FROM THE REVOLUTION TO THE CIVIL WAR ASHORE
The surrender of Cornwallis was followed by six years of black
bewilderment and depression, during which New England tottered,
regained her balance, and tottered again; always on the brink of
disaster. Too many readjustments had to be made--too many unprecedented
and unimagined situations confronted her. Before the war, the salt
tang of the winds from the sea had been the breath of life to all New
England. Nowhere on the Atlantic Coast had whales or codfish been safe
from New England harpoons and handlines. British wharves were piled
high with casks of colonial whale oil, and the West Indies bought
all the salt fish that home ports rejected. But now, with the white
elephant of Independence on their hands, Boston merchants found the
traditional European markets closed. Winds from the ocean still piped
to them, but they could not dance. Their vessels lay rotting from
disuse or had been captured during the war. Bewildered by the complete
change in their economic universe, and hampered by wagonloads of
worthless colonial currency, the Bay State shipowners floundered in the
doldrums while England laughed.
But there was enough vigor and virtue in the blood of our ancestors to
carry them through these six years of blind man’s buff. Strong wine
lay underneath the bubbles of confusion and brought long thoughts into
the heads of youthful merchants, who rightly concluded that Europe was
not the world, and that, if European churlishness saw fit to bar its
gates to American vessels, they would head westward instead and knock
at more hospitable doors across the Pacific. The Cape, which was the
saltiest corner of this salty community, was well represented in these
wildly speculative voyages. The experiences of some of her shipmasters
will be told in another chapter. Less spectacular but quite as useful
was the unrecognized resumption of the West India trade, which began
to flourish again even in the islands that were English possessions.
The arm of British law, for all its length, could barely span the
Atlantic; the islanders felt none of the bitterness toward the new
nation that the old country did. Yankee fishermen, by hook or by crook,
swapped cargoes with Jamaica traders on forbidden docks, and thereby
managed to keep the turnover of exports and imports brisk at home
during the long absences of the Canton merchantmen.
The Napoleonic Wars gave Yankee enterprise a fine chance for neutral
trade, which was carried on in a brisk and miscellaneous fashion;
even British ports were sometimes opened just wide enough to let a
Yankee vessel slip in if she carried a useful cargo. To cut a long
and intricate story short, maritime New England, after a few years of
post-Revolutionary doldrums, had got its sea legs once more and was
squared away on what looked like a long and prosperous tack.
Ashore, too, prosperity returned quickly, and as business gathered
headway, the Cape divided its stock, as it had done when it prospered
before, and created two towns for one. Yarmouth in 1793, by an almost
unanimous vote, allowed the eastern part of the village to incorporate
independently as Dennis, so named for the Reverend Josiah Dennis, a
former pastor of the West Parish. Four years later, Orleans became
a separate town, instead of continuing as a part of Eastham. These
divisions were achieved amicably; but when, in 1803, Brewster split
from Harwich, as Harwich had split from Eastham, there came near being
a diminutive civil war. However, the transaction was put through, and
Brewster, named for the pious Elder of Plymouth, is to-day one of the
proudest towns on the Cape. These were among the last incorporations
that took place. The settlements were now at last divided enough to
satisfy every one’s passion for independence, and the towns have
remained pretty much _in statu quo_ ever since.
But as the European wars continued, they became grimmer and more
ruthless. Napoleon’s navy made no bones about seizing American
merchantmen that were carrying cargoes to British ports, and the
British on a few occasions picked the crews from Yankee vessels
and impressed them into His Majesty’s service. In the face of such
outrages, Jefferson had to do something. If he had been a prophet, he
would have declared war in 1807. Instead he tried to avoid further
trouble by keeping American sailors at home. His Embargo of 1807
forbade our ships to engage in trade with any foreign port. Even China
came under the ban, because a large part of every cargo from the East
was exported to Europe after a sojourn on New England docks.
The Embargo knocked Massachusetts’ feet from under her just as she had
got back into her stride. Yankee sailors were thrown into a state of
rebellious idleness. They must either submit and become farmers or
break the law. No part of the State was harder hit than the Cape. Her
fishermen could no longer carry their fares to foreign ports, and half
their vessels lay rotting once more at abandoned wharves. The villages
were filled with idle men who spent their days in vehement and not
always very intelligent invective against the Administration. Others,
though they felt no less hostile toward the Embargo, chose a more
sensible method of trying to remedy it. They called town meetings and
petitioned Jefferson to have it lifted.
Still others showed an active instead of an oratorical rebellion by
trading in spite of the Embargo. A group of Brewster merchants fitted
one of their vessels for a voyage to Surinam out of Plymouth. She was
hardly clear of the land when a Government boat seized her and took her
into Provincetown, where she would have shared the fate of the fishing
fleet and perished at the dock if the Brewster owners had not sent a
crew across the Bay to recapture her and resume the voyage. This raid
was so unexpected that it succeeded. By the time the United States
Marshal arrived, the vessel was well on her way, and no one in Brewster
or Provincetown could give him any information about her.
But in spite of occasional flashes of the old fire, the Cape, with its
small vessels, small capital, and small fleets, suffered severely--far
worse than the merchant princes of Boston and Salem, who had ships
abroad that continued to trade without coming home, and who had money
enough in the bank to tide them over a few lean years. With the Cape
it was small investments and quick returns, or nothing. Since this was
precisely the sort of trade that the Government could most effectively
stop, it is no wonder that hostility to the Embargo blazed even hotter
on the Cape than in the larger seaports.
True, Jefferson, after turning a deaf ear to scores of petitions,
finally raised the Embargo in the spring of 1809. Massachusetts
deep-sea voyagers became neutral traders once more, and a few Cape
families cheered up for the moment. But the Embargo had lasted long
enough to ruin most of them. They were not the minions of merchant
princes with a command awaiting them; they were their own capitalists,
and recommissioning their schooners was slow work. They had no more
than begun to gather headway when they were held in irons once more by
a new embargo which was the preface to war. The declaration of war sunk
them as surely as a torpedo from a submarine. No wonder they regarded
it as the crowning folly of a treacherous Administration.
Under such conditions it is not surprising that the Cape’s part in the
War of 1812 was an inglorious one. Throughout the hostilities, most of
her towns shared the sullen and defiant attitude that was reflected in
the resolution which the citizens of Yarmouth drew up in a town meeting
of 1814:
Voted unanimously, that as this town have ever expressed their
decided disapprobation of the present ruinous and unhappy war, and
have hitherto refrained from engaging in the same; we are still
determined not to engage in, encourage or support it any further than
we are compelled to do, by the laws of the country of which we are
citizens.
Except for their state of mind, this war was for Cape-Codders a short
and diluted repetition of the Revolution. As soon as vessels could be
spared from European waters, the British sent a fleet across to begin
operations along the Atlantic Coast. The frigates Majestic and Spencer
established themselves in Provincetown Harbor, where their officers
passed the time agreeably enough, going ashore, strolling about the
towns of Truro and Provincetown, purchasing whatever the townsfolk had
for sale, and smiling gayly at the girls, for whom the arrival of a
barge-load of young Britishers from the Majestic was no hardship.
Commodore Ragget, of the Spencer, had a more unpleasant assignment,
albeit a bloodless one. It was his duty to sail along the shores of
the Cape, threatening to burn the towns unless they paid him ransom.
Naturally enough, in view of the citizens’ attitude toward the war,
Ragget met with considerable success. Eastham and Brewster dug up
$1200 and $4000 respectively, and their citizens slept peacefully in
consequence. Truro had a ‘Committee of Safety’ whose exact function is
shrouded in darkness. Nobody could blame them if they, too, decided
to pay the price of security, but the town records are non-committal
on this delicate subject, just as they were at similar critical
moments during the Revolution. In Wellfleet the Committee of Safety
had instructions not only to be ready to negotiate for exemption from
attack, but also ‘in all cases and at all times to so conduct as to
keep in as much friendship with the said enemy as possible, making
the Constitution and laws of the United States and the Constitution
of Massachusetts their guide as far as they can with safety to the
particularly exposed position of the said town of Wellfleet to the
enemy.’ Sandwich considered what course to follow if threatened and
valiantly decided to defend herself ‘to the last extremity.’ Without
wishing to detract from the staunchness of her citizens, it may be
observed that Sandwich was far less accessible to an attack from the
sea than the towns on the lower Cape. A narrow neck of beach, with an
expanse of salt marsh inside it, stretches almost the whole length of
the shore line. A handful of militiamen, strategically hidden at the
edge of the upland, could have made life very unpleasant for a landing
party that had to pick its way between the salt holes and flounder
through the muddy creeks of this marsh. Such a shore front reduced to
one or two the number of points at which the British could land in
Sandwich, and Ragget might blaze away with all the cannon the Spencer
carried without landing a single shot in the town, so remote were its
houses from deep water.
Barnstable was similarly protected from cannonade, and so was Yarmouth.
The fact is that the whole Bay side of the Cape presented a singularly
uninviting prospect to invaders, whether it was their intention to
stand off and bombard the towns or send landing parties ashore in small
boats. The buildings did not line the water’s edge, but stood well
back, leaving a wide belt of rough country for the assailants to cross
before they reached the villages. Salt works were the only valuable
objects near shore. These might, indeed, have been destroyed without
much trouble and they formed the most telling item in the British
threat.
That Ragget realized these difficulties and was therefore bluffing the
towns into paying the money appears from his dealings with Orleans, the
only town on the lower Cape that refused to pay up. The Commodore could
hardly ignore the indignant rejection of his offer; so he went through
the motions of sending off a landing party, and a small group of the
enemy actually came ashore. But they had no intention of fighting if
they could help it; some musket shots from the Orleans militia were
enough to turn them back. By this demonstration the town showed that
it was ready to stand behind the vote it had cast in the last two
elections, when in 1813 it had returned a large majority for Varnum,
the war candidate for Governor, and a still larger one for Dexter the
next year.
But the troubles of Orleans were not over. History repeated itself
when the British frigate Newcastle went aground in December, 1814,
on the flats off the Bay side of the town. This ship was luckier
than the Somerset, however, for by stripping her of some spars and
rigging, the crew managed to work her off. The spars went ashore,
but these were thin pickings in comparison with what the citizens
had hoped for when they first saw the Newcastle aground. Nothing so
completely destroys a seaman’s temper as to get his vessel into trouble
in the sight of spectators. When the spectators are men with whom he
is at war, his exasperation is all the greater. The captain of the
Newcastle, therefore, vented his wrath on Orleans by sending a barge
into Rock Harbor and seizing a small schooner named the Betsy and
three sloops, the Camel, Washington, and Nancy. Two of the vessels lay
on the mud, and so were set on fire. The others, the Betsy and the
Camel, were manned by prize crews and headed for British headquarters
in Provincetown Harbor. The young midshipman who commanded the Betsy
ordered an Orleans man, who had been acting as ship-keeper at the time
of her capture, to pilot her out; but he loyally ran her on the beach
near Yarmouth, where she fell an easy prey to the citizens, after a
sojourn of only a few hours in hostile hands. The British had better
luck with the Camel, which arrived safely at Provincetown and was never
retaken.
Meanwhile, there had been lively doings farther up the Cape. Falmouth,
like Orleans, had voted for war and was called upon to stand to its
guns. The citizens had taken pot-shots from time to time at British
cruisers that passed within range of their two field pieces, and had
quite properly seized the Nantucket packet on the ground that the
islanders were aiding the enemy. This charge was probably true, for
Nantucket men, faced with the alternative of declaring themselves
neutral or starving to death, had wisely declared themselves neutral.
It was a short step from this position to piloting British vessels
in the Sound, and the chances are that some Nantucketers could have
been found thus employed. At any rate, the Englishmen regarded them
as friends, and the captain of the British brig Nimrod demanded the
surrender of the field pieces and the packet.
Captain Weston Jenkins, commander of the Falmouth Artillery Company,
replied that the British were at liberty to try to get them. The
invitation was accepted; word came back from the Nimrod that the
citizens had two hours in which to move their non-combatants out of
range; then the town would be knocked to pieces.
Two hours proved to be adequate. When the first cannon ball landed,
the houses were empty, and the militia safe in trenches alongshore.
The Nimrod blazed away for several hours, but made no real attempt to
set a landing party ashore. Nobody was hurt, and after the bombardment
ceased, the inhabitants returned to inspect the damage. One house had
been badly smashed, a few others had received a shot or two, and some
salt works had been struck, but otherwise it was the same old town.
This incident occurred in January, 1814.
The following months saw some random plundering along the Falmouth
shore with Captain Jenkins swapping raid for raid with the British.
The chief offenders in plundering were the crew of the privateer
Retaliation, Captain Porter. During the spring and summer his men
had given the citizens little peace. Finally, in the fall of 1814,
Jenkins decided to capture the vessel while she lay in Tarpaulin Cove,
a favorite resort of British cruisers. He assembled about thirty
volunteers, embarked on the sloop Two Friends, and set sail for the
Retaliation. His crew had to row most of the way and finally arrived in
broad daylight near enough to be seen from the enemy’s deck. Captain
Jenkins then anchored and ordered all but one or two of his men to
get out of sight. The trick worked well. A boat filled with British
sailors immediately bore down on the Two Friends like a duck coming to
decoys. When she was alongside, the Falmouth volunteers stood up and
pointed their muskets in the faces of the Britishers, who surrendered
without more ado. Jenkins now outnumbered the enemy about two to one;
it was therefore no very desperate enterprise for him to sail up to the
Retaliation and demand her surrender. The whole maneuver went without
a hitch. The Britisher was taken into harbor by a prize crew, and the
Falmouth shore was left in peace.
At intervals during this random war, the Cape harbors received visitors
more welcome than the British. Late in 1812, the ship American Hero
with a cargo from India slipped into Barnstable Harbor on a high
tide and drew her first free breath for weeks. There must have been
busy evenings at Crocker’s Tavern when her officers came ashore to
stretch their legs. If Mr. Madison’s port ear did not burn after
these sessions, it was because that organ was already callous to
Cape sentiment. Hyannis, which at this time was little more than
a trading post, was much excited by the arrival in June, 1814, of
the schooner Kutuzoff from Savannah, which put in under fire from a
British privateer. Her cargo of rice and cotton was unloaded on the
beach, where the militia prepared to defend it if necessary against a
landing party. But the British, following their sensible custom, kept
the sea, rightly concluding that the small quantity of goods which
slipped through their blockade was not worth the lives it would cost to
recapture it.
Blockade-running on this side of the Cape, where a bold foreshore and
deep water enabled the British to sail close in, was almost hopeless
business; but the Bay shore, with its wide fringe of flats, which at
certain stages of the tide were covered with only a foot or two of
water, was just the place for small boats to skirt alongshore trading.
A brisk traffic with New York grew up, carried on in whaleboats, of
which there were plenty in every village. The route was from Truro or
Wellfleet or Orleans to Barnstable; from there a quick dash took them
past the long arm of Sandy Neck to the safety of Scusset Creek, in
Sandwich.
From there the boats with their cargoes were hauled overland by oxen
along the present Canal route to Monument River and launched again for
the last leg of the voyage to Providence, New Haven, or New York, where
they swapped their salt fish for flour. ‘It was no unusual thing,’
says Frederick Freeman, ‘for those who had commanded first class
merchantmen, being now out of employment, to sail these small boats on
such adventures.’ One of the most conspicuous of these blockade-runners
was John Collins, of Truro, a lad of eighteen who afterward commanded,
among other vessels, the Roscius of the celebrated Dramatic Line of
Liverpool packets. Ephraim Sanford, of Falmouth, by using red sails for
night work, ran the salt that he made into New York to the tune of one
hundred dollars’ profit per trip.
The voyages of the whaleboat fleets were not always successful. On
one occasion Captains Winslow Knowles and Matthew Mayo, deep-water
shipmasters from Eastham, embarked on a private speculation, carrying
a boatload of rye to Boston. On the return trip they were scooped up
by the Spencer. Knowles was sent to Boston to collect three hundred
dollars’ ransom, and thereafter faded from the picture. Mayo’s fun had
just begun, however. Commodore Ragget made him pilot of a captured
Duxbury pinkie, whose commander had orders to patrol the Bay. This
suited the Eastham sailor nicely. A northwest gale sprang up and
brought with it a string of adventures for him that reads like a boy’s
yarn of the Spanish Main. Kegs of rum, drunken sailors, picked locks,
pistols, dragging anchors, and cut hawsers all figure in the tale,
the scene of which was the stretch of salt water between Billingsgate
Island and the Eastham flats. The climax came when Mayo got the
schooner hard aground and, slipping over the side, notified the militia
of his own town, who marched off at low tide and took her. It was after
this exploit that Ragget collected $1200 from Eastham as the price of
keeping his hands off the town.
A good many fishermen tried to run the blockade and make voyages to
the Labrador grounds, but very few of them succeeded. Most shared the
fate of Timothy Hallett, of Yarmouth, who with his schooner Victory
was captured before he was clear of the Bay. He saved himself a long
term of imprisonment by sharing his knowledge of Nova Scotian waters
with the grateful British commander. These services earned for him safe
conduct back to Yarmouth with his schooner. Such adventures served only
to break the monotony of life at home; they almost always ended in
disaster. The whaleboats were the craft that kept fresh provisions in
Cape kitchens.
So far all the Cape’s activity in the war had been selfish. Her
citizens had rested content with protecting their own shores, either
with money or the home guard, and running the blockade in the hope of
replenishing their own larders. What little damage they had done to
the British fleet had been incidental to carrying out their own narrow
programme, it had consisted, indeed, of little more than recovering
captured vessels. They had undertaken no enterprise with the desire
of helping the Government of which they were a part. Only four of the
thirteen Cape towns favored the war: Sandwich, Barnstable, Falmouth,
and Orleans. The rest were more than willing to let Madison and his
party stew in their own juice. What support the Administration received
from the Cape, therefore, had to be furnished by the loyal minority.
These, quite naturally, took to the sea in privately armed vessels
because the Government had no navy worth mentioning. Long-sparred
topsail schooners were the favorite rig for the business of
privateering, which called for a maximum of speed and no carrying
capacity to speak of. Fleets of these lean and graceful craft which put
out from the ports of recalcitrant New England did much to offset the
depredations of His Majesty’s navy. One of them, the brig Reindeer, was
commanded by Captain Nathaniel Snow, of Truro, who had several other
Cape men in his crew, among them Captain Matthew Mayo, whose early
adventures with the Spencer have been mentioned above. Snow had orders
to intercept the fleet of returning East-Indiamen that was due in the
English Channel. They appeared on schedule time, to be sure, but were
accompanied by so strong a convoy of warships that the Reindeer sheered
off and contented herself with picking up six scattered prizes in a
five months’ cruise. Though some of the captured vessels were retaken by
the British, all hands retired at the end of the voyage with money in
the bank.
Captain Reuben Rich, of Wellfleet, was the quickest Cape money-maker,
however. Sailing in a vessel that he and two others had fitted out
at their own expense, he returned to Boston almost immediately with
a British East-Indiaman under his wing and put $17,000 in his pocket
as his share of the prize money. Apparently Captain Rich knew when
to stop, for no further record of him as a privateer appears. John
Collins, of Truro, was still too young to vote when, tired of running
the blockade to New York in whaleboats, he took to deep water and sent
back his share of prizes. The youthful impetuosity of the Truro lad
finally brought disaster, however, for mistaking a British sloop-of-war
for an East-Indiaman, he sailed in, dazzled by visions of another rich
captive, only to be met by a fire that outweighed his own. He hung on
for an hour, but found too late that he had bitten off more than he
could chew. Collins emerged from an English prison at the end of the
war with more wisdom and as much enterprise as ever.
[Illustration: CAPTAIN JOHN COLLINS]
A handful of Cape-Codders appear here and there on board the few
vessels that comprised the regular navy. John Cook, of Eastham, served
under Perry at the battle of Lake Erie; two Harwich men were on board
the Constitution when she beat the Guerrière. Local historians have
done their best to turn these few loyal Cape-Codders into a multitude,
but no alchemy can distort the truth. Too many men spent the three
years of war at home, stoutly proclaiming that they would not fight for
a Southern Administration, or trying to quiet a troublesome conscience
by sporadic activity in the local militia. They were not lacking
in bravery. What they lacked was vision. A house divided against
itself had no terrors for their political inexperience. Blinded by
sectionalism, veterans of the Northwest Coast, like Captain William
Sturgis, joined with veterans of the European ports, like Captain
Elijah Cobb, in trying to scuttle their nation. Luckily peace came
before they succeeded. Just as no part of the country had done less
than New England to bring about the peace, so no part of the country
was quicker to profit by it. Cape shipmasters, once more in demand,
sailed forth to trade with the nation they had refused to fight.
Ashore, too, the end of the war marked the beginning of a period of
energy and prosperity for the Cape that has never been equaled.
Men of all callings, from reformers to bridge-builders, sprang into
violent activity. A branch of the Boston Temperance Society spread as
far as Yarmouth, where in 1817 a group of righteous townsfolk decided
to check the drinking of hard liquor, which in those robust days was as
universal as swearing. The old custom of ‘a tavern to a town’ no longer
sufficed. Like other good things, drinking was being overdone, until it
took seventeen grogshops to quench the thirst of the men who lived on
the Bay side of Yarmouth. No doubt as many more catered to the drought
of the unregenerate South-Siders. A number of the worthiest citizens
joined the new Temperance Society and some of the taverns went out of
business.
The slings and arrows of righteousness were leveled at tobacco as well.
Societies against its use were formed in many towns. A peripatetic
reformer, the Reverend Charles S. Adams, of Boston, visited the Cape
in 1837 and 1838, and delivered an original poem before the Temperance
Society of Orleans and the Anti-Tobacco Societies of South Wellfleet
and Harwich. There is no doubting the author’s conviction, nor can it
be denied that he pays a fitting tribute to the power of his antagonist:
‘Popes, kings, and legislatures all combine
By excommunication, threats and fine,
To stay its march, to break its iron rod--
It conquers still, and triumphs like a god:
This nauseous weed, despite of all their laws,
Still holds its throne within the human jaws’;
and so on for twenty-four ferocious pages. Certainly the Cape was doing
its share toward discouraging frailties of the flesh.
The Cape men--now essentially a seagoing population--fancied, among
other things, in this period of hectic energy, that they were
manufacturers as well. They began to build factories and operate them.
Wellfleet, having given up the attempt to renew whaling, incorporated
what was known as The Wellfleet Manufacturing Company for making cotton
and woolen cloth. Sandwich, the same year that the war was declared,
showed her nonchalance by putting up a cotton factory near Wolftrap
Neck. Sandwich’s chief shore activity, however, was its glass works,
which were started in 1825 and ran with increasing prosperity until
1888. The recent demand among collectors of antiques for pieces of
Sandwich glass has lent a fictitious value to the products of this
factory, and has shed a glamour over the old concern that makes it seem
like a much greater industry than it really was.
The Chatham and Harwich Manufacturing Company was established in 1827
for making cotton and woolen cloth. The year 1829 saw a savings bank
incorporated in Barnstable; the Duck Harbor and Beach Company started
at Wellfleet, the Union Wharf Company at Truro, and the Skinnaquits
Fishing Company at Harwich.
And so it went. To judge from their activities on shore, one would
suppose that the Cape-Codders’ only hope for immortality lay in what
they could achieve on dry land, instead of in what they were doing
for the nation at sea. Wharfs appeared like mushrooms to accommodate
the fishing fleets, and riggers and sailmakers and caulkers had their
establishments near by. These industries must be taken more seriously
than the factories, for there is propriety in them. A Cape-Codder
who makes cloth for print dresses is a misguided victim of an age of
contagious energy. He is a temporary figure, and will disappear when
the pace drops back to normal. But a Cape-Codder who makes sails and
blocks, or who pounds oakum into the seams of fishing schooners, is
a proper picture for his setting; he may go on as long as schooners
continue to sail, and the world will not tire of watching him and
praising his wisdom.
So it was with the shipbuilders. It is impossible to say when the
first vessel was launched on the Cape--not very early, at all events,
for farming took all the time and energy of the settlers for three or
four generations. Occasionally, to be sure, a man would build himself
a sloop large enough to sail round the Bay, and there is some evidence
that a few scattering craft of this sort were built by amateurs as
early as 1675. Thomas Bourne, of Sandwich, built the sloop Charming
Betty for Simeon Dillingham in 1717, to be used as a Boston packet. But
the first professional builder of whom any record exists was Thomas
Agrey, who, about 1750, began the business at Barnstable, and trained
his young assistants so well that they continued after he moved away to
Maine. Once sown, the seed took root and spread up and down the Cape;
Shipyards appeared like mushrooms beside every creek from Buzzards
Bay to Provincetown. Immediately after the Revolution, the Brays at
Hockanom launched a fleet of fishing schooners and sloops running from
fifty tons to three times that size; and before the Revolution, the
Wellfleet whalemen pursued their calling in big local schooners, built
by fellow townsmen.
The most active builder on the lower Cape was Anthony Thacher, whose
headquarters were at Harwich, but who, like the early millwrights, went
where business called. About 1845, he laid the keels for a small fleet
of vessels in Harwich and Chatham. Some of them were for a wealthy
Harwich merchant, Job Chase, and were framed from timber growing on
his own land. Meantime, at Truro, Henry Rogers and Nathaniel Hopkins
were building brigs and schooners at their yard near the mouth of Pamet
River. Barnstable did not rest on her early laurels, but immediately
after the War of 1812 resumed the activity she had shown before the
Embargo. On the south side of the town, Richard Lewis was launching
schooners at Hyannis, and Crocker Marchant had a yard at the Port. At
Osterville, Horace Crosby and his brother, C. Worthington, started
boat-building in the thirties, and the business still flourishes in the
hands of their descendants, Wilton, Herbert, and H. Manley. West Dennis
was represented by Elisha Crowell and Luther Studley. Provincetown,
during these busy years, built more small vessels than any other town
and even after the Civil War, John Whitcomb launched a number of
whaling schooners there.
The names of some of the Cape vessels show that the spirit of
independence had spread even to the shipyards. Men christened their
craft according to their fancy, scorning names that were traditional
and trite. Even when they named them after real persons, a custom
which usually indicates the last resource of an exhausted imagination,
Cape-Codders injected a note of whimsical familiarity, like Willie
Swift and Freddie W. Alton, two of Whitcomb’s whalers. But the most
original names occurred when owners gave free rein to their fancy and
drew down parts of speech at random from the sky. Two of the schooners
that Anthony Thacher built were called the Ostrich and the Emulous.
Captain William Handy, of Bourne, was too old to have been serious
when he christened one of his vessels Love. Chatham proclaimed a
religious toleration which she did not practice, by painting Jew and
Gentile across the broad stern of one of her schooners; two others
were dubbed Exit and Philanthropic. Job Chase, Jr., and his associates
luxuriated in Hopes. Among his fleet appear such names as Superb Hope,
Royal Hope, Hope Mary Ann, Hope’s Lady, and Lady Hope. Thacher selected
creeks with strange names, too, to build his craft on. He launched
several from a place called No Horns, a corruption of the Indian
Nauhaught, and others from the Snake Hole.
Few of the vessels that have been mentioned measured more than seventy
feet over all; many of them were much smaller, for the Cape’s fame in
shipbuilding depended on the number of yards it supported, not on the
size of its vessels. But there were exceptions. At Sagamore, Benjamin
Burgess and Abner Ellis built two barks, the Franklin and the Lysander,
for the West Indian trade. These were launched in 1837 and 1842
respectively at the very peak of the boom. A little earlier, Captain
William Handy, after retiring from the sea, launched, besides various
brigs and schooners, the full-rigged ship Rebecca on the shores of
Buzzards Bay.
But the men who really saved the Cape from having nothing but small
craft to its credit were the Shivericks. Asa Shiverick, Sr., was born
in Falmouth, but moved to East Dennis, where, after learning his trade
in the shipyard of Jeremiah Crowell, he began to build brigs and
schooners on his own account. His son Asa was born there in 1816, and
before he was twenty-one he had considerable experience in shipbuilding
off the Cape. He worked for a time in Boston in Lot Wheelwright’s yard,
and later in the shipyards of Maine. When he returned to East Dennis in
1837, therefore, he was a valued ally to his father, who had more than
he could do to supply the demand that the boom had created. The old
gentleman had never tried his hand at ships, but had been content with
turning out small craft like the other Cape builders. He took the goods
the gods provided, and when the Atlantic came ashore at Sesuit, near
his house, he used her planking and timbers for the topsail schooner
Atlas that was then on the stocks. The arrival of his son Asa, fresh
from the Maine coast and with experience in Boston as well, brought
new life and larger ideas to the business. His other sons, Paul and
David, also joined forces with their father, and the old man’s troubles
were over. If the boys wanted to build big ships, well and good; he
was glad to let them try it. He retired a few years later, and the
firm, with Asa, Jr., as its leading spirit and his brothers as staunch
supporters, constructed a new and bigger yard farther down the creek,
where they began in 1850 to build a fleet of ships that would have
done credit to any yard in the country. They were in close relations
with the local capitalists and merchants, Christopher Hall and Prince
Crowell, retired shipmasters whose financial backing gave the young
builders confidence and a free hand. By 1862 eight full-rigged ships
and barks took the water from their ways. The first was the Revenue;
she was followed by the Hippogriffe, Belle of the West, Kit Carson,
Wild Hunter, Webfoot, Christopher Hall and Ellen Sears. Two of these,
the Belle of the West and the Wild Hunter, were extreme clippers with
all that the phrase implies. Another, the medium clipper Hippogriffe,
was hardly less graceful. She was a lucky ship, for though, in 1858,
while working her way across the China Sea, she struck an uncharted
rock, Captain David Sears, by a piece of expert seamanship, got her
clear and arrived safe at Hongkong. Here it was discovered that
a large fragment of the rock had come away and was lodged in her
planking, completely filling the hole that it had stove. The rock was
subsequently charted under the name of Hippogriffe Rock. Toward the end
of the Civil War, while she was lying in Calcutta, her owners--Hall and
Crowell--decided to sell her rather than risk a lop-sided encounter
with the Alabama; so, like many another American clipper, she ended her
days under the British flag.
[Illustration: ASA SHIVERICK]
The Wild Hunter, though she made no record runs, proved to be a good
investment and--after a checkered career, which included the California
trade, guano-carrying from the Pacific, and China voyages--the yards
were stripped from her mizzenmast in the seventies, and bark-rigged she
faded from sight in the decade that followed.
[Illustration: THE WILD HUNTER]
The Belle of the West was the sharpest of all the Shiverick ships. Her
designer was Samuel Pooke, of Boston, the same man who designed the
celebrated Red Jacket. She was towed to Boston to be rigged in 1853,
a year when the harbor was full of clippers from the yards of the
greatest builders in the country. Surrounded though she was by such
rivals, her appearance excited admiration, and on her maiden voyage
to San Francisco the newspapers of even that clipper-surfeited port
found space to praise her saucy lines. Thomas F. Hall, of East Dennis,
who sailed on her for four and a half years, thus pays tribute to the
excellence of the Shivericks’ workmanship and the beauty of the Belle:
The _South American_ ... was often said in shipping circles to be
the best built wooden ship afloat. The first opportunity I had, I
visited her in East Boston. I think that if the _Belle of the West_
and the _South American_ could have been placed alongside each other,
that the _Belle_ would by competent judges, be said to be the most
excellent. The beauty of the _Belle_ was never exploited. She was
always commanded by William F. Howes, who cared nothing for such
publicity. He rather abhorred it. She was not extensively known.
Christopher Hall sold her after ten years to Glidden and Williams, and
from these owners she passed into Eastern hands at Calcutta. Loaded
with rice, reduced in rig, and under a foreign commander, she foundered
in the Bay of Bengal in 1868.
The decline of our merchant marine, which began in the late fifties,
silenced the busy hammers of the Shivericks, as it silenced the din
in the other shipyards of the country. Asa Shiverick moved to Woods
Hole, where he spent the latter part of his life. His name does not
appear in the history of the Nation for the same reason that the names
of Donald McKay and Samuel Hall and Paul Curtis do not appear: they
never sought office. But these shipbuilders, by displaying the finest
sailing vessels that have ever been launched, did more for the Nation’s
prestige than many of its Presidents have done, and created a respect
for our flag that could not have been achieved by an army of polished
diplomats.
The next great industry on the Cape was, like shipbuilding, carried
on close to the water’s edge. Until a few years ago a man who stood
on the edge of the upland and looked out across the level expanse of
marshes, might have seen, in one or two places, a lone timber, bleached
like a huge bone, slanting up against the dark green background. If he
was interested enough to make his way out to it, he would have found
the splintered stumps of three other uprights hidden in the thatch and
forming, with the one left standing, the corners of a square. This
was all that remained of the salt works that once kept hundreds of
Cape-Codders busy and prosperous, and dotted the shore-front with the
sails of windmills.
Of course Cape-Codders made salt long before they invented salt works.
The primitive method was to boil sea-water in great iron kettles and
scrape out what little salt remained after the water had boiled away.
But this was slow business; incidentally, it helped to destroy the
forests, for the amount of fuel needed was prodigious. Yet it continued
for more than a century, until 1776, in fact, when Captain John Sears,
of Dennis, his wits sharpened by the high price that salt was beginning
to fetch because of the British blockade, tried the experiment of
letting the sun do the work of evaporation.
He built a big shallow trough--one hundred feet by ten--which could
be covered in case of rain by a clumsy contrivance of shutters. His
apparatus was crude, the vats leaked, and the labor of filling the
trough was prodigious, yet it was a great improvement over the old
method; and though the Captain’s ingenuity was rewarded by only
eight bushels of salt the first year, he was confident that further
improvements would make his invention practical.
Encouragement was given to his energies by a bounty of three shillings
per bushel which the Court offered on all salt locally manufactured
from sea-water. Captain Sears brought his nautical training to bear
successfully on the problem of making his vats tight; but still the
labor of filling them was great, in spite of experiments which he tried
with hand-pumps. This obstacle was finally removed by Major Nathaniel
Freeman, of Harwich, who, after the Captain had been racking his brains
in vain for ten years, suggested a windmill. The success of this device
was immediate. Meantime, other improvements had been made. In 1793,
Reuben Sears, of Harwich, invented a roof that could be rolled off
on wooden sheaves that ran on narrow ways built out beside the vats.
Hattil Kelly, a fellow townsman of Captain Sears, contrived a still
more ingenious scheme, which made it possible to cover or uncover two
vats at a time. He placed them corner to corner in pairs; at the
point of contact was a huge upright with a stout peg protruding from
its upper end. On this peg was pivoted a long horizontal crane that
supported the roofs of both vats. The roofs were left clear of the
sides of the vats, so that by swinging the cranebeam horizontally on
its pivot, both vats could be covered or uncovered as desired.
Such facilities as these encouraged so many men to become at least
part-time salt-makers, that in 1802, James Freeman reports 136 separate
establishments on the Cape, producing a total of over 40,000 bushels of
salt and 182,000 bushels of Glauber salts a year. Even these figures
look small when compared with the output a generation later, for the
War of 1812 gave a fillip to prices, and still more works appeared,
until, when the peak of the business was reached in the thirties (the
same decade that saw industry of all sorts booming on the Cape), the
number of salt works reached a total of 442, the annual output of which
was well over half a million bushels, exclusive of Glauber salts, which
were at that time a drug on the market.
Loring Crocker’s works at Common Fields, in Barnstable, represented the
last word in salt-making. To avoid having to lay his log pipes all the
way down to low-water mark, Mr. Crocker built big wooden reservoirs on
the ridge of the beach where the ground was highest. From these the
water was run through ‘falls’ into sets of seven vats, placed on ground
that sloped gently down from the level of the reservoirs, so that when
the falls were opened, the water ran through automatically. The vats
were eighteen feet wide, from fifty to sixty feet long, according to
the lay of the land, and not quite a foot deep. The first three were
called the first, second, and third water-rooms respectively; the next
three, the pickle-rooms; and the last was the salt-room. Each played
its part in the process of evaporation. The gunwales, or sides, of
the first water-rooms were left festooned with ropy vegetation by the
evaporating liquid; in the next two, a thick slime was deposited on the
bottom. In the pickle-rooms a substance called lime was precipitated,
and remained on the bottom when the brine passed through the last falls
into the salt-room, where the crystals of salt formed and were shoveled
out and stored in sheds to dry. The whole process took at least six
weeks, but of course varied with the weather.
[Illustration: LORING CROCKER’S BARNSTABLE SALT WORKS IN 1870]
The ‘bitter water,’ which was the name given to the liquid that
remained after all the ordinary salt had been extracted from it,
was still valuable for making Epsom salts. The manufacture of these
salts was a process apart, and could be done only in cold weather,
when crystals of crude Epsom salts formed in the bitter water. For
this reason the bitter water had to be stored in separate vats until
winter. As soon as the crystals appeared, the liquid was drained off
into a cistern, and fresh water was poured in on the crude salts until
an expert could tell by feeling it that the right strength had been
reached. The solution was then heated to about blood temperature by
a special stove (though the process was called ‘boiling salts,’ the
liquid was never allowed to boil) and was left standing overnight. In
the morning the windows of the shed were thrown open to chill the air,
the water was drawn off, and Epsom salts lay four or five inches deep
on the bottom of the vat. By adding a little fresh water to the old
bitter water, it could be made to produce crude salt crystals three or
four times, but those that appeared after the second time were of an
inferior quality. Even then the bitter water had commercial value; it
was used for making a special cement for cornices and filigree work,
and Mr. Crocker sold it for a dollar a barrel. Another by-product of
the business was Glauber salts, which formed before the water reached
the salt-room; they were removed and refined in much the same way as
the Epsom salts, and were sold to tanneries, where they were used to
prevent the hides from drying stiff. A cloth wrung out in a solution of
Glauber salts might hang on a clothes line all summer and still be wet.
Thus had the crude trough of Captain Sears been elaborated into an
intricate system of reservoirs, falls, vats, and boiling rooms,
that extracted the last ounce of salt from the sea-water. Such an
improvement in apparatus speaks for itself; the business paid in spite
of spells of bad weather and a fluctuating market, which sent the price
all the way from forty-two cents a bushel before the Civil War to
eighty-two cents after it. Hundreds of men prospered with salt-making
as their chief business, and many a building on the Cape was stored
to the eaves with salt for months on end, like whale oil on the New
Bedford docks, waiting for a rising market. This business, in flush
times, paid upwards of twenty-five per cent on the investment. Since
$2,000,000 of Cape money was invested in salt works throughout the
thirties, one reason for the great prosperity of that period becomes
clear. About 1840, the business began to decline for various reasons.
The price of soft pine from Maine--which was used almost exclusively in
building the vats--was going higher, and foreign salts became cheaper
as mines were developed. By degrees the vats were broken up, and some
of the lumber was used for building barns, sheds, and even houses, to
the despair of carpenters, whose tools were red with rust in a few days
from contact with boards that had been pickled in brine for years.
The growing economic importance of the Cape justified quicker
communication with Boston than the stage-coaches or packets provided,
and in 1848 the first train puffed its way from Middleboro to Sandwich.
For six years this remained the end of the route. Then rails were laid
as far as Hyannis. The next notch in the progress of the railroad
down the Cape came in 1865 with the building of a line from Yarmouth
to Orleans, whence it advanced jerkily the rest of the way, reaching
Wellfleet in 1869 and finally stretching to its goal at Provincetown in
1873. The Chatham Branch was not built until the late eighties.
The arrival of the first train in a town aroused varied emotions among
the citizens. Packet-owners and riggers were hostile, of course, and
cursed the railroad in picturesque style, while fishermen, rejoicing
in the quicker transportation of their fares, were whole-hearted
supporters of it. The Reverend A. J. Church was inspired to compose the
following lines, to be sung at the celebration which was held when the
directors decided to open the road to Wellfleet:
‘The great Atlantic Railroad for old Cape Cod, all hail!
Bring on the locomotive; lay down the iron rail;
Across the Eastham prairies, by steam we’re bound to go,
The railroad cars are coming, let’s all get up and crow.
The little dogs in Dogtown[1] will wag their little tails;
They’ll think that something’s coming, a-riding on the rails.’
[1] Dogtown was the name given to the region between Wellfleet and
South Wellfleet.
‘All hail, hell!’ muttered the packet captain. But no progress can
be made without treading on somebody’s toes, and even the dourest
conservative had to admit that, as a means of reaching Boston, the
train was a great improvement over the stage-coach.
Stage-coaches had begun to lumber their way to various parts of the
Cape about 1800. Before that, unless a man was lucky enough to pick
up a coaster, he had to hire his own horses and carriage, as James
Winthrop did in 1791. This young man was engaged to survey a route for
the proposed Cape Cod Canal, and his account of the journey to Sandwich
gives a good picture of travel on the Cape at that early date. He
writes in part as follows:
Thursday 12th May 1791, at 1 P.M. set out from Cambridge to survey
Sandwich neck.... Miss H. a lovely girl of eighteen, was polite
enough to take this opportunity to visit her Barnstable friends, and
rode in the chaise with me.... Oated at Bracket’s in Braintree ...
lodged at Cushing’s in Hingham twenty-three miles from home. Well
accomodated for horse keeping and victuals, but bugs in the bed.
Friday 13th, after breakfast set out for Plymouth; soon began to
rain but got to Kingston to dine, put up at Beal’s, accomodations
good but people slow. Saturday 14th, Rain. After breakfast the storm
intermitted. Rode into Plymouth by 9 o’clock, introduced Miss H.
to General Warren and lady, and put up at their house, proposing a
friendly but early dinner with them. Storm renewed and held till
toward night. Sabbath 15th. Attended meeting, drank tea at Mrs.
Winslow’s. Two agreeable and pretty daughters, both amiable. In the
evening Major Thomas and Lady, the Misses Winslows, Miss Gorham and
Miss Barr came to see Miss H. all the young ladies about her time
of life. We had an agreeable evening. Monday 16th. After Breakfast
rode to Ellises in Plymouth Woods where we dined in Company of the
Supreme Court as they were returning from Barnstable. Afternoon rode
to Sandwich, put up at Fessenden’s, deposited Miss H. at Rev. Mr.
Burr’s. He has a very handsome and agreeable wife. Spent the evening
at General Freeman’s. Capt. Allen & Major Williams & Rev. Mr. Burr
spent an hour with us at Fessenden’s.
Thus did young Winslow reach his goal. He sent Miss H. the rest of her
journey to Barnstable in the chaise in charge of his assistant, Mr.
Henry Parker.
Even after stage-coaches appeared, no one used them if he could help
it, except travelers from the city, like those hardy voyagers Dwight
and Kendall, who made the trip overland to Provincetown early in the
century. The wheels buried themselves in sand above the rims; for
miles on end the horses had to walk. Yet these vehicles somehow paid
their way, and the proprietors did what they could to make the journey
agreeable. Some of them painted their coaches with gaudy yellows and
reds, and employed festive philosophers to drive them. Their greatest
allies, however, were the tavern-keepers along the route. If these
public-spirited gentlemen had shut up shop, the stage-coaches could
hardly have survived. Even after the Temperance Movement breathed its
arid breath on the Cape, there were always one or two hosts in each
town who were glad to provide a glass or so to cut the dust of the
journey from the throats of passengers and drivers; and these oases
were not far enough apart to allow a very heavy gloom to settle between
taproom and taproom. It was a short jog from Fessenden’s at Sandwich to
Howland’s at West Barnstable, and a shorter one still from there to the
Crocker Tavern in Barnstable. A scant four miles, and the stage stopped
in Yarmouth under the swinging sign of Sears; there was balm for the
tired traveler after all.
From some parts of the road, too, the view was striking. Dr. Dwight,
as his coach climbed the old highway that used to lead over the top
of Scorton Hill in West Barnstable, was properly impressed by the
broad sweep of Great Marshes, threaded with creeks and bordered on the
north by the seven lean miles of Sandy Neck, which he describes with
appropriate eloquence as a ‘long, lofty, wild and fantastical beach,
thrown into a thousand grotesque forms by the united force of winds and
waves.’ Beyond lay the Bay, and if the day was clear, the low, white
shore of Wellfleet and Truro could be faintly discerned on the horizon.
A less reverend man than Dwight might well have been moved by such a
prospect.
[Illustration: SANDY NECK AND THE HAY-GROUNDS, WEST BARNSTABLE]
Post-riders also helped to keep the Cape in touch with what was going
on in other parts of the State. Before the Revolution, letters had come
and gone in the pockets of chance travelers, but in 1792 the Government
took charge of the mail and employed John Thacher, of Barnstable, to
carry it between that town and Boston. He made the round trip once a
week, leaving Barnstable Tuesday morning and returning Friday night.
His pay was one dollar for each day spent on the road. His budget of
letters was never too big to be carried in a saddle-bag. The lower Cape
got on as best it could for another five years; then a rider was put on
the Yarmouth-Truro route and made a round trip weekly. The War of 1812,
obnoxious as it was to all Cape men, furnished so much interesting
news, particularly to families who had sons or fathers on privateers,
that the mail began to run twice a week as far as Yarmouth, and
beginning in 1820 it came three times. This proved to be often enough
until the very height of the Cape’s prosperity in 1837, when a daily
mail was established, which lasted until the opening of the railroad.
The citizens did not allow the business and commercial prosperity that
they were enjoying to interfere with intellectual pursuits. Besides
the churches, which, thriving though they were, represented centers
of emotion and controversy rather than of intellect, the townspeople
started lyceums, over the graves of which monuments still stand in the
shape of dreary buildings, with ‘Lyceum Hall’ written large above their
doors. Yet in their day these organizations were centers of light and
leading. The Preamble to the Constitution of the Barnstable Lyceum,
organized in 1829, gives a good idea of the motives of its founders:
Being desirous of witnessing, in the community around us, a
development and expansion of mind and a refined and elevated taste;
it is our wish that a society for the advancement of these purposes,
may be established in this town.
The objects of this Lyceum shall be the improvement of its members in
useful knowledge and the advancement of popular Education.
These societies were also rudimentary museums and libraries. Curators
were elected who were authorized to collect any specimens of minerals,
natural curiosities, and books which they thought would be useful for
children as well as for adults. The lyceums worked hand in hand with
the schools, and encouraged children to become non-voting members by
admitting them for one half the annual fee. They allowed teachers to
use the society’s collections for the benefit of their classes. Their
scope was broad, and freedom of debate in meetings was encouraged.
Only one exception to this policy was made: no religious or political
question was allowed to come up for discussion. But there was fruitful
ground for discussion outside these forbidden realms, and the
President had it in his power to regulate the temperature of debates by
designating the men who should support respectively the negative and
the affirmative side of each question. Further interest was guaranteed
by the fact that the debaters usually spoke extemporaneously. The
exercises were by no means confined to debates, however: ‘Lectures,
Readings, Illustrations of the Sciences, and Conversation’ all found a
place in the meetings. The precise character of the topics discussed is
given in an entertaining style by a member of the Brewster Lyceum who
had a talent for verse, and who read the poem from which the following
extracts are quoted, at a meeting of the society in 1836. The first
lines allude to an address on ‘Curiosity’ which had recently been
delivered by the Reverend S. Williams:
‘On the 23rd day of the last month, December,
In a _curious_ address, if I rightly remember,
In a _curious_ way, too, I truly believe,
We were all introduced to our Grandmother Eve,
A _curious_ feeling ’twas said we possessed,
Which dwelt in her bosom,--which burnt in her breast,
And led her to wander and stand by the root
And pluck from the branches and eat of the fruit
Of the tree of the knowledge of evil and good,
Which she was forbidden to visit for food.
And ’twas said her fair daughters possess the same trait,
Which leads them to bite at the old serpent’s bait.’
In the same happy vein the writer reviews the rest of the address,
and then turns to a lecture that had been delivered by the Reverend
Nathaniel Simpkins, of Yarmouth:
‘Again we heard from a father--a sage--
The wisdom, advice and experience of age.
He stated the good that a rational use
Of the means we enjoy would most likely produce.
Lyceums, he observed, are most wisely designed
To call into action the powers of the mind,
To waken ideas that latently sleep,
That one from another advantage may reap.’
* * * * *
And as a good steel and a flint produce fire,
Our minds by collision raise intellect higher.’
Another clergyman had favored this lyceum with a discourse on
‘Phrenology,’ to which our poet alludes as follows:
‘But I leave this and hasten to give a few thumps
At the well-known address, Sir, the “Lecture on Bumps.”
* * * * *
This science, it seems, has commenced quite a rage
With many good people of this wondrous age;
And it is an employment by no means so dull,
To lecture on brains and examine the skull.
Pursuing the way that some others have trod
This doctrine has journeyed _quite down to Cape Cod_.’
Leaving the lecturers, the poet continues:
‘But again. In reviewing our doings of late
I shall notice the questions proposed for debate.
We have agreed and voted that riches have more
Influence than knowledge in towns along shore.
* * * * *
The next we contended to ascertain which
Enjoyed the most pleasure, the Poor or the Rich.
* * * * *
Again we debated. A great deal was said
About hanging bad people until they were dead;
And after advancing what reasons we could,
Concluded that hanging produces most good.
We must all behave well, then, according to that,
As we wish to avoid a new hempen cravat.
* * * * *
But while on this subject I must, by the way,
Observe that strict justice requires me to say,
That since this debate we have read a report
And given a vote of a different sort.’
Not every town could boast of a poet like this nameless Brewster bard,
but they all had lyceums, which succeeded in giving the citizens
something besides business and prosperity to think and talk about.
Yarmouth was regaled with lectures on subjects ranging from ‘The Genius
and Poetry of Lord Byron’ to Nat Atwood’s sterling comments on fish.
Even Provincetown, which has become an intellectual center only very
recently with the arrival of summer scriveners from Greenwich Village,
boasted a lyceum, but had something more important to occupy its
attention in another direction: the wind began to blow sand into East
Harbor until it became almost useless, and there was danger that the
main harbor would be ruined in the same way.
The danger to Provincetown was twofold: first to the village itself;
second to the harbor. The houses all border a street which runs along
the water’s edge. Behind to the north stretches a wilderness of sand
hills which, when the Mayflower band arrived, were for the most part
held stationary by trees and shrubs. But from the earliest times the
inhabitants, following the example of visiting fishermen, fell upon
the trees until the sand lay bare, a prey to the four winds of heaven.
The captains of fishing schooners were allowed to take sand ballast
from these hills, and, not content with this, the citizens turned their
cattle loose to graze on what clumps of vegetation still struggled for
existence on the denuded sand hills, with the result that the grass was
demolished as fast as it grew. The sand was free to blow down upon the
unprotected village with every northwester, threatening even to bury
the houses.
The danger attracted the attention of the Colonial Government as
early as 1714, when an act was passed to preserve the trees. In
1727, Provincetown was incorporated, and a dozen years later another
act forbade the pasturing of cattle on the sand hills. The Court
might as well have forbidden the winds to blow or the sun to shine.
Provincetowners cared nothing for laws, and continued to cut wood and
turn cattle loose for the next hundred years; in short, until the
danger, instead of threatening, actually arrived. The sand buried
a house or two, and was advancing toward the town, salt works, and
harbor at the rate of fifty rods a year along a four-and-a-half-mile
front. In 1825, another commission was sent to study the situation
and suggest remedies. This time they found the citizens so frightened
by the marching sand that they were ready at last to obey the laws.
They planted beach grass on the barren dunes, kept their cattle in the
pound, and stopped cutting down young pine trees. Thus was the sand
anchored and the town saved.
But the harbor, without which the town could not exist, was still
imperiled from two directions. The chief cause for alarm came from East
Harbor, which had been filling up for years with sand blown into it
from the north and washed down through its entrance into Provincetown
Harbor, which was being gradually silted up by this constant deposit.
Furthermore, the strip of beach that separated the marshes at the head
of East Harbor from the open ocean was so low and narrow that any
northeaster might send the sea tearing through it. At one point it was
only four or five rods wide at high water. If the sea ever should break
through, it would sweep tons of sand down into Provincetown Harbor,
from both banks of the new channel, doing damage that it would have
taken the blowing sand a century to accomplish. This danger was in no
sense chimerical. One storm had already sent a trickle of water across
the frail barrier. To add to the danger, this narrow beach was the only
road for vehicles, and much of its beach grass was thereby ruined.
[Illustration]
Various makeshifts had been tried to offset this menace. In 1854, a
legislative committee recommended building a bridge across the mouth of
East Harbor so that the traffic might be switched from the beach and
allow grass to grow on it, in the hope that it would then build itself
higher. A fence of posts and brush was also suggested to help the
process. The bridge was built, but the danger was not removed, for the
beach remained as low as ever. Two years later another committee, wiser
and more daring than any of its predecessors, came out flat-footed with
the statement that the only guaranty of security was to throw a solid
dike across the mouth of East Harbor below the bridge. They agreed that
this harbor was ruined, anyhow, and, that if a dike were built, the
sand from the upper reaches of the harbor would lodge against it, and
thus be prevented from filling Provincetown Harbor.
The drastic nature of such legislation staggered the lawmakers. It
would cost five times as much as the total of all the money that had
previously been spent on Provincetown Harbor. They thought about it for
ten years; then in 1868, work on the dike was begun, and was virtually
completed in 1869, at a cost of $131,770. It was 1400 feet long, 75
feet wide on top, and rose 6 feet above high-water mark. It was built
chiefly of earth and planted with beach grass.
Meantime, there was cause for anxiety from the opposite direction. The
tides carried sand from the Race Run and the outer side of Long Point
round the Point and into Provincetown Harbor, where it began to build
flats. To prevent this, the Government constructed bulwarks of plank on
the outer side of Long Point; these served their purpose and held the
sand in place; the Cape’s one great harbor has been safe since 1869.
The legislature showed wisdom, to be sure, in taking such an interest
in Provincetown and its harbor; but its policy was dictated by a very
special consideration: the land belonged to the State. The whole
territory included in the township had originally been called the
Province Lands; and Province Land it remained when the settlement
became a precinct in 1714 and a town in 1727. The act of incorporation
specified that, though the new town was invested with all appropriate
rights and privileges, the title of the Province to said lands should
be ‘in no wise prejudiced.’ This clause gave rise to an incongruous
situation. The inhabitants had heard in a general way that the land was
the State’s, but the information in no wise affected their actions.
They bought and sold property with complete freedom; they staked out
and fenced lots in the wild land, and received warranty deeds for them
from the selectmen. Opinion was divided among them in regard to the
State’s title. Some wanted the State to surrender its rights. Others
preferred to leave matters as they were, being satisfied that their
title would never be questioned. Still others refused to believe that
the State owned the land at all; and as far as any outward or visible
sign went, they were right. The only evidence of State ownership was
the model way in which the Legislature kept its eye on the blowing
sands and provided money to check their advance. Whenever the State’s
title was in danger of lapsing, it was renewed; it still exists,
in fact, for most of the territory, though in 1893 the Legislature
surrendered its rights to the strip of shore on which the town is
built; but the wild land that lies behind remains Province Land to this
day.