The impressive scenery and bold picturesqueness all about attract many
artists, who haunt the rocks and sea views of Cape Ann. The whole
district is full of summer-homes, with flower-gardens and shrubbery
amid the rocks and boulders, and the cliffs and ocean presenting an
endless variety of changing scenery. The outer extremity of the Cape,
long called Halibut Point, has been modernized into the Land's End,
thus being rightly named as the termination of the great Massachusetts
granite ridge, which falls away sharply into the sea. Upon the one
hand Pigeon Cove, with its adjacent Sandy Bay, indents the rocky
buttress, while upon the other side is Whale Cove. Just off the Land's
End is the noted Thatcher's Island, low-lying on the sea, elongated,
narrow and barren, with its tall twin lighthouses, and having nearby,
in front of Whale Cove, the diminutive Milk Island. To the northward,
off Pigeon Cove, is another barren rock surmounted by a lighthouse,
Straitsmouth Island. These three outlying islands were the "Three
Turks' Heads," as originally named by Captain John Smith. Thatcher's
Island has about eighty acres of mainly gravelly surface strewn with
boulders, being named from Anthony Thatcher's shipwreck there in 1635
in the most awful tempest known to colonial New England. Rockport is a
town of quarries extended around Sandy Bay, protected by breakwaters,
behind which vessels come to load stone almost alongside the quarry.
Pigeon Cove is the port for shipping stone taken out of Pigeon Hill,
where the granite ridge is humped up into a grand eminence.
Lanesville, to the north, is another large exporter of paving-blocks
and building-stone. Alongside is Folly Point, guarding Folly Cove, at
the northeastern extremity of the Cape, and to the westward are the
villages of Bay View and Annisquam, with more quarries, and having,
not far away, flowing out to Ipswich Bay through a lovely valley in
the very heart of the Cape, the attractive little Squam River. The
people of Cape Ann outside of Gloucester are almost all quarrymen,
their product, largely paving-blocks, being shipped to all the
seaboard cities. So extensive is this trade that it is difficult to
decide which now brings the district most profit, the granite or the
fish. There is no doubt, however, that the greatest fame of this
celebrated Cape comes from its fisheries and the venturesome men who
make them so successful. Edmund Burke, in the British House of
Commons, in 1774, thus spoke of these Massachusetts fishermen: "No sea
but what is vexed by their fisheries; no climate that is not witness
of their toils; neither the perseverance of Holland, nor the activity
of France, nor the dexterous and firm sagacity of English enterprise,
ever carried their most perilous mode of hardy industry to the extent
to which it has been pursued by this recent people--a people who are
yet in the gristle, and not yet hardened into manhood."
For three centuries, almost, this perilous trade has been carried on,
and they are fully as daring and even more enterprising now than in
the colonial days. Thus Whittier describes them:
"Wild are the waves which lash the reefs along St. George's Bank,
Cold on the shore of Labrador the fog lies white and dank;
Through storm and wave and blinding mist, stout are the hearts
which man
The fishing-smacks of Marblehead, the sea-boats of Cape Ann.
"The cold North light and wintry sun glare on their icy forms
Bent grimly o'er their straining lines, or wrestling with the
storms;
Free as the winds they drive before, rough as the waves they roam,
They laugh to scorn the slaver's threat against their rocky home."