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OLD CAPE COD
THE LAND: THE MEN: THE SEA
[Illustration: THE OLD FIGUREHEAD]
OLD CAPE COD
THE LAND: THE MEN
THE SEA
BY
MARY ROGERS BANGS
[Illustration: Decoration]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1920
COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY MARY ROGERS BANGS
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
TO
S. A. B.
CONTENTS
I. THE LAND 1
II. THE OLD COLONY 19
III. THE TOWNS 56
IV. THE FRENCH WARS 97
V. THE ENGLISH WARS 118
VI. THEOLOGY AND WHALING 158
VII. STORMS AND PIRATES 176
VIII. OLD SEA WAYS 203
IX. THE CAPTAINS 221
X. THE COUNTY 259
XI. GENIUS LOCI 291
ILLUSTRATIONS
THE OLD FIGUREHEAD _Frontispiece_
THE SHORE ROAD 6
A FIRST COMER 58
THE CREEK 112
THE FISH-HOUSE 164
THE CAP’N’S 222
THE MEADOWS 270
THE PASTURE BARS 294
_The end-paper maps are_ (1) _a modern map of_ Cape Cod _and_ (2)
_a facsimile of a part of_ Captain Cyprian Southack’s map (_see
page_ 300)
OLD CAPE COD [Illustration: asterism]
CHAPTER I
THE LAND
I
Cape Cod had its Age of Romance in a half-century best placed,
perhaps, in the years between 1790 and 1840. Then certainly
the picture of it was charming: a picture unblemished by the
paper-box architecture of a later period, or the alien hotels,
the villas, bungalows, and portable-houses of to-day. Then roads,
with no necessity laid upon them to be the servants of speed,
were honest native sand, and, gleaming like yellow ribbons across
hills and meadows, linked farm to farm and went trailing on to
the next township where houses nestled behind their lilacs in a
sheltered hollow, or stood four-square on the village street. As
if by instinct, the early settlers from Saugus and Scituate and
Plymouth, accustomed as their youth had been to the harmonies of
Old England, hit upon a style of building best suited to the genius
of the country. And if, consciously, they only planned for comfort
and used the materials at hand, the result, inevitably, bears the
test of fitness to environment. Their low slant-roof wooden houses
were set with backs to the north wind and a singularly wide-awake
aspect to the south. The watershed of the roof sometimes ran with
an equal slope to the eaves of the ground floor; but as frequently,
yielding barely room for pantry and storeroom at the north, it
lifted in front to a second story. And in either case the “upper
chambers,” with irregular ceilings and windows looking to the
sunrise and sunset, were packed tautly into the apex of the roof.
Ornament centred in the front door—a symbol, one might think, of the
determination to preserve, in the enforced privations of pioneer
life, the gentle ceremonials of their past; and however small or
remote, there is not such a house to be recalled that does not
thus offer its dignified best for the occasions of hospitality.
The doors are often beautiful in themselves: their panels of true
proportions framed in delicately moulded pilasters with a line of
glazing to light the tiny hall; frequently a pediment above protects
the whole from the dripping of eaves. And before paint was used to
mask the wood, the whole structure, played upon by sun and storm,
wore to a tone of silver-gray that made a house as familiar to the
soil as a lichen-covered rock. The square Georgian mansions came
later, with the prosperity of reviving trade after the Revolution.
They were built to a smaller scale than those of Newburyport or
Salem or Portsmouth; and the Cape Cod aristocrat seems to have been
content with two stories to live in and a vast garret above to store
superfluous treasure. There was not a jarring note in the scene; and
the old houses, set in neighborly fashion on the village street or
approached by a winding cart-track “across the fields,” with garden
and orchard merging into pasture, suit to perfection the gentle
undulating configuration of the land, which is never level, but
swells into uplands that recall the memory of Scotch moors or some
denuded English “Forest,” and sinks away into meadow, or marsh, or
hollows overflowing with the warm perfumes of blossomy growth.
And everywhere there is color: in hill and lowland, in circles of
swampy bush, in salt creek and dune. Even the motorist, projected
through the country with a slip, a flash, a change too swift for the
eye to note its intimate charm, is caught by the cheerfulness of
green and blue and dazzling white, and more blue, the blue of salt
water, clasping all. One may concede at once that it is a country
adapted to the pleasure of summer folk, if they be not set upon
taking their pleasure too seriously where there are neither mountains
to climb nor big game to hunt, and the soft air does not invite to
endeavor. But the wind sweeps clean from ocean to bay and picks up
in passing resinous scents of the pine; sands reflect magic lights
of rose and pearl; the townships to the north, as Robert Cushman
reported of Plymouth, are “full of dales and meadow ground as England
is”; and the long sweep of the outer shore, south, east, and north,
is extraordinarily varied and broken; deep inlets cool the air of the
warmest months, islands that yesterday were not and to-morrow may be
destroyed by the tides interlace the coast with shallow lagoons where
children sail their boats, bluffs carry the eye out to the clear
distances of the ocean, and there are harbors where, on a misty day,
buildings loom like “tower’d Camelot.” Tides rise and fall in the
salt rivers that wander through marshlands to give changing beauty to
the scene; lakes tempt the fisherman; and for more ambitious sport
one may put to sea and return at night, whether lucky or not, with
the fine philosophy engendered by a ravenous appetite and the sure
prospect of excellent food to stay it.
But perhaps the ultimate charm of the Cape is that, like a child, it
is small enough to be loved. For the native-born, returning here in
middle age, there is the delight of coming back to little things that
memory had held as stupendous: a dim foreign township that used to
be reached in a day’s journey with “carryall and pair” is only five
miles distant by the Lower Road; the Great Square proves to be within
the swing of an hour’s stroll; the “cap’n’s” a modest mid-Victorian
mansion with library and drawing-room that had the remembered vista
of Versailles. Yet, in their degree, this charm is free to the
stranger. The Cape has a whimsical and endearing smallness: its
greatest amplitude can boast but a few miles; and the most tortuous
wood road that promised a day’s excursion through an uncharted
wilderness will soon show you, from some gentle eminence, the true
north to be reckoned by the curve of the bay.
It is such a jaunt inland to the woods that should invite the
traveller, in any season, to forsake his motor-car for a sober
“horse and team” as the better equipment to circumvent obstacles of
unbridged stream or fallen tree. If even as he threads the crowded
village street he can occupy his imagination with the leisurely past
that matches the rate of his progress, his pleasure will be the
greater; and the effort prove not too difficult when, as of old,
poplar and willows shade the road and elms droop impartially over
gray homesteads and the passer-by, or behind decent screens of shrub
and hedge houses blink with a modest air of being sufficient for all
desirable comfort. Farther afield wayside tangles of wild rose and
cherry, and scented racemes of the locust-tree, in their season,
make the air sweet; or in a later month, bright companies of orange
lilies are drawn up at attention by the rail fence that has worn to
a beautiful silvery hue, and Joe Pyeweed nods at thoroughwort in the
swamp. Fields of warm-toned grass roll down to the blur of willows in
a meadow; in pastures intersected by crumbling stone walls stalwart
purple and white blooms rout the fading mists of succory. And there
on the outskirts of the village, hills are dressed in homespun woven
of sparse grasses and crisp gray moss buttoned down with clumps of
bayberry and juniper, adorned in summer by the filmy lace of the
indigo-plant, and in autumn with a lovely cloak of dwarf goldenrod
and asters.
Far to the north, now, lies the silver shield of the bay; inland,
beyond the hills, deep-set in wooded banks is a glint of blue water,
and near at hand a farm guarded by the spear of a pine that tops
the roof twice over. The road dips sharply to a brook that bubbles
along with a force that once turned mill wheels, and rises again in
a graceful curve to a hill where stands a weather-beaten house as
if a-tiptoe to survey in the meadows of the farther view the secret
beauties of a lake. A few miles more, and there, among the wooded
uplands that make the watershed between sea and bay, lies a network
of interlacing roads: “blind roads” where scrub oaks and pines lash
the traveller and the horse proceeds with a careful foot among the
springes of a vigorous younger growth; narrow tracks that lead to
the _cul-de-sac_ of a cranberry swamp or a woodlot where the axe
has been busy with its work of denudation; or long arched aisles of
green, with here a little bay a-dance with ferns washing out into
the woodland, and there a vista of hills opening through mullioned
windows built by the straight trunks of the pines. And here are the
great ponds with bold sandy bluffs and curves that cheat us into
believing them larger than they are. They are pictures of security
as their waves sparkle in the sun and break idly on the miniature
beaches, but quick squalls may come cutting down from the hills to
lash them into a sudden ugly fury that bodes ill for any stray craft
plying these waters, where, even to-day, there is never traffic
sufficient to disturb the pleasing atmosphere of solitude. On a
wooded shore there may be a shooting-lodge or a bungalow, a pier with
a few boats bobbing at anchor on one lake or another; but for the
most part they seem more remote from man than when Indians followed
the forest trails and beached their canoes under a shelving bank.
[Illustration: THE SHORE ROAD]
II
There are riches enough for all who love the land: for those who come
to play, and those who come chiefly to refresh their memory of the
past; for those of the fine old stock who live here year in and year
out on the modest competence inherited from seafaring ancestors; and
those who fish, or farm, or engage in the important modern industry
of ministering to the “summer people.” The quality of the riches,
as in any community, may vary with the individual. But save among
a negligible few of the idlers—where there is a sinister strain of
vice in a “petered-out” neighborhood, or a foolish and incongruous
display among some visitors—there is a recognizable inheritance
from the men who settled the land: an atmosphere of simplicity, a
sturdy instinct of judging one for what he is rather than for what
he has, a predilection for healthy pleasures. It is folk of this
kind whom the Cape attracts—plain people, if you will; and it is
perhaps significant that potent as the land might be to stimulate
the imagination, it is only the beguiling “foreign” atmosphere of
Provincetown that has fostered anything like a School.
Cape Cod: a sandbar, one may have the more excuse for judging, as the
land lifts to the wind-swept plains of Truro. There is a change in
the aspect of the Cape as it turns due north to brace itself against
the thunderous approach of the Atlantic. Straight and defiant, it
holds its own to the Clay Pounds at Highland Light, the Indians’
Tashmuit, and then, little by little, the ocean pushes it back and
folds it over in the graceful curve of the tip at Provincetown. From
the frayed edge of Chatham on the south shore—broken as it is into
deep bays with outer shoals and beaches that may alter their whole
contour in a winter’s storms—and on the north the snug village of
Orleans where the by-roads are the prettiest, we enter upon a new
country. It may be remarked in passing that Orleans offers something
of martial interest to the traveller there: for at Rock Harbor on the
bay was fought the famous Battle of Orleans, an engagement of 1812;
and at Nauset Harbor, in the Great War, a German submarine, with some
idea, apparently, of defeating a tow of empty coal barges, planted a
stray shot on the sandbar at its mouth to the considerable alarm of
cottagers in the vicinity.
At Nauset Beach we look out over the ocean, and turning, see behind
us the Harbor that lies there as if bent upon offering every variety
of inlet—bay, lagoon, cove, and salt river threading the marshes—that
may be crowded into a small compass of miles. In its progress it all
but meets the equally erratic inlets of Chatham, and also the waters
of Cape Cod Bay, with the result that any breeze there is from the
sea. To the south stretches the Beach, a low straight wall of sand
between Harbor and ocean, moulded by the Atlantic, worried by its
storms, yet somehow withstanding the impact, and linking up at the
sharp apex of Chatham with the sands of Monomoy that, again, are in
line with Nantucket Shoals and the Island. It needs a wary seaman to
know the safe entrance to Vineyard Sound. To the north the shore
rises steadily to the great bluffs at Highland Light—the Norsemen’s
Gleaming Strands, a name best appreciated by the seafarer proceeding,
on a fair morning, to the port of Boston, when the hours spent in
running by that line of golden cliffs may be the pleasantest of his
voyage. And wherever one may penetrate to the coast—unless one has
the enterprise of Thoreau to tramp along shore, he must return to a
town and take the next road eastward—there is always a difference in
the scene. Perhaps at no point is it more lovely than at Wellfleet,
where the bluffs curve gently to a promontory and the surf, touched
by a stray shaft of sunlight, breaks into crystal and jade. In and
out, they trend away again to the north; and the sea at our feet,
forward flow and backward clutch, even on a cold day of spring sounds
the whole gamut of blue, light, dark, bewilderingly mingled, out
to the intense purple of our farthest reach of vision—literally,
the Purple Sea. There is little break in the line of bluffs, but
sometimes one of the valleys, that now begin to cut transversely
across the Cape, persists to the coast; and one of the prettiest
drives is to Cahoon’s Hollow by way of a typical Cape Cod wood-road,
winding up hill and down, with vistas of blue ponds glinting through
the trees. The road debouches on dunes, covered with a low, shrubby
growth; and everywhere there has been an amazing quantity of the
wild cranberry covering acre after acre with its glossy green mat of
leaves. The land billows down to the water’s edge, yielding flashing
glimpses of blue water long before we reach it, and rises then on
either hand into deeply indented cliffs.
The country, as we follow the main road inland once more, swells
into rounded hills that seem under bonds to crowd as many of their
company as possible into the narrow confines between sea and bay. The
deep valleys among them conceal many snug homesteads built there by
the First Comers; and the atmosphere is indescribably pure blending,
by the winds that always blow, the bracing qualities natural to
ocean and upland. It is easy to share the enthusiasm of a physician
travelling this way who exclaimed: “It’s the best air in North
America.” The hills now merge into high moors that narrow to the Clay
Pounds where Highland Light finds a firm foundation. One overlooks
both sea and bay and walks poised aloft as on a roof-tree. Thoreau
is master there, and has written discursively of flora and birds and
humans, and, with the wonder appropriate to an inlander, of the sea.
In truth “a man may stand there and put all America behind him.”
As for the name, a triangular plot of some ten acres composed of a
blue clay cuts transversely through the sand; “pounds” is variously
explained as a corruption of ponds or as suggested by the pounding of
the surf. The land slopes up from the inner bay to the great shining
bluffs that are singularly bold and picturesque, with escarpment and
overhang, bastion and turret built by their architect, the sea. Below
them on calm days the polished surface of the Atlantic breaks into
foam on the ivory beaches. But in winter there is a different story
of savage surf and an ocean that flings up its spume near two hundred
feet to the starved grass of the upland. Such clamor is unbelievable
in the pearly haze of summer; but even then an infrequent nor’easter
may whip the Atlantic into a hungry rage as if to send it leaping
over the puny barrier that divides the outer uproar from the gray
dogs of the bay that are showing their teeth to the gale.
Provincetown is a story in itself. The village, with its ingredients
of old Cape Cod and a large proportion of handsome, gentle-mannered
folk from the East Atlantic Islands, is curled comfortably about
the edge of its harbor. It has been said that Provincetown has the
“privilege of turning to look at itself like a happy child who has
donned a long train,” and there is an evening picture of the “circlet
of lights with a background of slender spires and hills, a friendly
beacon shining over the narrow spit of land at Wood End.” Picturesque
and picturesque: one wears the words threadbare—picturesque in
summer, with the flicker of shadow and sun, sharp-cut, exotic, the
brightly dressed folk thronging the streets or hailing one another
from the windows above; picturesque, with a difference, in the less
exciting atmosphere of winter when the town is comfortably full of
its own people busy about their affairs, which more often than not
means preparing for the harvest that summer is to bring them. The
harbor is a picture at high tide or low, with the boats anchored in
the roadstead or moored to the wharves; or the sun slanting across
the sandflats where a dory is stranded by the tide, and its master,
dark-ringletted, slouch-hatted, a red kerchief knotted at his throat,
a red flower in his shirt, strides shorewards with his catch dripping
in its creel. The fish-wharves make a painter’s fingers itch to be at
work, and many are those who respond to the impulse. No small part
of the vivacity of the summer scene is furnished by the artists and
their easels and their colors—artists who express what they see after
a method that would horrify the ladies of the earlier era that is our
particular affair.
The soil is sand, and it is said that the gardens of the town were
imported by returning shipmasters who, in more fertile regions,
steved their holds with loam for ballast and dumped it in their
own front yards. However that may be, the little gardens are as
pretty as in any English village; a vista harborwards through bright
plantations of hollyhock is something to remember. And there are many
trees sheltering the houses and yards: silver abeles, and elms, and
willows,—the old willows “Way up along.” The scene to-day is perhaps
unduly dominated by the Monument, which with time may develop a
closer familiarity with its environment. Springing from clustering
trees on a low eminence above the town, graceful in itself, it is as
much a memorial to the indefatigable will of one of the last of the
deep-water captains as to his forbears, the Pilgrims. In season and
out he worked for its accomplishment, with the result that a colossal
Sienese bell-tower, supplementing as it were the enterprise of
Columbus, the Genoan, pins firmly in place the sands of Cape Cod.
The village is bounded by wooded hills, and a drive oceanward brings
us to the dunes where the State, year after year, has waged war
with the drifting sand of its Province Lands. Life-saving stations
and beacons are set at short intervals, and are needed, on this
shore, and out there lie the great shoals of the Peaked Hill Bar,
the cruellest of all the coast, where ship after ship has piled her
bones, and men by the hundred have gone to their death. To the eye,
in a crisp north wind, they present only lines of vivid jade-green
water set in the wide field of blue; and here sea and shore give such
promise of variety as makes one long to watch the seasons through
in sun and storm and shrouding mists. The dunes that are no other
color than that of sand, ever responsive to the changing mood of the
atmosphere, are covered now and then by carpets of growth that run
from dull green to the purple of winter; and they and the bluffs
beyond them are no more constant in aspect than their neighbor the
sea. Far from depressing the spirit, they stimulate keen anticipation
of what the hour shall bring forth and a sense that whatever its
fruit one shall be great enough to share it. Of all the places one
has seen here it is most fitting that man should dare to be free.
III
From the slender tip of Champlain’s Cap Blanc to Wareham one is never
out of sight of water: salt here and salt there, ocean and inlet
and bay; and the great ponds of the uplands, or deep in its swampy
covert a lake dropped from the jewelled chain among the hills. In the
towns nearer the mainland are creeks and brooks and tiny runlets,
flooded cranberry swamps, a ditch choked with the lush growth it
nourishes; or near the beach a peat bog may wink unexpectedly from
its bosky rim where a colony of night heron have nested to be near
their feeding-ground in the bay. And when the tide is at ebb they
and the seagulls wheel out there in airy platoons that manœuvre as
if to catch the light on their ermine or sleek surtouts of gray. On
the drying sands the gulls teeter about like high-heeled ladies on an
esplanade until a stranded minnow changes the play and they pounce
and cuff and scream like boys greedy for a penny. There are rich
harvests for the hungry on these wide reaches of the sandflats, and
even a glutton bird could gorge his fill upon the prey entrapped in
the fish-weirs that dot the inner coast.
There, at one point, the tide marches out a long mile to the Great
Bar and back again, by appointed channels, unhurrying, punctual to
the minute, to keep its tryst with the shore. Sailors, unless they
have a care to the time, are likely to be “hung up” on the Bar; but
for one ashore who looks out to the white line of breaking foam,
every moment of the ebb and turn has its special beauty. In bright
days the shoaling waters show a lovely interlacement of greens and
blue; but when the sky is shrouded in gray, fold upon fold, and
the sun, invisible, steps softly westward, their surface is like
burnished metal, although a painter’s eye would discern there a
pastel of mauves and pink and blue and a whole chromatic scale of
green. White sandflats, disclosed by the ebb, are carved in whorls
like a shell by the hand of the tide. Inshore plumy grasses fringe
them; here and there infinitesimal forms of life stain them amethyst
or green. But the wide sweep of them responds to some subtile quality
in the day, and they are plains of pearl where cloudy shadows drift,
or, in certain golden hours, they burn with color like some jewelled
marquetry of the East. A flaming sunset walks them with feet of
blood. And day after day they, or the waters above them, surprise us
with some new sweet diversity.
A scarf of gray tops the sand bluffs of the opposite shore, and when
the land looms, miragelike, scattered villages appear; or on certain
clear evenings we may catch the twinkle of friendly lights. And in
summer days when the languid creeks threading the marshlands add a
brighter blue to the picture that throbs in the sun—water and sky and
the dazzling collar of sand that yokes land and sea—the bay, seeming
all but landlocked in its honey-colored bluffs, deceives us with a
look of inland waters and lies as softly there as Long Pond among
the hills. Above the beaches, now and again, stand groves of pines,
homely thurifers that incense the breeze as it passes. And where
the line of shore dips to a lowland, the salt marshes, with their
exquisite adjustment to the season, are a treasury of beauty—rich
greens flushing and dying to the bronze, studded with haycocks like
the bosses of an ancient shield, that challenges encroaching autumn
tides.
Winter drains the scene of color, but salt winds cheat the lower
temperatures of their rigor, and it is a hard season when snow lies
in the meadows through consecutive weeks. Then there are days of
brave sunlight when whitecaps feather over the surface of the bay,
and ice-cakes churn in with the tide and pile up like opals on the
beach: days when the air is wine-clear, and the land is dressed in
its best of warm russet brown, and hoofs strike the frozen roads with
the resonance of Piccadilly pavements. Then sunset jewels woodland
interstices with mellow cathedral light; high on a bluff above the
crystal plane of a lake regiments of militant pines salute the dying
day; and up in the south, when night hangs the stars low, Orion will
be calling his dogs for the hunting. But more beautiful are the gray
days in winter when earth meets heaven with the justly modulated
values of a Japanese print, and the hills, clothed in the soft fur of
leafless woods, crouch under a pale sky; when in swamps the lances of
dead reeds clash, and by a stagnant pool stands a cluster of brown
cat-tails like candles that have lighted some past banquet of the
year.
In spring, long before the tardy oaks unsheathe their foliage, the
sudden scarlet of swamp maple flames in a hollow, and we are off to
the woods to hunt the stout fresh leaves which betray hiding-places
of the arbutus, the mayflower, under the waste of a dead year. Near
by, wintergreen in sturdy companies shoulders the red berries
that have eluded hungry winter birds, and graceful runnels of wild
cranberry flow through the open spaces. Here pretty colonies of
windflowers will soon be swinging their bells, ladies’-slipper and
Jack-in-the-pulpit dispute the season’s clemency; and when summer
brings red lilies to surprise the eye in some green chamber of the
wood, our journey should end at the beach of an inland lake where
spicy sabbatia sways delicately in the warm air and genesta grows on
the bank.
From spring around to winter, the months are packed with
flowers—roadside beauties, shy little creatures of the fields, waxen
Indian-pipes in the pine groves; even on the dunes are flowering
mosses, the yellow lace of the poverty-grass, the pretty gray velvet
leaf of “dusty-miller,” pink lupin, wild grapes and roses crowding
a secret hollow where the soil is enriched, perhaps, by an ancient
shell-heap of the Indians. And among the depressions of the hills
are swamps where a lovely progression, exquisitely disposed as if
by conscious art, walks through the year. Color dies hard in these
sheltered nooks, and hardly is dun winter lord of all, with stripped
bushes huddling like sheep in the hollow, than spring breaks his rule
and
“Along an edge of marshy ground
The shad-bush enters like a bride.”
Again the march begins: huckleberry, Clethra, honeysuckle, the dull
smear of Joe Pyeweed, the white web of elderberry blossoms turning
to fruity umbels that promise homely brews, swinging goldenrod and
feather-grass, the decorative intent of cat-tails that, with certain
engaging brown velvet buttons nodding on their stems in a swamp and
the firm coral of alderberries, brings us around to winter again.
And there are choristers a-plenty: the remote sweet piping of hylas
piercing the velvet darkness of a night in spring, the melodious
booming of bull-frogs, the challenge of Bob White; and all the dear
homely New England birds, twittering, chirping, chattering, pouring
out their hearts in song as they swing with the trees that the wind
sweeps into endless motion. And in summer and winter, from north,
south, east, or west, the wind brings us news from the sea: the
savor of salt, gray billows of cloud and fog, clear stark bright
days following one another through a season. The southwest gales of
summer beat down ripe grasses in the field and feather willow and
poplar with silver; the great autumn gales go trumpeting through the
land; the nor’easter sends surf thundering on the outer shore; and
there are the soft moist winds that relax the high-wrought tension of
humans, and melt the rigors of winter.
The free winds,—and contour, sound, color: with nothing superfluous,
yet satisfying and ever present. And from flowers and fruit and
woodland and the sharp tang of the sea there is distilled a draught
corrective of morbid humors and the wandering will,—a stanch pledge
of sobriety.