The lone workable windmill on Cape Cod is located in Eastham. Before
Pearl Harbor there would be a ceaseless trek of Summer visitors to the
Seth Knowles’ windmill and Miller John Fulcher would demonstrate its
ancient workings with true professional eclat. He’d set her sails,
swing her into the wind, give the lift wheel a deft spin, and, in jig
time, Miller John would turn out a bushel of ground corn before the
eyes of the intrigued city folk. Those who seemed to know asserted
that Miller John had the “miller’s thumb”. Dipping his thumb into the
trough, he would decide just when the corn was properly ground.
The story of the old windmill is vague. Some say it gave service
originally in Plymouth and then was “flaked” across the Bay to be
re-erected in Eastham. The date 1793 is nailed inside, but this still
leaves unanswered the point as to when and where its story begins.
There’s a tablet near a stretch of Eastham beach that memorializes
the “First Encounter.” The event is described in William Bradford’s
narrative:
“But, presently, all on ye sudain, they heard a great & strange crie,
which they knew to be the same voyces they heard in ye night, though
they varied their notes, & one of their company being abroad came
runing in & cried, ‘Men, Indeans, Indeans’; and withall, their arrowes
came flying amongst them. Their men rane with all speed to recover
their armes, as by ye good providence of God they did.... The crie of
ye Indeans was dreadfull, espetially when they saw ther men rune out of
ye randevoue towourds ye shallop, to recover their armes, the Indeans
wheeling aboute upon them. But some runing out with coats of malle
on, & cutlesses in their hands, they soon got their armes & let flye
amongst them, and quickly stopped their violence.”
Bradford’s narrative reveals, also, why the redskins were in a
war-making mood.
Six years previous “one Hunt, a mr. of a ship” had visited this scene.
Hunt had seized 24 of the Nauset Indians and taken them to Spain in
slave chains and, it is elsewhere related, he “sold these silly savages
for rials of eight.”
What changes are wrought by the years! Where slavery was introduced in
the early 17th century, a native son now is ranked with America’s great
heroes in a global war for freedom.