CIVIL AND MILITARY HISTORY TO 1775
Though the Cape’s influence in legislative matters was not at first
so great as its citizens would have liked, the days of its weakness
did not last long, for by 1650 Plymouth had shot its bolt and was
beginning to decline in population, business, and wealth, whereas the
Cape, its feet firmly under it, was stretching forward with vigor and
assurance. An indication that the tide had turned was the election of
Thomas Prince, of Eastham, as Governor of the Colony in 1657. From this
point on, the Cape was a bright spot in the political map. Prince was a
man of experience in Colony affairs. He had recently moved to Eastham
from Plymouth, where he had already served two terms as Governor.
The last thing he wished now was to go back to Plymouth, where the
Governor was expected to live while he held office. Prince held out so
firmly for remaining at Eastham that the Court consented, and to the
delight of all the citizens, the new Governor began his third term with
his residence on the Cape. He was reëlected every year for the next
seventeen years, with Thomas Hinckley, of Barnstable, as his assistant,
and died in office in 1673.
The years of Prince’s régime were not years of tranquillity. The
Quakers were making themselves obnoxious and were in turn outrageously
treated by the magistrates. These troubles will be discussed more
fully in another chapter. Suffice it for the moment to say that the
Governor’s inflexible hostility toward the antics of this sect did
nothing to remedy a situation which would have tried the abilities
of the most seasoned diplomat. The difficulties increased instead of
subsiding, and the blame may be divided about equally between the
Governor and the Quakers.
But Prince’s years as chief magistrate were marked by more profitable
activity than anti-Quaker demonstrations. Two of the original Cape
towns, Yarmouth and Barnstable, became parents during this period, the
former under picturesque circumstances. William Nickerson, a citizen
of Yarmouth, and the greatest speculator in wild lands the Cape ever
saw, had the soul of a pioneer and the tenacity of a bulldog. He needed
both in his undertaking--which was to buy a great tract of land at
Monomoyick (now Chatham) and start a new settlement.
He began cheerfully in 1656 by purchasing about a thousand acres from
Mattaquason, the sachem of the region, giving him a boat in payment.
But here his troubles began, for he had neglected to obtain the Court’s
permission to make the purchase, and was haled to Plymouth for trial.
He pleaded ignorance of the law, and the Court, anxious to have a
settlement started, but reluctant to let one man hold so much land,
and determined always to uphold its authority, first disfranchised
Nickerson for furnishing Mattaquason with a boat, then fined him five
pounds for each acre bought, and finally gave him a title to a small
tract of land. There was not money enough in the whole Plymouth Colony
to pay such a fine as this, as the Court well knew, and for some time
no attempt was made to collect it. As for the disfranchisement, that
seems to have worried Nickerson very little; if it was ever put into
effect at all, it was only for a short time. But the loss of most of
his purchase grieved the pioneer deeply. He temporarily abandoned his
attempt to settle in Chatham, went instead to Boston, took a flier in
Roxbury real estate, and was back in Yarmouth in 1661.
Here his proximity to Chatham made him think again of his great plan,
and he petitioned the Court for a title to all the lands he had
purchased. The Court then perpetrated the one joke in its history by
replying that if Nickerson would pay the fine of five pounds per acre
on all the land that he had bought illegally, he might have a title
to it. Nickerson’s answer was to move to Chatham with six sons, three
daughters, three sons-in-law, and all their families. He arrived
there about 1664. It was now Plymouth’s move, and without delay the
Court ordered the Chief Marshal to collect two hundred pounds in
money or goods from this troublesome speculator. The Marshal did his
best, but found nothing worth taking. Nickerson then appealed to the
Commissioners of the Crown, a group of royal inspectors who turned up
in Plymouth about this time in the course of a tour of the Colonies.
These dignitaries thought that he wanted too much; but the Court,
tired of the whole affair, and wishing to appear generous in the
eye of the King’s minions, remitted Nickerson’s fine, and gave him
title to one hundred acres, assigning all the rest to a group of very
distinguished citizens, including Thomas Hinckley, the Governor’s
assistant.
Nickerson was furious and was foolish enough to put his fury on paper,
accusing Hinckley of using his position to influence the Court.
For this, and for another written invective against the colonial
authorities, the luckless settler was summoned to Plymouth and fined
again. This last encounter with the law convinced him that opposition
was useless. Instead of continuing the losing battle, he approached
Hinckley and the other grantees, and for ninety pounds succeeded in
buying out all their interest, thereby at last acquiring title to the
tract of land on which his heart had been set for sixteen troublous
years. The deed was dated 1673. This, and other large purchases made
from time to time during the next ten years, made him the proprietor of
four thousand acres--a domain princely enough to compensate him for the
bitter years he had spent in acquiring it. His settlement grew slowly
and after being first placed under the jurisdiction of Yarmouth and
later under that of Eastham, it was finally incorporated as the Town of
Chatham in 1712.
Governor Prince died the year after Nickerson’s great purchase, and
for the first time in seventeen years the two chief executives of the
Colony were not Cape men. Prince and Hinckley had guided its affairs
so long that their repeated elections had become matters of routine.
A contested election was still unheard of. The problem was not for a
man to get himself elected, but for the electors to find a suitable
man who would consent to serve. With the death of Governor Prince,
Hinckley withdrew from public life for several years and lived quietly
in Barnstable.
While Nickerson was in the midst of his legal troubles, a group of men
and women moved quietly from Barnstable and started a new settlement
at Succonessitt, now called Falmouth after the English town. The
first detachment arrived in 1660. The Court had given its consent the
year before. The reasons for this enterprise are not entirely clear.
There was no land-greedy Nickerson among the emigrants, to establish
himself first and then sell lots to newcomers. They could not have felt
cramped for pasturage with Great Marshes close at hand. Probably there
were Quakers in the group who wanted to get away as far as possible
from the established church. But though freedom to enjoy their Quaker
meetings unmolested was apparently the principal motive of the settlers
at Succonessitt, their removal did not exempt them from attending the
regular church at Barnstable; and whatever services they may have held
at home, they were obliged every Sunday to travel twenty miles through
the woods to the meeting-house at Barnstable. For the first twenty-five
years of its history, Succonessitt remained under the jurisdiction of
Barnstable; finally in 1686 it was incorporated, and in 1693 its name
was changed to Falmouth.
Up to this time, the South Side of Barnstable had remained virtually
a wilderness. Hyannis, which to-day acknowledges itself to be the
business center of the Cape; the Port, which boasts the summer
residences of as many millionaires as are good for any community;
Centerville, the most quietly prosperous and dignified village on the
South Side--all were forests of virgin pine, and the whole region was
known as the South Sea. A Barnstable trader, Nicholas Davis, was the
first man to put up a building there, which he used as a warehouse
for goods received from Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New York. This
outpost of progress was at Lewis Bay, and Davis’s shed stood on land
which the Sachem Yanno ‘gave’ him in 1660; but no houses were built
in Hyannis for another twenty years. By the end of the century, about
a dozen families, attracted by the abundance of oysters, had settled
alongshore between Hyannis and Cotuit. A few years later, the Indians
had been done out of the ownership of Oyster Island and Cotuit Neck,
and all was marching smoothly for the whites. Though handicapped by
this comparatively late start, the South-Siders have done well, and
their villages have grown into prosperity.
Meanwhile, the lower Cape had not been idle. The region lying north and
west of Chatham, and now comprising the towns of Brewster and Harwich,
was thinly settled at about the time when Nickerson was beckoning
recruits to his domain at Monomoyick. By 1694 the inhabitants of this
anomalous territory, which in theory was under the jurisdiction of
Eastham, had become numerous enough to form a town of their own, and
the Court authorized its incorporation that year. The new town was
called Harwich, after the famous English seaport.
As early as 1689, a group of Eastham men had begun negotiations
with the Pamet Indians for purchasing land at Truro, and, calling
themselves the Pamet Proprietors, were allotting farms to newcomers.
They appointed one of their number--Thomas Paine, Jr., son of the
millwright--as agent for all their purchases. In this way they
avoided the risk of trouble from any who might develop land-grabbing
propensities, and at the same time protected themselves against the
chance of the Indians’ selling the same property twice. By 1700, enough
land had been bought to furnish each proprietor with a good-sized
tract, and the settlers left Eastham and established themselves at
Pamet. Five years later, under the name of Dangerfield, the community
was granted municipal privileges, and in 1709 it was incorporated as
the town of Truro.
Dangerfield, apparently, was not thought to be a name likely to attract
newcomers, so the settlers wisely changed it; and Truro it has remained
ever since.
Provincetown, the first place on the Cape to be visited by white
men, was one of the last to be dignified with the title of town. Its
geographic situation is responsible for both facts: an explorer,
groping his way in New England waters, could hardly fail to stumble
over the tip of the Cape, and Provincetown Harbor was pretty sure to
tempt him to anchor. The settlers, on the other hand, making their way
overland from various parts of the Bay Colony, found plenty of good
sites long before they reached the sand spit that is Provincetown.
If they had been seafarers from the outset, instead of farmers and
herdsmen, there would have been a different story to tell. But they
were looking for hay grounds and arable fields, and took small interest
in harbors.
Other Europeans had been interested in Provincetown Harbor, however,
long before the Mayflower found shelter there--long before the Concord
skirted its outer shore, carrying Gosnold and Archer. Landlords of
sixteenth-century fishermen’s taverns anywhere along the coast of
Brittany or the Bay of Biscay had heard all about Provincetown from the
picturesque villains who dropped in to drink brandy and sour wine of
an evening between one fishing season and the next. They told tales of
lurid sojourns ashore where a sickle-shaped arm of sand made a harbor
in which their vessels could ride out storms from any quarter, and
where natives gave them venison and strange corn for rum; tall trees
stood close to the water’s edge; all day great flocks of wild fowl flew
about the marshes; they could fill their holds with fish without going
a mile from shore. This was better than facing the rigors of the Grand
Banks to the north; here they lived in houses, and the savages were
their friends. ‘An island, perhaps?’ the landlord suggested. An island,
perhaps; perhaps a cape; of that they knew nothing. So the conversation
drifted along, and by and by the fishermen went to bed.
With a history like this behind it, Provincetown smiled at the
earnestness of the Pilgrims. Incorporation was an amusing detail
to a region whose fame had reached Europe a hundred years before.
Moreover, the grandsons and great-grandsons of these first merry Gallic
buccaneers, following the family tradition, continued to make free at
Provincetown even after 1700, when the first staid Britishers had built
their houses there. Vessels of other nationalities likewise dropped in
for one purpose or another, greatly to the concern of the permanent
population. One pious settler, William Clap, recorded his indignation
in a letter to Governor Dudley dated 1705:
SQUIER DUDLEY;
... Very often hear is opportunity to seas vesels, and goods which
are upon a smoglen acompt. i believe had i had a comishon so to do i
could have seased a catch this last weak which had most of thar men
outlandish men i judge porteges. she lay hear a week and a sloop i
believe did thar bisnes for them.... one thing more I make bould to
inform your honor that hear are a gret many men which goes fishing
at this harbor and som times the french comes hear and then every
one runs his way because they have no one to hud them. i myself have
been a souferor since i lived hear, being cared away by a small sloop
and hear was 130 men and several brave sloops and no hand, a capt.
about 12 miles distant, but we may all be tacken at the Cap and he no
nothing of it.... your homble and unworthy sarvont
WM. CLAP
This picturesque document reflects in a curiously exact fashion the
random work at Provincetown. Miscellaneous smugglers, ‘Portege’
whalemen, French privateers, and colonial fishermen who camped for the
summer, all plied their trades with as much freedom as if Provincetown
had been a remote island of the Spanish Main. The town was living up
bravely to the wild days of its youth. Echoes of riotous doings reached
and shocked the ears of the General Court, and resulted in an act,
passed in 1714, which put the unruly settlement under the jurisdiction
of Truro and decreed that all visiting fishermen--of whatever
nationality--should pay four shillings a week during their sojourn.
Truro had no desire to act as mere disciplinarian for a lawless gang
of polyglots, and promptly petitioned the Court ‘that Cape Cod [that
is, the tip end of the Cape] be declared either a part of Truro or
not a part of Truro, that the town may know how to act in regard to
some persons.’ At the same time Truro demanded an explanation from
its troublesome protégé why it ‘did not entertain a learned orthodox
minister of the Gospel to dispense the word of God to them as required
by law.’ In 1727, Provincetown petitioned to be incorporated. The Court
granted its request, and Truro was released from the burden that it had
borne dutifully for twelve years. By degrees, as the new town learned
respect for law, the gay French freedom that had marked its early days
gave way to more decorous walking. The town became a dignified and
subsequently a very prosperous member of the community.
Shortly after Provincetown was incorporated, the lower Cape, on the
strength of its growing population and the new towns that were being
incorporated there, petitioned the Court to be made a separate county,
with its headquarters at Eastham. The reason for the request was that
the distance to Barnstable Courthouse was a great inconvenience to
jurymen and others who had lawsuits on their hands. The Court, however,
wisely refused. In 1763, Billingsgate, which had always been under
the jurisdiction of Eastham, set up for itself and became the town
of Wellfleet. In the act of incorporation the Court christened the
new town Poole, perhaps after the English town of that name. But the
citizens preferred Wellfleet and Wellfleet it became. Clearly this is
not a fancy name. Its origin was for many years a mystery. Various
conjectures were made--among them the suggestion that the name was a
corruption of ‘Whale fleet’--appropriate enough in view of the town’s
activity in this business, but hardly convincing. The late Everett Nye,
postmaster and historian of the town, suggests that it was named for
the celebrated Wallfleet oysters, which came from Blackwater Bay in the
English Essex; and quite recently an alert antiquarian, in glancing
over a sixteenth-century broadside, came upon the line ‘Wallfleet
oysters be very good food.’ The riddle was answered--oysters had lain
thick on Billingsgate flats from time immemorial; nothing was more
natural than that the men who lived there should name the town for
these famous oyster beds of England.
In 1797, Eastham was shorn of still another great district,
Orleans, that lay along her western border. The incorporation
of this town completed the ruin of Eastham. Originally she had
controlled--nominally, at least--all the territory below Yarmouth.
One by one, as her forests fell and her soil was blown thin, Chatham,
Harwich, Truro, and Wellfleet had been lost to her. Now, with the
independence of Orleans, the old mother town of the lower Cape
experienced the same feelings of desertion that Plymouth had undergone
when half her men left home to settle Eastham in the wilderness. Her
prestige was gone; like Plymouth, she must from now on rest content
with a small tax list, a modest acreage, and a proud past.
Minor troubles like these, however, are of no importance when compared
with a very real disaster that the Cape met with during this period.
Prosperity, in spite of Quaker troubles, had marked the long régime of
Prince and Hinckley. Prosperity continued, after Prince’s death, under
the tolerant leadership of Josiah Winslow, who served as Governor until
his death in 1680. The helm was then once more put into the hands of
a Cape-Codder, and Thomas Hinckley, after seven years of retirement
from public life, was elected Governor. He was sixty-two years old,
and no man in the colony had a more intimate knowledge of its affairs.
He had come to Barnstable with Lothrop in 1639, had fought in the
French and Indian War, and afterwards had served for seventeen years as
Prince’s assistant. Thus he had had experience as pioneer, soldier, and
magistrate. Hinckley was progressive, and under him in 1685 the Colony,
for convenience in administration, was divided into three counties,
Plymouth, Bristol, and Barnstable, the last including the entire
Cape, with Barnstable as the shire town. A courthouse was built, and
appropriate officials were appointed.
But the great disaster lay ahead. In 1686, while Hinckley was serving
his sixth term, the notorious Edmond Andros came from New York with a
commission from James II, and not only supplanted Hinckley as Governor,
but completely abolished the now long-sanctioned government of the
Plymouth Colony. This amazing magistrate operated on the theory that
the colonists were not Englishmen. The titles to their farms, which
the settlers had earned by the sweat of their brows, and had hewn with
their own hands out of the wilderness, Andros declared worthless.
Indian deeds he characterized as ‘a scratch with a Bear’s paw,’ and he
demanded that the colonists pay quit-rent for land that had been theirs
for two generations.
Nothing can more effectively destroy a man’s peace of mind than to
be told that his house is built on quicksand; he may not believe
it, but his tranquillity is at an end. Such was the effect of
Andros’s proclamation. Hinckley was powerless to oppose this royal
representative, who came armed with the majesty of the British Empire,
but his long training stood him in good stead. He kept his head, bowed
though it was to the inevitable, and, realizing that he could best
serve the interests of the Colony by quiet work from the inside, he
accepted a seat in Andros’s Council. While he held this position--which
he soon discovered to be an empty honor--Hinckley did his best to
relieve the sufferings of the citizens. He repeatedly petitioned a deaf
King for justice, he stalwartly opposed a scheme that Andros devised
whereby the colonists should be taxed for the support of the Church
of England. But all was in vain. During 1687 and 1688, the Colony was
paralyzed. The withering tyranny of Andros taxed men into poverty
and killed their ambition. Cornfields were knee deep in weeds. His
administration was a fine example of belated severity. Wisdom has her
own opinion of the parent who, after giving his son free rein for years
and shutting both eyes to his errors, suddenly calls him to account
in the woodshed and then locks him in his room. This was precisely
what the British Government, in the person of Andros, was doing to New
England. There is no doubt that in some cases freedom had gone to the
colonists’ heads and affected them as old wine affects an abstainer.
Charters had not always been obeyed; the settlers had more than once
taken the law into their own hands. At such irregularities Parliament
had winked for seventy years; but now, suddenly aroused to irrational
severity, it acted as though the colonists were a penal settlement
instead of a group of earnest experimentalists.
Happily, in 1689, James, who was no more successful in England than
his agents were here, was forced to flee for his life, and with the
accession of William and Mary, Andros, who had been jailed in Boston
at the first whisper of the King’s flight, was officially deposed. The
Plymouth Government immediately resumed its activities, with Hinckley
in command. The New-Englanders learned much from their experience with
Andros; the old country nothing. Almost a century later, Burke was
laboring to make a stubborn House of Commons understand that a wise
neglect was the only way for an empire to hold remote possessions; and
the colonists, having experienced once too often the tyranny that only
ignorant governments are capable of, were storing up powder and molding
bullets for the Revolution.
The last year of Hinckley’s régime, 1692, was marked by an event of
great importance--the merging of the Plymouth Colony with its younger
neighbor, the Massachusetts Bay Colony. This step was taken in spite
of the strong opposition of the Old Colony, whose citizens petitioned
in vain for a separate charter. William and Mary remained obdurate and
would give but one charter for both Colonies, uniting them into the
‘Massachusetts Bay in New England.’ Furthermore, the Crown from now
on insisted on appointing the Colonial Governors, refusing to allow
the practice of electing them to continue. In 1692, Sir William Phipps
(the only successful treasure-seeker outside the pages of fiction)
arrived with the new charter and with his own commission as Governor.
The Old Plymouth Colony was entitled to four Councilors, and promptly
sent Hinckley as one of them. Two of the others also, John Walley and
Barnabas Lothrop, were or had been Barnstable men; so the Cape was well
represented in the new government.
There was much speculation throughout the Colony as to how far
Hinckley had aided the unwelcome union, and his firmest friends had
to confess that he had at least done nothing to oppose it. What his
real feelings were in regard to this important transaction cannot be
known, for he was wise enough to keep them to himself. If, as many
believed, he favored it, he showed himself a statesman. Any one who
was not blinded by sentiment could see that the days of the Plymouth
Government were numbered. On the north, the Bay Colony outnumbered its
population more than four to one. On the west and south, New York had
already begun to angle for its annexation. The Old Colony was living
on the unsubstantial basis of its past, and men of vision saw clearly
that it must soon be absorbed by one or the other of these prosperous
neighbors. It is more than likely that Hinckley was among this number.
No one knew better than he the impoverished condition and the growing
weakness of the Colony, and he was honest enough to admit that hope for
future prosperity unaided was a will-o’-the-wisp. In such circumstances
any conscientious Governor would work for a powerful alliance, even
if it sacrificed the identity of his government and cost him his own
position.
The Cape, during the hundred years or so following Governor Prince’s
death, was at war with some one or other a good part of the time. First
came King Philip’s conspiracy in 1675. After this had been crushed,
there followed the long, intermittent French and Indian wars, which
for want of better names have been called after the King or Queen who
happened to be reigning at the time. Thus the 1690 fighting was known
as King William’s War; when this was prolonged after the Treaty of
Ryswick, it became Queen Anne’s War. Hostilities ceased for a time
with the Peace of Utrecht in 1713, but twenty-five years later England
and Spain were at each other’s throats, and a few Cape men--who took
about as much interest in the quarrel as the Madagascar Negroes did in
the World War--died of fever in Cuban swamps. In 1744, the English and
French were at it again, and the Cape in consequence embarked on the
celebrated Louisburg Expedition. The Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, which
followed the capture of Louisburg, was a bitter pill to the victorious
Cape soldiers, but they took up arms again in 1755 and marched against
the French at Fort Duquesne, Niagara, Crown Point, and in Nova Scotia.
The Peace of Paris, which was signed in 1763, came just in time to give
the Cape a chance to draw breath for the Revolution.
It must not be supposed that the Cape was much exercised by these wars.
They were too frequent and most of them too remote to be regarded as
anything more than nuisances by men whose interests were in raising
good crops of corn and catching as many fish and harpooning as many
whales as they could. None of the fighting took place on Cape soil,
and although at one time or another a good many Cape men were in the
service, their casualties were not heavy. The only conflict that
touched them nearly was King Philip’s War, and even then all the
fighting was off the Cape. However, the effects of such prolonged
hostilities were marked, and two or three of the outstanding military
figures were Cape men.
The nominal cause of the war against Philip was the supposed murder at
Middleboro of an educated Indian named Sausamon. The Plymouth Court,
with characteristic zeal, arrested three Indians--one of whom was a
councilor of Philip--charging them with the murder; they were tried and
executed, whether justly or unjustly nobody knows. Here was the pretext
that Philip had been waiting for. He assembled his warriors, and the
fight was on.
The ins and outs of the Sausamon affair remain mysteries. It has been
alleged that he was bringing or had brought to the whites news of
Philip’s hostile preparations, and that this treachery was the cause of
his murder. It may very well be so. Far more doubtful is the question
whether or not the Court hanged the right men as his assassins.
However, these matters are of no importance. A conflict was inevitable,
murder or no murder. Whenever civilized men invade the domains of
savages, a fight is bound to follow, sooner or later. Philip had long
been restless and alarmed; the settlers had never felt easy since their
arrival more than fifty years before. Anything might have served as
a spark for the inevitable explosion; Sausamon’s death was more than
adequate.
The unnecessary but perfectly natural apprehensions of the Cape
villages during this war have been sufficiently discussed in another
chapter. Surrounded as they were by Indians who might turn hostile at
any moment, it is no wonder that the townspeople felt anxious as they
watched their quotas march off to Rhode Island, the departure of every
detachment weakening their own defense to an alarming degree. Sandwich,
Barnstable, and Yarmouth each sent about one hundred men in all;
Eastham about fifty. Happily for the peace of mind of those who stayed
at home, these soldiers did not leave at the same time; each town
sent its quota in several installments, and many of the enlistments,
following the old custom, were for very short periods of time. Even so,
a wide breach was left in the Cape’s defenses, and boys who were too
young to enlist were drafted into the home guard.
Owing to the cheerfully unscientific fashion in which our ancestors
conducted wars, it is almost impossible to trace exactly the campaigns
in which Cape-Codders were engaged. A letter from Captain John Gorham,
who commanded the Yarmouth detachment, has been preserved, and
indicates that he and his men were having the same experience that has
been shared by many fighters of Indians: they had spent fourteen weeks
in a vain attempt to find the enemy. Subsequently, Gorham succeeded
in joining forces with the main body of the colonial troops, and took
part in the most important battle of the war, that of Swamp Fort, near
North Kingston, Rhode Island. This was not an attack against Philip
but against the Narragansetts who were supporting him. This powerful
tribe had withdrawn to a fortified plateau surrounded by a swamp and
further protected by a rude palisade. Here were assembled not only
their warriors, but their families and all their possessions as well.
The Colonial Headquarters decided that this stronghold must be taken,
and troops consequently set out from Wickford before daylight on a
December morning, marched twenty miles through the snow, stormed Swamp
Fort in a four-hour fight, killed or wounded about a thousand Indians,
burned their lodges, and started back to Wickford through snow and
darkness. Thomas Hinckley was in charge of the commissary department
on this expedition, and managed to supply the troops with food enough
to keep them going, but when they arrived at Wickford next morning,
their condition may be imagined. Captain Gorham, who during this attack
was in command of half the Plymouth Colony’s battalion, with Sparrow,
of Eastham, as lieutenant, died two months later from an illness
contracted during this twenty-four hours of toil and fighting; but no
other Cape men were lost.
The Narragansetts were now out of the running, and the Colony was free
to concentrate on Philip. The only other engagement that affords any
record of Cape troops was at or near Seekonk (Rehoboth). Here in the
early spring of 1676, Captain John Pierce, of Scituate, with a small
command of about fifty whites and twenty Indians from the friendly Cape
tribes, was led into ambush by the same trick that birds employ to lead
enemies away from their nests--feigning injury. Too late Pierce saw his
predicament; almost the entire company were killed; their lives were
not thrown away, however, for the Indian losses were still heavier.
The Cape casualties in this disaster numbered twenty-one. It is easy
to criticize Pierce for his folly in being deceived by so ancient a
trick. In fact, however, like most of the tactical errors of colonial
officers, it was the result of impetuosity and zeal. The settlers
knew little of the science of warfare. They distrusted the unorthodox
methods of their one inspired commander, Captain Ben Church, and tied
his hands so often that he resigned and was induced to take the field
again only by a conscience which was powerful enough to overcome his
righteous indignation. If his advice at Swamp Fort had been followed,
the nightmare march back to Wickford would have been avoided, and the
weary soldiers would have slept in the warm Indian huts which their
commander’s folly had prompted them to burn. No group of men were ever
educated at a higher price than the early New England army officers.
Philip, his allies falling away and his own tribe scattered, finally
returned to Mount Hope with three hundred warriors who remained
faithful to him. Church, who had resumed command, with a little band of
forty men, half of whom were Indians, harassed the luckless Philip in
repeated skirmishes and finally bottled him up in his stronghold. While
trying to sneak away from this last entrenchment, the notorious savage
was shot by one of Church’s Indians. After a few more false flashes,
the settlements were again at peace.
The happy situation of the Cape during the war becomes more striking
when compared with the experiences of settlements near by. A part of
Plymouth called Halifax was burned; Bridgewater, Taunton, and Scituate
were raided, some of them more than once; houses were destroyed
in Middleboro. At Eel River, three miles on the Sandwich side of
Plymouth, a fortified house that sheltered the property of a number
of neighboring settlers was plundered and burned and a dozen women
and children tomahawked while the garrison were at church. At such
atrocities the Cape shuddered, but was safe. Even the casualties among
its troops were insignificant. To set the total at fifty would be
putting it high.
When it came to paying the bill, however, the case was different,
and justly so. The war debt of the Plymouth Colony had reached the
staggering sum of £27,000, and of this amount the towns of the Cape
were naturally called upon for their full share. Every spare shilling
that could be wrung out of the soil or pulled out of the sea went into
taxes; frugality, always the rule on the Cape, became now an absolute
necessity, and with a fortitude equal to that which their fathers had
shown in paying the Merchant Adventurers, the settlers paid this huge
sum to the uttermost farthing.
Scarcely were they relieved of this burden when another war cloud began
to roll up ominously in the north. As early as 1631, Plymouth traders
had had trouble with the French in the neighborhood of Penobscot Bay,
and the skirmishes that took place then indicated clearly enough that
serious trouble must come when the colonies of the two old rivals began
to spread. It is not the purpose of this volume to rehearse in detail
the well-known story of the long struggle which did come, and which,
though broken from time to time by a series of inadequate treaties,
left the Colonies small time for profitable pursuits between 1689 and
1763. Omitting all references to causes and effects, except in so far
as they were reflected in the fortunes of Cape-Codders, the present
narrative will confine itself to the exploits of Cape men in these
French and Indian Wars.
Of these exploits the most picturesque was that of the whaleboat fleet
commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel John Gorham, of Barnstable, son of the
renowned Indian fighter. Shallow-draft boats of some sort were needed
for carrying troops up the rivers to the settlements which the French,
with a proper respect for the British navy, had established far inland.
Whaleboats were the very craft for this sort of enterprise, and since
the Cape was the home of the most experienced whalemen in New England,
it was only natural that Captain Ben Church should look to the Cape for
the man to command this branch of the expedition. These unique fleets
made their first appearance in 1690, early in King William’s War, and
continued to be used during Queen Anne’s War. Church in a letter to
Governor Dudley gives a good description of them: he called for forty
or fifty ‘good whaleboats, well fitted with good oars and twelve or
fifteen good paddles to every boat. And upon the wale of each boat,
five pieces of strong leather to be fastened on each side to slip five
small ash bars through; so that, whenever they land the men may step
overboard and slip in said bars across, and take up said boat that
she may not be hurt against the rocks.’ Each carried its own camping
equipment and provisions, and when turned bottom-up furnished adequate
shelter at night. On a pinch, five hundred men could be floated inland
on forty or fifty boats.
Young Cape whalemen, who could be dragooned into any other branch of
the service only with the greatest difficulty, consented to embark in
this flotilla with less reluctance. They felt more at home swinging an
ash oar in a whaleboat than trooping through the woods with a musket.
So the whaleboat fleets were very largely Cape Cod ventures, and to
the Cape men who commanded and manned them belongs the credit for such
success as they achieved.
At first this success was not great. The Canada expedition of 1689-90
ended in disaster, and Gorham’s whaleboats had to retreat as well as
the land forces. That Church in no way ascribed his failure to the
‘fleet,’ appears from the fact that in subsequent expeditions the
Barnstable Captain was promoted to the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel and
was second in command of the entire campaign. But in spite of his
advancement he stuck to his whaleboats, and led several fleets of them
against French settlements before the Peace of Ryswick was signed in
1697.
This peace, though it put a stop to hostilities for the moment, by
no means settled the differences between England and France. The
respite lasted six years. Then, in 1703, Queen Anne’s War began, and
the Indians, at the instigation of the French, sacked Deerfield.
Again Church was given command of the New England troops, and again
Gorham assembled the whaleboats. The expedition sailed north, where
it ingloriously pillaged the Acadian coast. The French retaliated by
sending an occasional privateer to loot the unprotected fishing village
of Provincetown. Port Royal fell in 1710, but the English forces
shattered themselves in vain against the natural bulwarks of Quebec.
The Peace of Utrecht in 1713 came nearer being permanent than any
preceding cessation of hostilities, and gave the Colonies a generation
in which to recuperate.
During the lull, Church and Gorham died, but the latter handed the
torch to his son Shubael, who, when the next phase of the century of
warfare began, was on hand at the capture of Louisburg in 1745, with
his two sons John and David. Louisburg was the headquarters of armed
French vessels that for years had made fishing on the Grand Banks risky
business for British subjects; and, forsaking northern waters, had even
seized our merchantmen as they plied between New England and the West
Indies. The Cape had money invested in both these branches of maritime
enterprise, and many of her sons were in command of the ships. It was
with altogether unwonted zeal, therefore, that Cape men girded up their
loins for the reduction of this stronghold.
Forty recruits immediately enlisted from Yarmouth under Captain Joseph
Thacher, and the other towns were equally prompt with their quotas.
The freedom of the sea was a cry that touched these sailors nearly.
Shubael Gorham commanded the first company of the Seventh Massachusetts
Regiment, and his son John commanded the Second, and had charge of the
whaleboat fleet, which had become a family tradition. Shubael’s other
son, David, also served under his father. All three had the title of
Colonel, and were citizens of Barnstable. As usual, numbers of friendly
Indians were included in the Cape detachments. The whaleboat fleet
went through the hardest fighting of the entire siege, and, though
its attacks were repulsed, John Gorham and his men lived up to the
reputation for valor that his ancestors had established. Tradition
has it that one of the Yarmouth Indians in Thacher’s company risked
his life for a bottle of brandy by crawling into the fortress through
an embrasure and opening the gate to the invaders. At any rate, the
stronghold fell, and in June, 1745, the city of Louisburg surrendered
to Sir William Pepperell’s New-Englanders.
For the next three years, Cape-Codders, though they did little
fighting, were kept in a state of apprehension by the report that
a French armada was under way to avenge the fall of Louisburg by
plundering the New England coast. If such a fleet had actually arrived,
the Cape would certainly have been the first to suffer, for its
unprotected shores were an invitation to any invader. Happily, storms
and sickness took the teeth out of the expedition, and in 1748 the
Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle put an end to the Cape’s anxiety. But it was a
bitter pill to all New-Englanders, for by its terms the fortress that
they had bled to reduce was handed back to the French. This amazing
piece of folly looked to the colonists like treachery pure and simple;
but it was only another of the many instances in which statesmen have
undone the work of soldiers.
War came again in 1755. Great Britain accused France of violating
the terms of the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, and sent over a force of
regulars to show colonial troops how campaigns should be conducted.
Expeditions against Fort Duquesne, Crown Point, Niagara, and Nova
Scotia met with varying success, but the British were at last the
inglorious victors, and Canada, which for a century had been the bone
of contention between the two powers, passed into their hands by the
Peace of Paris in 1763.
Early in this phase of the war, the Cape was bewildered by the arrival,
on the south shore of Sandwich, of seven boatloads of ‘French neutrals’
with their families. These wanderers said that they were on their way
from Rhode Island to Boston, and asked to have their boats carted
across to the Bay shore. Instead of granting the request, the Sandwich
authorities seized the boats and sold them, and held the Frenchmen
under arrest--distributing them among the neighboring towns, where they
were detained until the end of the war. This was the only band of
exiled Acadians whose wanderings brought them to the Cape.
The result of sending British troops to this war was very different
from what the King and his Councilors had anticipated. Instead of
furnishing the undisciplined local talent with a splendid example of
military acumen, the regulars, who knew less about Indian warfare
than the settlers did about dress parades, marched to destruction
under the valiant but hidebound Braddock, while the colonial troops,
watching from the shelter of tree-trunks and rocks, discovered that
these invincibles were frail creatures after all. Cape-Codders who
limped home after these fights brought astounding news to their
fellow citizens: The British regulars were men of straw; they knew
nothing of warfare as it was waged in the wilderness; their valor
served only to lead them into close range of hidden muskets; a young
Virginian had reassembled the remains of Braddock’s command and shown
a flexible leadership that made the officers of the old country stare
in amazement. Great Britain, indeed! What had she to enforce obedience
with? Such was the comment of veterans at the fireside, while James
Otis, the young West Barnstable orator, was preaching Independence in
high places. Revolution was only twelve years away.
The wars had reduced the Colonies to financial chaos. New England had
been wading through campaigns for three generations, and there was not
money enough to pay for them all. Men had had small experience with
money in the eighteenth century, and wise ministers of finance were too
few to prevent the inflation of currency--a resort which has proved
fatal as often as it has been tried. The Colonies were deluged with
paper money that had nothing behind it; on the Cape the depreciation
was not only tremendous, but shifted with the disconcerting
unexpectedness of a feather before random zephyrs. Fishermen could not
tell what their fares were worth until they had reduced the fabulous
sum of paper pounds to a basis of hard cash, and in the process the
profits shrank almost to invisibility. In 1707, the citizens of
Falmouth, in calling a new minister, furnish an illuminating bit of
evidence as to the value of a shilling. ‘We ... are ... agreed,’ they
write, ‘to give you £160 in money, at weight and value it now usually
passeth at, which is 15 pennyweight at six shillings.’ At that rate, a
shilling had shrunk to a quarter of its normal value. Ten years later,
it was worth even less. Jenkins, the historian of Falmouth, reckons
that in his town in 1718 a pound was worth forty-four cents. In 1749,
the Yarmouth minister was poor with a salary of £625 beside the usual
perquisites of wood and salt hay. Such was the result of repeated
issues of bills of credit; they served only to increase the depth of
the water in which the Colonies were already floundering.
The Cape had by this time become largely a maritime region. Fishermen,
whalers, and small West India trading vessels, commanded, manned,
and in many cases owned, by Cape men, sailed from all the harbors
alongshore. The growing commerce, however, had been seriously
interfered with by the wars and was now hampered almost as badly by the
chaotic state of the currency. Furthermore, whales began to be scarce
in local waters; cod-fishermen wanted to be nearer the Grand Banks;
Quakers wanted to be farther from the General Court; restlessness and
discontent--infallible visitors of civilians in time of war--descended
upon many Cape families, and exoduses took place with disturbing
frequency. The emigrants offered various excuses for their departure,
but behind them all lay the war with its apparently never-ending
series of renewals. Besides those who actually left--and only one
degree less unsettling to the rest--were the men who kept talking
about moving away, but never went. Such malcontents, who lacked the
courage to prove their complaints sincere, were abundant. In 1739, a
group of Provincetown whalemen announced that they would depart with
their families for Casco Bay the next spring and talked of little
else throughout the winter; but as far as can be discovered from the
records, they grumbled on to their graves in the old town.
Of those who did little talking and quietly sailed away bag and
baggage, in search of a new Utopia, the Gorhams of Barnstable are
the best known. Colonel Shubael Gorham, the same who took part in
the capture of Louisburg, spent all his money and many years of his
life in founding the town of Gorham, Maine. With him went some of
the best citizens of Barnstable, Yarmouth, and Eastham, with a few
from Sandwich. Among them were his brother John and other members of
the family. None of these newest pioneers had the enterprise so much
at heart as Colonel Shubael, however. His perseverance was largely
responsible for securing grants of land from the Legislature as
pensions for the descendants of the soldiers in King Philip’s War.
A township called Narragansett No. 7 was assigned to old Captain
John Gorham’s heirs, and Colonel Shubael, as his grandson, had an
indisputable right in it. In 1736, he assembled the other claimants,
chief among them his fellow townsman, Captain John Phinney, who acted
throughout as his right-hand man. Some who received grants in the new
township had no desire to go. The Colonel bought their shares without
ever having seen the ground, and like many another land speculator,
went bankrupt as a result. His command in the Louisburg Expedition
switched his energies from Gorhamtown, as the settlement was usually
called, and turned out to be the last act of his life, for he died the
next year, 1746. The town of Gorham to-day stands as a monument to his
perseverance.
Other scattering emigrants settled in various parts of Maine and
Canada, but the majority of those who had no warring ancestor to
justify them in claiming land at Gorham set sail for Barrington in Nova
Scotia. The history of this township is inextricably interwoven with
the narrative of the Cape men who left their homes for newer pastures.
Such Cape names as Doane, Crowell, Knowles, Sears, and Nickerson are
scattered all over the early records of Barrington and are still common
there to-day.
Among the earliest Cape men to settle there were Thomas Crowell and
Solomon, Jonathan and Archelaus Smith, fishermen who had grown familiar
with the region on their annual voyages north. In 1761, they decided
to stay at Barrington instead of wasting time on the long voyage home.
They put up log cabins and were joined by their families, who made the
trip with Captain Eldad Nickerson, another Cape fisherman and a veteran
of Nova Scotia waters. He stayed, too, and became a prosperous trader.
Edmund Doane sailed from the Cape with the timbers of his old house
lashed on deck, though he had to cut them shorter in order to get them
on board. Doane also carried his furniture and live stock, but, owing
to storms and exposure, most of his cattle died before the vessel
reached Barrington. In 1762, the little settlement welcomed another
group of newcomers from Nantucket and the Cape.
Though Barrington was the first permanent settlement that Cape men
made in Nova Scotia, other Cape-Codders were scattered here and there
throughout the Province before Crowell and the Smiths decided to move.
Governor Lawrence, in a report dated 1760, writes: ‘... Transient
fishermen from Marble head and Cape Cod, who have put in there
[Liverpool, N.S.] out of curiosity, are so taken with the promising
prospects of those people that they have all solicited strongly to be
admitted into their township.’
Governor Lawrence, in fact, did everything in his power to make things
pleasant for New England fishermen, and his many inducements reached
the Cape at the psychological moment. Taxes were high, whales scarce,
and the Grand Banks too far away for convenience. It looked like a fine
chance to change a Province that was at swords’ points with the King for
one that basked in the sunshine of the royal smile. The combination of
circumstances was too strong for a good many Cape families. They sailed
north and became pioneers once more.
Meanwhile, in spite of taxes, wars, and emigrations, the wheels of
progress ground on. Schools were started; churches were full. Even
before King Philip’s uprising--as far back, indeed, as 1670--the
Plymouth Colony farmed out the Provincetown fisheries to pay for a free
school at Plymouth. This was all very well for Plymouth, but it was
small help to the Cape children. Plymouth apparently thought she had
done her duty by outlying towns seven years before when the General
Court recommended that each settlement give the question of schools
‘serious consideration.’ A more generous step was taken in 1687 under
Hinckley, when the Court, instead of spending all the revenue from the
fisheries to support the Plymouth school, let it be divided among the
more important towns. The sum thus supplied was only half enough to pay
a teacher, however, for five pounds was the most that any town might
receive.
When the two colonies merged, the Cape tried a different scheme, called
the ‘Squadron System,’ whereby the school went to the pupil instead
of the pupil’s going to the school. It was out of the question for
children who lived far out on the fringes of thinly settled towns to
make long daily trips to school; it was hard enough to get them all to
church once a week. The schoolmaster, therefore, following the example
of the peripatetic philosophers, moved from one part of a township to
another and kept school for a stated time in each. At first only one
shift was needed to cover a whole town; but as the settlements grew,
the pedagogue’s wanderings became more frequent, until in 1730 it took
him six moves and three years and a half to make the rounds of Harwich,
allowing on an average six months for each group. When he had finished
the cycle, if his courage was still good, he began again and worked his
way round the town once more.
The curriculum consisted of the three R’s, good measure considering
the salaries the towns paid the teachers. In 1700, Eastham paid ten
pence per week per child; in Sandwich, the devoted James Battersly
labored from 1701 to 1704 for ten pounds a year. But for the custom of
‘boarding round’ with the families of their pupils, it would seem that
schoolmasters must have starved; but Deacon Joseph Hawes, who taught
in Yarmouth and Barnstable just after the Revolution, received seven
dollars a month and boarded himself.
The Deacon has left an illuminating account of his experiences as a
pupil in the pre-Revolutionary schools of Yarmouth. He says that the
teacher
was generally placed in a great chair, at a large table before a
large fireplace. When he entered, every scholar must make a bow.
The master would make a short prayer, (this was held sacred by the
good old women). The Bible class was then called out to read one
chapter, standing in a half circle behind the master. He would
meantime be employed making pens etc., while each scholar would
mention the number and read one verse, while some might be playing
pins and others matching coppers. Then the Psalter class read in the
same manner.... The master would be writing copies, setting sums,
making and mending pens, etc., while nearly all the scholars would
be playing or idle. The most forward in Arithmetic might do one
or two sums in a day, if they could do them without the master’s
assistance;--he gave me one sum in the Single Rule of Three, which
I could not resolve for two or three days; after requesting him a
number of times to inform me, he would reply he had no time, and
I must study the answer.... As soon as the master retired from
the school, every instrument of correction or torture would by the
scholars be destroyed. At this time I lived with my aged grandfather,
who had a liberal education but in low circumstances. I could learn
more in his corner with my pine candle, in one evening, than I could
at school in a week.
Apparently Ichabod Cranes tarried in other regions besides Sleepy
Hollow, but some discount should be granted the Deacon’s narrative for
the unfailing exaggeration that every adult male allows himself when
recounting his youthful exploits at school. Time is a magnifier that
turns snub-nosed youngsters into gigantic malefactors; with the passing
of the years, a single unruly episode is seen as habitual rebellion.
Some muscular discipline must have been called for at times, however.
Who can doubt, for example, that Nathaniel Dill, of Wellfleet, who
for years taught a school for youthful Provincetown whalemen between
voyages, relied on something more primitive than knowledge to inspire
awe in his Herculean pupils? Our ancestors, in fact, were convinced of
the beneficial effects of the rod. The citizens of Truro paid two men
to act as ‘boy whipers’ when youth profaned the Sabbath, and they would
certainly have supported their schoolmaster in the same robust style.
But not even methods of discipline in schools can be standardized.
There remains always the individual to upset the profoundest
generality. While Dill with his fists was pounding obedience into lads
who had harpooned whales, the widow Sarah Spencer, mindful of Satan’s
delight in idle hands, gave her Barnstable pupils cotton to pick the
seeds out of as they learned the Bible by heart.