Having walked about eight miles since we struck the beach, and passed
the boundary between Wellfleet and Truro, a stone post in the sand,--for
even this sand comes under the jurisdiction of one town or another,--we
turned inland over barren hills and valleys, whither the sea, for some
reason, did not follow us, and, tracing up a hollow, discovered two or
three sober-looking houses within half a mile, uncommonly near the
eastern coast. Their garrets were apparently so full of chambers that
their roofs could hardly lie down straight, and we did not doubt that
there was room for us there. Houses near the sea are generally low and
broad. These were a story and a half high; but if you merely counted the
windows in their gable-ends, you would think that there were many
stories more, or, at any rate, that the half-story was the only one
thought worthy of being illustrated. The great number of windows in the
ends of the houses, and their irregularity in size and position, here
and elsewhere on the Cape, struck us agreeably,--as if each of the
various occupants who had their _cunabula_ behind had punched a hole
where his necessities required it, and according to his size and
stature, without regard to outside effect. There were windows for the
grown folks, and windows for the children,--three or four apiece: as a
certain man had a large hole cut in his barn-door for the cat, and
another smaller one for the kitten. Sometimes they were so low under the
eaves that I thought they must have perforated the plate-beam for
another apartment, and I noticed some which were triangular, to fit that
part more exactly. The ends of the houses had thus as many muzzles as a
revolver; and if the inhabitants have the same habit of staring out of
the windows that some of our neighbors have, a traveller must stand a
small chance with them.
Generally, the old-fashioned and unpainted houses on the Cape looked
more comfortable, as well as picturesque, than the modern and more
pretending ones, which were less in harmony with the scenery, and less
firmly planted.
These houses were on the shores of a chain of ponds, seven in number,
the source of a small stream called Herring River, which empties into
the Bay. There are many Herring Rivers on the Cape: they will, perhaps,
be more numerous than herrings soon. We knocked at the door of the first
house, but its inhabitants were all gone away. In the mean while we saw
the occupants of the next one looking out of the window at us, and
before we reached it an old woman came out and fastened the door of her
bulkhead, and went in again. Nevertheless, we did not hesitate to knock
at her door, when a grizzly-looking man appeared, whom we took to be
sixty or seventy years old. He asked us, at first, suspiciously, where
we were from, and what our business was; to which we returned plain
answers.
"How far is Concord from Boston?" he inquired.
"Twenty miles by railroad."
"Twenty miles by railroad," he repeated.
"Didn't you ever hear of Concord of Revolutionary fame?"
"Didn't I ever hear of Concord? Why, I heard the guns fire at the Battle
of Bunker Hill." (They hear the sound of heavy cannon across the Bay.)
"I am almost ninety: I am eighty-eight year old. I was fourteen year old
at the time of Concord Fight,--and where were you then?"
We were obliged to confess that we were not in the fight.
"Well, walk in, we'll leave it to the women," said he.
So we walked in, surprised, and sat down, an old woman taking our hats
and bundles, and the old man continued, drawing up to the large,
old-fashioned fireplace,--
"I am a poor good-for-nothing crittur, as Isaiah says; I am all broken
down this year. I am under petticoat-government here."
The family consisted of the old man, his wife, and his daughter, who
appeared nearly as old as her mother,--a fool, her son, (a
brutish-looking, middle-aged man, with a prominent lower face, who was
standing by the hearth when we entered, but immediately went out,) and a
little boy of ten.
While my companion talked with the women, I talked to the old man. They
said that he was old and foolish, but he was evidently too knowing for
them.
"These women," said he to me, "are both of them poor good-for-nothing
critturs. This one is my wife. I married her sixty-four years ago. She
is eighty-four years old, and as deaf as an adder, and the other is not
much better."
He thought well of the Bible,--or at least he _spoke_ well, and did not
_think_ ill, of it, for that would not have been prudent for a man of
his age. He said that he had read it attentively for many years, and he
had much of it at his tongue's end. He seemed deeply impressed with a
sense of his own nothingness, and would repeatedly exclaim,--
"I am a nothing. What I gather from my Bible is just this: that man is a
poor good-for-nothing crittur, and everything is just as God sees fit
and disposes."
"May I ask your name?" I said.
"Yes," he answered,--"I am not ashamed to tell my name. My name is ----.
My great-grandfather came over from England and settled here."
He was an old Wellfleet oysterman, who had acquired a competency in that
business, and had sons still engaged in it.
Nearly all the oyster-shops and stands in Massachusetts, I am told, are
supplied and kept by natives of Wellfleet, and a part of this town is
still called Billingsgate, from the oysters having been formerly planted
there; but the native oysters are said to have died in 1770. Various
causes are assigned for this, such as a ground frost, the carcasses of
black-fish kept to rot in the harbor, and the like; but the most common
account of the matter is,--and I find that a similar superstition with
regard to the disappearance of fishes exists almost everywhere,--that,
when Wellfleet began to quarrel with the neighboring towns about the
right to gather them, yellow specks appeared in them, and Providence
caused them to disappear. A few years ago sixty thousand bushels were
annually brought from the South and planted in the harbor of Wellfleet
till they attained "the proper relish of Billingsgate"; but now they are
imported commonly full-grown, and laid down near their markets, at
Boston and elsewhere, where the water, being a mixture of salt and
fresh, suits them better. The business was said to be still good and
improving.
The old man said that the oysters were liable to freeze in the winter,
if planted too high; but if it were not "so cold as to strain their
eyes," they were not injured. The inhabitants of New Brunswick have
noticed that "ice will not form over an oyster-bed, unless the cold is
very intense indeed; and when the bays are frozen over, the oyster-beds
are easily discovered by the water above them remaining unfrozen, or, as
the French residents say, _degèle_." Our host said that they kept them
in cellars all winter.
"Without anything to eat or drink?" I asked.
"Without anything to eat or drink," he answered.
"Can the oysters move?"
"Just as much as my shoe."
But when I caught him saying that they "bedded themselves down in the
sand, flat side up, round side down," I told him that my shoe could not
do that, without the aid of my foot in it; at which he said that they
merely settled down as they grew; if put down in a square, they would be
found so; but the clam could move quite fast. I have since been told by
oystermen of Long Island, where the oyster is still indigenous and
abundant, that they are found in large masses attached to the parent in
their midst, and are so taken up with their tongs; in which case, they
say, the age of the young proves that there could have been no motion
for five or six years at least. And Buckland, in his "Curiosities of
Natural History," (page 50,) says,--"An oyster, who has once taken up
his position and fixed himself when quite young, can never make a
change. Oysters, nevertheless, that have not fixed themselves, but
remain loose at the bottom of the sea, have the power of locomotion;
they open their shells to their fullest extent, and then suddenly
contracting them, the expulsion of the water forwards gives a motion
backwards. A fisherman at Guernsey told me that he had frequently seen
oysters moving in this way."
Some still entertain the question whether the oyster was indigenous in
Massachusetts Bay, and whether Wellfleet Harbor was a natural habitat of
this fish; but, to say nothing of the testimony of old oystermen, which,
I think, is quite conclusive, though the native oyster may now be
extinct there, I saw that their shells, opened by the Indians, were
strewn all over the Cape. Indeed, the Cape was at first thickly settled
by Indians on account of the abundance of these and other fish. We saw
many traces of their occupancy, after this, in Truro, near Great Hollow,
and at High-Head, near East-Harbor River,--oysters, clams, cockles, and
other shells, mingled with ashes and the bones of deer and other
quadrupeds. I picked up half a dozen arrow-heads, and in an hour or two
could have filled my pockets with them. The Indians lived about the
edges of the swamps, then probably in some instances ponds, for shelter
and water. Moreover, Champlain, in the edition of his "Voyages" printed
in 1613, says that in the year 1606 he and Poitrincourt explored a
harbor (Barnstable Harbor?) in the southerly part of what is now called
Massachusetts Bay, in latitude 42°, about five leagues south, one point
west of _Cap Blanc_, (Cape Cod,) and there they found many good oysters,
and they named it _Le Port aux Huistres_ (Oyster-Harbor). In one edition
of his map, (1632,) the "_R. aux Escailles_" is drawn emptying into the
same part of the Bay, and on the map "_Novi Belgii_" in Ogilby's
"America," (1670,) the words "_Port aux Huistres_" are set against the
same place. Also William Wood, who left New England in 1633, speaks, in
his "New England's Prospect," published in 1634, of "a great
oyster-bank" in Charles River, and of another in the Mystic, each of
which obstructed the navigation. "The oysters," he says, "be great ones,
in form of a shoe-horn; some be a foot long; these breed on certain
banks that are bare every spring-tide. This fish without the shell is so
big that it must admit of a division before you can well get it into
your mouth." Oysters are still found there. (See, also, Thomas Morton's
"New English Canaan," page 90.)
Our host told us that the sea-clam, or hen, was not easily obtained; it
was raked up, but never on the Atlantic side, only cast ashore there in
small quantities in storms. The fisherman sometimes wades in water
several feet deep, and thrusts a pointed stick into the sand before him.
When this enters between the valves of a clam, he closes them on it, and
is drawn out. The clam has been known to catch and hold coot and teal
which were preying on it. I chanced to be on the bank of the Acushnet at
New Bedford one day, watching some ducks, when a man informed me, that,
having let out his young ducks to seek their food amid the samphire
(_Salicornia_) and other weeds along the river-side at low tide that
morning, at length he noticed that one remained stationary amid the
weeds, something preventing it from following the others, and on going
to it he found its foot tightly shut in a quahaug'a shell. He took up
both together, carried them home, and his wife, opening the shell with
a knife, released the duck and cooked the quahaug. The old man said that
the great clams were good to eat, but that they always took out a
certain part, which was poisonous, before cooking them. "People said it
would kill a cat." I did not tell him that I had eaten a large one
entire that afternoon, but began to think that I was tougher than a cat.
He stated that peddlers came round there, and sometimes tried to sell
the women-folks a skimmer, but he told them that their women had got a
better skimmer than _they_ could make, in the shell of their clams; it
was shaped just right for this purpose. They call them "skim-alls" in
some places. He also said that the sun-squawl was poisonous to handle,
and when the sailors came across it, they did not meddle with it, but
hove it out of their way. I told him that I had handled it that
afternoon, and had felt no ill effects as yet. But he said it made the
hands itch, especially if they had previously been scratched,--or if I
put it into my bosom, I should find out what it was.
He informed us that ice never formed on the back side of the Cape, or
not more than once in a century, and but little snow lay there, it being
either absorbed or blown or washed away. Sometimes in winter, when the
tide was down, the beach was frozen, and afforded a hard road up the
back side for some thirty miles, as smooth as a floor. One winter, when
he was a boy, he and his father "took right out into the back side
before daylight, and walked to Provincetown and back to dinner."
When I asked what they did with all that barren-looking land, where I
saw so few cultivated fields,--
"Nothing," he said.
"Then why fence your fields?"
"To keep the sand from blowing and covering up the whole."
"The yellow sand," said he, "has some life in it, but the white little
or none."
When, in answer to his questions, I told him that I was a surveyor, he
said that those who surveyed his farm were accustomed, where the ground
was uneven, to loop up each chain as high as their elbows; that was the
allowance they made, and he wished to know if I could tell him why they
did not come out according to his deed, or twice alike. He seemed to
have more respect for surveyors of the old school, which I did not
wonder at. "King George the Third," said he, "laid out a road four rods
wide and straight the whole length of the Cape"; but where it was now he
could not tell.
This story of the surveyors reminded me of a Long-Islander, who once,
when I had made ready to jump from the bow of his boat to the shore, and
he thought that I underrated the distance and would fall short,--though
I found afterward that he judged of the elasticity of my joints by his
own,--told me, that, when he came to a brook which he wanted to get
over, he held up one leg, and then, if his foot appeared to cover any
part of the opposite bank, he knew that he could jump it. "Why," I told
him, "to say nothing of the Mississippi, and other small watery streams,
I could blot out a star with my foot, but I would not engage to jump
that distance," and asked how he knew when he had got his leg at the
right elevation. But he regarded his legs as no less accurate than a
pair of screw-dividers or an ordinary quadrant, and appeared to have a
painful recollection of every degree and minute in the arc which they
described; and he would have had me believe that there was a kind of
hitch in his hip-joint which answered the purpose. I suggested that he
should connect his two ankles by a string of the proper length, which
should be the chord of an arc measuring his jumping ability on
horizontal surfaces,--assuming one leg to be a perpendicular to the
plane of the horizon, which, however, may have been too bold an
assumption in this case. Nevertheless, this was a kind of geometry in
the legs which it interested me to hear of.
Our host took pleasure in telling us the names of the ponds, most of
which we could see from his windows, and making us repeat them after
him, to see if we had got them right. They were Gull Pond, (the largest
and a very handsome one, clear and deep, and more than a mile in
circumference,) Newcomb's, Swett's, Slough, Horse-Leech, Round, and
Herring Ponds,--all connected at high-water, if I do not mistake. The
coast-surveyors had come to him for their names, and he told them of one
which they had not detected. He said that they were not so high as
formerly. There was an earthquake about four years before he was born,
which cracked the pans of the ponds, which were of iron, and caused them
to settle. I did not remember to have read of this. Innumerable gulls
used to resort to them; but the large gulls were now very scarce, for,
as he said, the English robbed their nests far in the North, where they
breed. He remembered well when gulls were taken in the gull-house, and
when small birds were killed by means of a frying-pan and fire at night.
His father once lost a valuable horse from this cause. A party from
Wellfleet having lighted their fire for this purpose, one dark night, on
Billingsgate Island, twenty horses which were pastured there, and this
colt among them, being frightened by it, and endeavoring in the dark to
cross the passage which separated them from the neighboring beach, and
which was then fordable at low tide, were all swept out to sea and
drowned. I observed that many horses were still turned out to pasture
all summer on the islands and beaches in Wellfleet, Eastham, and
Orleans, as a kind of common. He also described the killing of what he
called "wild hens" here, after they had gone to roost in the woods, when
he was a boy. Perhaps they were "Prairie hens" (pinnated grouse).
He liked the beach pea, (_Lathyrus maritimus_,) cooked green, as well as
the cultivated. He had seen them growing very abundantly in
Newfoundland, where also the inhabitants ate them, but he had never been
able to obtain any ripe for seed. We read, under the head of Chatham,
that, "in 1555, during a time of great scarcity, the people about
Orford, in Sussex (England) were preserved from perishing by eating the
seeds of this plant, which grew there in great abundance on the
sea-coast. Cows, horses, sheep, and goats eat it." But the writer who
quoted this could not learn that they had ever been used in Barnstable
County.
He had been a voyager, then?
Oh, he had been about the world in his day. He once considered himself a
pilot for all our coast; but now, they had changed the names so, he
might be bothered.
He gave us to taste what he called the Summer Sweeting, a pleasant apple
which he raised, and frequently grafted from, but had never seen growing
elsewhere, except once,--three trees on Newfoundland, or at the Bay of
Chaleur, I forget which, as he was sailing by. He was sure that he could
tell the tree at a distance.
At length the fool, whom my companion called the wizard, came in,
muttering between his teeth, "Damn book-peddlers,--all the time talking
about books. Better do something. Damn 'em, I'll shoot 'em. Got a doctor
down here. Damn him, I'll get a gun and shoot him"; never once holding
up his head. Whereat the old man stood up and said in a loud voice, as
if he were accustomed to command, and this was not the first time he had
been obliged to exert his authority there,--"John, go sit down, mind
your business,--we've heard you talk before,--precious little you'll
do,--your bark is worse than your bite." But, without minding, John
muttered the same gibberish over again, and then sat down at the table
which the old folks had left. He ate all there was on it, and then
turned to the apples which his aged mother was paring, that she might
give her guests some apple-sauce for breakfast; but she drew them away,
and sent him off.
When I approached this house the next summer, over the desolate hills
between it and the shore, which are worthy to have been the birthplace
of Ossian, I saw the wizard in the midst of a cornfield on the
hillside, but, as usual, he loomed so strangely that I mistook him for a
scarecrow.
This was the merriest old man that we had ever seen, and one of the
best-preserved. His style of conversation was coarse and plain enough to
have suited Rabelais. He would have made a good Panurge. Or rather he
was a sober Silenus, and we were the boys Chromis and Mnasilus who
listened to his story.
"Not by Hæmonian hills the Thracian bard,
Nor awful Phoebus was on Pindus heard
With deeper silence or with more regard."
There was a strange mingling of past and present in his conversation,
for he had lived under King George, and might have remembered when
Napoleon and the moderns generally were born. He said that one day, when
the troubles between the Colonies and the mother-country first broke
out, as he, a boy of fifteen, was pitching hay out of a cart, one Doane,
an old Tory, who was talking with his father, a good Whig, said to him,
"Why, Uncle Bill, you might as well undertake to pitch that pond into
the ocean with a pitchfork as for the Colonies to undertake to gain
their independence." He remembered well General Washington, and how he
rode his horse along the streets of Boston, and he stood up to show us
how he looked.
"He was a r-a-ther large and portly-looking man, a manly and
resolute-looking officer, with a pretty good leg, as he sat on his
horse.--There, I'll tell you, this was the way with Washington." Then he
jumped up again, and bowed gracefully to right and left, making show as
if he were waving his hat. Said he, "_That_ was Washington."
He told us many anecdotes of the Revolution, and was much pleased when
we told him that we had read the same in history, and that his account
agreed with the written.
"Oh," he said, "I know, I know! I was a young fellow of sixteen, with my
ears wide open; and a fellow of that age, you know, is pretty wide
awake, and likes to know everything that's going on. Oh, I know!"
He told us the story of the wreck of the Franklin, which took place
there the previous spring: how a boy came to his house early in the
morning to know whose boat that was by the shore, for there was a vessel
in distress; and he, being an old man, first ate his breakfast, and then
walked over to the top of the hill by the shore, and sat down there,
having found a comfortable seat, to see the ship wrecked. She was on the
bar, only a quarter of a mile from him, and still nearer to the men on
the beach, who had got a boat ready, but could render no assistance on
account of the breakers, for there was a pretty high sea running. There
were the passengers all crowded together in the forward part of the
ship, and some were getting out of the cabin-windows and were drawn on
deck by the others.
"I saw the captain get out his boat," said he; "he had one little one;
and then they jumped into it, one after another, down as straight as an
arrow. I counted them. There were nine. One was a woman, and she jumped
as straight as any of them. Then they shoved off. The sea took them
back, one wave went over them, and when they came up there were six
still clinging to the boat: I counted them. The next wave turned the
boat bottom upward, and emptied them all out. None of them ever came
ashore alive. There were the rest of them all crowded together on the
forecastle, the other parts of the ship being under water. They had seen
all that happened to the boat. At length a heavy sea separated the
forecastle from the rest of the wreck, and set it inside of the worst
breaker, and the boat was able to reach them, and it saved all that were
left, but one woman."
He also told us of the steamer Cambria's getting aground on his shore a
few months before we were there, and of her English passengers who
roamed over his grounds, and who, he said, thought the prospect from the
high hill by the shore "the most delightsome they had ever seen," and
also of the pranks which the ladies played with his scoop-net in the
ponds. He spoke of these travellers, with their purses full of guineas,
just as our Provincial fathers used to speak of British bloods in the
time of King George III.
_Quid loquar?_ Why repeat what he told us?
"Aut Scyllam Nisi, quam fama secuta est,
Candida succinctam latrantibus inguina monstris,
Dulichias vexâsse rates, et gurgite in alto
Ah timidos nautas canibus lacerâsse marinis?"
In the course of the evening I began to feel the potency of the clam
which I had eaten, and I was obliged to confess to our host that I was
no tougher than the cat he told of; but he answered, that he was a
plain-spoken man, and he could tell me that it was all imagination. At
any rate, it proved an emetic in my case, and I was made quite sick by
it for a short time, while he laughed at my expense. I was pleased to
read afterward, in Mourt's Relation of the Landing of the Pilgrims in
Provincetown Harbor, these words:--"We found great muscles," (the old
editor says that they were undoubtedly sea-clams,) "and very fat and
full of sea-pearl; but we could not eat them, for they made us all sick
that did eat, as well sailors as passengers, ... but they were soon well
again." It brought me nearer to the Pilgrims to be thus reminded by a
similar experience that I was so like them. Moreover, it was a valuable
confirmation of their story, and I am prepared now to believe every word
of Mourt's "Relation." I was also pleased to find that man and the clam
lay still at the same angle to one another. But I did not notice
sea-pearl. Like Cleopatra, I must have swallowed it. I have since dug
these clams on a flat in the Bay, and observed them. They could squirt
full ten feet before the wind, as appeared by the marks of the drops on
the sand.
"Now I am going to ask you a question," said the old man, "and I don't
know as you can tell me; but you are a learned man, and I never had any
learning, only what I got by natur."--It was in vain that we reminded
him that he could quote Josephus to our confusion.--"I've thought, if I
ever met a learned man, I should like to ask him this question. Can you
tell me how _Axy_ is spelt, and what it means? _Axy_," says he; "there's
a girl over here is named _Axy_. Now what is it? What does it mean? Is
it Scriptur? I've read my Bible twenty-five years over and over, and I
never came across it."
"Did you read it twenty-five years for this object?" I asked.
"Well, _how_ is it spelt? Wife, how is it spelt?"