-known light on
the coast, and, when he discovered his mistake, was wont to curse the
prudent fisher or the wakeful cottager without reason.
Though it was once declared that Providence placed this mass of clay
here on purpose to erect a light-house on, the keeper said that the
light-house should have been erected half a mile farther south, where
the coast begins to bend, and where the light could be seen at the same
time with the Nauset Lights, and distinguished from them. They now talk
of building one there. It happens that the present one is the more
useless now, so near the extremity of the Cape, because other
light-houses have since been erected there.
Among the many regulations of the Light-house Board, hanging against
the wall here, many of them excellent, perhaps, if there were a
regiment stationed here to attend to them, there is one requiring the
keeper to keep an account of the number of vessels which pass his light
during the day. But there are a hundred vessels in sight at once,
steering in all directions, many on the very verge of the horizon, and
he must have more eyes than Argus, and be a good deal farther-sighted,
to tell which are passing his light. It is an employment in some
respects best suited to the habits of the gulls which coast up and down
here, and circle over the sea.
I was told by the next keeper, that on the 8th of June following, a
particularly clear and beautiful morning, he rose about half an hour
before sunrise, and having a little time to spare, for his custom was
to extinguish his lights at sunrise, walked down toward the shore to
see what he might find. When he got to the edge of the bank he looked
up, and, to his astonishment, saw the sun rising, and already part way
above the horizon. Thinking that his clock was wrong, he made haste
back, and though it was still too early by the clock, extinguished his
lamps, and when he had got through and come down, he looked out the
window, and, to his still greater astonishment, saw the sun just where
it was before, two-thirds above the horizon. He showed me where its
rays fell on the wall across the room. He proceeded to make a fire, and
when he had done, there was the sun still at the same height.
Whereupon, not trusting to his own eyes any longer, he called up his
wife to look at it, and she saw it also. There were vessels in sight on
the ocean, and their crews, too, he said, must have seen it, for its
rays fell on them. It remained at that height for about fifteen minutes
by the clock, and then rose as usual, and nothing else extraordinary
happened during that day. Though accustomed to the coast, he had never
witnessed nor heard of such a phenomenon before. I suggested that there
might have been a cloud in the horizon invisible to him, which rose
with the sun, and his clock was only as accurate as the average; or
perhaps, as he denied the possibility of this, it was such a looming of
the sun as is said to occur at Lake Superior and elsewhere. Sir John
Franklin, for instance, says in his Narrative, that when he was on the
shore of the Polar Sea, the horizontal refraction varied so much one
morning that “the upper limb of the sun twice appeared at the horizon
before it finally rose.”
He certainly must be a son of Aurora to whom the sun looms, when there
are so many millions to whom it _glooms_ rather, or who never see it
till an hour _after_ it has risen. But it behooves us old stagers to
keep our lamps trimmed and burning to the last, and not trust to the
sun’s looming.
This keeper remarked that the centre of the flame should be exactly
opposite the centre of the reflectors, and that accordingly, if he was
not careful to turn down his wicks in the morning, the sun falling on
the reflectors on the south side of the building would set fire to
them, like a burning-glass, in the coldest day, and he would look up at
noon and see them all lighted! When your light is ready to give light,
it is readiest to receive it, and the sun will light it. His successor
said that he had never known them to blaze in such a case, but merely
to smoke.
I saw that this was a place of wonders. In a sea turn or shallow fog
while I was there the next summer, it being clear overhead, the edge of
the bank twenty rods distant, appeared like a mountain pasture in the
horizon. I was completely deceived by it, and I could then understand
why mariners sometimes ran ashore in such cases, especially in the
night, supposing it to be far away, though they could see the land.
Once since this, being in a large oyster boat two or three hundred
miles from here, in a dark night, when there was a thin veil of mist on
land and water, we came so near to running on to the land before our
skipper was aware of it, that the first warning was my hearing the
sound of the surf under my elbow. I could almost have jumped ashore,
and we were obliged to go about very suddenly to prevent striking. The
distant light for which we were steering, supposing it a light-house
five or six miles off, came through the cracks of a fisherman’s bunk
not more than six rods distant.
The keeper entertained us handsomely in his solitary little ocean
house. He was a man of singular patience and intelligence, who, when
our queries struck him, rung as clear as a bell in response. The
light-house lamps a few feet distant shone full into my chamber, and
made it as bright as day, so I knew exactly how the Highland Light bore
all that night, and I was in no danger of being wrecked. Unlike the
last, this was as still as a summer night. I thought, as I lay there,
half awake and half asleep, looking upward through the window at the
lights above my head, how many sleepless eyes from far out on the Ocean
stream—mariners of all nations spinning their yarns through the various
watches of the night—were directed toward my couch.
[1] The light-house has since been rebuilt, and shows a _Fresnel_
light.
IX
THE SEA AND THE DESERT
The light-house lamps were still burning, though now with a silvery
lustre, when I rose to see the sun come out of the Ocean; for he still
rose eastward of us; but I was convinced that he must have come out of
a dry bed beyond that stream, though he seemed to come out of the
water.
“The sun once more touched the fields,
Mounting to heaven from the fair flowing
Deep-running Ocean.”
Now we saw countless sails of mackerel fishers abroad on the deep, one
fleet in the north just pouring round the Cape, another standing down
toward Chatham, and our host’s son went off to join some lagging member
of the first which had not yet left the Bay.
Before we left the light-house we were obliged to anoint our shoes
faithfully with tallow, for walking on the beach, in the salt water and
the sand, had turned them red and crisp. To counterbalance this, I have
remarked that the seashore, even where muddy, as it is not here, is
singularly clean; for notwithstanding the spattering of the water and
mud and squirting of the clams while walking to and from the boat, your
best black pants retain no stain nor dirt, such as they would acquire
from walking in the country.
We have heard that a few days after this, when the Provincetown Bank
was robbed, speedy emissaries from Provincetown made particular
inquiries concerning us at this light-house. Indeed, they traced us all
the way down the Cape, and concluded that we came by this unusual route
down the back-side and on foot, in order that we might discover a way
to get off with our booty when we had committed the robbery. The Cape
is so long and narrow, and so bare withal, that it is wellnigh
impossible for a stranger to visit it without the knowledge of its
inhabitants generally, unless he is wrecked on to it in the night. So,
when this robbery occurred, all their suspicions seem to have at once
centred on us two travellers who had just passed down it. If we had not
chanced to leave the Cape so soon, we should probably have been
arrested. The real robbers were two young men from Worcester County who
travelled with a centre-bit, and are said to have done their work very
neatly. But the only bank that we pried into was the great Cape Cod
sand-bank, and we robbed it only of an old French crown piece, some
shells and pebbles, and the materials of this story.
Again we took to the beach for another day (October 13), walking along
the shore of the resounding sea, determined to get it into us. We
wished to associate with the Ocean until it lost the pond-like look
which it wears to a country-man. We still thought that we could see the
other side. Its surface was still more sparkling than the day before,
and we beheld “the countless smilings of the ocean waves”; though some
of them were pretty broad grins, for still the wind blew and the
billows broke in foam along the beach. The nearest beach to us on the
other side, whither we looked, due east, was on the coast of Galicia,
in Spain, whose capital is Santiago, though by old poets’ reckoning it
should have been Atlantis or the Hesperides; but heaven is found to be
farther west now. At first we were abreast of that part of Portugal
_entre Douro e Mino_, and then Galicia and the port of Pontevedra
opened to us as we walked along; but we did not enter, the breakers ran
so high. The bold headland of Cape Finisterre, a little north of east,
jutted toward us next, with its vain brag, for we flung back,—“Here is
Cape Cod,—Cape Land’s-Beginning.” A little indentation toward the
north,—for the land loomed to our imaginations by a common mirage,—we
knew was the Bay of Biscay, and we sang:—
“There we lay, till next day.
In the Bay of Biscay O!”
A little south of east was Palos, where Columbus weighed anchor, and
farther yet the pillars which Hercules set up; concerning which when we
inquired at the top of our voices what was written on them,—for we had
the morning sun in our faces, and could not see distinctly,—the
inhabitants shouted _Ne plus ultra_ (no more beyond), but the wind bore
to us the truth only, _plus ultra_ (more beyond), and over the Bay
westward was echoed _ultra_ (beyond). We spoke to them through the surf
about the Far West, the true Hesperia, ἕω πέρας or end of the day, the
This Side Sundown, where the sun was extinguished in the _Pacific_, and
we advised them to pull up stakes and plant those pillars of theirs on
the shore of California, whither all our folks were gone,—the only _ne_
plus ultra now. Whereat they looked crestfallen on their cliffs, for we
had taken the wind out of all their sails.
We could not perceive that any of their leavings washed up here, though
we picked up a child’s toy, a small dismantled boat, which may have
been lost at Pontevedra.
The Cape became narrower and narrower as we approached its wrist
between Truro and Provincetown, and the shore inclined more decidedly
to the west. At the head of East Harbor Creek, the Atlantic is
separated but by half a dozen rods of sand from the tide-waters of the
Bay. From the Clay Pounds the bank flatted off for the last ten miles
to the extremity at Race Point, though the highest parts, which are
called “islands” from their appearance at a distance on the sea, were
still seventy or eighty feet above the Atlantic, and afforded a good
view of the latter, as well as a constant view of the Bay, there being
no trees nor a hill sufficient to interrupt it. Also the sands began to
invade the land more and more, until finally they had entire possession
from sea to sea, at the narrowest part. For three or four miles between
Truro and Provincetown there were no inhabitants from shore to shore,
and there were but three or four houses for twice that distance.
As we plodded along, either by the edge of the ocean, where the sand
was rapidly drinking up the last wave that wet it, or over the
sand-hills of the bank, the mackerel fleet continued to pour round the
Cape north of us, ten or fifteen miles distant, in countless numbers,
schooner after schooner, till they made a city on the water. They were
so thick that many appeared to be afoul of one another; now all
standing on this tack, now on that. We saw how well the New-Englanders
had followed up Captain John Smith’s suggestions with regard to the
fisheries, made in 1616,—to what a pitch they had carried “this
contemptible trade of fish,” as he significantly styles it, and were
now equal to the Hollanders whose example he holds up for the English
to emulate; notwithstanding that “in this faculty,” as he says, “the
former are so naturalized, and of their vents so certainly acquainted,
as there is no likelihood they will ever be paralleled, having two or
three thousand busses, flat-bottoms, sword-pinks, todes, and such like,
that breeds them sailors, mariners, soldiers, and merchants, never to
be wrought out of that trade and fit for any other.” We thought that it
would take all these names and more to describe the numerous craft
which we saw. Even then, some years before our “renowned sires” with
their “peerless dames” stepped on Plymouth Rock, he wrote,
“Newfoundland doth yearly freight neir eight hundred sail of ships with
a silly, lean, skinny, poor-john, and cor fish,” though all their
supplies must be annually transported from Europe. Why not plant a
colony here then, and raise those supplies on the spot? “Of all the
four parts of the world,” says he, “that I have yet seen, not
inhabited, could I have but means to transport a colony, I would rather
live here than anywhere. And if it did not maintain itself, were we but
once indifferently well fitted, let us starve.” Then “fishing before
your doors,” you “may every night sleep quietly ashore, with good cheer
and what fires you will, or, when you please, with your wives and
family.” Already he anticipates “the new towns in New England in memory
of their old,”—and who knows what may be discovered in the “heart and
entrails” of the land, “seeing even the very edges,” etc., etc.
[Illustration: Towing along shore]
All this has been accomplished, and more, and where is Holland now?
Verily the Dutch have taken it. There was no long interval between the
suggestion of Smith and the eulogy of Burke.
Still one after another the mackerel schooners hove in sight round the
head of the Cape, “whitening all the sea road,” and we watched each one
for a moment with an undivided interest. It seemed a pretty sport. Here
in the country it is only a few idle boys or loafers that go a-fishing
on a rainy day; but there it appeared as if every able-bodied man and
helpful boy in the Bay had gone out on a pleasure excursion in their
yachts, and all would at last land and have a chowder on the Cape. The
gazetteer tells you gravely how many of the men and boys of these towns
are engaged in the whale, cod, and mackerel fishery, how many go to the
banks of Newfoundland, or the coast of Labrador, the Straits of Belle
Isle or the Bay of Chaleurs (Shalore the sailors call it); as if I were
to reckon up the number of boys in Concord who are engaged during the
summer in the perch, pickerel, bream, hornpout, and shiner fishery, of
which no one keeps the statistics,—though I think that it is pursued
with as much profit to the moral and intellectual man (or boy), and
certainly with less danger to the physical one.
One of my playmates, who was apprenticed to a printer, and was somewhat
of a wag, asked his master one afternoon if he might go a-fishing, and
his master consented. He was gone three months. When he came back, he
said that he had been to the Grand Banks, and went to setting type
again as if only an afternoon had intervened.
I confess I was surprised to find that so many men spent their whole
day, ay, their whole lives almost, a-fishing. It is remarkable what a
serious business men make of getting their dinners, and how universally
shiftlessness and a grovelling taste take refuge in a merely ant-like
industry. Better go without your dinner, I thought, than be thus
everlastingly fishing for it like a cormorant. Of course, _viewed from
the shore_, our pursuits in the country appear not a whit less
frivolous.
I once sailed three miles on a mackerel cruise myself. It was a Sunday
evening after a very warm day in which there had been frequent
thunder-showers, and I had walked along the shore from Cohasset to
Duxbury. I wished to get over from the last place to Clark’s Island,
but no boat could stir, they said, at that stage of the tide, they
being left high on the mud. At length I learned that the tavern-keeper,
Winsor, was going out mackerelling with seven men that evening, and
would take me. When there had been due delay, we one after another
straggled down to the shore in a leisurely manner, as if waiting for
the tide still, and in India-rubber boots, or carrying our shoes in our
hands, waded to the boats, each of the crew bearing an armful of wood,
and one a bucket of new potatoes besides. Then they resolved that each
should bring one more armful of wood, and that would be enough. They
had already got a barrel of water, and had some more in the schooner.
We shoved the boats a dozen rods over the mud and water till they
floated, then rowing half a mile to the vessel climbed aboard, and
there we were in a mackerel schooner, a fine stout vessel of
forty-three tons, whose name I forget. The baits were not dry on the
hooks. There was the mill in which they ground the mackerel, and the
trough to hold it, and the long-handled dipper to cast it overboard
with; and already in the harbor we saw the surface rippled with schools
of small mackerel, the real _Scomber vernalis_. The crew proceeded
leisurely to weigh anchor and raise their two sails, there being a fair
but very slight wind;—and the sun now setting clear and shining on the
vessel after the thundershowers, I thought that I could not have
commenced the voyage under more favorable auspices. They had four
dories and commonly fished in them, else they fished on the starboard
side aft where their fines hung ready, two to a man. The boom swung
round once or twice, and Winsor cast overboard the foul juice of
mackerel mixed with rain-water which remained in his trough, and then
we gathered about the helmsman and told stories. I remember that the
compass was affected by iron in its neighborhood and varied a few
degrees. There was one among us just returned from California, who was
now going as passenger for his health and amusement. They expected to
be gone about a week, to begin fishing the next morning, and to carry
their fish fresh to Boston. They landed me at Clark’s Island, where the
Pilgrims landed, for my companions wished to get some milk for the
voyage. But I had seen the whole of it. The rest was only going to sea
and catching the mackerel. Moreover, it was as well that I did not
remain with them, considering the small quantity of supplies they had
taken.
Now I saw the mackerel fleet _on its fishing-ground_, though I was not
at first aware of it. So my experience was complete.
It was even more cold and windy to-day than before, and we were
frequently glad to take shelter behind a sand-hill. None of the
elements were resting. On the beach there is a ceaseless activity,
always something going on, in storm and in calm, winter and summer,
night and day. Even the sedentary man here enjoys a breadth of view
which is almost equivalent to motion. In clear weather the laziest may
look across the Bay as far as Plymouth at a glance, or over the
Atlantic as far as human vision reaches, merely raising his eyelids; or
if he is too lazy to look after all, he can hardly help hearing the
ceaseless dash and roar of the breakers. The restless ocean may at any
moment cast up a whale or a wrecked vessel at your feet. All the
reporters in the world, the most rapid stenographers, could not report
the news it brings. No creature could move slowly where there was so
much life around. The few wreckers were either going or coming, and the
ships and the sand-pipers, and the screaming gulls overhead; nothing
stood still but the shore. The little beach-birds trotted past close to
the water’s edge, or paused but an instant to swallow their food,
keeping time with the elements. I wondered how they ever got used to
the sea, that they ventured so near the waves. Such tiny inhabitants
the land brought forth! except one fox. And what could a fox do,
looking on the Atlantic from that high bank? What is the sea to a fox?
Sometimes we met a wrecker with his cart and dog,—and his dog’s faint
bark at us wayfarers, heard through the roaring of the surf, sounded
ridiculously faint. To see a little trembling dainty-footed cur stand
on the margin of the ocean, and ineffectually bark at a beach-bird,
amid the roar of the Atlantic! Come with design to bark at a whale,
perchance! That sound will do for farmyards. All the dogs looked out of
place there, naked and as if shuddering at the vastness; and I thought
that they would not have been there had it not been for the countenance
of their masters. Still less could you think of a cat bending her steps
that way, and shaking her wet foot over the Atlantic; yet even this
happens sometimes, they tell me. In summer I saw the tender young of
the Piping Plover, like chickens just hatched, mere pinches of down on
two legs, running in troops, with a faint peep, along the edge of the
waves. I used to see packs of half-wild dogs haunting the lonely beach
on the south shore of Staten Island, in New York Bay, for the sake of
the carrion there cast up; and I remember that once, when for a long
time I had heard a furious barking in the tall grass of the marsh, a
pack of half a dozen large dogs burst forth on to the beach, pursuing a
little one which ran straight to me for protection, and I afforded it
with some stones, though at some risk to myself; but the next day the
little one was the first to bark at me. under these circumstances I
could not but remember the words of the poet:—
“Blow, blow, thou winter wind,
Thou art not so unkind
As _his_ ingratitude;
Thy tooth is not so keen,
Because thou art not seen,
Although thy breath be rude.
“Freeze, freeze, thou bitter sky,
Thou dost not bite so nigh
As benefits forgot;
Though thou the waters warp,
Thy sting is not so sharp
As friend remembered not.”
Sometimes, when I was approaching the carcass of a horse or ox which
lay on the beach there, where there was no living creature in sight, a
dog would unexpectedly emerge from it and slink away with a mouthful of
offal.
The sea-shore is a sort of neutral ground, a most advantageous point
from which to contemplate this world. It is even a trivial place. The
waves forever rolling to the land are too far-travelled and untamable
to be familiar. Creeping along the endless beach amid the sun-squall
and the foam, it occurs to us that we, too, are the product of
sea-slime.
It is a wild, rank place, and there is no flattery in it. Strewn with
crabs, horse-shoes, and razor-clams, and whatever the sea casts up,—a
vast _morgue_, where famished dogs may range in packs, and crows come
daily to glean the pittance which the tide leaves them. The carcasses
of men and beasts together lie stately up upon its shelf, rotting and
bleaching in the sun and waves, and each tide turns them in their beds,
and tucks fresh sand under them. There is naked Nature, inhumanly
sincere, wasting no thought on man, nibbling at the cliffy shore where
gulls wheel amid the spray.
We saw this forenoon what, at a distance, looked like a bleached log
with a branch still left on it. It proved to be one of the principal
bones of a whale, whose carcass, having been stripped of blubber at sea
and cut adrift, had been washed up some months before. It chanced that
this was the most conclusive evidence which we met with to prove, what
the Copenhagen antiquaries assert, that these shores were the
_Furdustrandas_ which Thorhall, the companion of Thorfinn during his
expedition to Vinland in 1007. sailed past in disgust. It appears that
after they had left the Cape and explored the country about
Straum-Fiordr (Buzzards’ Bay!), Thorhall, who was disappointed at not
getting any wine to drink there, determined to sail north again in
search of Vinland. Though the antiquaries have given us the original
Icelandic. I prefer to quote their translation, since theirs is the
only Latin which I know to have been aimed at Cape Cod.
“Cum parati erant, sublato
velo, cecinit Thorhallus:
Eò redeamus, ubi conterranei
sunt nostri! faciamus aliter,
expansi arenosi peritum,
lata navis explorare curricula:
dum procellam incitantes gladii
moræ impatientes, qui terram
collaudant, Furdustrandas
inhabitant et coquunt balænas.”
In other words: “When they were ready and their sail hoisted, Thorhall
sang: Let us return thither where our fellow-countrymen are. Let us
make a bird[1] skilful to fly through the heaven of sand,[2] to explore
the broad track of ships; while warriors who impel to the tempest of
swords,[3] who praise the land, inhabit Wonder-Strands, _and cook
whales_.’” And so he sailed north past Cape Cod, as the antiquaries
say, “and was shipwrecked on to Ireland.”
Though once there were more whales cast up here, I think that it was
never more wild than now. We do not associate the idea of antiquity
with the ocean, nor wonder how it looked a thousand years ago, as we do
of the land, for it was equally wild and unfathomable always. The
Indians have left no traces on its surface, but it is the same to the
civilized man and the savage. The aspect of the shore only has changed.
The ocean is a wilderness reaching round the globe, wilder than a
Bengal jungle, and fuller of monsters, washing the very wharves of our
cities and the gardens of our sea-side residences. Serpents, bears,
hyenas, tigers, rapidly vanish as civilization advances, but the most
populous and civilized city cannot scare a shark far from its wharves.
It is no further advanced than Singapore, with its tigers, in this
respect. The Boston papers had never told me that there were seals in
the harbor. I had always associated these with the Esquimaux and other
outlandish people. Yet from the parlor windows all along the coast you
may see families of them sporting on the flats. They were as strange to
me as the merman would be. Ladies who never walk in the woods, sail
over the sea. To go to sea! Why, it is to have the experience of
Noah,—to realize the deluge. Every vessel is an ark.
We saw no fences as we walked the beach, no birchen _riders_, highest
of rails, projecting into the sea to keep the cows from wading round,
nothing to remind us that man was proprietor of the shore. Yet a Truro
man did tell us that owners of land on the east side of that town were
regarded as owning the beach, in order that they might have the control
of it so far as to defend themselves against the encroachments of the
sand and the beach-grass,—for even this friend is sometimes regarded as
a foe; but he said that this was not the case on the Bay side. Also I
have seen in sheltered parts of the Bay temporary fences running to
low-water mark, the posts being set in sills or sleepers placed
transversely.
After we had been walking many hours, the mackerel fleet still hovered
in the northern horizon nearly in the same direction, but farther off,
hull down. Though their sails were set they never sailed away, nor yet
came to anchor, but stood on various tacks as close together as vessels
in a haven, and we in our ignorance thought that they were contending
patiently with adverse winds, beating eastward; but we learned
afterward that they were even then on their fishing-ground, and that
they caught mackerel without taking in their mainsails or coming to
anchor, “a smart breeze” (thence called a mackerel breeze) “being,” as
one says, “considered most favorable” for this purpose. We counted
about two hundred sail of mackerel fishers within one small arc of the
horizon, and a nearly equal number had disappeared southward. Thus they
hovered about the extremity of the Cape, like moths round a candle; the
lights at Race Point and Long Point being bright candles for them at
night,—and at this distance they looked fair and white, as if they had
not yet flown into the light, but nearer at hand afterward, we saw how
some had formerly singed their wings and bodies.
A village seems thus, where its able-bodied men are all ploughing the
ocean together, as a common field. In North Truro the women and girls
may sit at their doors, and see where their husbands and brothers are
harvesting their mackerel fifteen or twenty miles off, on the sea, with
hundreds of white harvest wagons, just as in the country the farmers’
wives sometimes see their husbands working in a distant hillside field.
But the sound of no dinner-horn can reach the fisher’s ear.
Having passed the narrowest part of the waist of the Cape, though still
in Truro, for this township is about twelve miles long on the shore, we
crossed over to the Bay side, not half a mile distant, in order to
spend the noon on the nearest shrubby sand-hill in Provincetown, called
Mount Ararat, which rises one hundred feet above the ocean. On our way
thither we had occasion to admire the various beautiful forms and
colors of the sand, and we noticed an interesting mirage, which I have
since found that Hitchcock also observed on the sands of the Cape. We
were crossing a shallow valley in the Desert, where the smooth and
spotless sand sloped upward by a small angle to the horizon on every
side, and at the lowest part was a long chain of clear but shallow
pools. As we were approaching these for a drink in a diagonal direction
across the valley, they appeared inclined at a slight but decided angle
to the horizon, though they were plainly and broadly connected with one
another, and there was not the least ripple to suggest a current; so
that by the time we had reached a convenient part of one we seemed to
have ascended several feet. They appeared to lie by magic on the side
of the vale, like a mirror left in a slanting position. It was a very
pretty mirage for a Provincetown desert, but not amounting to what, in
Sanscrit, is called “the thirst of the gazelle,” as there was real
water here for a base, and we were able to quench our thirst after all.
Professor Rafn, of Copenhagen, thinks that the mirage which I noticed,
but which an old inhabitant of Provincetown, to whom I mentioned it,
had never seen nor heard of, had something to do with the name
“Furdustrandas,” i.e. Wonder-Strands, given, as I have said, in the old
Icelandic account of Thorfinn’s expedition to Vinland in the year 1007,
to a part of the coast on which he landed. But these sands are more
remarkable for their length than for their mirage, which is common to
all deserts, and the reason for the name which the Northmen themselves
give,—“because it took a long time to sail by them,”—is sufficient and
more applicable to these shores. However, if you should sail all the
way from Greenland to Buzzards’ Bay along the coast, you would get
sight of a good many sandy beaches. But whether Thorfinn saw the mirage
here or not, Thor-eau, one of the same family, did; and perchance it
was because Lief the Lucky had, in a previous voyage, taken Thor-er and
his people off the rock in the middle of the sea, that Thor-eau was
born to see it.
This was not the only mirage which I saw on the Cape. That half of the
beach next the bank is commonly level, or nearly so, while the other
slopes downward to the water. As I was walking upon the edge of the
bank in Wellfleet at sundown, it seemed to me that the inside half of
the beach sloped upward toward the water to meet the other, forming a
ridge ten or twelve feet high the whole length of the shore, but higher
always opposite to where I stood; and I was not convinced of the
contrary till I descended the bank, though the shaded outlines left by
the waves of a previous tide but half-way down the apparent declivity
might have taught me better. A stranger may easily detect what is
strange to the oldest inhabitant, for the strange is his province. The
old oysterman, speaking of gull-shooting, had said that you must aim
under, when firing down the bank.
A neighbor tells me that one August, looking through a glass from
Naushon to some vessels which were sailing along near Martha’s
Vineyard, the water about them appeared perfectly smooth, so that they
were reflected in it, and yet their full sails proved that it must be
rippled, and they who were with him thought that it was mirage, _i.e._
a reflection from a haze.
From the above-mentioned sand-hill we over-looked Provincetown and its
harbor, now emptied of vessels, and also a wide expanse of ocean. As we
did not wish to enter Provincetown before night, though it was cold and
windy, we returned across the Deserts to the Atlantic side, and walked
along the beach again nearly to Race Point, being still greedy of the
sea influence. All the while it was not so calm as the reader may
suppose, but it was blow, blow, blow,—roar, roar, roar,—tramp, tramp,
tramp,—without interruption. The shore now trended nearly east and
west.
Before sunset, having already seen the mackerel fleet returning into
the Bay, we left the sea-shore on the north of Provincetown, and made
our way across the Desert to the eastern extremity of the town. From
the first high sand-hill, covered with beach-grass and bushes to its
top, on the edge of the desert, we overlooked the shrubby hill and
swamp country which surrounds Provincetown on the north, and protects
it, in some measure, from the invading sand. Notwithstanding the
universal barrenness, and the contiguity of the desert, I never saw an
autumnal landscape so beautifully painted as this was. It was like the
richest rug imaginable spread over an uneven surface; no damask nor
velvet, nor Tyrian dye or stuffs, nor the work of any loom, could ever
match it. There was the incredibly bright red of the Huckleberry, and
the reddish brown of the Bayberry, mingled with the bright and living
green of small Pitch-Pines, and also the duller green of the Bayberry,
Boxberry, and Plum, the yellowish green of the Shrub-oaks, and the
various golden and yellow and fawn-colored tints of the Birch and Maple
and Aspen,—each making its own figure, and, in the midst, the few
yellow sand-slides on the sides of the hills looked like the white
floor seen through rents in the rug. Coming from the country as I did,
and many autumnal woods as I had seen, this was perhaps the most novel
and remarkable sight that I saw on the Cape. Probably the brightness of
the tints was enhanced by contrast with the sand which surrounded this
tract. This was a part of the furniture of Cape Cod. We had for days
walked up the long and bleak piazza which runs along her Atlantic side,
then over the sanded floor of her halls, and now we were being
introduced into her boudoir. The hundred white sails crowding round
Long Point into Provincetown Harbor, seen over the painted hills in
front, looked like toy ships upon a mantel-piece.
The peculiarity of this autumnal landscape consisted in the lowness and
thickness of the shrubbery, no less than in the brightness of the
tints. It was like a thick stuff of worsted or a fleece, and looked as
if a giant could take it up by the hem, or rather the tasselled fringe
which trailed out on the sand, and shake it, though it needed not to be
shaken. But no doubt the dust would fly in that case, for not a little
has accumulated underneath it. Was it not such an autumnal landscape as
this which suggested our high-colored rugs and carpets? Hereafter when
I look on a richer rug than usual, and study its figures, I shall
think, there are the huckleberry hills, and there the denser swamps of
boxberry and blueberry: there the shrub-oak patches and the bayberries,
there the maples and the birches and the pines. What other dyes are to
be compared to these? They were warmer colors than I had associated
with the New England coast.
After threading a swamp full of boxberry, and climbing several hills
covered with shrub-oaks, without a path, where shipwrecked men would be
in danger of perishing in the night, we came down upon the eastern
extremity of the four planks which run the whole length of Provincetown
street. This, which is the last town on the Cape, lies mainly in one
street along the curving beach fronting the southeast. The sand-hills,
covered with shrubbery and interposed with swamps and ponds, rose
immediately behind it in the form of a crescent, which is from half a
mile to a mile or more wide in the middle, and beyond these is the
desert, which is the greater part of its territory, stretching to the
sea on the east and west and north. The town is compactly built in the
narrow space, from ten to fifty rods deep, between the harbor and the
sand-hills, and contained at that time about twenty-six hundred
inhabitants. The houses, in which a more modern and pretending style
has at length prevailed over the fisherman’s hut, stand on the inner or
plank side of the street, and the fish and store houses, with the
picturesque-looking windmills of the Salt-works, on the water side. The
narrow portion of the beach between, forming the street, about eighteen
feet wide, the only one where one carriage could pass another, if there
was more than one carriage in the town, looked much “heavier” than any
portion of the beach or the desert which we had walked on, it being
above the reach of the highest tide, and the sand being kept loose by
the occasional passage of a traveller. We learned that the four planks
on which we were walking had been bought by the town’s share of the
Surplus Revenue, the disposition of which was a bone of contention
between the inhabitants, till they wisely resolved thus to put it under
foot. Yet some, it was said, were so provoked because they did not
receive their particular share in money, that they persisted in walking
in the sand a long time after the sidewalk was built. This is the only
instance which I happen to know in which the surplus revenue proved a
blessing to any town. A surplus revenue of dollars from the treasury to
stem the greater evil of a surplus revenue of sand from the ocean. They
expected to make a hard road by the time these planks were worn out.
Indeed, they have already done so since we were there, and have almost
forgotten their sandy baptism.
As we passed along we observed the inhabitants engaged in curing either
fish or the coarse salt hay which they had brought home and spread on
the beach before their doors, looking as yellow as if they had raked it
out of the sea. The front-yard plots appeared like what indeed they
were, portions of the beach fenced in, with Beach-grass growing in
them, as if they were sometimes covered by the tide. You might still
pick up shells and pebbles there. There were a few trees among the
houses, especially silver abeles, willows, and balm-of-Gileads; and one
man showed me a young oak which he had transplanted from behind the
town, thinking it an apple-tree. But every man to his trade. Though he
had little woodcraft, he was not the less weatherwise, and gave us one
piece of information; viz., he had observed that when a thunder-cloud
came up with a flood-tide it did not rain. This was the most completely
maritime town that we were ever in. It was merely a good harbor,
surrounded by land dry, if not firm,—an inhabited beach, whereon
fishermen cured and stored their fish, without any back country. When
ashore the inhabitants still walk on planks. A few small patches have
been reclaimed from the swamps, containing commonly half a dozen square
rods only each. We saw one which was fenced with four lengths of rail;
also a fence made wholly of hogshead-staves stuck in the ground. These,
and such as these, were all the cultivated and cultivable land in
Provincetown. We were told that there were thirty or forty acres in
all, but we did not discover a quarter part so much, and that was well
dusted with sand, and looked as if the desert was claiming it. They are
now turning some of their swamps into Cranberry Meadows on quite an
extensive scale.
[Illustration: A cranberry meadow]
Yet far from being out of the way, Provincetown is directly in the way
of the navigator, and he is lucky who does not run afoul of it in the
dark. It is situated on one of the highways of commerce, and men from
all parts of the globe touch there in the course of a year.
The mackerel fleet had nearly all got in before us, it being Saturday
night, excepting that division which had stood down towards Chatham in
the morning; and from a hill where we went to see the sun set in the
Bay we counted two hundred goodly looking schooners at anchor in the
harbor at various distances from the shore, and more were yet coming
round the Cape. As each came to anchor, it took in sail and swung round
in the wind, and lowered its boat. They belonged chiefly to Wellfleet,
Truro, and Cape Ann. This was that city of canvas which we had seen
hull down in the horizon. Near at hand, and under bare poles, they were
unexpectedly black-looking vessels, μέλαιναι νῆες. A fisherman told us
that there were fifteen hundred vessels in the mackerel fleet, and that
he had counted three hundred and fifty in Provincetown Harbor at one
time. Being obliged to anchor at a considerable distance from the shore
on account of the shallowness of the water, they made the impression of
a larger fleet than the vessels at the wharves of a large city. As they
had been manœuvring out there all day seemingly for our entertainment,
while we were walking north-westward along the Atlantic, so now we
found them flocking into Provincetown Harbor at night, just as we
arrived, as if to meet us, and exhibit themselves close at hand.
Standing by Race Point and Long Point with various speed, they reminded
me of fowls coming home to roost.
These were genuine New England vessels. It is stated in the Journal of
Moses Prince, a brother of the annalist, under date of 1721, at which
time he visited Gloucester, that the first vessel of the class called
schooner was built at Gloucester about eight years before, by Andrew
Robinson; and late in the same century one Cotton Tufts gives us the
tradition with some particulars, which he learned on a visit to the
same place. According to the latter, Robinson having constructed a
vessel which he masted and rigged in a peculiar manner, on her going
off the stocks a bystander cried out, “_O, how she scoons!_” whereat
Robinson replied, “_A schooner let her be!_” “From which time,” says
Tufts, “vessels thus masted and rigged have gone by the name of
schooners; before which, vessels of this description were not known in
Europe.” (See Mass. Hist. Coll., Vol. IX., 1st Series, and Vol. I., 4th
Series.) Yet I can hardly believe this, for a schooner has always
seemed to me—the typical vessel.
According to C. E. Potter of Manchester, New Hampshire, the very word
_schooner_ is of New England origin, being from the Indian _schoon_ or
_scoot_, meaning to rush, as Schoodic, from _scoot_ and _anke_, a place
where water rushes. N. B. Somebody of Gloucester was to read a paper on
this matter before a genealogical society, in Boston, March 3, 1859,
according to the _Boston Journal_, q. v.
Nearly all who come out must walk on the four planks which I have
mentioned, so that you are pretty sure to meet all the inhabitants of
Provincetown who come out in the course of a day, provided you keep out
yourself. This evening the planks were crowded with mackerel fishers,
to whom we gave and from whom we took the wall, as we returned to our
hotel. This hotel was kept by a tailor, his shop on the one side of the
door, his hotel on the other, and his day seemed to be divided between
carving meat and carving broadcloth.
The next morning, though it was still more cold and blustering than the
day before, we took to the Deserts again, for we spent our days wholly
out of doors, in the sun when there was any, and in the wind which
never failed. After threading the shrubby hill country at the southwest
end of the town, west of the Shank-Painter Swamp, whose expressive
name—for we understood it at first as a landsman naturally would—gave
it importance in our eyes, we crossed the sands to the shore south of
Race Point and three miles distant, and thence roamed round eastward
through the desert to where we had left the sea the evening before. We
travelled five or six miles after we got out there, on a curving line,
and might have gone nine or ten, over vast platters of pure sand, from
the midst of which we could not see a particle of vegetation, excepting
the distant thin fields of Beach-grass, which crowned and made the
ridges toward which the sand sloped upward on each side;—all the while
in the face of a cutting wind as cold as January; indeed, we
experienced no weather so cold as this for nearly two months afterward.
This desert extends from the extremity of the Cape, through
Provincetown into Truro, and many a time as we were traversing it we
were reminded of “Riley’s Narrative” of his captivity in the sands of
Arabia, notwithstanding the cold. Our eyes magnified the patches of
Beach-grass into cornfields in the horizon, and we probably exaggerated
the height of the ridges on account of the mirage. I was pleased to
learn afterward, from Kalm’s Travels in North America, that the
inhabitants of the Lower St. Lawrence call this grass (_Calamagrostis
arenaria_), and also Sea-lyme grass (_Elymus arenarius_), _seigle de
me_; and he adds, “I have been assured that these plants grow in great
plenty in Newfoundland, and on other North American shores; the places
covered with them looking, at a distance, like cornfields; which might
explain the passage in our northern accounts [he wrote in 1749] of the
excellent wine land [_Vinland det goda_, Translator], which mentions
that they had found whole fields of wheat growing wild.”
The Beach-grass is “two to four feet high, of a seagreen color,” and it
is said to be widely diffused over the world. In the Hebrides it is
used for mats, pack-saddles, bags, hats, etc.; paper has been made of
it at Dorchester in this State, and cattle eat it when tender. It has
heads somewhat like rye, from six inches to a foot in length, and it is
propagated both by roots and seeds. To express its love for sand, some
botanists have called it _Psamma arenaria_, which is the Greek for
sand, qualified by the Latin for sandy,—or sandy sand. As it is blown
about by the wind, while it is held fast by its roots, it describes
myriad circles in the sand as accurately as if they were made by
compasses.
It was the dreariest scenery imaginable. The only animals which we saw
on the sand at that time were spiders, which are to be found almost
everywhere whether on snow or ice-water or sand,—and a
venomous-looking, long, narrow worm, one of the myriapods, or
thousand-legs. We were surprised to see spider-holes in that flowing
sand with an edge as firm as that of a stoned well.
In June this sand was scored with the tracks of turtles both large and
small, which had been out in the night, leading to and from the swamps.
I was told by a _terræ filius_ who has a “farm” on the edge of the
desert, and is familiar with the fame of Provincetown, that one man had
caught twenty-five snapping-turtles there the previous spring. His own
method of catching them was to put a toad on a mackerel-hook and cast
it into a pond, tying the line to a stump or stake on shore. Invariably
the turtle when hooked crawled up the line to the stump, and was found
waiting there by his captor, however long afterward. He also said that
minks, muskrats, foxes, coons, and wild mice were found there, but no
squirrels. We heard of sea-turtle as large as a barrel being found on
the beach and on East Harbor marsh, but whether they were native there,
or had been lost out of some vessel, did not appear. Perhaps they were
the Salt-water Terrapin, or else the Smooth Terrapin, found thus far
north. Many toads were met with where there was nothing but sand and
beach-grass. In Truro I had been surprised at the number of large
light-colored toads everywhere hopping over the dry and sandy fields,
their color corresponding to that of the sand. Snakes also are common
on these pure sand beaches, and I have never been so much troubled by
mosquitoes as in such localities. At the same season strawberries grew
there abundantly in the little hollows on the edge of the desert
standing amid the beach-grass in the sand, and the fruit of the
shadbush or Amelanchier, which the inhabitants call Josh-pears (some
think from juicy?), is very abundant on the hills. I fell in with an
obliging man who conducted me to the best locality for strawberries. He
said that he would not have shown me the place if he had not seen that
I was a stranger, and could not anticipate him another year; I
therefore feel bound in honor not to reveal it. When we came to a pond,
he being the native did the honors and carried me over on his
shoulders, like Sindbad. One good turn deserves another, and if he ever
comes our way I will do as much for him.
In one place we saw numerous dead tops of trees projecting through the
otherwise uninterrupted desert, where, as we afterward learned, thirty
or forty years before a flourishing forest had stood, and now, as the
trees were laid bare from year to year, the inhabitants cut off their
tops for fuel.
We saw nobody that day outside of the town; it was too wintry for such
as had seen the Back-side before, or for the greater number who never
desire to see it, to venture out; and we saw hardly a track to show
that any had ever crossed this desert. Yet I was told that some are
always out on the Back-side night and day in severe weather, looking
for wrecks, in order that they may get the job of discharging the
cargo, or the like,—and thus shipwrecked men are succored. But,
generally speaking, the inhabitants rarely visit these sands. One who
had lived in Provincetown thirty years told me that he had not been
through to the north side within that time. Sometimes the natives
themselves come near perishing by losing their way in snow-storms
behind the town.
The wind was not a Sirocco or Simoon, such as we associate with the
desert, but a New England northeaster,—and we sought shelter in vain
under the sand-hills, for it blew all about them, rounding them into
cones, and was sure to find us out on whichever side we sat. From time
to time we lay down and drank at little pools in the sand, filled with
pure fresh water, all that was left, probably, of a pond or swamp. The
air was filled with dust like snow, and cutting sand which made the
face tingle, and we saw what it must be to face it when the weather was
drier, and, if possible, windier still,—to face a migrating sand-bar in
the air, which has picked up its duds and is off,—to be whipped with a
cat, not o’ nine-tails, but of a myriad of tails, and each one a sting
to it. A Mr. Whitman, a former minister of Wellfleet, used to write to
his inland friends that the blowing sand scratched the windows so that
he was obliged to have one new pane set every week, that he might see
out.
On the edge of the shrubby woods the sand had the appearance of an
inundation which was overwhelming them, terminating in an abrupt bank
many feet higher than the surface on which they stood, and having
partially buried the outside trees. The moving sand-hills of England,
called Dunes or Downs, to which these have been likened, are either
formed of sand cast up by the sea, or of sand taken from the land
itself in the first place by the wind, and driven still farther inward.
It is here a tide of sand impelled by waves and wind, slowly flowing
from the sea toward the town. The northeast winds are said to be the
strongest, but the northwest to move most sand, because they are the
driest. On the shore of the Bay of Biscay many villages were formerly
destroyed in this way. Some of the ridges of beach-grass which we saw
were planted by government many years ago, to preserve the harbor of
Provincetown and the extremity of the Cape. I talked with some who had
been employed in the planting. In the “Description of the Eastern
Coast,” which I have already referred to, it is said: “Beach-grass
during the spring and summer grows about two feet and a half. If
surrounded by naked beach, the storms of autumn and winter heap up the
sand on all sides, and cause it to rise nearly to the top of the plant.
In the ensuing spring the grass mounts anew; is again covered with sand
in the winter; and thus a hill or ridge continues to ascend as long as
there is a sufficient base to support it, or till the circumscribing
sand, being also covered with beach-grass, will no longer yield to the
force of the winds.” Sand-hills formed in this way are sometimes one
hundred feet high and of every variety of form, like snow-drifts, or
Arab tents, and are continually shifting. The grass roots itself very
firmly. When I endeavored to pull it up, it usually broke off ten
inches or a foot below the surface, at what had been the surface the
year before, as appeared by the numerous offshoots there, it being a
straight, hard, round shoot, showing by its length how much the sand
had accumulated the last year; and sometimes the dead stubs of a
previous season were pulled up with it from still deeper in the sand,
with their own more decayed shoot attached,—so that the age of a
sand-hill, and its rate of increase for several years, is pretty
accurately recorded in this way.
[Illustration: The sand dunes drifting in upon the trees]
Old Gerard, the English herbalist, says, p. 1250: “I find mention in
Stowe’s Chronicle, in Anno 1555, of a certain pulse or pease, as they
term it, wherewith the poor people at that time, there being a great
dearth, were miraculously helped: he thus mentions it. In the month of
August (saith he), in Suffolke, at a place by the sea side all of hard
stone and pibble, called in those parts a shelf, lying between the
towns of Orford and Aldborough, where neither grew grass nor any earth
was ever seen; it chanced in this barren place suddenly to spring up
without any tillage or sowing, great abundance of peason, whereof the
poor gathered (as men judged) above one hundred quarters, yet remained
some ripe and some blossoming, as many as ever there were before: to
the which place rode the Bishop of Norwich and the Lord Willoughby,
with others in great number, who found nothing but hard, rocky stone
the space of three yards under the roots of these peason, which roots
were great and long, and very sweet.” He tells us also that Gesner
learned from Dr. Cajus that there were enough there to supply thousands
of men. He goes on to say that “they without doubt grew there many
years before, but were not observed till hunger made them take notice
of them, and quickened their invention, which commonly in our people is
very dull, especially in finding out food of this nature. My worshipful
friend Dr. Argent hath told me that many years ago he was in this
place, and caused his man to pull among the beach with his hands, and
follow the roots so long until he got some equal in length unto his
height, yet could come to no ends of them.” Gerard never saw them, and
is not certain what kind they were.
In Dwight’s Travels in New England it is stated that the inhabitants of
Truro were formerly regularly warned under the authority of law in the
month of April yearly, to plant beachgrass, as elsewhere they are
warned to repair the highways. They dug up the grass in bunches, which
were afterward divided into several smaller ones, and set about three
feet apart, in rows, so arranged as to break joints and obstruct the
passage of the wind. It spread itself rapidly, the weight of the seeds
when ripe bending the heads of the grass, and so dropping directly by
its side and vegetating there. In this way, for instance, they built up
again that part of the Cape between Truro and Provincetown where the
sea broke over in the last century. They have now a public road near
there, made by laying sods, which were full of roots, bottom upward and
close together on the sand, double in the middle of the track, then
spreading brush evenly over the sand on each side for half a dozen
feet, planting beachgrass on the banks in regular rows, as above
described, and sticking a fence of brush against the hollows.
The attention of the general government was first attracted to the
danger which threatened Cape Cod Harbor from the inroads of the sand,
about thirty years ago, and commissioners were at that time appointed
by Massachusetts, to examine the premises. They reported in June, 1825,
that, owing to “the trees and brush having been cut down, and the
beach-grass destroyed on the seaward side of the Cape, opposite the
Harbor,” the original surface of the ground had been broken up and
removed by the wind toward the Harbor,—during the previous fourteen
years,—over an extent of “one half a mile in breadth, and about four
and a half miles in length.”—“The space where a few years since were
some of the highest lands on the Cape, covered with trees and bushes,”
presenting “an extensive waste of undulating sand”;—and that, during
the previous twelve months, the sand “had approached the Harbor an
average distance of fifty rods, for an extent of four and a half
miles!” and unless some measures were adopted to check its progress, it
would in a few years destroy both the harbor and the town. They
therefore recommended that beach-grass be set out on a curving line
over a space ten rods wide and four and a half miles long, and that
cattle, horses, and sheep be prohibited from going abroad, and the
inhabitants from cutting the brush.
I was told that about thirty thousand dollars in all had been
appropriated to this object, though it was complained that a great part
of this was spent foolishly, as the public money is wont to be. Some
say that while the government is planting beach-grass behind the town
for the protection of the harbor, the inhabitants are rolling the sand
into the harbor in wheelbarrows, in order to make house-lots. The
Patent-Office has recently imported the seed of this grass from
Holland, and distributed it over the country, but probably we have as
much as the Hollanders.
Thus Cape Cod is anchored to the heavens, as it were, by a myriad
little cables of beach-grass, and, if they should fail, would become a
total wreck, and erelong go to the bottom. Formerly, the cows were
permitted to go at large, and they ate many strands of the cable by
which the Cape is moored, and well-nigh set it adrift, as the bull did
the boat which was moored with a grass rope; but now they are not
permitted to wander.
A portion of Truro which has considerable taxable property on it has
lately been added to Provincetown, and I was told by a Truro man that
his townsmen talked of petitioning the legislature to set off the next
mile of their territory also to Provincetown, in order that she might
have her share of the lean as well as the fat, and take care of the
road through it; for its whole value is literally to hold the Cape
together, and even this it has not always done. But Provincetown
strenuously declines the gift.
The wind blowed so hard from the northeast that, cold as it was, we
resolved to see the breakers on the Atlantic side, whose din we had
heard all the morning; so we kept on eastward through the Desert, till
we struck the shore again northeast of Provincetown, and exposed
ourselves to the full force of the piercing blast. There are extensive
shoals there over which the sea broke with great force. For half a mile
from the shore it was one mass of white breakers, which, with the wind,
made such a din that we could hardly hear ourselves speak. Of this part
of the coast it is said: “A northeast storm, the most violent and fatal
to seamen, as it is frequently accompanied with snow, blows directly on
the land: a strong current sets along the shore; add to which that
ships, during the operation of such a storm, endeavor to work
northward, that they may get into the bay. Should they be unable to
weather Race Point, the wind drives them on the shore, and a shipwreck
is inevitable. Accordingly, the strand is everywhere covered with the
fragments of vessels.” But since the Highland Light was erected, this
part of the coast is less dangerous, and it is said that more
shipwrecks occur south of that light, where they were scarcely known
before.
[Illustration: The white breakers on the Atlantic side]
This was the stormiest sea that we witnessed,—more _tumultuous_, my
companion affirmed, than the rapids of Niagara, and, of course, on a
far greater scale. It was the ocean in a gale, a clear, cold day, with
only one sail in sight, which labored much, as if it were anxiously
seeking a harbor. It was high tide when we reached the shore, and in
one place, for a considerable distance, each wave dashed up so high
that it was difficult to pass between it and the bank. Further south,
where the bank was higher, it would have been dangerous to attempt it.
A native of the Cape has told me that, many years ago, three boys, his
playmates, having gone to this beach in Wellfleet to visit a wreck,
when the sea receded ran down to the wreck, and when it came in ran
before it to the bank, but the sea following fast at their heels,
caused the bank to cave and bury them alive.