STORMS AND PIRATES
I
The sea that was at every man’s threshold, combing down the beaches
of the outer shore, lapsing from the sands ebb-tide and flood again
in the bay, formed such a part of the day’s experience as would be
inconceivable to one of inland habitude. It was a friend to be loved,
an enemy to be fought, a giver of food, and a solemn harvester that
brought dead men to the door. Memorable storms have ravaged the
shore: it is amazing that anything so delicate as the charming curve
of Champlain’s Cap Blanc could withstand the pull and push of the
Atlantic surges; Gosnold’s Point Gilbert and Tucker’s Terror have
been torn away and moulded elsewhere in other form; and the shoals of
that cruel outer strand might be piled high with their wrecked ships.
Nor has tragedy been all oceanwards.
In 1827 there was a lowering capricious winter when with more than
common malice the wind, “bringing cold out of the north,” would swing
to the melting south and back again to freeze and destroy. It was on
such a day that the schooner Almira, loaded with wood, put her nose
out of Sandwich Harbor. The rain had stopped at noon, the air was
thick with vapor, and high overhead, as if seeking their shepherd
wind, scudded little anxious clouds. Then, change about, by nightfall
the iron hand of the north had stripped the heavens bare and stars
looked coldly down upon the scene. The air had filled with needles of
frost to cut the faces of the miserable crew, and drenched as they
were with spray they froze as they stood. The boat was headed for
Plymouth Light; but Plymouth lay directly in the eye of the wind, and
it was tack and tack again with sails slowly shredding to rags and
every rope unyielding steel. The boat still answered her helm, but
it was useless to drive her longer against wind and tide, and they
turned her about for home. Into Barnstable Bay she swept, and in the
moonlight that was more relentless than shrouding storm the master
could see his own comfortable white house. The boat travelled as “if
intent on some spot where it might be wrecked,” and there on the
teeth of a cruel ledge, less than the turn of twenty-four hours since
she had set sail in the languorous south wind, the land once more
received her. At the helm, his hands frozen to the tiller, his feet
set fast in ice, pitiful rescuers found the only man who breathed:
the others of that little company had made the cold port of death.
There have been historic wrecks, historic storms. As early as 1669 a
quarrel over the salvage of a wreck was settled in court. Bradford,
in 1635, records such a storm “as none living in these parts, either
English or Indians, ever saw, causing the sea to swell above twenty
feet right up.” “Tall young oaks and walnut trees of good bigness
were wound as a withe.” And “the wrecks of it will remain for a
hundred years.” It was this storm, raging up and down the coast,
that threw Anthony Thacher and his little family upon the rocks of
Cape Ann. And some Connecticut colonists, wrecked in Manomet Bay and
wandering for days in the snow, finally reached Plymouth and were
hospitably entertained there for the winter. Bradford’s storm “took
the roof of a house at Manomet and put it in another place”; and Rich
reports the great gale of a later year that washed a house from its
moorings on the Isles of Shoals and landed it at Truro so far intact
that a box of linen and some papers were preserved to tell its story.
He seems to think that if the family had had the courage to stand by
their house, they might have made the voyage to Cape Cod in safety.
After a savage September gale in 1815 that centred in Buzzard’s
Bay, a coasting schooner was found upright in some large trees, and
another, lifted clean over a bluff, blocked the door of a house.
Everything ashore was laid waste; even springs became brackish; but
some land was enriched by its flooding and where only moss had been
grass was to grow.
In 1703 the body of Captain Peter Adolphe, cast upon the shore at
Sandwich, was there decently buried; and his widow, in grateful
acknowledgment, presented the town with a bell cast in Munich and
inscribed, “Si Devs pron bvs [_sic_] qvis contra nos 1675,” which was
later sold to Barnstable where it is preserved as a relic.
In 1723 “The Great Storm” that “raised the tide three or four feet
higher than had been known aforetime,” was reported by Mather to the
Royal Society of London. In 1770 and 1785 were similar storms.
Bradford records that “the moon suffered a great eclipse” the second
night after his storm; there were comets, portents of evil, during
the Indian troubles, and earthquakes—in 1638 one so violent that
“people out of doors could scarcely retain a position on their feet”;
and the dating of subsequent events as so long “after the earthquake”
was “as common for many years as once with the Children of Israel.”
In 1727 a heavier shock still was “reformatory of some loose-livers
in America who became apparently devout penitents”; and in 1755 was
the worst earthquake that ever was known.
In November, 1729, one Captain Lothrop, Boston to Martha’s Vineyard,
espied off Monomoy a vessel in distress, and boarding her discovered
shocking evidence of her state. Of the one hundred and ninety souls
who had set sail from Ireland for the port of Philadelphia, no less
than one hundred, including all the children but one, had died of
starvation. Twenty weeks they had been afloat, and were out of both
water and food. “They entreated him to pilot them into the first
harbor they could get into, and were all urgent to put them ashore
anywhere, if it were but land.” Lothrop would have taken them to
Boston, but, when they threatened to throw him into the sea, landed
them hastily with some provisions, at Sandy Point where there was
but one house. A writer in a current number of the “New England
Weekly Journal” remarks that “notwithstanding their extremity, ’twas
astounding to behold their impenitence, and to hear their profane
speeches.” Their captain proceeded to Philadelphia where he was
arrested for cruelty to passengers and crew, sent in irons to Dublin,
and met his just deserts by being hanged and quartered. The one young
survivor of that wretched company, James Delap, found his way to
Barnstable, and was apprenticed to a blacksmith there. In due time
he married Mary O’Kelley, of Yarmouth, and in winter practised his
trade, in summer was a seaman on the Boston packet. This Irishman was
something of a Tory, and in 1775 emigrated to Nova Scotia where he
died. A son, master of a vessel in the king’s service, perished on
Nantucket where his boat was wrecked in a furious blizzard; two of
his daughters married in Barnstable.
When the emigration of loyalists was well under way, boat after boat,
crowded far beyond safety, set out from Boston and New York for Nova
Scotia, where, as one such traveller said, “it’s winter nine months
of the year, and cold weather the rest of the time”; and where, even
were they fortunate enough to escape disease or starvation or wreck
on the voyage, they were to suffer privations beyond any the early
Pilgrims endured. In March, 1776, “a sloop loaded with English goods,
having sailed from Boston for Halifax, with sundry Tories and a large
number of women and children, some of whom were sick with smallpox,”
was cast ashore at Provincetown. Nathaniel Freeman was one of a
committee appointed “to repair forthwith to the place and prevent the
escape of the passengers and crew and secure the vessel and cargo,”
and the selectmen of Truro shared in the task. What became of the
sick women and children we are not told, but we may be reasonably
certain that the rancor of the Whigs was not vented on them. Another
of these Tory refugee ships was wrecked on Block Island, and it was
said that for years after the ghosts of those who perished there
could be seen struggling in the surf and their cries heard by men
ashore.
English ships, in these days, were raking the coast of the Cape
from their stations at Tarpaulin Cove and Provincetown, but in
November, 1778, a sorry landing was made when “The Somerset, British
man-of-war,” sung by Longfellow in his “Landlord’s Tale,” struck
on the murderous Peaked Hill Bar off Provincetown and, lightered
of guns and ammunition, at high tide was flung on the beach. For
two years, patrolling the coast or “swinging wide at her moorings”
in the harbor, she had been a familiar sight to patriots ashore,
and now, without observing too closely the letter of the law, they
were to take what the sea gave them. Rich records some preliminary
amenities between the captain and a company of visitors from Hog
Back, one of whom, “a short old man with a short-tailed pipe,” asked
for the captain, and Aurey, supposing him in authority, received
him civilly. “Well, cap’n,” drawled Cape Cod, “who did you pray to
in the storm? If you called on the Lord, he wouldn’t have sent you
here. And I’m sure King George wouldn’t.” Whereupon the captain:
“Old man, you’ve had your pipe fished.” An anecdote that goes to
show not unfriendly relations between adversaries. In due time the
captain and crew, to the number of four hundred and eighty, were
marched to Boston to the exultation of all beholders, and the Board
of War stripped the ship of her armament. But before and after this
was accomplished, the neighborhood engaged itself with plunder, and
there seems to have been some confusion in the right to loot. “From
all I can learn,” wrote Joseph Otis, of Barnstable, “there is wicked
work at the wreck, riotous doings.” He excused himself from the duty
of regulating matters there as his father, the old chief justice,
lay a-dying. “The Truro and Provincetown men made a division of the
clothing, etc. Truro took two-thirds and Provincetown one-third.
There is a plundering gang that way.” Certainly Barnstable was too
remote to share in the largess. Mr. Rich had seen canes made from
the Somerset’s fine old English oak, and cites a certain silver
watch, part of the “effects,” that was still keeping good time at
Pond Village. Drifting sands piled up to conceal the wreck, a century
later swept back to disclose her to the gaze of the curious, and then
again buried the bones of her.
In December of 1778, the Federal brig General Arnold, Magee master
and twelve Barnstable men among the crew, drove ashore on the
Plymouth flats during a furious nor’easter, the “Magee storm” that
mariners, for years after, used as a date to reckon from. The vessel
was shrouded in snow and ice, men froze to the rigging, others were
smothered in the snow, a few were washed overboard; and when, after
three days, succor came to them, only thirty-three men lived of
the one hundred and five who had sailed from Boston so short a time
before. Of the twelve Barnstable men only one survived. Bound in
ice, he lay on deck as one dead: conscious, but powerless to move or
speak. By one chance in a thousand, the rescuers caught his agonized
gaze; they bore him ashore, nursed him back to life, and when he
was able to travel sent him home over the snow-blocked roads in an
ambulance improvised from a hammock slung between horses fore and
aft. The Plymouth folk, unlike the looters of the Somerset—who, to
be sure, looted only an enemy—not only buried the dead and sheltered
the living, but guarded the property aboard the General Arnold for
its owners. As for Barnstable, he lost both his feet from frost-bite,
but could ride to church on the Sabbath as well as another. He busied
himself about his garden in summer, and in winter coopered for his
neighbors; with considerable skill, also, he cast many small articles
in pewter and lead.
In 1798, the “Salem Gazette” reports: “seven vessels ashore on Cape
Cod, twenty-five bodies picked up and buried, probably no lives
saved.” In 1802, there was another memorable wreck on the Peaked
Hill Bar when three Salem vessels richly laden, one for Leghorn, two
for Bordeaux, foundered there in a blinding storm. And, slow as the
posts then were, not for nearly three weeks were full details of
the loss received at Salem. For many years, every great snowstorm
following a fine day in March would revive the story of “the three
Salem ships.” During the Embargo War, a Truro man fitted out an old
boat to trade with Boston, and on one such trip was overtaken at
nightfall, below Minot’s Ledge, by a furious northeast snowstorm. It
seemed probable that there would be one embargo-dodger the less to
harry the revenue officers. The crew consisted of a solitary seaman
noted for good judgment, his only oath milkmild. “Well, Mr. White,
what would you do now?” inquired the skipper. “By gracious, sir,”
returned White, all unperturbed, “I’d take in the mains’l, double
reef the fores’l, and give her an offing.” Laconic direction for the
one course that offered hope, and the event justified its wisdom.
In 1815 a September gale that equalled Bradford’s Great Storm swept
Buzzard’s Bay, piled the tides higher than had ever been known, and
all but excavated a Cape Cod Canal. Trees were uprooted, salt-works
destroyed, and vessels driven high on land. In 1831, to vary the
story, unprecedented snows were fatal to deer in the Sandwich woods
where they fell easy prey to hunters on snowshoes who brought in no
less than two hundred, forty of them trapped alive.
All up and down the Cape, in every village and town, as the years
passed, the sea took its toll of men. In 1828 some thirty of them,
mostly from Sandwich and Yarmouth, small merchants and artisans who
had spent the winter “prosecuting their business” in South Carolina,
were lost on their homeward voyage. That was a disastrous year for
many a man who followed the sea, and in Truro, especially, the number
of grave-stones grew. Of all these memorials the most tragic is that
“Sacred to the memory of fifty-seven citizens of Truro who were lost
in seven vessels, which foundered at sea in the memorable gale of
October 3, 1841.” Fifty-seven men of Truro, ten of Yarmouth, twenty
of Dennis “mostly youngsters under thirty,” never made port in that
gale. They were fishing on George’s Bank when the storm broke, and
“made sail to run for the highland of Cape Cod,” we may read. “But
there were mighty currents unknown to them before which carried them
out of the proper course to the southwest. Finding they could not
weather by the highland they wore ship and stood to the southeast
but being disabled in their sails and rigging—the strongest canvas
was blown into shreds—they were carried by wind and current upon the
Nantucket Shoals.” A few boats did succeed in rounding Provincetown;
others never made even the Nantucket Shoals; one was found bottom up
in Nauset Harbor, “with the boys drowned in her cabin.” A captain,
whose seamanship and indomitable pluck saved him that day, lived to
write the record. “I knew we had a good sea-boat; I had tried her in
a hard scratch, and knew our race was life or death.” Somehow, where
other masters failed, he won. By a hair’s breadth he escaped the
shoals. “We hung on sharp as possible by the wind, our little craft
proving herself not only able but seemingly endowed with life. In
this way at 3.30 we weathered the Highlands with no room to spare.
When off Peaked Hill Bar the jib blew away, and we just cleared the
breakers; but we had weathered! the lee shore was astern, and Race
Point under our lee, which we rounded and let go our anchor in the
Herring Cove.” Rich chronicles the almost incredible feat of another
boat that turned turtle and around again and survived. The Reform
lay-to “under bare poles, with a drag-net to keep her head to the
wind. As it was impossible to remain on deck on account of the sea
making a breach fore and aft, all hands fastened themselves in the
cabin and awaited their fate, at the mercy of the storm. A moment
after a terrific sea fairly swallowed them many fathoms below the
surface. The vessel was thrown completely bottom up. The crew had
no doubt it was her final plunge. A few seconds only, she was again
on her keel. Two or three men crawled on deck; they found the masts
gone and the hawser of the drag wound around the bowsprit. She had
turned completely over, and came up on the opposite side.” For weeks
after the storm, a vessel cruised about seeking disabled boats or
some trace of their loss; but save the schooner in Nauset Harbor,
not a vestige of boats or men was ever found. It is said that a
Provincetown father, “who had two sons among the missing, for weeks
would go morning and evening to the hill-top which overlooked the
ocean, and there seating himself, would watch for hours, scanning the
distant horizon with his glass, hoping every moment to discover some
speck on which to build a hope.”
In 1853 another Great Storm swept away wharves and storehouses on
the bay, and wrecked a schooner at Sandy Neck, with “all hands lost”
to add to the tale of disaster on the outer shore. And so walks
the procession of storms down to the one of yesterday when the
coast-guard fought hour by hour through the night to save the crew of
a boat pounding to pieces in the surf a scant two hundred and fifty
feet from shore. And before the days of the coast-guard, men had worn
paths above the cliffs where they paced on the lookout for wrecks.
“Thick weather, easterly gales, storms,” and on such nights men,
even as they ate, kept an eye to the sea. One Captain Collins, of
Truro, called from table by the familiar cry, “Ship ashore, all hands
perishing,” within the hour had laid down his life in a fruitless
effort at rescue—he and a companion whose widow had lost all the men
related to her by the sea. By differing methods the same spirit has
worked through all the years: “Ship ashore, all hands perishing,” and
it is the business of men who might be safe to risk their lives in
the fight with death.
II
The sombre tale of wrecks will never be done, but pirate stories
no longer incite youth to possible adventure. In the old days Cape
Cod men had plenty of chances to show their prowess against such
adversaries, and likewise against the privateersmen who sometimes
made use of their letters of marque in highly personal ventures.
Nor was danger from out-and-out piracy unfamiliar to peaceful folk
ashore. The Earl of Bellamont, Governor of Massachusetts and New
York, was “particularly instructed to put a stop to the growth of
piracy, the seas being constantly endangered by freebooters”; and the
achievement of his short incumbency was the apprehension of Captain
Kidd. Kidd, duly commissioned a privateer, was one of those who
turned to the more lucrative trade of pirate. Then, pushed hard, he
buried his profits, to the incitement of many future treasure hunts,
and thinking to escape detection through sheer boldness, appeared in
Boston. But he was recognized, laid by the heels, and packed off to
London where he was duly hanged. An earlier pirate of our coast with
better fortune died in his bed, a respected country gentleman, no
doubt, at Isleworth, England, in the year 1703. He had been pilot on
a pirate-chaser appointed by Governor Andros to clean up the seas off
New England, and in process of pursuing the pirates had opportunity
to observe the ease of their methods.
In 1689 this Thomas Pound, in partnership with another master-mariner
and duly commissioned to prey upon French merchantmen, set sail
from Boston. But they had proceeded no farther than the Brewsters
when they were holding up a mackerel sloop for supplies, and
fifteen miles out they neatly exchanged their own boat for a better
one Salem-bound, whose crew, save one John Derby who joined the
adventurers as a “voluntary,” was to turn up at home and give news
of the lately commissioned privateer, Thomas Pound, master. Pound,
meantime, with a long advantage in the chase, was off for Portland
and Casco Bay. Fully equipped from the Portland militia stores with
clothing, powder, musket and cutlass, carbines and brass cannon,
he made for Provincetown and again changed to a better boat whose
master was sent back to Boston with the saucy message to probable
pursuers that: “They Knew ye goot Sloop lay ready but if she came
out after them & came up wh them shd find hott work for they wd die
every man before they would be taken.” Boston, nevertheless, sent
out its sloop, with orders to take Pound, or any other pirate, but
quaintly, in so hazardous an enterprise, “to void the shedding of
blood unless you be necessitated by resistance.” Perhaps Boston had
heard the rumor that Richard, brother to Sir William Phips, Governor,
was of the pirate company. Pound rounded the Cape, picked up a prize
in the Sound, was blown out to sea, and returned to the rich hunting
about the Cape by way of Virginia. Off Martha’s Vineyard, again, he
drove a ketch into the harbor and would have followed and cut her
out, if the inhabitants had not risen in force. In Cape Cod Bay he
held up a Pennsylvania sloop that was such poor prey he let her go
scot free; but off Falmouth he got a fine stock of provisions—which
very likely was needed by now—from a New London boat. Then he lay-to
for several days in Tarpaulin Cove where, at last, the merry cruise
was to end. Boston was sending out another boat, under command of
one Samuel Pease, with instructions to get the pirates but, again,
“to prevent ye sheding of blood as much as may bee,” and with better
luck this time for the avengers of the law. In Tarpaulin Cove they
surprised the pirate, with the red flag at her peak. Shots were
exchanged, and called upon to strike to the King of England, Pound
answered in true pirate rodomontade. “Standing on the quarter-deck
with his naked sword in his hand flourishing, said, come aboard, you
Doggs, and I will strike you presently, or words to yt purpose.”
Firing was renewed, and “after a little space we saw Pound was shot
and gone off the deck.” Quarter was offered, and refused. “Ai yee
dogs we will give you quarter,” yelled the pirates. Pease was also
wounded, but his men boarded the pirate sloop, and “forced to knock
them downe with the but end of our muskets at last we quelled them,
killing foure, and wounding twelve, two remaining pretty well.”
This ended the Homeric battle of Tarpaulin Cove. Pease, the king’s
captain, died of his wounds, and offerings were made in church for
his widow and orphans. The pirates were taken to Boston jail where
they were visited for the good of their souls by Judge Sewall and
Cotton Mather. In due process of law they were condemned to be
hanged on indictments for piracy and murder. But the sequel proved
that fashion and the elders, whether or not by reason of the claims
of consanguinity, were interested for the scapegraces. Justice was
appeased by the hanging of one lame man of humble origin, and Pound
was taken to England, where later he was made captain in the navy
and died, as we have seen, in the odor of respectability. Some say
that his brief piratical career was induced by politics rather than
a criminal taste. He and his men were royalists, it was said, and,
siding with Andros in the colonial quarrels, meant to draw out of
Boston Harbor for their pursuit the royal frigate Rose which the
colonists were holding there. But if that were their game, it was
spoiled by the sending out of the Province sloop under Captain
Pease and the genuine fight at Wood’s Hole. In any case the Salem
and New London boats they had looted were not disposed, probably, to
distinguish them from pirates.
A close perusal of the “Pirate’s Own Book,” published at Portland
in 1859, would no doubt reveal further adventures involving Cape
Cod; and in 1717, at any rate, there was an encounter with pirates
off the “Back Side” that was brought to a successful conclusion by
the wit of a Cape Cod seaman. The Whidah, Samuel Bellamy, captain,
of some two hundred tons burden with an equipment of twenty-three
guns and one hundred and thirty men, while cruising offshore had the
good fortune, which turned to ill, to take seven prizes. Seven prize
crews were put aboard to take the vessels to port there, presumably,
to sell them at a price. The master of one, seeing that his captors
were drunk, took his boat straight into Provincetown and gave the
pirate crew into custody. Nor was their chief to meet a better fate.
One of his prizes was a “snow,” and seeing a storm coming up, he
offered its skipper the boat intact if he would pilot the Whidah safe
around to Provincetown Harbor. The bargain struck, a lantern, as
guide, was hung in the snow’s rigging. Some say the skipper, trusting
to the lighter draft of his boat, ran her straight for shore, the
heavy pirate craft floundering after; another story has it that he
put out his mast-light and flung a burning tar-barrel overboard to
float ashore and lure the Whidah to her doom. Be that as it may, the
sequel was successful. The Whidah and two of her attendant ships
were dashed on shore near Nauset, and only two men of the crews, an
Englishman and an Indian, escaped drowning. As for the storm, it was
sufficiently heavy to furrow out the first Cape Cod Canal, the ocean
making a clean break across the Cape near the Orleans line, and “it
required a great turnout of the people and great efforts to close it
up.” Captain Cyprian Southack, sent from Boston to inspect the wreck
and landing on the bay shore, refers in his report to “the place
where I came through with a Whale Boat,” and adds that he buried “one
Hundred and Two Men Drowned.” Having buried the pirates, Southack
set a watch over their property, and had some complaint to make of
the inhabitants, who came from twenty miles around to share in the
spoils. As usual, there seems to have been a clash between government
and individual rights; but Southack advertising retribution for any
private profiteers, several cartloads of the stores were retrieved
and sent to Boston. And there is a story of the right pirate cast in
regard to a man “very singular and frightful” in aspect who, every
season for many years after, used to revisit the neighborhood of the
wreck. Taciturn and uncommunicative in his waking hours, his dreams
were perturbed as needs must be, and then such ribald and profane
words passed his lips as proved him in league with evil spirits with
whom he communed on past bloody deeds. Plainly he was the one English
survivor of the Whidah returned to the scene to dig for buried
treasure; and to prove the case, when he died a belt filled with gold
was found on his person.
In 1772 there was a pirate story less well authenticated which served
chiefly as a bone to worry between Tory and Whig. A schooner flying
signals of distress was boarded off Chatham, and the single seaman
found there, appearing “very much frightened,” said that armed men in
four boats had overhauled the craft and murdered the master, mate,
and a seaman; himself he had saved by hiding. He supposed the men,
he cunningly said, came from a royal cruiser, a story ridiculous
on the face of it. At any rate, a royal cruiser, the Lively, under
command of Montague, the admiral who had advised the two Truro
captains to undertake their whaling voyage to the Falklands, set
out in pursuit of a possible pirate, with no result; and the upshot
was that the whole story was suspected to be an invention of the
survivor to conceal his own guilt. The jury sitting in the case
disagreed, and in the fevered state of public opinion, it was used
in mutual recriminations by Whig and Tory: the Whigs contending that
the English navy had committed the footless outrage, the Tories, more
reasonably, that the seaman was a liar and murderer. But controversy
could not restore the dead, who had all hailed from Chatham.
The Cape, as it reached out for its share in the commerce that
developed after the Revolution, was as intimately concerned in
pirate adventures off the Spanish Main as it might have been in Cape
Cod Bay. By 1822 our shipping was so harried by pirates in those
southern seas that the Government sent out armed boats to protect our
merchantmen, among them the sloop-of-war Alligator. And a story,
in which the Alligator is concerned, typical of many another of the
time, is told by one of the last of the old Cape Cod sea-captains who
died some twenty years ago. He sailed, as cabin boy, for the Spanish
Main in the brig Iris commanded by a Brewster man and carrying a crew
of eleven and one passenger. As the Iris neared the Antilles, two
suspicious ships were sighted, and suspicion turned to certainty when
they hoisted the red flag, put out their “sweeps,” and one pirate
made for the Iris, the other for a Yankee schooner Matanzas-bound.
The Iris was no clipper, and was quickly brought to by a shot over
her bow. The passenger and captain had meantime gone down to the
cabin to hide their valuables; and the cabin boy also, he tells
us, “went down and took from my chest a little wallet, with some
artificial flowers under a crystal on its front, in which were three
dollars in paper money and a few coppers. This I hid in the bo’sun’s
locker and went on deck again.” The lapse of seventy years had not
dimmed his memory of the precious wallet.
The pirate ship, bristling with guns, was now alongside, her deck
crowded with men dressed in white linen and broad straw hats, quite
like Southern gentlemen, and soon a yawl filled with men armed to the
teeth put off from her side. The Iris, with forced courtesy, lowered
a gangway for their reception, and six of the strangers climbed on
deck. Their leader inquired of the cargo, and was told that the Iris
was practically in ballast.
“Have you any provisions to spare? We’re a privateer out for pirates.
Seen any?” asked the officer.
“No,” answered the captain, looking him in the eye. “I can let you
have some salt beef and pork.”
The play at civility was soon ended, the ship searched, and the
stranger, reappearing on deck dressed out in the captain’s best
clothes, cried jovially: “Well, sirs, we’re pirates, and you’re our
prisoners.”
The Iris under her new command tacked back and forth toward the
shore, and the prize crew found some rum for their refreshment, and
thought, by threatening the cabin boy, to find treasure concealed in
the ship. Trembling, he climbed up to the locker, and produced his
wallet, but so far from being placated by this offering one pirate
knocked him down and made as if to skewer him with a cutlass, while
another vowed to throw him overboard. Then they ordered him off to
bed, and he crept into the sailroom. Next morning all were called
up to man ship, and captor and prize beat down the coast to “Point
Jaccos” where the boats lay-to and the pirates spent the night in
drinking and the Yankees in keeping out of their way. The captain
and the cabin boy hid under the longboat. In the morning they put
into a bay, a true pirate rendezvous, with mangroves growing down to
the water’s edge. The cargo was transferred to the pirate ship, and
their captain, boarding the Iris, ordered his officer to get money
from the Yankees or kill all hands and burn the brig. But the Yankees
understood his Spanish, and Captain Mayo, averring still that he had
no money aboard, offered if the pirates would send him into Matanzas
to return with any ransom they should name.
“Very good,” said the pirate. “I give you three days. If you aren’t
back then with six thousand dollars, I’ll kill all the crew and fire
the brig.”
Then they gave him back his best clothes and his watch, and put him
aboard a passing fishing-smack with orders to land him at Matanzas.
There he was not too generously received, and all but despairing of
help, as he walked on the quay next morning he spied an American
man-of-war coming in—a schooner with fourteen guns and well manned—in
short, the Alligator. Captain Mayo aboard, the Alligator put
about, and on the morning of the third day, with no time to spare,
sighted the pirate rendezvous and four vessels at anchor, the two
pirates, the Iris, and the schooner that had been Matanzas-bound,
her fellow-prisoner. The pirates were brave fighters of unarmed
men, but had no taste for warships. At sight of the Alligator, the
men on one boat fired a gun to warn their comrades on the prizes,
took to their sweeps and made off to sea. The Yankees on the Iris
had been confined in fo’c’s’le and cabin, and were awaiting with
some perturbation the dawn of the third day that was to bring them
Captain Mayo and the ransom or death, when they were startled by a
cannon shot that was succeeded by a stillness above decks. Rushing
up, they saw their captors making off, the first pirate schooner
showing a clean pair of heels well out at sea, the second rounding
the harbor point with three boats in chase. The sun rode high in the
heavens, the sea was like glass, and it seems that Lieutenant Allen,
of the Alligator, unable to handle his vessel in the calm and eager
to secure at least one of the pirates, had attacked from his small
boats, with disastrous results. The pirate escaped, he himself was
mortally wounded, several of his men were wounded, and a retreat was
ordered to the Alligator, which withdrew, Captain Mayo and the ransom
still aboard, without further casualties. But the second pirate craft
remained, a speck to the sight, at the head of the bay, and as the
cabin boy was pouring coffee for the meal that had been laid on the
quarter-deck, a boat was seen to put off from her and pull toward
the Iris. The Iris hailed her sister captive, the Matanzas schooner,
which begged her to take off the crew when they would make common
cause against the pirate. Nothing was more certain than that the boat
that swiftly drew nearer was intent on their destruction. The first
mate of the Iris and one sailor jumped into a boat and, pulling for
the schooner, took off her crew, but instead of returning, made for
the shore. Now, indeed, all seemed lost for the hapless men and the
boy aboard the Iris. He and the sailors fled for the hold, while on
deck the second mate and the passenger awaited what should come. The
pirates, once aboard, slashed at the mate and threw him overboard,
the sailors were haled on deck and forced to run for their lives,
forward and aft, the pirates cutting at them as they ran. Poor
Crosby, the mate, half drowned and weak from loss of blood, clambered
aboard again, sank down on the windlass, and gasped out: “Now,
then, kill me if you like.” Perhaps thinking him worth a ransom, the
pirates ordered him into their small boat alongside.
Meantime the boy, half dead with terror, had stowed himself away in a
corner of the hold; nor was his terror lessened at the appearance of
a pirate, cutlass in hand, slashing right and left in the darkness.
He was about to cry for mercy when the man gave up his search; and
an old sailor, who had been pals with the boy, now advised him to go
boldly on deck as the pirates were sure to have him in the end, and
in any case were likely to burn the brig. No sooner was he there than
the pirates began a cruel game, making a circle about him, cutting
at him with their swords, some crying to kill him, others to let him
go, he was only a boy. They called for powder; he told them there
was none. They called for fire; he told them he could get none. They
threw a demijohn at him and told him to fetch them water. They knew
well they had finished the rum. As the boy went below, he met his old
sailor, who, offering to fetch the water, turned back, and was seen
no more. The boy, reappearing, was ordered into the boat where the
wounded mate, the passenger, and the sailors were already seated,
the pirate muskets piled up astern, and a pirate standing there on
guard. The mate, seeing his chance, heaved the pirate overboard, and
pushed off. The pirates on deck pelted the boat with anything at
hand, but the Yankees had all their firearms. And Crosby, seizing a
musket, cried: “There, damn you, throw away!” The Yankees bent to
their oars. “Are we all here?” cried Crosby to his men. But the old
sailor who had gone to get the water was missing. They pulled up at a
safe distance, hoping in vain that he might jump overboard, and then,
when needs must, made for Matanzas, rowing along shore to provide
for escape in case of pursuit, a distance they supposed of some
thirty-five miles. A freshening breeze favored them, and by nightfall
they made the harbor, rowing in with muffled oars as they wished to
avoid Spanish vessels there and the fort. They were soon hailed by
a friendly English voice, clambered aboard ship, the captain there
got out his medicine chest and dressed their wounds, the sailors
spread their mattresses on deck, and the refugees “lay down to such
peace and rest,” said the cabin boy, “as you may well appreciate.”
As for the ill-fated Alligator, having returned to Matanzas with her
dead and wounded, she was ordered to Charlestown with the boats she
had captured on her cruise, and the second night out grounding on a
Florida reef, which has been named for her, was lost. The captain of
the Iris, in the general settlement at the home port, bought for each
of his crew, as a memento of their adventure, a pirate musket and a
pirate sword.
Cape Cod sailors were in like degree, and with varying success,
using their wits to elude pirates of the farther seas, swift Chinese
lorchas, and low-hung craft in the Malay Straits. A Truro captain,
commanding the Southern Cross, was shot by pirates in the China Sea
in the presence of his wife. A Falmouth whaling captain, by his skill
and coolness, saved his men from massacre by natives of the Marshall
Islands. A Dennis captain, in 1820, had been murdered by pirates off
Madeira. Another Dennis captain, of the barque Lubra, lost his life
as late as 1865, when, one day out of Hong Kong, he was overhauled
by so large a force of pirates that resistance was hopeless. Some of
the crew took to the rigging, and two of them were shot there; others
jumped overboard and were picked up by the pirates, who boarded the
barque and proceeded to ransack her. The captain, whom they found
in the cabin with his wife and child, they shot dead. Then, having
stolen all valuables, destroyed the boats and nautical instruments,
and set fire to the ship, they made off, leaving the crew to their
fate. But with true Cape Cod pluck, the survivors of the tragedy
managed to save the ship and somehow navigated her back to Hong Kong.
They were now sailing seas the world over, these Cape Cod men:
farmers, fishermen, whalers as they had been, they were manning
merchant ships that were carrying the American flag into every port.
Yet from the first they had furnished some seamen for the traders:
for as early as 1650, it is said, both at Saint Christopher’s and
Barbadoes, “New England produce was in great demand”; and Gorhams and
Dimmocks of Barnstable had acquired fortunes in the coasting and West
Indies trade. An interesting little industry, in addition to fishing
on the Banks, was carried on by a few boats that were fitted out to
go to the Labrador coast to collect, on the rocky islands offshore,
feathers and eider-down for the Cape Cod housewives. There, in the
nesting-season, were held great battues, when the birds were killed
wholesale with clubs or brooms made of spruce branches. Rich tells
us that the sack that left home filled with straw returned filled
with down for bed and pillows, “the latter called ‘pillow bears,’
and apostrophized by the old people as ‘pille’bers.’” Mountainous
beds of feathers or down were then in order, and “boys used to joke
about rigging a jury-mast and rattle down the shrouds to climb into
bed.” Two Barnstable men, we know, coopers and farmers by trade, went
on some of these “feather voyages,” which, however, were not long
continued, as the merciless slaughter made the birds wary of their
old haunts.
As early as 1717 hundreds of ships in the year were clearing from
Boston and Salem for Newfoundland and “British plantations on the
continent,” for “foreign plantations,” and the West Indies and the
Bay of Campeachy, for European ports and Madeira and the Azores.
And when all Europe was exhausted by the Napoleonic struggle, the
United States, neutral and safe three thousand miles away, snapped
up the carrying trade of the world; from fish cargoes for the hungry
combatants the transition was easy to more varied commodities. Their
own wars, French and English, had been good training schools for men
of enterprise, and immediately the Cape Cod sailors were to prove
their mettle in this new era of adventure. They bought shares in
the ships they sailed, and profited, and bought more. Some of them,
shrewd traders by instinct, gave up the sea for an office ashore,
and as East India merchants laid the secure foundation of more than
one snug urban fortune that survives to-day.