to the individual of fixed habits, tender feet, and uncertain digestion.
There is, for example, the beautiful white sand, glistening in the
sun, smooth as a billiard table and fine as powder. It must be admitted
that after the bath one is conscious of the pervading quality of its
particles. It is in one’s hair, one’s shoes, and often elsewhere about
the person. It is discovered invading the aforesaid sandwiches, which
seem well named at such times. A brisk wind slaps it into your eye or
your mouth in disconcerting fashion, and you become aware of its grating
presence. Then, again, there are clouds upon the horizon. To those who
are seriously affected by the sand, these clouds look ominous. They may
forebode a storm and a wetting. A certain clamminess of hands and feet,
occasioned by the bath, remind one that a change in the weather precedes
a cold in the head. These feelings mark the man of creature comforts and
he fails to join in the part-singing which comes after the hearty meal,
when pipes are lighted and the entire gathering stretch themselves upon
the sands for a lazy half-hour before the inevitable cleaning-up process
begins. This same individual declines to tell his best story, and should
a ball game be suggested, he will be found callous to all coaxing. He
has enough sand in his shoes as it is, or he has eaten too much for
exercising, or possibly the clouds on the horizon lower more formidably.
Yes, a picnic discloses the strength and weakness of character which
mark our friends, and yet, after all, it does more, for it brings out the
best in most of us, and few, even of our habitually conventional friends,
fail to respond to the delights of a seashore picnic or lack in the
essential philosophy of an outdoor, care-free existence.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
X
MODELS
Long before the Old Colony Railroad thought of running a line to Cape
Cod—although that in itself was not so very long ago, well within the
memory of man—there was one charm of the Cape which is fast vanishing and
entirely unknown to the casual visitor and unappreciated by the perennial
summer residents. In those days there was a host of rugged, sturdy men,
intelligent, courageous, upright, and keen-minded. They were the Cape
captains, the men who grew up among the sand-dunes, to the rote of the
sea. The men who carried the good name of Cape Cod to the ends of the
earth and who brought back with them the fortunes which made the little
towns, dotted here and there along the shore, havens of comfort and rest.
Such men could tell stories which would vie with those of Conrad and
Stevenson, but for the most part their deeds go unrecorded except in
their ships’ logs, for they were a simple, reserved company. Of this
epoch there remains but one relic which is sought after by the present
generation, and it savors of the antique. In fact, it is the antiquarian
rather than the adventurer who ransacks the Cape at present for ships’
models.
In those early days there were months at a time when the ship’s company
were idle, and it grew to be a custom for those clever with their hands
to fashion models of the schooners in which they sailed or of seacraft
notable for beauty of line or complexity of rig.
Many an old sea captain would pass his idle moments in fashioning these
miniature boats, and many members of the ships’ crews became adept at
the hobby, for a knowledge of tools was almost an essential for every
man on the Cape, where the trades of carpenter, painter, and plumber
were generally performed by the householder. Furthermore, a sailor would
infinitely prefer to whittle out a model than to swab down the deck, and
frequently a clever mechanic would be relieved by his captain from this
menial work, if he devoted his time to the perfection of a model which
was destined for the mantel of the captain’s best parlor.
Therefore, in the old days, there was scarcely a Cape family of saltwater
ancestry which did not boast of at least one model and often more, the
trademark of an honorable and hazardous occupation and a relic of former
days of plenty when the Cape was peopled only by the native Cape-Codders
and before steam took from them the vocation to which they were reared.
To-day the captain of a full-rigged ship is as hard to find as the
vessel herself, and the Cape exists upon the summer residents and upon
the less productive occupation of fishing, which is largely in the hands
of the Portuguese, who have come in droves to settle upon our land of
Bartholomew Gosnold and his company of adventurers. And so the interest
in ships and in tales of the sea has disappeared along with those who
upheld the trade; and the models, familiar sights to the descendants,
have been relegated to the attic or have been sold as curiosities to the
ubiquitous dealers in antiques, who persistently come to the Cape for old
furniture, pewter, china—anything, in fact, which can be palmed off on
that voracious type of collector, the lover of antiques.
During the last few years, for some reason or other, these models have
become very popular. Just why it is not easy to explain. It is true
that they typify a lost trade which was full of adventure. It is also
true that they are decorative, many of them, but that hardly explains
the ravenous appetite which many collectors of antiques have recently
developed to obtain a genuine model. Dealers have secured agents in
every town on the Cape who are ransacking their neighborhoods for models,
half-models, pictures of boats made in bas-reliefs, weather vanes in the
shape of ships, and the prices are increasing by leaps and bounds. In
fact, so popular has this fad become that ex-sailors and carpenters with
some slight acquaintance with the sea are now developing quite a business
in fashioning models of special designs or of former famous ships. A few
years ago the model of a schooner about two feet in length fully rigged
would bring in the neighborhood of twenty-five dollars; to-day the same
model could not be secured for less than one hundred dollars. Often the
smaller, more exquisitely made specimens will bring more. The descendants
of the old captains have lost any sentimental regard for these relics
and gladly part with them for a comparatively small sum, but only to the
patient and skillful, who know Cape ways and Cape people, and so it is
almost impossible for the tourist to secure a model except from a dealer.
Should the casual summer visitor attempt to bargain with his native Cape
neighbor, he would find him a wily bird, suspicious of being imposed upon
and as likely as not to put an absurd valuation upon his possession; and
yet that same Cape neighbor might part with the model the next day to a
total stranger for a smaller sum, for such is the nature of the denizen
of the Cape. This contrary-mindedness and disinclination to do a favor is
not unusual, but as against this trait, he will be found to be a genial
host and a kindly acquaintance often generous beyond his means.
And so to-day we witness the passing of the models, last relic of the
olden days, the golden days of Cape Cod, from those tiny Cape cottages
built by these same sturdy sea captains to the comfortable mansions of
the summer people whose knowledge of the sea is secured in July and
August by an occasional dip, a sail in a knockabout, and a glimpse of a
glorious sunset over the shining waters of the Atlantic Ocean.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
XI
“A WET SHEET AND A FLOWING SEA”
In my youthful days I often wondered at the regularity with which elderly
people would go out to drive day after day, sitting in the same seat in
the same carriage, behind the same horses, driven by the same coachman
along the same roads. It seemed to me a lamentable waste of time. And now
I have more or less (less as the years advance) the same feeling toward
those couples whose chief relaxation is a spin along the state roads of
their district in a well-appointed limousine, for I belong to that class
of motorists who use their cars purely for convenience and prefer the
fresh-air variety.
Yet, when it comes to sailing, for some reason which I am at a loss to
explain, my views are diametrically opposite. I am content to clamber
into my knockabout and to perform the routine labor of pumping “her” out,
unfurling and hoisting the sail, and casting off, then to cruise lazily
about our harbor, sailing over the same course day in and day out with
little variation, and to do this either alone or with a kindred spirit
as the case may be.
To many these cases may seem parallel, but to me they are widely variant.
There is a formality to a drive or a motor ride which starts with the
costume worn and ends with the character of conversation.
On a boat—and I am speaking entirely of small boats—the costume is of a
heterogeneous variety and the conversation of the freest. In fact, there
is something so thoroughly unconventional about life on the water that
even the stiffest of Brahminian Bostonians may occasionally be heard to
indulge in slang and to assume a rakish attitude, perched upon deck.
But such criticism, or rather comparison, is highly superficial. There
is more to it than external appearance; for sailing brings out the best
in human nature, encourages philosophy, develops independence of thought
and act, and largely so because those who sail shed their coating of
reserve and allow their natural feelings fair play. There is no quicker
way to know and size up one’s friends than to go on a cruise for a few
days. There is no better way of enjoying and extending one’s friendships
with both sexes than spending a few afternoons sailing together, skirting
along the shore with a fair breeze, nor is there any quicker way of
learning the weaknesses of certain individuals than by observing their
conduct under perhaps less peaceful conditions at sea. For the best of
skippers cannot predict weather conditions, and there are times when wind
and storm will come upon one with surprising quickness.
Here in New England, the sailing fraternity may be divided into those
who prefer the Maine coast and those who cling to the Cape and Buzzard’s
Bay. As one of the latter class, I always claim our supremacy by stating
two points which I believe to be true: first, that we have more wind, and
second, that we have less fog. To me this is convincing. The southwest
wind which cools the Cape, blows nearly every day in summer and with a
strength that often requires reefing. Rarely between ten in the morning
and five at night will the mariner find himself becalmed in Buzzard’s
Bay. In fact, the stranger is generally amazed to see girls and young
boys sailing without the presence of an older person, in what looks to
him a three-reef breeze.
They have been brought up to it and realize that vigilance must always be
exercised on the water, and they know the qualities of their boat and the
power of the wind. I know of no better training for youngsters who are
proficient in swimming than to learn to sail and race their own little
boats. The development of a power of observation, accurate judgment,
prompt action, and steady nerve comes more quickly with the handling of a
boat than in any other way for those who lead our kind of life.
Sailing is confined to boats, but boats are not by any means confined to
sailing, for latterly there are almost as many motor-boats to be found
chugging along the shores of the Cape as there are sailboats, although
I personally always pity the groups in the stern of one of these modern
affairs which makes its noisy passage leaving an odorous wake of oil and
smoke. But doubtless I am extreme in my views and old-fashioned in my
taste.
Give me a knockabout—a fifteen-footer for real comfort for a daily sail,
a stiff member of the twenty-one-foot class for cruising along shore.
Give me a comfortable catboat, broad of beam, for a family boat or for
a day’s fishing, or let me idle about in one of our little twelve-foot
Herreshoff class with my small son. In any one of them I shall find the
same sense of freedom, the same sort of pleasure, and the same love for
the salt sea, and from each I shall look at the windy, sandy shores of
the Cape with the same loyal affection.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
XII
MY CAPE FARM
If I have thought of it at all, I have thought of myself as a sociable
cuss. Not that I like sociables; I hate them, and that is probably why
they have gone out of fashion. What to my mind defines sociability is the
quality of enjoying and giving enjoyment to others, singly, in pairs, or
in groups; and in present days sociability is generally put to the test
either at dinners or at week-end parties, for these are the principal
points of contact between friends.
Latterly, however, my social bent has been somewhat warped by the growing
desire on the part of my friends to boast of their success as producers
of food. Whether it be premature senility, the result of conservation, or
merely the acquisition of wealth, which is being rapidly returned to its
own through the purchase of land and the ingenuity of gardeners, it is a
fact that at dinners of the cut-and-dried variety or a family gathering,
or, more especially, over a week-end, my host invariably calls attention
to the asparagus with a modest cough as prelude, or my hostess mentions
the number of eggs the farmer brought in yesterday to be put down in
water-glass. Sometimes it is not asparagus, but peas, or corn, or perhaps
a chicken, or even a ham. This the host. His wife more generally dilates
upon the milk products and the preserving end of the bill of fare; but,
for whatever cause, the thing got a bit on my nerves, so that I found
myself thinking of reasons for not visiting So-and-So or for not dining
with the Thing-um-Bobs on Friday week, when I knew we hadn’t a thing on
earth to do.
This frame of mind was, of course, all wrong. In the first place, these
friends were as good and as loyal as they were ten years ago, when,
if they had any garden at all, it consisted of a half-dozen radishes
that no one could eat without summoning a physician within four hours.
Furthermore, the aforesaid asparagus, with its accompaniments, was
better than the ordinary variety which has decorated the entrance to the
greengrocer’s establishment for the better part of a week. And lastly, as
I had no garden myself, why not enjoy the best and be thankful?
Probably the reason was envy and the season spring, when, contrary to
budding nature, one’s own physical being is not as blooming as it should
be.
Be this as it may, the final result has probably made me more of a bore
to my friends than they ever were to me, for to get even with them I
conceived the happy idea of catering to their epicurean tastes from my
own farm, which consisted of a scant two acres of shore line in that
section of Cape Cod which is renowned for its scarcity of soil.
The idea came to me soon after we had moved down for the summer months,
and my wife became so enthusiastic that it really became our hobby for
the season. We had planned for a succession of week-ends, and many of
these agricultural intimates were coming to us for return visits. We
would feed them upon the fat of our land or in this case largely the fat
of the sea.
It is interesting and instructive to learn just what varieties of food
can be secured from the immediate vicinity of any place, and to me
especially so of our Cape Cod.
During the entire summer I felt so personal an interest in our section
of the country that my small son exclaimed one day that I talked as if I
owned the entire Cape. I know I felt a proprietary interest in certain
fishing grounds, the whereabouts of which I would not confess even on
the rack. And it amuses me now to think of the circuitous routes I used
in getting to certain berry patches and stretches where mushrooms grew
overnight. In variety our dinners, or high teas (as we always called
them), were infinite as compared with those of our asparagus associates.
I remember one little repast which pleased me mightily, because it came
at the end of one of those hot days—they are rare on the Cape—when the
wind refused to blow from the southwest. We had had our swim, but even
golf was a bit too strenuous and food does not have its usual appeal on
such occasions even on the Cape. It also happened that our friends of
this particular week-end were literally congested with land and its more
generous offerings, and so when I practiced the usual humiliatory cough
and remarked that our simple repast came from my Cape farm and they must
excuse its simplicity, I was just a trifle nervous.
The melons were a gift from my plumber, a curious combination. If only
the plumber could plumb as well as he grows melons upon his barren
sandpile, our summer comfort would be increased by fifty per cent. No
better melons can be found than these little fellows. The clam-broth,
from my own clam-bed, was an appetizer. I seriously believe that there
is real energizing value in such clam-broth as this, boiled down almost
to a _liqueur_ from newly dug clams. Then came scallops plucked that
day from the seaweed, where they lie at low tide blowing like miniature
whales. We all know how delicious they are in the autumn served with
_tartare_ sauce, but have you ever tasted them creamed with a dash of
brown sherry and served with fresh mushrooms?
Just as the plumber supplies us with melons, so the fishman is the local
authority on lettuce. Our salad, therefore, came from Captain Barwick,
crisp and white with slices of early pears from a near-by tree, and with
it my favorite muffins of coarse, white cornmeal toasted, thin, and eaten
with beach-plum jam made from our own bushes in the bramble patch close
by the lane, and cottage cheese which our cook positively enjoys making.
My wife had felt this to be a rather scant repast for those used to
dinners of six or eight courses, and so the dessert was a substantial
huckleberry pudding served cold from the ice-chest with whipped
cream, and to take the chill off we had a small glass of my home-made
wild-cherry brandy with our coffee; and while there are other beverages
which are preferable I confess it gave us a delightfully comforting
sensation.
The hearty, genuine praise from my guests gave me a fleeting feeling of
shame at the way I had criticized their asparagus and numberless eggs,
but the pride of success carried me with it.
“Oh, this is not anything; wait until to-morrow and let me show you the
varieties which my farm offers. In the catboat, I have a well in which we
keep fish alive. What say you to a butterfish for breakfast? For dinner
we can either go out to the fishing grounds for something with a real
pull to it, or we can motor over to Turtle Pond for a try at a bass, or
we can golf and take a couple of lobsters out of my pots bobbing up and
down out there by the point.”
“Hold on,” my friend interjected. “What I want to know is whether every
one on the Cape lives in this way, for if they do I think I shall be
moving down here by another season.”
“No,” I replied, “very few. In the first place, most people continue to
do just what their neighbors do—tennis, golf, swimming, sailing. The
fishing is poor unless you know where to go. The natives are not helpful
unless you know how to take them, and that is why I call it all _my_
farm, because I have taken it all unto myself and I reap a reward much
richer than I deserve.
“I pass much of my time hunting up new fishing grounds or the lair of
the soft-shell crab, or even the quiet, muddy recesses of the ‘little
necks.’ I wander about the country exploring new berry patches, for there
is a great variety of these. And if you must know, I fraternize with
certain delightfully conversational individuals who sell me delicious
fruit and vegetables as well as ducks and chickens and a variety of odds
and ends, as, for instance, that little model over there. But you could
not buy them. No, sir, not until you learned the art of negotiation to
perfection. You may manage your estates to the Queen’s taste, but when it
comes to managing a Cape-Codder, ah, that’s not done so easily.”
I see my friends leading the conventional summer life and wonder at
times how they can come to the Cape year after year and yet be strangers
to its real fascination, because it has many other hidden allurements
besides this quest for food.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
XIII
SCALLOPS
Sport, according to our highest authorities, is “that which diverts
and makes mirth,” and from this general interpretation the term has
been applied to games, and to the various forms of hunting and fishing
commonly known, but I have yet to hear the word applied to the pursuit
of the scallop. And yet, scalloping more nearly approaches the original
meaning of sport than most of the games which are commonly classed under
this heading, for not only does the scallop divert and provoke the mirth
of his pursuer, but the pursuer in turn evokes a similar feeling and
impression upon those who chance to see him in action. Those who have
never tasted the joys and excitement of a scallop hunt have not completed
their education as real sportsmen. It is true that Badminton does not
devote a volume to this particular pastime; it is equally true that the
progressive American journalist, whose duty it is to supply the sporting
columns of his paper with all the news of current athletic events,
invariably ignores this important item, and our mighty Nimrods fail to
include scalloping among their feats of prowess; but in each case the
cause of the omission invariably can be traced to ignorance, and to the
fact that your scallop-hunter is a wary fellow who says but little and
boasts less, fearing inadvertently to disclose the favored haunts of his
favorite prey. And so, for these and divers causes, the pursuit of the
scallop lies in obscurity.
On the other hand, the scallop has been a friend to man for generations
in many and varied ways. In the days of the Crusaders, the pilgrims
returning from the Holy Land wore scallop shells, gathered upon the coast
of Palestine, as a badge or mark of the success of their wanderings.
At an equally early period the scallop shell became an important factor
in design, from architecture, through the various stages, to the
adornment of women’s clothes. The scallop shell is discovered embedded
in the capitals of many famous columns. It will be found chiseled upon
the keystones of countless arches. Scarcely a theater but possesses it
among its mural decorations. Upon the title-pages of books it serves in
an equally decorative capacity, while the scalloping upon the hems of
dresses brings the scallop’s shell familiarly into our family life.
In addition to all this, certain families of ancient lineage have
adopted the shell as a part of their crest. Heraldry traces the cause to
the days of the Knights of the Holy Land.
The scallop, therefore, has been sought by generations, and is no marine
upstart basing his claims to popularity upon his flavor as a savory dish
for a modern Lucullus. In short, the scallop is historic, artistic,
decorative, and delicious. In real life, however, he is one of the
numerous marine bivalve mollusks of the genus _Pecten_, and to those who
have not already recognized the symmetrically ribbed shells so often
found upon our beaches, a dictionary is recommended.
Although his past is buried in the annals of the Holy Land, in Ægean
waters, and upon the banks of the Red Sea, just at present he is rampant
upon the shoals of Cape Cod, and it is here that our scallopers pursue
him during the weeks previous to early autumn days, when the Cape
fisherman wages destruction with sea-rakes, seines, and nets.