With his striped back--
Says he, reef in the mains’l, and haul on the tack,
For it’s windy weather,
It’s stormy weather,
And when the wind blows pipe all hands together--
For, upon my word, it’s windy weather.
“Up jumped the cod,
With his chuckle head--
And jumped into the main chains to heave at the lead,--
For it’s windy weather,” etc.
This town, the Indian Pamet, was formally settled in 1709 by a few
English purchasers from Eastham, having been occupied earlier only by
irresponsible fishermen and traders. The new planters took hold with
energy, waging war against blackbirds and crows, wolves and foxes, for
the protection of their little wealth in corn and cattle, while none the
less they dug clams, fished by line and net and watched from their
lookouts for offshore whales. The Cape plumes itself not a little upon
its early proficiency in whaling. In 1690, one Ichabod Paddock, whose
name might so easily have been Haddock, went from Yarmouth to Nantucket
“to instruct the people in the art of killing whales in boats from the
shore.” And when the sea-monster, thus maltreated, withdrew from its New
England haunts, the daring whalemen built ships and followed, cruising
the Atlantic and Pacific, even the Arctic and Antarctic oceans. But the
Revolution put a check on all our maritime enterprises. The Truro
fishermen, like the rest, laid by their harpoons, and melted up their
mackerel leads for bullets. From one village of twenty-three houses,
twenty-eight men gave up their lives for liberty. In religion, too,
Truro had the courage of her convictions, building the first Methodist
meeting-house on the Cape, the second in New England. The cardinal
temptation of Cape Cod is Sunday fishing, and Truro righteousness was
never put more sharply to the pinch than in 1834, when a prodigious
school of blackfish appeared off Great Hollow one autumnal Sabbath
morning. A number of Truro fishermen, from the Grand Banks and
elsewhere, were on their way home in boats from Provincetown, when the
shining shoulders of hundreds of the great fish were seen moving through
the waves. With fortunes in full view, a goodly number of these men
shifted into boats which rowed soberly for their destination, while the
rest, with eager outcry, rounded up the school, and drove the frightened
creatures, with shouts and blows from the oars, like sheep upon the
beach. Church-members who took part in the wild chase were brought to
trial, but a lurking sympathy in the hearts of their judges saved them
from actual expulsion.
This befell within the period of Truro’s highest prosperity. From 1830
to 1855 the wharves were crowded with sloops and schooners, a shipyard
was kept busy, and salt was made all along the shore. At the middle of
the century, the town had over two thousand inhabitants, but the number
has now fallen off by some three fifths. The “turtle-like sheds of the
salt-works,” which Thoreau noted, have been long since broken up and
sold for lumber. There is weir-fishing still, supplying fresh fish for
market and bait for the fishing-fleets of Provincetown and Gloucester.
Rods of the black netting may be seen spread over the poverty-grass to
dry.
Although the sand of Cape Cod is in some places three hundred feet deep,
there is believed to be a backbone of diluvian rock. There is a clay
vein, too, which slants across the Cape and crops out at Truro in the
so-called Clay Pounds, now crowned by Highland Light, shining two
hundred feet above the ocean. This hill of clay thus renders a sovereign
service to that dangerous stretch of navigation. It must be borne in
mind that Cape Cod runs out straight into the Atlantic for twoscore
miles, by the south measurement, and then,
[Illustration: HIGHLAND LIGHT.]
abruptly turning, juts up another forty to the north. The shifty
sand-bars of the Back Side have caught, twisted and broken the hulls of
innumerable craft. One gale of wind wrecked eighteen vessels between
Race Point, at the extremity of the Cape, and Highland Light. The
average width of our crooked peninsula is six miles, but at Truro it
narrows to half that distance. Across this strip the storms whirl the
flinty sand, until the humblest cottage may boast of ground-glass
window-panes. The coast outline is ever changing and the restless dunes
show the fantastic carvings of the wind. The houses cuddle down into the
wavy hollows, with driftwood stacked at their back doors for fuel, and
with worn-out fishnets stretched about the chicken-yards. Here and there
a pine-tree abandons all attempt at keeping up appearances and lies flat
before the blast. The ploughed fields are as white with sand as so many
squares of beach, and the sea-tang is strong in the air. Accustomed,
before their harbor failed them, to depend chiefly upon the sea for
subsistence, the people of Truro now find it no easy matter to wrest a
living from what they have of land. Everything is turned to account,
from turnips to
[Illustration: OYSTER POINT, WELLFLEET.]
mayflowers. Along those sand-pits of roads, bordered with thick beds of
pink-belled bear-berries, or where the dwarfish pines, their wizened
branches hung with gray tags of moss, yellow the knolls, are gathered
large quantities of sweetest, pinkest arbutus for the Boston market.
Wellfleet, which drew off from Eastham in 1763, has also fallen on evil
days. Perhaps the fishermen have overreached themselves with the greedy
seines. There is high controversy on this point between line-fishers and
weir-fishers, but the fact stands that fish are growing scarce.
Wellfleet had once her hundred vessels at the Banks, her
whaling-schooners, built in her own yards from her own timber, and beds
of oysters much prized by city palates. There was a time when forty or
fifty sail were busy every season transporting Wellfleet shell-fish to
Boston. “As happy as a clam” might then have been the device of
Wellfleet heraldry. But suddenly the oyster died and, although the beds
have been planted anew, the ancient fame has not been fully regained. A
town, too, many of whose citizens spent more than half their lives on
shipboard, was sure to suffer from our wars, peculiarly disastrous to
seafaring pursuits. Early in the Revolution, Wellfleet was constrained
to petition for an abatement of her war-tax, stating that her
whale-fishery, by which nine tenths of her people lived, was entirely
shut off by British gunboats, and that the shell-fish industries, on
which the remaining tenth depended, was equally at a standstill. In this
distress, as again in the Civil War, Cape Cod sailors took to
privateering and made a memorable record. Wellfleet, like Truro, has
lessened more than one half in population since 1850, but her shell
roads are better than the sand-ruts of her neighbor, and bicyclists and
other summer visitors are beginning to find her out. She has her own
melancholy charm of barrenness and desolation quite as truly as she has
her characteristic dainties of quahaug pie and fried-quahaug cakes. The
place abounds in dim old stories, from the colonial legend of the
minister’s deformed child, done to death by a dose from its father’s
hand, that child whose misshapen little ghost still flits, on moonlight
nights, about a certain rosebush, to the many-versioned tale of the
buccaneer, ever and anon seen prowling about that point on the Back Side
where Sam Bellamy’s pirate-ship was cast away, and stooping to gather
the coins flung up to him by the skeleton hands of his drowned
shipmates. A volume would not suffice for the stories of these Cape
towns. Their very calendar is kept by storms: as the Magee storm of
December, 1778, when the government brig _General Arnold_, commanded by
Captain James Magee, went down; or the Mason and Slidell storm of 1862,
when the Southern emissaries were brought from Fort Warren to
Provincetown, and there, amidst the protest of the elements, yielded up
to the British steamer _Rinaldo_; or the pitiless October gale of 1841,
when from Truro alone forty-seven men were swallowed by the sea.
[Illustration: BISHOP AND CLERK LIGHT, HYANNIS.]
The quiet little town of Eastham, originally “Nawsett,” settled in 1646,
only seven years after the three pioneers, Barnstable, Sandwich and
Yarmouth, has shared the hard fortunes of the lower Cape. With a remnant
of less than five hundred inhabitants, it finds, under the present
stress, a resource in asparagus, shipping a carload or two to Boston
every morning in the season. To this land industry the ocean consents to
contribute, the soil being dressed for “sparrowgrass” with seaweed and
shells. But no hardship can deprive Eastham of its history. After the
encounter between the Pilgrims and Indians here in 1620, the place was
not visited again until the following July, when Governor Bradford sent
from Plymouth a boatload of ten men to recover that young scapegrace,
John Billington. This boy, whose father, ten years after, was hanged by
the colonists for murder, had come near blowing up the _Mayflower_, in
Provincetown harbor, by shooting off a fowling-piece in her cabin, close
by an open keg of powder, and, later, must needs lose himself in
Plymouth woods. He had wandered into the territory of the Nausets, who,
although this was the tribe which had suffered from Hunt’s perfidy,
restored the lad unharmed to the English. The Nausets further proved
their friendliness by supplying the Pilgrims, in the starving time of
1622, with stores of corn and beans. But the following year, suspecting
an Indian plot against the colonists, Myles Standish, that “little
chimney soon on fire,” appeared upon the Cape in full panoply of war,
executed certain of the alleged conspirators and so terrified the rest
that many fled to the marshes and miserably perished.
[Illustration: OLD WINDMILL, EASTHAM.]
The traveller up the Cape notices still that Eastham has more of a land
look than the lower towns. The soil is darker, small stones appear, and
the trees, although still twisted to left and right, as if to dodge a
blow, are larger. The Indians had maize-fields there and the site seemed
so promising to the Pilgrims that talk sprang up in the early forties of
transferring the Plymouth colony thither. As a compromise, several of
the old-comers obtained a grant of the Nauset land, and established a
branch settlement, soon incorporated as a township. Promptly arose
their meeting-house, twenty feet square, with port-holes and a thatch.
They secured a full congregation by absence penalties of ten shillings,
a flogging or the stocks. One of these sturdy fathers in the faith,
Deacon Doane, is said to have lived to the patriarchal age of one
hundred and ten, rounding life’s circle so completely that at the end,
as at the beginning, he was helplessly rocked in a cradle.
Thoreau was amused over a provision made by the town of Eastham in 1662,
that “a part of every whale cast on shore be appropriated for the
support of the ministry,” and drew a fancy-picture of the old parsons
sitting on the sand-hills in the storms, anxiously watching for their
salaries to be rolled ashore over the bars of the Back Side. One of
these worthies, Rev. Samuel Treat, whose oratory outroared the stormy
surf, shares with Richard Bourne, of Sandwich, the memory of a true
pastoral care for the Cape Indians. He was, in return, so well beloved,
that, on his death, his wild converts dug a long passage through the
remarkably deep snowfall of the time, and bore him on their shoulders
down this white archway to his grave. The Revolutionary War was a heavy
drain on the resources of the staunch little town, but, with the
restoration of peace, whaling and all kinds of deep-sea fishing were
resumed, and a tide of prosperity set in. Salt-works were established,
and presently Eastham was able to afford such luxuries as a pulpit
cushion and a singing-school.
Orleans, set off in 1797 from the southerly portion of Eastham, has an
old-fashioned quaintness that is better than business prosperity. Sand
has partially closed the harbors, and the population has been dwindling
for the past half-century, but the ocean still serves old neighbors as
it can with quahaugs and the seaweed, now collected for paper-making.
The distinction of being the terminus of the French Atlantic Cable from
Brest is in keeping with the name Orleans--a unique instance of a
foreign title among these old Cape towns. The early settlers put by the
melodious Indian words, Succanessett, Mattacheeset, and the rest, and
substituted the dear home names from Devon, Cornwall, Norfolk and Kent.
The christening of Brewster, Bourne and Dennis honored severally the
Pilgrim elder, the Sandwich friend of the Indians and a Yarmouth pastor;
but these are of comparatively recent date. As Wellfleet and Orleans
have been cut, on north and south, out of the original Eastham, so were
Harwich, Chatham, Dennis, Brewster, once “within the liberties of
Yarmouth.”
The history of Yarmouth, too, is so closely allied to the histories of
Barnstable and of Sandwich, with her daughter Bourne, that the story of
all these may be told as one.
These three initial settlements on the Cape were recognized as townships
in 1639. From the outset, the difference in their locations imposed upon
them different tasks. Yarmouth, the elbow town of the Cape, bore the
brunt of wind and wave; Sandwich kept the border, notably in King
Philip’s War, when she guarded the faithful Cape Indians from temptation
and received for safe harborage English refugees from the ravaged
districts; and Barnstable, the aristocratic sister of the group, made
traditions, set examples and produced the Otis family. With Old
Yarmouth, the Cape widens. No longer do householders, as at Truro, own
land in strips from shore to shore. The soil, too, deepens, and the cows
need not with hungry noses brush away the drifted sand to find the
grass. On the Back Side is no marked change in aspect. Still pine grove
after pine grove adds flavor to the salt air, and where the carpet of
needles is trodden through, gleam patches of white sand. The strange
reappearance of the _Somerset_ is out-miracled in Old Ship Harbor,
where, in 1863, long after the significance of the name had been
forgotten, the hull of the _Sparrow-Hawk_, wrecked there in 1626, on her
way from London to Virginia, rose again to view. This portion of the
Cape is in excellent repute with pleasure-seekers, and the seaside
cottage is ubiquitous, especially in beautiful Chatham, whose
ever-changing shore takes the wildest raging of the surf. Harwich, which
has gone through the regular stages of whaling, codding,
mackerel-fishing and salt-making, cultivates in turn the summer boarder,
but somewhat quizzically. Retired sea-captains are not easily overawed
even by golf-sticks, and retired sea-captains, in Harwich, are as thick
as cranberries. Snuffing the brine, they pace their porches like so many
quarter-decks and delight their auditors and themselves with marvellous
recitals. The Cape has not proved friendly to manufactures in general.
Salt-works and glass-works have come to naught,--but the spinning of
sea-yarns is a perennial industry.
[Illustration: RUINS OF THE CHATHAM LIGHT.]
Many of the summer guests prefer the north side of the Cape, where fogs
are less frequent, or where, in ancient Indian parlance, old Maushope
smokes his pipe less often. Such find in Brewster and Dennis no less
delightful colonies of ancient ship-masters, living easily off their
sea-hoards. In 1837 that little town of Dennis claimed no fewer than one
hundred and fifty skippers sailing from various American ports, and in
1850 it was said that more sea-captains went on foreign voyages from
Brewster than from any other place in the United States. Often their
wives sailed with them and had thereafter something wider than village
gossip to bring to the quilting-and the sewing-circle. It was a great
day for the children in the village when a sea-captain came home. From
door to door went his frank sailor-gifts, jars of Chinese sweetmeats,
shimmering Indian stuffs, tamarinds, cocoanuts, parrots, fans of gay
feather, boxes of spicy wood, glowing corals, and such great, whispering
shells as Cape Cod beaches never knew. It was a hospitable and merry
time, given to savory suppers, picnic clambakes, and all manner of
neighborly good-cheer. Even the common dread made for a closer sympathy.
Any woman, going softly to her neighbor to break the news of the
husband lost in Arctic ice, might in some dark hour drop her head upon
that neighbor’s shoulder in hearing of a son drowned off the Banks or
slain by South Sea Islanders.
The old town of Yarmouth, dozing thus among children already gray, has
many a thing to dream about, when the surf is loud. She remembers the
terrible gale of 1635, in which the Thacher family were wrecked upon the
island that since has borne their name, the March snow-storm that
destroyed the three East Indiamen from Salem, the stranding of the
English _Jason_, and many a tragedy more. Along that treacherous Back
Side, lighthouse towers are now closely set, and well-equipped,
well-manned life-saving stations have succeeded the rude Charity Houses,
the fireplace, wood and matches, straw pallet, and signal-pole which
used to give what succor they might to hapless mariners. The old
volunteer coast-guard, which rarely failed to pace the beach in storms,
is now replaced by a regular patrol, carrying lanterns and red
hand-lights and thoroughly drilled in the use of shot-line and
breeches-buoy. But still the fierce-blowing
[Illustration: LIFE-SAVING STATION AT WELLFLEET.]
sand cuts their faces to bleeding and still the furious surf makes
playthings of their lifeboats, so that manhood has no less heroic
opportunity than in the earlier days. The crew at one of these stations,
after an exposure of twelve hours on the wintry beach, failed in every
effort to launch the surf-boat and had to see the rescue they should
have made effected by a crew of fishermen volunteers. The keeper brooded
over his disgrace and the following winter wiped out what is known upon
the Cape as the “goading slur” by a
[Illustration: BASS RIVER BRIDGE. SOUTH YARMOUTH.]
desperate launching in a surf that beat the life from his body.
Ever since the day of the Pilgrims, who made the suggestion, and of
George Washington, who furthered the project, there has been talk of a
Cape Cod canal to expedite traffic and avert disaster. A channel between
Eastham and Orleans was once forced by the sea, and various routes
through Yarmouth, Barnstable and Sandwich have been surveyed, and
charters granted, but ships still round Race Point. The railroad,
however, which was built by slow stages down the Cape and reached
Provincetown only a quarter of a century since, has facilitated travel,
doing away both with the red-and-yellow mail-coach, which used, a
hundred years ago, to clatter through to Boston in two glorious days,
and with the packet service of jolly memory. Yarmouth and Barnstable
were sharp rivals in these packet trips, Barnstable putting her
victories into verse:
“The _Commodore Hull_ she sails so dull
She makes her crew look sour;
The _Eagle Flight_ she is out of sight
Less than a half an hour.
But the bold old _Emerald_ takes delight
To beat the _Commodore_ and the _Flight_.”
[Illustration: BARNSTABLE INN.]
Barnstable has pursued from the outset a course of modest prosperity.
She does not ask too much of fortune. If her census-roll has gained only
five in the last decade, that is better than losing, as most of the Cape
towns have done, and, even so, her numbers rank next to Provincetown.
How humble were the beginnings of this sedate and gracious county seat
may be learned from the letter of an early citizen, declining Governor
Winslow’s appointment to lead an expedition against the Dutch. This
quiet colonist, who commanded the Plymouth forces in King Philip’s War,
pleads his domestic cares:
“My wife, as is well known to the whole town, is not only a weak
woman, and has been so all along, but now, by reason of age, being
sixty-seven years and upwards, and nature decaying, so her illness
grows more strongly upon her. Never a day passes but she is forced
to rise at break of day, or before. She cannot lie for want of
breath. And when she is up, she cannot light a pipe of tobacco, but
it must be lighted for her. And she has never a maid. That day your
letter came to my hands, my maid’s year being out, she went away,
and I cannot get or hear of another. And then in regard of my
occasions abroad, for the tending and looking after all my
creatures, the fetching home my hay, that is yet at the place where
it grew, getting of wood, going to mill, and for the performing all
other family occasions, I have now but a small Indian boy about
thirteen years of age, to help me. Sir, I can truly say that I do
not in the least waive the business out of an effeminate or
dastardly spirit, but am as freely willing to serve my King and my
country as any man whatsoever, in what I am capable and fitted for,
but do not understand that a man is so called to serve his country
with the inevitable ruin and destruction of his own family.”
An “effeminate or dastardly spirit” would indeed be a novelty in the
birthplace of James Otis. But it was not only in face of the Indian and
the redcoat that these three old towns showed firm courage. To their
glory be it remembered that they withstood the persecutor and bluntly
refused to enforce the laws against heresy, so that a special officer
had to be sent by Plymouth Court to hunt out and oppress the Quakers.
Under his petty tyrannies, the faith of the Friends gained many
converts, and Quakerism became permanently established on the Cape.
These upper towns have never depended on the sea as exclusively as those
below, and hence the decline of the fisheries has been less disastrous
to them. They need industries to hold their young people at home, but
the marine manufacture of salt by solar evaporation, the discovery of a
Dennis sea-captain, has had its day, and the once famous Sandwich
glass-works are now idle. Sheep-raising and cattle-raising were long
since abandoned, but while the New England Thanksgiving lasts, cranberry
culture bids fair to yield an honest profit. As early as 1677,
Massachusetts presented Charles II. (put out of humor by the pine-tree
shilling) with three thousand codfish, two hogsheads of samp and ten
barrels of cranberries. These last are still good enough for a better
king than the Merry Monarch, and cranberry-picking is one of the most
picturesque sights on the modern Cape. Hundreds of pickers, gathering by
hand or with the newly invented machines, move over a bog in ordered
companies. The “summer folks” flock to the fun, and Portuguese,
Italians, Swedes, Poles, Finns, Russians, troop down from Boston and
over from New Bedford for the brief cranberry season, or they may come
earlier to join the blueberry-pickers that dot the August hills. The
bogs are easily made from the wastes of swamp, which are drained,
sanded, planted and given three years to grow a solid mat of vines. The
crop from a few acres brings dollars enough to carry the thrifty Cape
Codder through the year. Rents are of the lowest, and the shrewd old
seaman who tends his own garden, salts his own pork, raises his own
chickens, milks his own cow and occasionally “goes a-fishin’,” while his
wife cooks and sews, and “ties tags” for pin-money, has no heavy bills
to meet. There is so little actual poverty in these towns that the
poorhouse is often rented.