_Mayflower’s_ crew, climbing a high tree to see how the land lay, saw
shining before him a blue sheet of water which he took to be the ocean,
and this was called after him “Billington’s Sea.” Following the shore of
this lake, through the leafy paths of Morton’s Park, we come upon the
source of the famous Town Brook, which with its honorable record of two
centuries’ supply of alewives has always played an important part in the
town’s annals, helping to grind the Pilgrims’ first grists in 1636, and
now lending its busy aid in turning complicated machinery. In the
fields on either side--the hunting-grounds of the banished race who once
rejoiced in their possession--are still found the beautifully worked
Indian arrow-heads and hatchets; here the smoke arose from their
wigwams; here they often paddled past in their swift canoes, and here,
perhaps, were shot the five deer that formed their offering in the first
New England Thanksgiving.
[Illustration: THE GRAVE OF DR. FRANCIS LE BARRAN, THE NAMELESS
NOBLEMAN.]
But the manifold charms of Plymouth and Plymouth Woods must be seen and
felt on the soil whence they sprung! So in the hope that the “Courteous
Reader” to whom they are still unfamiliar may care to verify this
truthful statement, we leave in brief and imperfect outline this story
of the Old Colony, whither “they wente weeping and carried precious
seeds; but they shall returne with joye and bring their sheaves.”
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
CAPE COD TOWNS
FROM PROVINCETOWN TO FALMOUTH
BY KATHARINE LEE BATES
“Cape Cod,” wrote Thoreau, “is the bared and bended arm of
Massachusetts; the shoulder is at Buzzard’s Bay; the elbow, or
crazy-bone, at Cape Mallebarre; the wrist at Truro; and the sandy fist
at Provincetown--behind which the State stands on her guard.”
This sandy fist curls toward the wrist in such fashion as to form a
semicircular harbor, famous as the New World haven which first gave
shelter to the _Mayflower_ and her sea-worn company. On the 21st of
November (by our modern reckoning), 1620, the Pilgrims, after their two
bleak months of ocean, cast anchor here, rejoicing in the sight and
smell of “oaks, pines, juniper, sassafras and other sweet wood.” Here
they signed their memorable compact, forming themselves into a “civil
body politic” and covenanting with one another, as honest Englishmen, to
“submit to such government and governors as we should by common consent
agree to make and choose.” Upon the adoption of this simple and
significant constitution, the Pilgrim Fathers, still on board the
_Mayflower_ in Provincetown harbor, proceeded to set in motion the
machinery of their little republic, for “after this,” wrote Bradford,
“they chose, or rather confirmed, Mr. John Carver (a man godly and well
approved amongst them) their Governor for one year.” That same day a
scouting party went ashore and brought back a fragrant boatload of red
cedar for firewood, with a goodly report of the place.
These stout-hearted Pilgrims were not the first Europeans to set foot on
Cape Cod. Legends of the Vikings which drift about the low white dunes
are as uncertain as the shifting sands themselves, and the French and
Florentine navigators who sailed along the North American coast in the
first half of the sixteenth century may have done no more than sight
this sickle of land between sea and bay, but there are numerous records
of
[Illustration: THE BEACH, FALMOUTH.]
English, French and Dutch visits within the last twenty years before the
coming of the _Mayflower_. It may be that no less a mariner than Sir
Francis Drake was the first of the English to tread these shores, but
that distinction is generally allowed to Captain Bartholomew Gosnold,
who made harbor here in 1602 and was “so pestered with codfish” that he
gave the Cape the name, “which,” said Cotton Mather, “it will never lose
till shoals of codfish be seen swimming upon the tops of its highest
hills.” Gosnold traded with the Indians for furs and sassafras root, and
was followed the next year by Martin Pring, seeking a cargo of this
latter commodity, then held precious in pharmacy. Within the next four
years three French explorers touched at the Cape, and a French colony
was projected, but came to nothing. The visit of Henry Hudson, too, left
no traces. In 1614 that rover of land and sea, Captain John Smith, took
a look at Cape Cod, which impressed him only as a headland of hills of
sand, overgrown with scrubby pines, hurts [huckleberries] and such
trash, but an excellent harbor for all weathers.” After Smith’s
departure, Hunt, his second in command, enticed a group of Nauset
Indians on
[Illustration: From map of Massachusetts, copyrighted by Geo. H. Walker
& Co., Boston, Mass.
MAP OF CAPE COD SECTION]
shipboard, carried them off, and sold them into slavery at Malaga,
Spain, for twenty pounds a man. As a consequence of this crime, the
Indians grew suspicious and revengeful, but nevertheless an irregular
trade was maintained with them by passing vessels, until the pestilence
that raged among the red men of the region from 1616 to 1619 interrupted
communication.
The Pilgrims tarried in Provincetown harbor nearly a month. The compact
had been signed, anchor dropped and the reconnoissance made on a
Saturday. The Sunday following, the first Pilgrim Sabbath in America,
was devoutly kept with prayer and praise on board the _Mayflower_, but
the next morning secular activities began. The men carried ashore the
shallop which had been brought over in sections between-decks and
proceeded to put it together, while the women bundled up the soiled
linen of the voyage and inaugurated the first New England Monday by a
grand washing on the beach. On Wednesday, Myles Standish mustered a
little army of sixteen men, each armed with musket, sword and corselet,
and led them gallantly up the wooded cape, “thorou boughes and bushes,”
nearly as far as the present town of Wellfleet. After two days the
explorers returned with no worse injury than briar-scratched armor,
bringing word of game and water-springs, ploughed land and
burial-mounds. William Bradford showed the noose of the deer-trap, a
“very pretie devise,” that had caught him by the leg, and two of the
sturdiest Pilgrims bore, slung on a staff across their shoulders, a
kettle of corn. As the few natives whom the party had met fled from
them, the corn had been taken on credit from a buried hoard. The
following year that debt was scrupulously paid, but a custom had been
established which still prevails with certain summer residents on the
Cape, who are said to make a practice of leaving their grocery bills
over until the next season.
As soon as the shallop could be floated, a larger expedition was sent by
water along the south coast to seek a permanent settlement. Through wind
and snow the Pilgrim Fathers made their way up to Pamet River, in Truro,
the limit of the earlier journey. They did not succeed in agreeing upon
a fit site for the colony, but they sought out the corn deposit and,
breaking the frozen ground with their swords, secured ten bushels more
of priceless seed for the springtime. On the return of the second
expedition there was anxious discussion about the best course to pursue.
Some were for settling on the Cape and living by the fisheries, pointing
out, to emphasize their arguments, the whales that sported every day
about the anchored ship; but the Pilgrims were of agricultural habit and
tradition and had reason enough just then to be weary of the sea. The
situation was critical. “The heart of winter and unseasonable weather,”
wrote Bradford, “was come upon us.” The gradual slope of the beach made
it always necessary to “wade a bow-shoot or two” in going ashore from
the _Mayflower_, and these icy foot-baths were largely responsible for
the “vehement coughs” from which hardly one of the company was exempt.
Once more, on the 16th of December, the shallop started forth to find a
home for the Pilgrims. Ten colonists, including Carver, Bradford and
Standish, together with a few men of the ship’s crew, volunteered for
this service. It was so cold that the sleety spray glazed doublet and
jerkin “and made them many times like coats of iron.” The voyagers
landed within the present limits of Eastham or Orleans, where, hard by
the shore, a camp was roughly barricaded. One day passed safely in
exploration, but at dawn of the second, when, “after prayer,” the
English sat about their camp-fire at breakfast, “a great and strange
cry” cut the mist, and on the instant Indian arrows, headed with
deer-horn and eagles’ claws, whizzed about their heads. But little
Captain Standish was not to be caught napping. “Having a snaphance
ready,” he fired in direction of the war-whoop. His comrades supported
him manfully, their friends in the shallop, themselves beset, shouted
encouragement, and the savages, gliding back among the trees, melted
into “the dark of the morning.” After this taste of Cape Cod courtesy,
the Pilgrim Fathers can hardly be blamed for taking to their shallop
again and plunging on, in a stiff gale, through the toppling waves,
until, with broken rudder and mast split in three, they reached a refuge
in the harbor of Plymouth.
When the adventurers returned to the _Mayflower_ with glad tidings that
a resting-place was found at last, the historian of the party, William
Bradford, had to learn that during his absence his wife had fallen from
the vessel’s side and perished in those December waters. Three more of
the colonists died in that first haven, and there little Peregrine White
began his earthly peregrinations. In view of all these occurrences,--the
signing of the compact in Provincetown harbor, the first landing of the
Pilgrims on the tip of Cape Cod, the explorations, the first deaths and
the first birth,--it would seem that Provincetown is fairly entitled to
a share of those historic honors which are lavished, none too freely,
but, perhaps, too exclusively, upon Plymouth.
When the _Mayflower_ sailed away, carrying William Bradford and his
tablets, the beautiful harbor and its circling shores were left to a
long period of obscurity. Fishers, traders and adventurers of many
nations came and went on their several errands, but these visits left
little trace. The Plymouth colonists, meanwhile, did not forget their
first landing-point, but returned sometimes, in the fishing season, for
cod, bass and mackerel, always claiming full rights of ownership. This
claim rested not only on their original brief occupation, but on formal
purchase from the Indians, in 1654, or earlier, the payment being “2
brasse kettles six coates twelve houes 12 axes 12 knives and a box.” In
process of time, as the
[Illustration: PROVINCETOWN.]
English settlers gradually pushed down the Cape, a few hovels and
curing-sheds rose on the harbor shore, but the land was owned by
Plymouth Colony until Massachusetts succeeded to the title. These
Province Lands were made a district, in the charge of Truro, in 1714,
but in 1727 the “Precinct of Cape Cod” was set off from Truro, and
established, under the name of Provincetown, as a separate township. It
was even then merely a fishing-hamlet, with a fluctuating population,
which by 1750 had almost dwindled away. In Revolutionary times, it had
only a score of dwelling-houses, and its two hundred inhabitants were
defenseless before the British, whose men-of-war rode proudly in the
harbor. One of these, the _Somerset_, while chased by a French fleet on
the Back Side, as the Atlantic coast of the Cape is called, struck on
Peaked Hill bars, and the waves, taking part with the rebels, flung the
helpless hulk far up the beach. Stripped by “a plundering gang” from
Provincetown and Truro, the frigate lay at the mercy of the sands, and
they gradually hid her even from memory; but the strong gales and high
tides of 1886 tore that burial-sheet aside, and brought the blackened
timbers again to the light of day. The grim old ship, tormented by
relic-hunters, peered out over the sea, looking from masthead to
masthead for the Union Jack, and, disgusted with what she saw, dived
once more under her sandy cover, where the beach-grass now grows over
her.
Since the Revolution, Provincetown has steadily progressed in numbers
and prosperity, until to-day, with over four thousand five hundred
inhabitants, it is the banner town of the Cape. During this period of
development, the Province Lands, several thousand acres in extent,
naturally became a subject of dispute. Old residents had fallen into a
way of buying and selling the sites on which they had built homes and
stores, as if the land were theirs in legal ownership. Five years ago,
however, the General Court virtually limited State ownership to the
waste tracts in the north and west of the township, leaving the
squatters in possession of the harbor-front. “The released portion of
the said lands,” stated the Harbor and Land Commissioners in their
report of 1893, “is about 955 acres and includes the whole inhabited
part of the town of Provincetown.”
The present Provincetown is well worth a journey. From High Pole Hill,
a bluff seventy feet high in the rear of the populated district, one
gazes far out over blue waters, crossed with cloud-shadows and flecked
with fishing-craft. Old sea-captains gather here with spy-glasses to
make out the shipping; bronzed sailor-boys lie in the sun and troll
snatches of song; young mothers of dark complexion and gay-colored dress
croon lullabies, known in Lisbon and Fayal, over sick babies brought to
the hilltop for the breezy air; the very parrot that a black-eyed urchin
guards in a group of admiring playmates talks “Portugee.” Leaning over
the railing, one looks down the bushy slope of the bluff to the curious
huddle of houses at its base. Out from the horseshoe bend of shore, run
thin tongues of wharf and jetty. Front Street follows the water-line, a
seaport variety of outfitting stores and shops, mingled with hotels,
fish-flakes, shipyards and the like, backing on the beach, with the
dwelling-houses opposite facing the harbor-view. Back Street copies the
curve of Front, and the two are joined by queer, irregular little
crossways, that take the abashed wayfarer close under people’s windows
and along the very borders of their gardens and poultry-yards. Although
nearly all of the buildings stand on one or the other of these main
streets, there are bunches and knots of houses in sheltered places,
looking as if the blast had blown them into accidental nooks. In general
these houses are built close and low, tucked in under one another’s
elbows, but here and there an independent cottage thrusts its
sharp-roofed defiance into the very face of the weather.
[Illustration: WHARVES AT PROVINCETOWN.]
Up and down the sandy knolls behind the streets straggle populous
graveyards, where one may read the fortunes of Provincetown more
impressively, if less precisely, than in the census reports. Where the
goodly old Nathaniels and Shubaels and Abrahams and Jerushas rest, a
certain decorum of green sodding and white headstone is maintained,
despite the irreligious riot of the winds. The Catholic burial-ground,
too, is not uncared for in its Irish portion. Marble and granite
monuments implore “Lord have mercy on the soul” of some Burke or Ryan or
McCarty, but the Portuguese, wanderers from the Cape Verde Islands and
the Azores, sleep the sleep of strangers, with no touch of tenderness or
beauty about their dreary lodging. Only here and there a little Jacinto
or Manuel or Antone has his short mound set about with fragments of
clam-shell, as if in children’s play. Some lots are enclosed, the black
posts with rounded tops looking like monastic sentries, and a few
headboards, with the painted name already rain-washed out of
recognition, lean away from the wind. In the centre of this gaunt
graveyard, where the roaring Atlantic storms tear up even the coarse
tufts of beach-grass, a great gray cross of wood, set in a hill of
sand, spreads weather-beaten arms. The guardianship of the Church and
the fellowship of the sea these Portuguese fisherfolk brought with them,
and as yet America has given them nothing dearer.
The Portuguese constitute a large proportion of the foreign element in
Barnstable County, where nearly nine tenths of the people are of English
descent. The protruding tip of Cape Cod easily catches such ocean drift
as these Western Islanders, and they have made their way as far up the
Cape as Falmouth, where they watch their chance to buy old homesteads at
low rates. They are natural farmers and even in Harwich and Truro divide
their labors between sea and land. But it is in Provincetown that these
swart-faced strangers most do congregate, gardening wherever a garden is
possible, tending the fish-weirs, working, when herring are plenty, in
the canning factories, and almost monopolizing the fresh fishing
industry. Even those who are most thrifty, building homes and buying
vessels, wear the look of aliens, and some, when their more active years
are over, gather up their savings and return to the Azores; but the
raven-haired girls are beginning to listen to Yankee wooers, and the
next century may see the process of amalgamation well under way. Already
these new Pilgrims have tasted so much of the air of freedom as to wax a
little restive under the authority of their fiery, devoted young priest,
who upbraids them with his last expletive for their shortcomings as
energetically as he aids them with his last dollar in their distress.
In the general aspect of the port, it is as true to-day as when, in
1808, the townspeople petitioned for a suspension of the embargo, that
their interest is “almost totally in fish and vessels.” A substantial
citizen keeps his boat as naturally as an inlander would keep his
carriage. Any loiterer on the street can lend a hand with sweep-seine or
jibstay, but the harnessing of a horse is a mystery known to few. In
1819, there was but one horse owned in Provincetown, and that “an old,
white one with one eye.” In point of fact, however, the fortunes of
Provincetown seem to demand, at present, some further support than the
fisheries. It is believed that, by dint of capital, labor and
irrigation, more could be gained from the soil, and that the advantages
of the place as a summer resort might be developed. The whaling business
has greatly declined
[Illustration: PROVINCETOWN IN 1839.
FROM AN OLD DRAWING.]
since the discovery of petroleum, the mackerel have forsaken their old
haunts, and even cod-fishing, in which Provincetown long stood second to
Gloucester, is on the wane. Wharves and marine railways are falling into
ruin, and the natives of the old Cape seek a subsistence in Western
ranches and crowded cities, leaving their diminished home industries to
the immigrants. Still twoscore or so of vessels go to the Grand Banks,
and as many more engage in the fresh fishing. Emulous tales do these
fishermen tell of quick trips and large catches, for example the clipper
_Julia Costa_, under a Portuguese skipper, which set sail at six in the
morning for fishing-grounds about fifteen miles northeast of Highland
Light, took fifteen thousand pounds of cod, and arrived at her Boston
moorings an hour before midnight. But the “fish-stories” told in
Provincetown are more often legends of the past, before the heroic days
of whaling went out with the invention of the explosive bomb
lance,--legends of fortunes made in oil and ambergris, of hair-breadth
escapes from the infuriated monsters, and especially of Moby Dick, the
veteran whale who, off the coast of Chili, defied mankind until the
whale-gun rolled him over at last, with twenty-three old harpoons rusted
in his body.
The foreign element in Provincetown is not all Portuguese. There is a
sprinkling of many nationalities, especially Irish, and, more numerous
yet, English and Scotch from the British provinces, while sailor-feet
from all over the globe tread the long plank-walk of Front Street. This
famous walk was built, after much wrangling, from the town’s share of
the Surplus Revenue distributed by Andrew Jackson, and the story goes
that the more stiff-necked opponents of this extravagance refused their
lifetimes long to step upon the planks, and plodded indignantly through
the sandy middle of the road. Upon this chief thoroughfare stand
several churches, looking seaward. Sailors in these waters used to steer
by the meeting-house steeples, which are frequent all along the Cape.
Some of those early churches now struggle on with meagre congregations,
and a few are abandoned, the wind whistling through the empty belfries.
Provincetown has a record of ancient strife between the Orthodox and the
Methodists. The established sect resented the intrusion of the new
doctrine to such a degree that they made a bonfire of the timber
designed for the Methodist building. The heretics effectively retaliated
by securing the key to the Orthodox meeting-house, locking out the
astonished owners, and taking permanent possession, triumphantly singing
Methodist hymns to the Orthodox bass-viol. It was thirty-two years
before the discomfited Orthodox rallied sufficiently to build themselves
another church.
Journeying from Provincetown, “perched out on a crest of alluvial sand,”
up the wrist of the Cape, one sees the land a-making. At first the loose
sand drifts like snow. Then the coarse marsh-grasses begin to bind and
hold it, low bushes mat their roots about it, and planted tracts of
pitch-pine give the shifting waste a real stability. The Pilgrims
found, they said,--but perhaps there was a Canaan dazzle in their
eyes,--their landing-place well wooded and the soil “a spit’s depth,
excellent black earth.” But now all sods and garden-ground must be
brought from a distance, and a mulberry or a sycamore, even the most
stunted apple-tree that squats and cowers from the wind, is a proud
possession. When President Dwight of Yale rode through Truro into
Provincetown a century ago, he was amazed at the sterility and bleak
desolation of the landscape, half hidden as it was by “the tempestuous
tossing of the clouds of sand.” He was told that the inhabitants were
required by law to plant every April bunches of beach-grass to keep the
sand from blowing. The national government, stirred by the danger to the
harbor, afterwards took the matter in hand. Between 1826 and 1838,
twenty-eight thousand dollars were expended in an attempt to strengthen
the harbor shores by beach-grass. Of late Massachusetts has become
aroused to the desolate condition of her Province Lands, and is making a
determined effort to redeem them by the planting of trees and by other
restorative measures. These blowing sand-dunes have, however, a strange
beauty of their own, and the color effects in autumn, given by the low
and ragged brush, are of the warmest.
“It was like the richest rug imaginable,” wrote Thoreau, “spread
over an uneven surface; no damask nor velvet, nor Tyrian dye or
stuffs, nor the work of any loom, could ever match it. There was
the incredibly bright red of the Huckleberry, and the reddish brown
of the Bayberry, mingled with the bright and living green of small
Pitch-Pines, and also the duller green of the Bayberry, Boxberry
and Plum, the yellowish green of the Shrub Oaks, and the various
golden and yellow and fawn-colored tints of the Birch and Maple and
Aspen,--each making its own figure, and, in the midst, the few
yellow sand-slides on the sides of the hills looked like the white
floor seen through rents in the rug.”
The sand has dealt most unkindly of all with Truro, choking up her
harbor, from which a fine fleet of mackerel vessels used to sail. No
longer is her rollicking fishing-song, apparently an inheritance from
Old England, lifted on the morning breeze: